Don Delillo: The Possibility of Fiction (Routledge Transnational Perspectives on American Literature)

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Don DeLillo

DeLillo’s writing has been concerned, from its inception, with thinking about how fiction has developed from the end of the Second World War. This book reads the whole of Don DeLillo’s oeuvre to date – from Americana to Cosmopolis – and asks how far his writing can be thought of as an enactment of the possibilities of literary fiction in contemporary global culture. DeLillo’s work offers an analysis of the ways in which the globalisation of capital, the end of the modernist avant-garde, and the expansion of US military and economic power have transformed the production of fiction. The writer as a social critic, as a figure who helps us to ‘think and see’, is under threat in DeLillo’s writing from new forms of mass communication, and ever more advanced modes of surveillance and control. But if his writing charts the disappearance of critical fiction, then it also develops new forms in which fiction might persist under new global conditions. This is the first book to offer a reading of DeLillo’s complete oeuvre in the light of 9/11, and of the new global power relations that have come about in the wake of the attacks. In reading DeLillo’s ambivalent engagement with globalisation, and with global terrorism, Peter Boxall suggests ways in which his writing might help us to think about the possibilities of fiction in the post-9/11 global context. Peter Boxall is a senior lecturer in English Literature at the University of Sussex. He has published widely on modernist and postmodernist literature, in Europe and the USA.

Routledge Transnational Perspectives on American Literature Edited by Susan Castillo University of Glasgow

In an age of globalisation, it has become increasingly difficult to characterise the United States as culturally and linguistically homogenous and impermeable to influences from beyond its territorial borders. This series seeks to provide more cosmopolitan and transnational perspectives on American literature, by offering: • •

in-depth analyses of American writers and writing literature by internationally based scholars critical studies that foster awareness of the ways in which American writing engages with writers and cultures north and south of its territorial boundaries, as well as with the writers and cultures across the Atlantic and Pacific.

New Woman Hybridities Femininity, feminism, and international consumer culture, 1880–1930 Edited by Ann Heilmann and Margaret Beetham Don DeLillo The possibility of fiction Peter Boxall Toni Morrison’s Beloved Possible worlds Justine Tally Fictions of the Black Atlantic in American Foundational Literature Gesa Mackenthun

Don DeLillo The possibility of fiction

Peter Boxall

First published 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2006 Peter Boxall All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN10: 0–415–30981–6 (hbk) ISBN10: 0 –203 –31542–1 (ebk) ISBN13: 978 – 0 – 415 –30981–3 (hbk) ISBN13: 978 – 0 –203–31542–2 (ebk)

For Hannah, Ava and Laurie

Contents

Figures Preface and acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction: the possibility of fiction

ix x xiii 1

PART I

The 1970s

17

1

19

Americana: Americana, End Zone, Great Jones Street Silent with answers: early DeLillo and the canon 19 American Bethlehem: art as redemption 22 Cliché, tautology and the possibility of fiction 35

2

The historical counterfunction: Ratner’s Star, Players, Running Dog

50

Messages to ourselves 50 Dreams beyond our grasp 60 Lost historical categories 68 PART II

The 1980s

85

3

Writing and apostasy: The Names

87

4

Death and the avant-garde: White Noise

109

5

Becoming historical: Libra

131

viii Contents PART III

The 1990s

155

6

Terrorism and globalisation: Mao II

157

7

The work of death: Underworld

176

Ecstasy and apocalypse 176 Uncycled memory 195 CODA

Ground Zero

213

8

The body of history: The Body Artist, Cosmopolis

215

Notes Index

233 248

Figures

1 2 3 4 5

The self-immolation of Quang Duc Lee Harvey Oswald A Kouros sculpture Detail from Pieter Bruegel, The Triumph of Death Ground Zero

17 85 97 155 213

Preface and acknowledgements

I began work on the outline of this book in the summer of 2001, and was at my desk on campus on the afternoon of September 11. I left my office for a coffee at around 3 p.m. GMT, and when I returned there was a message on my answering machine from my partner telling me that something unbelievable was happening, that I should stop what I was doing and come home. I returned home immediately, and spent the afternoon and the evening with my partner and my daughter, watching the attacks repeated on television, again and again. The following day I arrived back in my office to continue my work, feeling that there was something absurd about carrying on as if nothing had happened, as if the world had not changed, or was not about to change again. The message from my partner, belonging to the inconceivable past, was still on my machine. The recording had a strange power for me, a strange aura – a loved voice speaking in the very shadow of what was to become 9/11 – and I decided that I should save it, that I should keep it to commemorate a moment of global change. Inexpertly, I summoned the menu on my voice mail. Scrolling through the ‘options’ itemised for me by the machine’s synthetic voice – a voice I always find strangely unnerving – I mistakenly deleted the message, consigning it to memory, to the unrecoverable past. The telephone message, of course, was central to the experience of 9/11, and to its dramatisation. The voices left on answering machines by victims of the attacks are, among other things, a testimony to the fact that 9/11 is about the possibilities of electronic, global communication. Planes, as much as mobile phones and world trade, make the world supremely navigable, just as they make it unprecedentedly vulnerable, and the cinematic event that occurred on September 11 performed, as never before, the incredible proximity of this navigability and this vulnerability. The technologies that bring us into communication, that make us available and answerable to one another, also threaten us with erasure. My deleting of my partner’s message seemed to me, on September 12, to be inevitable, and perhaps, after all, the most fitting way of responding to its out-of-time urgency. The book that I wrote, after completing the outline that summer, is in a sense framed by that answering machine message, and by my accidental

Preface and acknowledgements xi deletion of it. DeLillo’s writing is concerned, at its heart, with the ways in which the progression towards an ultimate, apocalyptic communicability is shadowed and undermined by an opposite movement towards erasure, silence and darkness. My thinking about the possibilities of fiction, in the pages that follow, is conducted through an approach to this delicate relation in DeLillo between what can be said, preserved, ‘saved’, and what cannot be brought to the surface, what remains shrouded in the past, and secreted in an unforeseeable future. If the telephone answering machine is a sign, in DeLillo, of complete communication – a technology which, one of his narrators suggests, destroys the ‘poetry of nobody home’ – then it also speaks of the very absence that it seeks to eradicate. The digitally recorded voice of my partner, speaking as the event that continues to dictate the passage of world history was in the very process of becoming, carried an unmistakable aura of loss. The message suggested that the transitional moment, even as it is recorded, as it is replayed, cannot be seen again or lived again, cannot, perhaps, be seen or lived at all. Deleting the message was simply to realise the erasure of which it already spoke, to respond to its poetry of nobody home. It is still unclear what the legacy of September 11 is going to be. The event, to that extent, is still underway, overflowing the boundaries of the date by which it is known. But what is clear is that 9/11 is a major point of reference for our understanding of the relations between global capital, global terrorism and advanced technology. What is urgently required, at this tremendously precarious historical moment, is a way of thinking the ethics and the politics of these relations, a way of understanding how they determine or modulate our sense of history, and our conception of the future. It is for this reason that DeLillo is such a timely writer. From the beginning of his career, he has been working towards an ethics of globalisation, working to understand how the possibilities of global communication relate to the violence of global capital and global terror. He has tried to understand, from the beginning, how an imaginative resistance to or dissent from the tyranny of globalisation can find ethical and poetic expression; an expression which does not simply reduce itself to regressive forms of terror, but which is animated by the spirit of a future in which anything is possible, a future in which the word peace – the word with which Underworld closes – may come to have a meaning recognisable to us all. The possibility of fiction, as it is thought and performed in his writing, is the possibility of this kind of expression, the possibility that we might find, in the poetry of nobody home that persists even in an era of mass communication, the trace of what Marx called the poetry of the future. Many friends and colleagues helped me in the writing of this book. The bulk of the work was carried out during a period of study leave, granted by the Department of English at the University of Sussex. Matthew Losasso spent many hours working on the art work reproduced here. For his time, and for his skill, I am deeply grateful. Drafts have been read by Maria Lauret, Richard Godden, Peter Nicholls, Josh Cohen, Rick Crownshaw, Hannah Jordan and

xii Preface and acknowledgements Darren Pangbourne, and I am very grateful for their comments and thoughts. I have benefited enormously from the friendship and intellectual energy of many other colleagues and students, particularly Nicholas Royle, Laura Marcus, Lindsay Smith, Celine Surprenant, Darrow Schecter, Richard Murphy, Marcus Wood, Alistair Davies, the late Geoff Hemstedt, Alan Sinfield, Elena Gualtieri, Jenny Taylor, Drew Milne, Andrew Hadfield, Norman Vance, Vincent Quinn, Sophie Thomas, Vicky Lebeau, Alistair Davies, David Marriott, Amber Jacobs, Denise DeCaires Narain, Minoli Salgado, Paul Davies, Nicky Marsh, Liam Connell, Alvin Birdi, Sam Thomas, Anna Foca, Esme Floyd, Kiuchi Kumiko, Michael Doyle, David Rush, Anthony Leaker, and Sebastian Franklin. It has been a pleasure to work with Routledge in the preparation of the manuscript – particularly with Liz Thompson, Terry Clague and Katherine Carpenter. A number of organisations and bodies have provided me with permission to reproduce material in the book and I wish to express my thanks to them. If any unknowing use of copyright material in the book has been made, please contact the author via the publishers, since every effort was made to trace copyright owners. Above all, I owe a debt of gratitude to my family – the Boxalls, the Jordans, the Neils, the Moenchs, the Losassos, the Chamberlains – for their love and support. Between the words ‘epic’ and ‘morbidity’, on page 179, my second child was born. That I continued to write and to finish this book – itself a labour of love – in the midst of such urgent new life, was a triumph of love and selflessness on the part of all those closest to me.

Abbreviations

A E GJS RS P RD N WN DR L M U V BA C

Don DeLillo, Americana (1971; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990) Don DeLillo, End Zone (1972; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986) Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street (1973; London: Picador, 1998) Don DeLillo, Ratner’s Star (1976; London: Vintage, 1991) Don DeLillo, Players (1977; London: Vintage, 1991) Don DeLillo, Running Dog (1978; London: Picador, 1999) Don DeLillo, The Names (1982; London: Picador, 1999) Don DeLillo, White Noise (1984; London: Picador, 1999) Don DeLillo, The Day Room (New York: Dramatists Play Service inc., 1988) Don DeLillo, Libra (1988; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989) Don DeLillo, Mao II (1991; London: Vintage, 1992) Don DeLillo, Underworld (1997; London: Picador, 1999) Don DeLillo, Valparaiso (1999; London: Picador, 2004) Don DeLillo, The Body Artist (2001; London: Picador, 2001) Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis (2003; London: Picador, 2003)

Introduction The possibility of fiction

Something is taking its course. Samuel Beckett, Endgame1 Something is happening. Don DeLillo, The Body Artist2

In a conversation with Theodor Adorno, that takes place in 1964, Ernst Bloch comments that ‘possibility has had a bad press’.3 For both the left and the right, for the east and the west, he goes on, there is something disreputable about the concept of possibility. For those on the right who have vested interests to protect, for whom an irrational status quo yields profit and comfort, it is rather important to resist or deny the possible, to ‘prevent the world from being changed into the possible’.4 Possibility, for the dominant class, spells revolution. For those on the left, who struggle against the status quo, an investment in the possible can seem too often like a distraction, a fond and politically disabling dream of the world that might be. For a revolutionary consciousness, it is perhaps necessary to focus not on the possible world – on what Bloch calls the ‘ocean of possibility’5 – but on the real world, where injustice occurs, and where wealth is distributed unequally. The possible is an ignis fatuus. The context for Bloch’s remarks – a context conditioned by the cold war and by the iron curtain, by Stalinism and socialist realism and McCarthyism – seems to be a somewhat remote one from where I am writing. The constituencies that Bloch addresses in 1964 – the west and the east, the left and the right – may no longer exist in the form in which he conceived of them. The end of the cold war and the fall of the Berlin wall have led to an uneasy consensus between east and west. The left has waned as a political force in many democratic nation states, as the political spectrum has narrowed in response to the collapse of the USSR and the globalisation of capital. The work of national governments, the development of foreign and domestic policy, concerns itself now largely with the attempt to influence the movements of an unboundaried global market which no single nation state is able fully to control. The very concept of an alternative to the free market economy,

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Introduction: the possibility of fiction

an anti-capitalist ‘system’ of government imposed and maintained by the state, has come, remarkably quickly, to seem quaint.6 But despite these changes in context, Bloch’s suggestion that possibility gets a bad press still has currency, or indeed its currency has inflated since the end of the cold war. The distrust of utopian possibility that Bloch recognises in both east and west in 1964 has matured, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, into a wider abandonment of the possibility of any form of opposition whatsoever to an economic and political hegemony that is tending towards the global and the universal. There is a widely recognised perception in contemporary culture that, with the globalisation of capital, history has reached a kind of end point, that there is no more possibility, that there is nothing latent in the culture left to explore or to develop. The struggle between opposing blocs that drove the twentieth century through hot and cold world wars has given way, for many, to a kind of historical completion, an ‘end of history’ in which the ‘liberal democracy’ that is enforced on the globe by the world’s single superpower stands in for Hegel’s absolute knowledge. Francis Fukuyama claims that we must ‘take seriously’ Alexandre Kojève’s claim that ‘history has ended’.7 For Kojève, Fukuyama goes on, the spread of liberal democracy has ‘definitely solved the question of recognition by replacing the relationship of lordship and bondage with universal and equal recognition’. Fukuyama suggests, still paraphrasing Kojève, that ‘what man had been seeking throughout the course of history – what had driven the prior “stages of history” – was recognition. In the modern world, he finally found it, and was “completely satisfied”’.8 For theorists such as Fukuyama, Kojève and Anthony Giddens, the engine that drives history forward for Hegel, and later for Bloch and Adorno, has stalled with the arrival of the global market.9 And with this stalling of the dialectic, the possibility that has a bad reputation in 1964 disappears altogether. Bloch conceives possibility as a kind of negative potential that is immanent in the dialectic, that is contained latently within the Hegelian struggle for recognition.10 The possible is that which has not yet become conscious. It is the unrealised historical potential which, through its ‘determined negation of that which merely is’, points towards what ‘should be’.11 In a globalised world in which prosperity and democracy has made us all ‘completely satisfied’, in which there is no longer historical tension between is and ought, possibility as ‘determined negation’, as a compelling absence in the present, has been wiped out, colonised by the forces of benign liberalism. The recent signs of a violent resistance to western hegemony, evidenced in the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, and in the opposition to the western occupation in Iraq since 2003, might suggest that the perception of ‘complete satisfaction’ with liberal democracy is a little wide of the mark. But Fukuyama argues in 2001 that Islamic and Arab rejection of western democracy is not organised around a ‘serious alternative to western liberal democracy’, but is rather a simple root and branch rejection, by a fundamentalist minority, of modernity per se.12 For Fukuyama, Al Qaeda has no more power to create a new future, or to conceive a new set of historical possibilities,

Introduction: the possibility of fiction 3 than Marx, or Castro, or Che Guevara. After September 11, he insists, we ‘remain at the end of history because there is only one system that will continue to dominate world politics, that of the liberal-democratic west’.13 Capital, like the ‘freedom’ invoked in George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign, is ‘on the march’,14 and there is no historical force, no as yet unrealised possibility, that can stop it. Whilst Fukuyama might articulate his end of history thesis more trenchantly than most, this sense of historical completion, and of a failure of resistance to a global capitalist hegemony, is pervasive in contemporary culture. It is not confined to the right wing, to Fukuyama’s neo-conservative championing of the victory of western liberalism, but rather its influence can be felt across the political spectrum. The perception that Bloch’s possibility has waned, that there has been what Maurice Blanchot among others has characterised as a ‘weakening of the negative’, influences almost every sphere of cultural production. The globalisation of capital produces a kind of dizzying speed, a rush of technological invention and creativity, but it also produces a cultural exhaustion, what Gilles Deleuze calls the ‘exhaustion of the possible’. Deleuze comments, in his essay on Samuel Beckett entitled ‘The Exhausted’, that ‘there is no longer any possible’. Beckett’s work, situated as it is in the wake of modernism, in a kind of extended aftermath of the avant-garde and at the threshold of globalisation, is that of the ‘exhausted person’. ‘He exhausts that which, in the possible, is not realized,’ Deleuze says. ‘He has done with the possible, beyond all tiredness, “for to end yet again”’.15 Beckett’s work, it has been suggested, stands as a kind of epitaph to the possibility of any critique of a culture which has become globalised and self-perpetuating; it marks the exhaustion of the possibility of fiction. The final snippet of the final sentence of his novel The Unnamable – ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ – brings fiction up against a blank and unnavigable aporia.16 To ‘proceed’ from here, the narrator acknowledges right at the beginning of the novel, is to proceed ‘by aporia pure and simple’ (‘I say aporia’, he adds demurely, ‘without knowing what it means’).17 The Unnamable brings us to a kind of closure, or impasse, a historical ending in which one has nevertheless to continue, in which one has to end, yet again, and then again. Don DeLillo has suggested, in a letter to Gary Adelman quoted in 2004, that Beckett is ‘the last writer whose work enters into the world’.18 In exhausting the possible, in articulating a cultural predicament in which one can ‘no longer possibilize’,19 Beckett’s writing is fiction’s last gasp, its last attempt to ‘enter the world’. In the words of one of DeLillo’s fictional creations, a novelist named Bill Gray, Beckett is the last writer to produce a critical reflection on the cultural conditions that ‘shape the way that we think and see’. After him, Gray goes on, ‘the major work involves mid-air explosions and crumbled buildings’ (M 157). If the progress of the twentieth century has seen a gradual weakening of the negative, an attenuation of the ways in which possibility can be preserved in the art work as that which has yet to be realised, then Beckett’s writing sees the final fizzles of the possibility of critical fiction. After

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him, the work of cultural critique is handed over to terrorists, to paramilitaries, to suicide bombers; to a kind of uncritical violence which, Fukuyama tells us, can in any case scarcely make an impact on the shiny surface. Don DeLillo’s fiction, his body of novels stretching from Americana in 1971 to Cosmopolis in 2003, comes into being in the wake of the ‘last writer’, in the narrow space of the contradiction cleared by the final line of The Unnamable. DeLillo’s writing takes place, perhaps, in what Beckett’s character/ narrator Molloy calls his ‘ruins’. ‘My ruins’, Molloy says, are a ‘place with neither plan nor bounds’, in a ‘world at an end, in spite of appearances’.20 As in his play Endgame, Beckett’s fictional spaces offer a kind of flimsy refuge at the end of the world, where a little life continues to go on without going on, where movement is also an exhausted stasis, and where a persistent stirring, as in one of Beckett’s last prose pieces, nevertheless remains still.21 And it is this refuge, this space without foundations, this time without direction, that offers an ambiguous asylum to the writers that come after Beckett. DeLillo’s oeuvre may evidence an anti-Beckettian prolificacy, a capacity to offer an encyclopaedic cataloguing of culture that is more redolent, perhaps, of Joyce than of Beckett. But from the beginning, DeLillo’s writing has taken place, like Beckett’s, in the shadow of the end. If Molloy says of his own fictional effort that ‘ending it began’, then DeLillo’s origins are found in what one of his early characters calls a ‘terminal nullity’ (E 88).22 It is perhaps his fascination with life at the end that leads to his preoccupation with the millennial moment. From Americana onwards, the millennium has formed DeLillo’s far horizon, and his organising principle. The millennium comes to signify, in DeLillo’s work and elsewhere in later twentieth century culture, an apocalyptic end point.23 It provides a means of conceiving and fixing in time and space, in a kind of longitudinal grid, the endedness which has inhabited culture since Beckett, the endedness which marks the very conception of a globalised world. But if the millennium forms the far horizon in DeLillo’s writing, it is also always already here. DeLillo’s novels take place in what Edward Said has called ‘lateness itself ’.24 The culture to which DeLillo responds, and of which his work is symptomatic, is one which is entering, in 1971, into a kind of static completion, where endedness cannot be deferred until a later date, cannot wait for Judgement Day or the appearance of the Messiah to declare its coming. Again and again in DeLillo’s novels we are confronted with a predicament in which the future is already here, in which the postapocalyptic future that is darkly massing behind the flimsy boundary of the second millennium comes flooding in, to arrive ‘ahead of schedule’ (P 84). The future, which harbours the unrealised possibility, which preserves that which has yet to be seen or imagined or colonised, has ‘become insistent’ in DeLillo’s work. It is forcing itself into the now, as the culture reaches past its own spatial and temporal margins, colonises its own outsides, brings even unlived time under the jurisdiction of the global market. In this sense, DeLillo’s novels can be thought of as an extended enactment of the exhaustion of possibility in post-war culture. It is a familiar refrain in

Introduction: the possibility of fiction 5 his writing that even the most fleeting urge to invention, to fabrication or to dissent, is cancelled by the interpellating power of a culture which has become, in another of DeLillo’s key words, ‘self-referring’ (e.g. N 297, L 23, WN 51). When the world has become self-referring, Owen says in The Names, when it is ruled by a single bloc from which there is ‘no escape’ (N 297), it no longer matters ‘whether we lie or tell the truth’ (N 81).25 Self-reference, historical closure, the exhaustion of the possibility of fiction, means that it becomes an impossibility or an irrelevance to lie, or to deviate from an orthodoxy that has become so all embracing that there is no space left for the fictional, the unorthodox, or the counter-hegemonic. As the narrator of White Noise puts it, a millennial, historical completion produces a strange, dislocated medium, in which ‘remarks exist in a state of permanent flotation. No one thing [is] either more or less plausible than any other thing’ (WN 129). Or as Freddie has it in The Day Room, self-reference produces a predicament in which ‘everything is true’, and in which ‘one place is as good as another’ (DR 41). (‘How different can two places be’, Freddie goes on, ‘if we use the word “place” in both cases?’) Everything is true, or as Karen discovers in Mao II, ‘everything is real’ (M 85). DeLillo’s novels posit a world in which the nonexistent, the unnameable, the unthinkable, have been eradicated; in which cultural truth is disseminated by the forces of a globalised capital from which there is no escape. When the last obstacles to world trade and to US hegemony give way, dismantled like the Berlin wall, when the ‘force of converging markets produces an instantaneous capital that shoots across horizons’, there is a resulting cultural uniformity a ‘furtive sameness, a planing away of particulars’ (U 786). ‘Capital’, the epilogue to Underworld declares, ‘burns off the nuance in a culture’ (U 785). Just when you think you are lying, when you fondly believe you are inventing, or disobeying, or dissenting, you find that you are toeing the line, because the ground upon which the counternarrative might be based has been removed, or subsumed into the hegemony. As Beckett’s Molloy puts it, ‘you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart’.26 In a globalised culture that has absorbed its own margins, and crossed its own far horizons, there is no possibility of dishonesty, or secrecy, or conspiring against the state. As Oswald discovers in Libra, resistance becomes just another form of compliance, and a plot against the state is a form of civil service. Throughout DeLillo’s fiction, his characters and narrators struggle against this predicament. The development of his fiction follows a historical trajectory towards the millennium, and towards the globalisation of US military and economic power, and in tracing this trajectory, the novels also chart a history of resistance to cultural uniformity. Through the 1970s, the 1980s and the 1990s, DeLillo’s fiction is organised around the possibility of a historical counterfunction, of a counternarrative that might preserve a radical revolutionary spirit, that might keep possibility alive in the thin air of the ‘end of history’. From Americana to Underworld, the novels look for a spatial and a temporal

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ground that remains beyond the interpellating power of an American voice, a ground upon which difference, singularity, and resistance to US cultural imperialism might be based. David Bell travels into the heart of the USA in search of the Navaho; James Axton travels to Greece in search of a European history etched in Parian marble and in Mediterranean light; Oswald travels to Moscow in search of the spirit of Marx; Nick Shay journeys from the USA to Kazakhstan and back, from the 1990s to the 1950s and back, in search of the ghost of himself. All of these restless movements are driven by a search for spaces that have not yet been colonised, for culturally specific and diverse histories that have not yet been erased by the excoriating power of capital. In the passage from Americana to Cosmopolis, and from 1945, through the cold war, to the present day, the novels trace the shifts in the balance of power, and the economic, political and cultural developments that have shaped the second half of the twentieth century. The struggle to resist, to find spaces beyond the reach of a US central intelligence, are modulated by these developments. The novels offer a mini history, for example, of technological developments in the post-war. Like Pynchon’s writing, DeLillo’s oeuvre can be read as a history of military technology.27 The possibility of fiction is traced in relation to the development of the U2 spy plane, of satellite surveillance, of the proliferation of nuclear weaponry. If we are heading towards the millennium, in the passage from Americana to Underworld, then we are also heading towards a nuclear apocalypse, and the novels read the post-war historical development as the playing out of a military narrative, a narrative with a mushroom cloud as its consummation. As Matt Shay thinks to himself in Underworld, ‘all technology refers to the bomb’ (U 467). In tracing this technological development towards the end of history, towards the End Zone or the endgame, the novels might project us towards the disaster, but they also suggest that the end has not yet arrived, that it is possible somehow to place oneself outside the current towards apocalypse. The ostensibly civilian forms of technology that develop across the sweep of DeLillo’s oeuvre in parallel with the military – information technology, video and computer technology – similarly suggest ever more sophisticated means of surveillance and mediation. Civilian and military technology develops in sinister tandem in DeLillo’s fiction. The progression from Americana to Cosmopolis takes us from relatively primitive communication technologies – from the office mimeograph and the cine camera in Americana – to information technologies, in Cosmopolis, that are so advanced, so intimate and invasive that have become more available to us than our own bodies. The electronic distribution of information and of capital has become so immediate, in Cosmopolis, that the passage of money seems more effortless, more weightless, than the passage of thought. This sweep towards virtualisation suggests a progression towards a form of control that is as effective, and as destructive of possibility, as any military power, an electronic rather than an atomic apocalypse. But the trajectory that is preserved in DeLillo’s oeuvre, the slow passage from the mimeograph, through the telex machine,

Introduction: the possibility of fiction 7 to email and the internet, suggests, again, that the mediation of the culture is not yet total, that there are other histories that can be written and imagined, unrealised possibilities that remain dormant in the culture, unthought, and offline. This sense, however, that history is continuing to progress in DeLillo’s writing – that there is an ongoing struggle to discover the counternarrative, to angle oneself against the historical current towards the globalisation of capital – has to contend with the opposite sense that the future is already here, that historical progression is a fantasy, that the very concept of proceeding has become aporetic. DeLillo’s fiction suggests a deep underlying connection between technology, violence and capital, a connection which undermines the possibility of historical progression. If, for Matt Shay, ‘all technology refers to the bomb’, then for the venture capitalist Eric Packer of Cosmopolis, it is the ‘interaction between technology and capital’ that is the most important reference in contemporary culture, the ‘only thing in the world worth pursuing intellectually and professionally’ (C 23). The kinds of destruction wreaked by weaponry, by technology and by capital reach a certain equivalence here, a certain ‘inseparability’ (C 23). As Warhol’s extraordinary silkscreen Atomic Bomb (1965) has suggested, the violence of mass production and of the photographic image mirrors the violence of an atomic explosion.28 This equivalence between capital, violence and technology unsettles any attempt to conceive of a gradual historical progression towards the millennium, or towards the end. Locating the destructive power of the bomb in the technologies of mass production suggests that the apocalypse will not wait, that the apocalypse is happening now. Warhol’s print multiplies the image of a mushroom cloud, repeating it twenty-five times, in five lines of five. The only variation between one image and the next is that the contrast is gradually reduced, so that as the reading eye travels from left to right and from top to the bottom of the print, the explosion exhausts itself, fading out through the process of duplication. This lends the work a kind of doubleness, as if it is spread over two planes. The mushroom cloud suggests one kind of consummation, one explosive end point to history, figuratively expressed, captured by the camera, whilst the fading of the duplicated image from top to bottom suggests another ending that is in process in the print itself, a kind of fizzling out, a Deleuzian exhaustion through repetition. The explosive power of the bomb here is not confined to its potential energy, the deferred, mutually assured destruction that powered the cold war. Rather, it is found in the reproductive technologies that grew up with the bomb, that ‘refer to the bomb’, and that transform the culture through the power of repetition, and through the work of the photographic image. This set of connections that Warhol makes between photography, weaponry, and a kind of ongoing apocalypse-through-exhaustion achieves a rich resonance in DeLillo’s work. The Kazakh capitalist Viktor Maltsev suggests, in the epilogue to Underworld, that it is the bomb that leads to the exhaustion of the possibility of fiction. ‘Once they imagine the bomb’, he says,

8

Introduction: the possibility of fiction they see it’s possible to build, they build, they test in the American desert, they drop on the Japanese, but once they imagine in the beginning, it makes everything true [ . . . ] Nothing you can believe is not coming true. (U 801–802)

The bomb makes everything true. The equations on the page that lead to the bomb, once they are written down, once they are imagined, sweep away the possibility of difference, of dissent, of fiction. The equations themselves do it; we don’t need to wait for the blast, or for the fallout. The power of the bomb, of the technology that produces the bomb, is such that it sweeps everything away, levels everything, planes away the particulars. The decade boundaries that organise DeLillo’s oeuvre, that hold off the future, that keep the apocalypse at bay, are blown away by the mere thought of the bomb. Historical progress, a steady march through the decades towards an end that has not yet been seen, becomes a fantasy as soon as those sinister equations undo the bonds that hold time and space together, abandoning us to a stalled temporality, to a kind of endless ground zero. The splitting of the atom releases explosive energy, but it also clears the cultural ground. It removes the obstacles, opens the culture to the free movement of capital, to the endless repetition of the image. One of the spin-offs of military research in the 1970s was the invention of email, as if military technology leads directly to weightless communication.29 DeLillo’s oeuvre might offer us a history of this technological progression, the progression for example from epigraphy to calligraphy to the typewriter to the word processor to the weightless speed of hypertext, but this history is one which contains within it the cancellation of the very possibility of history. It is a history which traces the progression towards weightlessness, towards endless repetition, to the loss of the grounds upon which a material history might found itself. It is a history which comes from and returns to the impasse marked out by Samuel Beckett, in the 1950s, at the end of The Unnamable and at the beginning of the cold war. It is a history at an end, in spite of appearances; a history which continues to go on even though it can’t go on, which conjures the phantasm of progress from a condition of profound stasis. DeLillo’s fiction, then, can be seen as an extended performance of a kind of critical exhaustion. It marks the end of the avant-garde, the end of a writing which is able to shape the way we think and see. It offers a non-critique of the possibility of fiction, by living through a suspension of the critical capacity, by performing the ways in which the struggle towards singularity, towards invention and civil disobedience, collapses repeatedly back into a vast, static uniformity, the kind of spatial and temporal sameness that is required and guaranteed by the globalisation of capital. Despite this sense of stasis, however, this stalled historical quality that reaches across the oeuvre, DeLillo’s fiction is not simply an enactment of the exhaustion of possibility. This is not to deny the force of Deleuze’s conception of exhaustion; it is no doubt the case that DeLillo’s writing exemplifies, in its depiction of a time

Introduction: the possibility of fiction 9 that has ‘lost its narrative quality’ (BA 65), the end of a certain kind of possibility. But, even in the new temporality of the post-war, DeLillo’s writing suggests that possibility persists, that the unrealised and the not-yet conscious still inhabit the contemporary, albeit in a changed form. DeLillo does not simply enact the collapse of the possibility of fiction. Rather, in performing a historical endedness, in articulating a mode of cultural stasis, his writing produces also a new kind of possibility; in enacting a form of cultural exhaustion, it evidences nevertheless the continuing possibility of fiction. Beckett’s play Endgame opens with Clov’s declaration that it is ‘Finished’.30 The play is, in some respects, simply a yawning of the void, a flaw in the emptiness that allows time to continue after it has finished, a spectral duration in the heartland of the end. But even here, where things are already over, where there is ‘no more nature’,31 ‘no more tide’,32 and ‘no more painkiller’,33 something continues to unfold. ‘What’s happening’, Hamm asks Clov repeatedly, in a kind of apoplectic bafflement at his failure to be still, to be at peace, and Clov replies, ‘Something is taking its course’.34 Something is continuing to take its course, even in the close straits of Endgame, even at the tortured end of The Unnamable. It may be that, like Hamm, we do not have the apparatus to see this thing clearly, or to measure the time and rhythm of its passing, but it is this pale continuation, this tidal something that continues to take its course, that is Beckett’s legacy to DeLillo. Deleuze suggests that Beckett’s poetics of exhaustion leads not simply to a failure of possibility, but to what he calls a ‘Language III’, a language which opens the exhausted to a new set of possibilities.35 Beckett’s exhaustion of language discovers an ‘immanent limit’ to the possible, a limit which is ‘ceaselessly displaced’,36 which is exceeded and ruptured by the movement of Beckett’s poetics. The exhaustion of possibility in Beckett does not lead simply to stasis or completion, but it opens a tear in language itself. A young Beckett writes, in 1937, that ‘language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it’,37 and Deleuze discovers precisely this destruction of language in Beckett’s late work. The exhaustion of language, Deleuze suggests, opens ‘hiatuses, holes, or tears that we would never notice, or attribute to mere tiredness, if they did not suddenly widen in such a way as to receive something from the outside or from elsewhere’.38 It is this something from elsewhere, this opening onto an outside that has not yet been thought or dreamt, this disjunction in the unbroken surface of things, that is Beckett’s gift to those who come after him. Something continues to take its course in Beckett, and is taking its course even now, and even here. Even in the virtually still, keening time of DeLillo’s 2001 novel The Body Artist, something continues. ‘Something is happening,’ Lauren Hartke thinks. ‘Something is happening. It has happened. It will happen. This is what she believed. There is a story, a flow of consciousness and possibility. The future comes into being’ (BA 98–99). The sign of this something, in DeLillo, this something that continues, is death. If the end of history, produced by the bomb, by information

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Introduction: the possibility of fiction

technology, by global capital, delivers a transcendent death, the kind of total extinction and implacable judgment imagined in Revelations, then the possibility of fiction in DeLillo is intimately bound up with an unrevealed, immanent death, a death in process which inhabits the texture of the present as the unrealised, the not yet conscious. ‘Death’, Blanchot says, ‘is man’s greatest hope’; ‘death is man’s possibility, his chance, it is through death that the future of a finished world is still there for us’.39 For Blanchot, ‘literature is really the work of death in the world’.40 This deathliness in the present, this death that is at work in literature, remains unnameable and unlocatable. It is difficult to spot. It does not set itself against the historical tide, it does not pit itself against electronic capital, against the repetition of the photographic image, against the weightless history of film, of video, or of the internet. Indeed, DeLillo finds death, and deathly possibility, inhabiting those very technologies that promise to eradicate death, to bring the unknown future under the control of the present. Film, for example, might prepare the world for the global market, might offer the world up for consumption as a virtual product. Film, like the infinitely repeatable image, like the virtualisation of internet culture, might lead to a certain weightlessness and timelessness, a simultaneity, an undoing of history, a cancellation even of the history of film. But again and again in DeLillo’s writing, it is film, and information technology more generally, that harbour precisely the kind of deathly possibility that is threatened by the technological globalisation of capital. It is film, in DeLillo as in Deleuze, that offers to mark a hiatus in an exhausted culture. The Zapruder film, for example, contains, in its capturing of the Kennedy assassination, a kind of disruptive historical disjunction; in capturing the historical moment, it opens history to Deleuze’s ‘something from the outside or from elsewhere’. Even in its capacity to deliver time to us in its completion, to replay endlessly and exhaustively the moment at which Kennedy takes the bullet, the film carries within it a kind of surplus, a death that remains at work in the grain of the celluloid. The Zapruder footage, Klara Sax thinks in Underworld, seemed to advance some argument about the nature of film itself. The progress of the car down Elm Street, the movement of the film through the camera body, some sharable darkness – this was a death that seemed to rise from the streamy debris of the mind, it came from some night of the mind, there was some trick of film emulsion that showed the ghost of consciousness. (U 496) The death that is conjured here, that belongs to the night of the mind, is an absence that is given to us by film, an unrealised historical possibility that is a kind of side effect of technology itself. If something is continuing to take its course in DeLillo’s oeuvre, if there is to be an as yet undreamt future in store in Blanchot’s ‘finished world’, then it is from this death-at-work

Introduction: the possibility of fiction 11 in film that the new future will emerge, from the absences and the flaws that ghost the culture in DeLillo’s writing, that are at work even in ‘advanced’ technology, in voice mail, in the internet, in the live streaming video feed. The history of struggle that DeLillo’s oeuvre catalogues, the search for a historical counternarrative, for a spatial or temporal ground beyond the interpellating power of the American voice, is organised around this latent possibility, this death at work. The decades during which DeLillo’s writing has come into being have seen a kind of acceleration towards the end, towards the global. The power of military and civilian technology works, as I have suggested, to sweep away both decade boundaries and national boundaries, to deliver us to an unboundaried time and space, a place which, for DeLillo’s Freddie and for Beckett’s Hamm, is just like any other place, an endless day which is just ‘like any other day’.41 But death as possibility, the disjunctive, disruptive space that persists in DeLillo’s fiction, that haunts consciousness, that cannot be articulated or named or brought into the light, works to maintain the boundaries that are under threat of disappearance in post-war culture. The decade boundary, both in DeLillo’s oeuvre, and in the visual imagination of this book, is inhabited by a death. James Axton’s death is suspended, in The Names, in the passage from 1979 to 1980; the death of Bill Gray is situated, in Mao II, in the passage from 1989 to 1990; and the prose that comes after 1999 is situated in the space of a technological, postmillennial death that is still occurring, in the space of a boundary that has not yet discovered its far side, in Voltaire’s and Bloch’s ocean of death which does not have a shore.42 In one sense, this death testifies to the unnameable, unimaginable nature of the boundary, to the impossibility of marking the point at which one decade becomes another, or at which one moment becomes another. Transition itself is a kind of impossible fiction, which can only be figured as a death. But in another sense, it is this death in the boundary – this death that is at work in the now – that allows for the possibility of duration, of spatial and temporal diversity, of a continual becoming over time. It is this death that is interwoven into the texture of the moment that marks and performs the persistence of the negative, that keeps history moving, and that holds a transcendent death – a deathly global uniformity – at bay. It is this death at work that allows something to happen, something to take its course. It is this death that DeLillo inherits from Beckett, this death that allows for the continuing possibility of critique, of struggle, of resistance. It is the death at work in the space of the boundary that allows for the continuing possibility of fiction. *

*

*

There is a story one can tell about the history of critique in western thought, since Kant and Hegel, since the Phenomenology of Spirit, the Critique of Judgement and the Critique of Pure Reason. This story has it that the historical reception of Kant and Hegel has taken the form of a fork. One prong of this

12

Introduction: the possibility of fiction

fork has passed through Freud and has led us to poststructuralism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and deconstruction, to Derrida, Kristeva and DeMan. The other prong of this fork has taken us through Marx, and has led to critical theory, to the Frankfurt school, to Adorno and Benjamin and Lukács. If we allow ourselves to be carried along with this story for a while, we might suggest that the first prong leads to the abandonment of the possibility of critique, whilst the second is organised around the possibility of its persistence. The work of the latter, of Frankfurt school critics such as Adorno and Horkheimer, is the search for a space from which to critique the culture industry, a space which would allow for the persistence of what Adorno calls a negative dialectic.43 The work of the former, of contemporary French theorists, of thinkers such as Derrida and Deleuze, is organised around the impossibility of such a critical space. A deconstructive logic demands that ‘instead of opposing critique to non-critique’, it is necessary to ‘situate the non-critical in a place that would no longer be opposed to, nor even perhaps exterior to, critique’.44 For Derrida, for example, it is axiomatic that ‘critique and non-critique are fundamentally the same’.45 If we go along with this story still further, then we can suggest that the postmodern, and all of the discrete cultural elements that are positioned by that term, are built upon this fork in the reception of Kant and Hegel. Postmodernism is the end of the road of deconstruction, its destination, its conclusion. The work of thinkers such as Jean Baudrillard and Judith Butler is the end result of Derrida’s reception of Hegel. The refusal to oppose critique to non-critique leads to Baudrillard’s claim that the first Gulf War did not happen, and to Butler’s disavowal of the materiality of the body.46 The postmodern, and any politics that is erected upon its groundless ground, testifies to the collapse of critique, and the withering of Marxist thought. Alexandre Kojève’s reading of Hegel leads, for Frederic Jameson, directly to a postmodernism which is characterised by an exhausted cultural and political depthlessness, by ‘the free play of masks and roles without content or substance’.47 A theorist such as Jameson, who seeks to think a Marxist postmodernism, has to reckon at the outset with this problem. ‘Marxism and postmodernism’, he writes in an essay entitled ‘Marxism and Postmodernism’: people often seem to find this combination peculiar or paradoxical, and somehow intensely unstable, so that some of them are led to conclude that, in my own case, having ‘become’ a postmodernist, I must have ceased to be a Marxist in any meaningful (or in other words stereotypical) sense.48 The reception of DeLillo’s work has been informed, to a considerable extent, by this kind of story. Debate in DeLillo criticism has been organised around DeLillo’s response to postmodernity. Some have argued that his work is a celebration or a symptom of postmodernism, that it derives from the kinds of weightlessness produced by the abandonment of a dialectical politics. This branch of DeLillo criticism tends to read DeLillo through Baudrillard, and through the received models of postmodernism, and of postmodern politics.

Introduction: the possibility of fiction 13 Frank Lentricchia, for example, has argued in his essay ‘Libra as Postmodern Critique’, that DeLillo’s novel Libra dramatises a movement away from a radical politics grounded in a dialectical Marxism, towards a Baudrillardian, postmodern politics of the image. Oswald initially sees his struggle towards self-consciousness in terms of the ‘classic Marxist directive’, which enjoins each of us to ‘take part in the struggle’. But at the end of the novel, Lentricchia suggests, ‘Marxist Oswald’ becomes ‘postmodern Oswald’, a post-Marxist breed of insurrectionary who revolts against the state ‘not through striking a blow in class warfare on the side of the working oppressed’, but by ‘entering the aura’, by giving himself up to the postmodern manipulation of the image.49 Others have argued that DeLillo’s work represents a rejection of postmodernism, or at least an ambivalence towards it. David Cowart, for example, has argued in his tremendously elegant work The Physics of Language (2002), that, despite being an ‘exemplary postmodernist’, ‘DeLillo’s engagement with the postmodern, at least as it is commonly defined, is or has come to be adversarial’.50 This second branch of criticism, which has become the more influential in recent years, tends to find in DeLillo a quality or a value that survives postmodern depthlessness, and that offers itself in some kind of opposition to it. Mark Osteen, for example, suggests that DeLillo’s work represents a struggle to preserve the value of art, in a culture which has forsaken the auratic power of the art work. DeLillo engages with postmodern culture – and with American dread – only in order to transform it, to redeem its loss of critical purchase. DeLillo, for Osteen, ‘presents art as the soundest magic against dread, the truest source of radiance and community’.51 Art here is a quasi sacred, mystical force which has the power to transcend the postmodern; it is an alchemy, or a kind of aesthetic recycling, which transforms the very symptoms of the contemporary – the abandoned ‘wastes’ of postmodernity – into ‘signs of redemption’.52 If Osteen pits the magic of art against postmodern dread, then Cowart suggests that DeLillo finds redemption in language. Cowart concedes that there is a postmodern resonance to DeLillo’s writing, a resonance which he discovers in the compatibility between DeLillo and poststructuralism. ‘To be sure,’ he writes, ‘DeLillo invites his readers to recognise, with poststructuralist theory, the inadequacy of the old model of things and their word labels’.53 One must, he says, test DeLillo’s fictions against elements of the postmodern aesthetic defined by such theorists as Lacan, Derrida, and Baudrillard: the foreshortened view of history, the unmooring of subjectivity, radical discontinuity, replication and parody, awareness of the constructedness of all knowledge and myths, resistance to closure, indifference to what Lyotard calls ‘the solace of good forms,’ and that ‘new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense’ that Frederic Jameson characterizes as ‘the supreme formal feature of all postmodernisms’.54 But, for Cowart, this is a superficial compatibility. DeLillo is finally ‘impatient of the reductive thinking that makes language some kind of gossamer

14 Introduction: the possibility of fiction film, some completely depthless word-gauze between world and cognition’.55 Poststructuralist theory, Cowart argues, ‘misvalues and belies’ language, which is a ‘system that subsumes virtually all human experience’.56 DeLillo’s writing reveals the depths of language, depths in which a kind of humanity is preserved, and a kind of spirituality, that is disavowed by poststructuralist thinking, and by ‘postmodern depthlessness’. DeLillo, he says, ‘charts new territory for literary art in fictions that constantly probe language for an epistemological depth largely denied by poststructuralist theory’.57 The critical response to DeLillo, then, can be calibrated by his relationship with postmodernism. He is an enthusiastic postmodernist; or a postmodernist who feels a longing for a critical art that has been lost in the age of the mass media; or he is an artist whose work is an authentic, moral reaction against what are often characterised as the ‘excesses’ of the postmodern. But the story that informs this kind of response, that characterises a contentless postmodernism as the extension of ‘poststructuralist’ theory, might not be the only way to conceive of the history of critique after Hegel and Kant. In recent years, the orthodoxy that places Derrida in opposition to Adorno, and that reads the failure of postmodern critique back through Derrida’s apolitical reception of Hegel, has faced a number of significant challenges. The establishment by Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, in 1980, of the ‘Centre for Philosophical Research on the Political’, has suggested some compelling ways of rereading the political, through Heidegger and Derrida. Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s work Retreating the Political (1997) stems from this collaborative research.58 As the title suggests, this work seeks to understand how the philosophical retreat from the political that is associated with contemporary French thought might open onto a retreating, or a rethinking of the political itself. And Derrida’s more recent writings, particularly his work Specters of Marx (1994), have contributed to this sense that deconstruction does not involve a simple rejection of the political, or an outright abandonment of Marx.59 Since Derrida’s writing has taken its ‘political turn’, since he has sought overtly to theorise the relationship between Marxism and deconstruction, the story that pits French and German thought against one another has become somewhat less plausible. This is not to suggest that Derrida has been a Marxist all along, or that deconstruction is simply a form of Marxist critique. It is rather to suggest that deconstruction might have more in common with Adornian negativity than has until recently been widely accepted. It is to suggest that Deleuze’s ‘line of flight’, Derrida’s economy of the gift and of the secret, Adorno’s conception of the determined negation, Bloch’s theorisation of possibility, Benjamin’s conception of dialectical materialism, Freud and Lacan’s conception of the unconscious, Kristeva’s theorisation of the abject, may all share political concerns, and shadow forth political dialogues, that have until recently been difficult to see or hear. The ‘rush to the post’, and the invention of the portmanteau term ‘postmodernism’ to define and delimit an entire range of cultural activity, has set up and hypostasised false distinctions between the political and the apolitical, the depthless and the authentic, the

Introduction: the possibility of fiction 15 committed, the autonomous and the decadent, that have retarded political thinking for generations. DeLillo’s work has been read, I suggest, in the light of these false oppositions. 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 the culture from the post-war to the present day. In reading DeLillo’s oeuvre as at once a critique and an enactment of the possibility of fiction in the post-war, this book seeks to move beyond the assumptions that are at work in the theorisation and the deployment of the terminology of postmodernism. It seeks to give some kind of critical articulation to a negativity that is at work in DeLillo’s oeuvre, a kind of critical negativity that draws on deconstruction, as it draws on Marxism, and psychoanalysis, that is neither a postmodern abandonment of the political nor an aesthetic or political resistance to theory, and that does not find itself redeemed or guaranteed by Osteen’s ‘art’, or by Cowart’s ‘language’. DeLillo’s fiction is tremendously referential, suggestive, and multiphonic. As many have suggested, his attention to the zeitgeist is such that his writing seems to touch on the very springs that make the culture work. In reaching in this intimate way into the fibres of the intellectual, political and private life of the culture, his writing strikes a rich resonance with Marx and Freud, with Wittgenstein, with Heidegger, with Benjamin and Adorno, with Deleuze and Derrida and Kristeva, with Baudrillard and Virilio. In following a few of the ways in which these resonances inform our reading of DeLillo, this book suggests that DeLillo’s fiction is balanced around a new kind of critical possibility, a possibility which is difficult to hold to the light, which does not conform to the existing divisions of intellectual labour and partisanship, which is inhabited at once by the spirit of Marx and Derrida, of Freud and Wittgenstein, of Deleuze and Adorno. This is a kind of critical possibility which bears out Derrida’s perception that ‘critique and non-critique are fundamentally the same’, whilst nevertheless finding, within this equation between resistance and compliance, a kind of deathliness, an Adornian negativity, which allows for the continuing possibility of critique. At the opening of Underworld, DeLillo’s narrator suggests that ‘longing on a large scale is what makes history’ (U 11). It is this unnameable longing, this yearning for something that is missing in history, that is the very spirit of theory and of philosophy, as it is the driving force behind DeLillo’s writing. It is this longing that thrills through DeLillo’s fiction, that gives it its ethical and poetic imperatives, that allows it to go on. It is this longing that points to that in history which is still unrealised, and which allows thought and history to persist. A character in Great Jones Street, one of DeLillo’s early novels, comments that art, in 1970s America, is giving way to violence, as a means of shaping the way that we think and see. ‘Any curly haired boy can write windswept ballads’, DeLillo’s rock star Bucky Wunderlick claims. ‘You have to crush people’s heads. That’s the only way to make those fuckers listen’ (GJS 104).

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Introduction: the possibility of fiction

This loss of faith in the possibilities of an ethical, non-violent form of countercultural expression predicts, of course, the collapsing of the distinctions, in the later novel Mao II, between the artist and the terrorist. Throughout DeLillo’s writing, there is a recognition and a dramatisation of the failure of a critical art under the conditions of late capitalism, of globalisation, and of Americanisation. But this enactment of a collapse of ethical opposition, of a kind of descent into a countercultural violence which simply mirrors and doubles the violence of global capitalism, is accompanied in DeLillo by a writing towards the not yet seen that lies latent in the culture, and that points towards the possibility of an ethical becoming, a becoming whose contours are not yet imaginable to us. Bill Gray suggests, in Mao II, that ‘I’ve always seen myself in sentences’. ‘I begin to recognize myself,’ he goes on, ‘word by word, as I work through a sentence. The language of my books has shaped me as a man. There’s a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right’ (M 48). It is this writing towards the unknown, this writing towards an ethics and a poetics that is still to come, that characterises DeLillo’s fiction. It is this democracy to come, this not yet conscious possibility, that DeLillo’s writing sounds in Marx and Derrida, in Wittgenstein and Freud and Deleuze. DeLillo’s fiction moves constantly beyond itself. The rhythm and the shaping of his sentences produce a kind of poetic excess; his sentences lead to a kind of deathly beyond that is secreted in language itself. His fiction works towards a form of critical possibility that might take us past the theoretical impasse marked out by postmodernism, as it might take us beyond the end of history as imagined by Fukuyama and by Kojève. In doing so, his writing offers to produce new ways of thinking and seeing, to find new ways of telling the story of critical thinking since Hegel and Kant. This book suggests some of the ways in which we can begin to read the possibilities that DeLillo’s writing shadows forth; some of the ways in which his fiction can help us to think and to see, in our famously dark times.

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,

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The 1970s

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

Americana 21 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

22 The 1970s 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

Americana 23 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.

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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

Americana 25 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 America, an America living beyond the colonising power of the USA, in which the population ‘lived off roots and berries but no symbols’, and in which material, non-linguistic history would be written on the land, in stone and in silence, because as Uncle Malcolm suggests in Sullivan’s later story, ‘to be silent in the stone’s silence is the beginning of a union with the past’ (A 322). If the first of Sullivan’s stories extends itself beyond the boundaries of the USA towards a comically fantasised, native American merging with the prelingual earth, then the second of her stories projects out in the opposite direction, towards a British, Irish and European cultural geography. Sullivan’s foray into the Atlantic, and to the last outpost of America before the sweep of the ocean, is also a probing into her own ancestry, towards the truth of her Scotch-Irish birth, which is shrouded in a kind of dangerous, incestuous, oedipal secrecy; it is a salmon’s leap into a ‘pool of birth and truth’ (A 327). Her confrontation with Uncle Malcolm brings Sullivan to a traumatic recognition of the fragility of her Americanness. As the realisation begins to dawn that Malcolm is her father rather than her uncle, she feels ‘some sudden lurch in the runnings of my blood. Broadsword and pipers . . . Centuries of the Scottish Kirk’ (A 326). And with the stirring in her blood of her ScotchIrish ancestry comes the recognition that the USA itself is born from its immigrant population, that, as the naming of the American landscape might suggest, it is nothing more than a facsimile made up from the patchwork of European immigrants that colonised the land originally squatted by Black Knife. ‘And aren’t there eighteen Belfasts in America’, she asks herself, ‘and didn’t Ulster stock the colonies?’ (A 327). And as Sullivan’s journey of discovery gathers weight and pace, the narrative itself reflects the crumbling of revolutionary America into those cultural elements from which it is fashioned, becoming increasingly rich in European cultural references. The journey by sloop into the Sound, chasing an apparitional origin and a foundational landscape, has many crossovers with Moby Dick, and Sullivan makes these Melvillian parallels explicit in her narrative (A 322). But as the journey continues, as the moment of revelation approaches, the cultural frame of the story shifts from America to Europe. Uncle Malcolm steers the boat towards Mount Desert Island, and up an ‘authentic Fjord’ (A 328), into a Bergmanesque Scandinavian seascape, upon which a ‘Nordic fog’ descends (A 329). And with the falling of the fog, and the becalming of the

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sea, so that the boat enters the ‘silence and the darkness’ (A 329) in which Malcolm can tell his daughter the secret of her birth, the narrative finds itself in a space more redolent of Conrad or Coleridge than of Melville. The boat’s tense and uncanny drift on a slack tide calls to mind Conrad’s The Shadow Line, itself a shadow of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and the struggle to force the boat into the Celtic heart of Sullivan’s story has clear parallels with Marlow’s phantasmal journey away from London to another dark, silent, colonial heartland in Heart of Darkness. And with the development of a European landscape and a European literary frame, a British historical context grows up around the voyage, and around the becalmed, benighted sloop. The sloop’s name, Marston Moor, calls up the English civil war from the story’s start, but as the journey continues, Cromwell’s routing of the Royalists in the battle of Marston Moor becomes a direct focus. Sullivan’s own narrative incorporates an extract from Cromwell’s letter to his brother-in-law Valentine Walton celebrating the Puritan victory at the battle – his assertion that ‘England and the Church of God hath had a great favor from the Lord in this great victory given to us’ (A 328).7 But Cromwell’s faith in the power of God to produce a Puritan Britain and Ireland in his image is short-lived, as this ‘prayer from Marston Moor’ ends with the restoration of the monarchy, and with ‘Cromwell’s head blinking on a pike at Tyburn gallows’ (A 328). The Puritan mission, it is suggested, is to flourish not in England, but in New England, after the ‘great migration’ to Maine in the 1630s.8 So in returning to Marston Moor, Sullivan’s story returns not only to her dark and incestuous origins, but also to the European birth of the USA itself. These two stories of Sullivan’s, then, hold the novel, and its portrait of America, in place. America leaks out of itself both towards the east, and towards the west, towards Black Knife, and towards Oliver Cromwell. And the overarching frame provided by Sullivan’s two stories holds in place an entire network of reference in the novel, in which the America of the early 1970s, which is in the process of becoming the ‘greatest superstate of them all’ (A 120), is fed back into its geographical and historical contexts. The Second World War lies under the surface of the novel throughout, as the moment at which the European colonial powers enter into a terminal decline, giving way to the rise of America and Russia as the new superpowers, inaugurating the Vietnam, Korean and cold wars. American military involvement in the Pacific during the Second World War is a direct focus, with the Bataan death march, and Guadalcanal, and the battle of the Eastern Solomons acting as a kind of uneasy backdrop to 1970s corporate America. And to counterbalance this focus on American action in the Pacific, the novel is shot through with reference to European culture, to the French New Wave, to British, Irish and European modernism, to an entire cultural history with which the USA has an ambivalent engagement. Sullivan’s two stories provide a kind of semipermeable membrane, which frames these historical, geographical and cultural jockeyings; a membrane through which America disperses into the Pacific and into the Atlantic, but also a skin which helps to hold America in, helps

Americana 27 to provide the shape of a fully united state towards which history may be propelling all of us. As I have already suggested, however, Sullivan’s geographical/historical frame is only one of several structuring principles in Americana. If Sullivan’s stories mark the porous edges both of the novel, and of the America that the novel struggles to imagine into being, then David’s film offers another structuring device, which works in some ways in opposition to Sullivan’s narratives of American dispersion. The film inside the book, the fledgling work inside the fledgling work, is structured around an ambivalent attempt to synthesise the psychical and cultural material that Sullivan’s stories frame. David says that the ‘true subject of film’ is ‘space itself, how to arrange it and people it, time hung in a desert window, how to win out over sand and bone’ (A 240). His film is driven by the attempt to find, in the desert landscapes of the Midwest, some mystical, religious centre, some nodal point around which space, and objects in space, can be reorganised, cast like bronze into a final, transcendent shape. The work, in some sense, is an attempt to gather up the diverse material of the novel into a new aesthetic harmony. Through a minute poetics of gesture, motion and shifting perspective, David seeks a filmic epiphany, in which the dispersed fragments of his contemporary America might be imagined into a new shape, which is scorched, in heat and projected light, onto the sand and bone of the ancient continent. The idea for the film, the ‘strangest, darkest, most horrifying idea of [his] life’ (A 125), comes from his chance, voyeuristic encounter with a sexualised, maternal figure, who he watches intently from a window as she trims a hedge with poetic ease, ‘her arms beating, somewhat like a bird discovering flight’ (A 125). The power of this image, for David, is found in its capacity to harbour, within the restricted ambit of its barely moving parts, something else, a trembling, nascent something that the image itself is not. As he later explains to Sullivan, ‘I saw a woman trimming a hedge. Almost immediately it became something else. And it’s still changing’ (A 205). The something else that he finds in the image opens onto an economy of equivalence, an economy which determines the aesthetic contours both of young David’s film, and of the older David’s narrative. David seeks, through the power of the camera, to transform the landscape through which he travels by giving an expression to this equivalence. The film will discover, in the gaps and the nuances immanent in gesture, stance, and rhythm, a true America which lies hidden, dormant and disguised in the trampled, devalued, commodified images of everyday life; a clean version of its sullied self. And the America that David divines, fleetingly, in the beating arms of the hedge-trimming woman, is an America that is also, and at once, a psychical landscape, a private mindscape, in which the oedipal prohibitions beneath which David lives might be lifted to offer him an orgasmic, epiphanic release. The America that emerges in Americana, through David’s autobiographical quest, is a nation that is inscribed and disfigured with oedipal injunctions, with baffled, prohibited desire, with nameless fear and dread. The pathology from which David suffers, a pathology which is

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reflected and repeated across the entire nation, in the ‘lost towns of America’ (A 125), is inseparable from the unresolved erotic longing that David feels for his deranged, spiritual mother. David’s portrait of his family life is of people devastated by multiple trauma, unable to navigate their desires for each other, unable to open up effective channels of communication. David’s father, suffering from the brutalising effects of the Bataan death march, in which he buried a man alive, directs all his creative and communicative energies into advertising, into his evangelistic mission to ‘move the merch off the shelves’ (e.g. A 207). And his empathic mother, whose highly tuned sensibility offers the possibility of a fleeting and poetic telepathic community to the family, is too delicate an instrument to survive contemporary American life, and retreats into madness and silence. But his film offers David the possibility of curing this pathology, of redrawing and rebuilding America by facing and overcoming the primary, mythical injunction against his desire for his mother. The hedge-trimming woman is one of many versions of David’s mother that appear throughout the novel, and David sees, in the spectral vision of his dead mother that is shrouded in the gestures of a stranger, a way of reinventing everything around him, a way of seeing, through the mass produced carnage of modern America, a ghostly, original, mythical scene, bathed in renaissance light, that needs only a particular filmic glance to bring it once more into visibility. This film, watched compulsively by the older David on his tropical island, offers an aesthetic scaffolding to the novel in which it is contained – it provides the bones upon which a transfigured America might be hung. The economy of repetition and equivalence which lies at the heart of David’s film reverberates concentrically outwards, to bring the entire novel into its rhythmic harmony. The ragged collection of American types who strike out, in the midst of their confusions, into the heart of America – the Vietnam vet, the avant-garde sculptor, the stalled novelist, the failed TV executive – might be reborn and redeemed as they are sucked into the familial orbit of David’s film. The film offers to recreate the novel and the nation from within. And if the novel and the film can be organised as ripples around a central disturbance, then at the very heart of both works is the extraordinary erotic encounter between David and his mother, which occurs after David’s rite of passage party. The party is held as a comic celebration of David’s entry to the mythic territory of American manhood. His parents’ neighbours line up to welcome him into their exhausted community, to reveal to him its tawdry mysteries. The ‘Collier woman’, to whom a distant scandal is attached, informs him archly that ‘you have a man’s body and a man’s appetite’ (A 191), and the local frustrated novelist, Harold Torgeson, confides in him that ‘I killed three Japanese in the war that I know of. I’m telling you these things because they’ll be useful to you someday’ (A 194). At the end of the party, as David stands on the threshold of adult, post-war, small-town America, he catches a glimpse of his mother, through the kitchen doorway:

Americana 29 My mother was in there. The refrigerator door was open. She was wearing just one shoe. The other was on the floor, a black shoe, upright, near the wall. She held a tray of ice cubes in her hands and she was spitting on the cubes. She disappeared behind the refrigerator door and I could hear her open the freezer compartment and slide the tray back in. I moved away as the freezer slammed shut. I went upstairs and into my room. I closed the door behind me as quietly as I could. I took off my shirt and my shoes and lay on the bed, knowing it was too hot to sleep [ . . . ] Then I went downstairs. The kitchen light was still on but she was in the pantry. ‘It was only a matter of time,’ she said [ . . . ] ‘There is nothing but time. Time is the only thing that happens of itself. We should learn to let it take us along. The Collier woman is a fool.’ I did not move. I felt close to some overwhelming moment. In the dim light her shadow behind her consumed my own. I knew what was happening and I did not care to argue with the doctors of that knowledge. Let it be. Inside her was something splintered and bright. Something that might have been left by the spiral passage of my own body. She was before me now, looking up, her hands on my shoulders. The sense of tightness I had felt in my room was beginning to yield to a promise of fantastic release. It was going to happen. The cage would open, the mad bird soar, and I would cry in epic joy and pain at the freeing of a single moment, the beginning of time. Then I heard my father’s bare feet on the stairs. That was all. (A 195–197) This unfulfilled encounter, during which David looks over the boundary of his tarnished, compromised reality into the abyssal, poetic depths of unchecked desire, forms the primal scene of novel and film. It is from this modernist wellspring that both works are drawn. The encounter is heavy with mythical and literary freight, but perhaps it is Proust that looms largest here. David’s lust after his mother, and the prohibiting intervention of the ‘father’s bare feet on the stairs’, invoke Marcel’s forbidden yearning for his mother in the overture to A la recherche, and the terrible appearance of the phallic father, bearing a candle, at the top of the stairs.9 And like Marcel, David seeks an aesthetic form that will be able to re-imagine this moment, to absorb it into a landscape of perfected memory, in which it can be recuperated as art. The moment reappears insistently throughout the film and novel, radiating out from itself, refiguring itself in poetic guise after poetic guise. The most dominant scene in the film in which the encounter is restaged employs Sullivan, again, as a central figure. David rebuilds the scene in the surrogate kitchen and pantry of the Yost family, staging Bud Yost as his teenage self, and Sullivan as his mother. Standing behind the camera, David finds himself as both voyeur and director of the scene, struggling to control it,

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filming the encounter as it develops, Sullivan, facsimile of the mother, placing her hands on the shoulders of Bud, facsimile of himself. As the scene rushes frantically towards the climactic moment, which in life was denied but in art might be somehow realised, David stands behind the camera, shooting the scene, ‘spilling seed into the uncaptured light’ (A 318). But as he continues to shoot, as the power of the camera opens the scene to the nuances, gaps and possibilities that it contains within it, a space opens in which David might become his young self again, resurrected within the filmic moment; in which he moves from ejaculating voyeur to become once more the recipient of his mother’s loving gaze: Then I began to shoot the last sequence and I found I could not stop. Through the viewfinder I saw them, motionless, supremely patient, steadfast, her long fingers knuckle to tip visible over his shoulders, her left eye looking past his ear and into the eye of the camera, and I kept shooting for two or three minutes, lost somewhere, bent back in twentyfive watts of brown light, listening for a sound behind me. (A 318) In this moment of psychic and aesthetic reconstruction, the power of the camera, its ‘religious authority’, is found in its capacity to bend the present moment back into a fully regained past. As the simulacral mother’s gaze is drawn into the eye of the camera, there is the possibility that ‘time and distance’ might be ‘annihilated’ by its centripetal pull (A 86). The forbidding, paternal sound on the stairs is never heard, in this reconstruction, as David, standing both behind and within the camera’s sweep, can reshape the moment, refashion from it the life that has led, in all directions, away from the foundational crisis that unfolds in it. If the original encounter with the mother in David’s kitchen is the foundational moment of lost time and failed desire, and the filmic, simulacral reconstruction is the primary moment in which this lost time is refashioned, then ripples fan out from this filmic moment, all the way to the edges of the novel, bringing the dispersed moments of the narrative into the rhythm and tension of its new architectural frame. The original encounter with the mother opens a breach in the small town life for which David was being groomed, through which he loses ‘the idea of what I was’ (A 198), but the echoes that answer from the filmic representation of the encounter travel across the landscape of the novel, promising to reclaim this idea, and to remake it in a new image. Through its use of stand-ins and simulacra, its development of an overarching aesthetic economy of equivalence, the novel multiplies the flipping over that occurs in the scene with Sullivan and Bud: time and space collapse into the void of the camera, and the stand-ins reveal their potential to become the originals. The new space of the film washes back out over the America that David has been travelling through. The hedge-trimming woman, searching for flight like the ‘mad bird’ of David’s oedipal desire, is

Americana 31 released by this backwash of the filmic scenario, allowed to reveal the possibilities that her gesture contains. With this liberation of the mother, and of oedipal desire, an entirely new novel can be glimpsed, a novel which is made up of elements from the primal scene, elements which remain dormant until the film activates them, giving them a new lease of aesthetic and libidinal life. A delicate tracery of references to ice, for example, spreads throughout the novel from the mother’s spitting on the ice cubes in the heart of the primal scene. As if to balance oedipal eroticism against maternal death, ice emerges in the Joycean scene in which David sits at his mother’s deathbed: I felt a sudden chill, the vast white silences of my mother’s deathbed, candlewax and linen, her enormous eyes, the breathing shallow and bad. Beneath the blanket her body was little more than ash, crumbs of bone; her hands were dry kindling. Death became her well, so horribly well, and when I heard the bells of an ice-cream truck I almost laughed. (A 97) The bells of the ice-cream truck, as a Proustian sign for the death of the mother, reverberate through the novel, as does the chill that emanates from her deathbed. The ice cubes that the mother spits on, that evoke both her sexuality and her death, emerge again in the filmic reconstruction of the oedipal encounter. At the end of the filming, as David prepares to leave the Yost’s house, simulacrum of his own childhood home, Glen Yost, who doubles in the film as David’s father, finally appears as a belated, forbidding patriarch; and the terms in which he condemns David reflect the glacial metaphors that surround maternal sex and death: Then the capillaries flared in his wild eye, the thin whispering streaks, hints of cold deacon fury, the kind of cold that burns, the cold that sticks to hands, that furious cold light damning my soul, those arctic streaks, those veins in the cube of ice inside his eye. (A 318) This working together, in the film, of the mother’s death, a forbidden desire for the mother, and the prohibition of the simulacral father, collected in the metaphorical ice cube lodged in the father’s gaze, reaches right back, across the novel to the opening scene. At the Antonioniesque party that opens the novel, David narrates a moment in which he goes into an empty kitchen: I stood there awhile. Then I opened the refrigerator door and took an ice tray out of the freezer. There were four ice cubes left. I brought up the phlegm from my throat and spat on each of the cubes, separately. Then I slid the tray back into the freezer and shut the refrigerator door. (A 10)

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In the forward movement of the narrative, this gesture is as deranged and unreadable as the mother’s own ice-spitting, which so unsettles and excites David. It sets the tone for the novel’s journey, scattered as it is with moments of casual violence and random violations of social codes. But the encounter with the mother, and the filmic restaging of this encounter, sets up another frame of signification, a kind of reverse signification which gathers the novel into itself, which reaches back to this first scene and transforms an act of disdain into one of poetic homage, and which welcomes the derangement of both mother and son into a new, redeemed aesthetic economy. If the novel turns around the possibility of finding a poetic frame that can reclaim the mother, save her from death and oedipal prohibition, then it is the figure of Sullivan who offers the most important space for this reclamation. Sullivan contains within herself, as a kind of endlessly potent manuscript, all of the ingredients of the novel, that lie waiting for transformation under the gaze of the camera, or of the narrator. She is pregnant, from the beginning, with the spiritual weight of David’s mother. The correspondences between Sullivan and David’s mother run through the novel, and reach back, again, to the party that opens the novel. Sullivan is the first of the many stand-ins for David’s mother that appear in the novel, and David is ‘terribly drawn’ (A 8) to her maternal sexuality, but it is a quiet accident of poetic gesture, at the opening of the novel, that is the first in a series of aesthetic equivalences that culminate in the scene at the Yost household, an accident that lies dormant, waiting to be resurrected and articulated as meaning. As David watches her voyeuristically at the party, Sullivan adopts a posture which, in a sense, inaugurates the novel: She slipped her right foot out of her shoe and then, with exquisite nonchalance, tucked her leg way up behind her against the wall so that it disappeared, storklike, behind the shroud of her trenchcoat. She remained that way, on one leg, a cryptic shoe moored beneath her. (A 7) In the opening scene, David returns several times to this posture, saying that ‘I couldn’t take my eyes off that empty shoe’ (A 10). The empty shoe that lies beneath Sullivan’s raised leg, that is connected to her body by an evocatively missing thread, has to wait for nearly two hundred pages for its absent referent to arrive, in the discarded shoe of the deranged mother, spitting on her own ice cubes. It takes two hundred pages for David’s fascination with the shoe to cohere, for that accident of gesture to become fated. If the entire, many-mansioned world of A la recherche grows out of a tea cup, then Americana grows out of the empty space of that cryptic shoe. As Marcel remakes his world, as art, from the chance possibilities offered by involuntary memory, and Joyce’s Dedalus uses the alchemy of modernist poetics to forge ‘out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being’,10 so David seeks to build, from the potential that lies in the empty shoe, a

Americana 33 new America; an America in which aura is preserved and maintained, in which the trembling possibility that David divines in his adolescent kitchen is finally born, like Yeats’ rough beast,11 and returned to a new American Bethlehem at the very centre of things. David as auteur invokes Bergman, Antonioni, Kurosawa and Godard, whilst David as narrator invokes Joyce, Proust and Yeats, as avant-garde, modernist fathers, as guiding spirits in his bid to produce a new mythology which might incorporate 1970s America. Through the work of art that David and David produce between them, Sullivan the sculptor might be sculpted anew, might be coaxed to give up the unsullied possibility that she harbours, and to reorganise herself around the centre that David glimpses within her. David, in his guise both of filmmaker and of writer, evinces a tremendous respect for the power of his media. He regards his own art objects with a kind of religious awe. He likes to ‘touch the film’ (A 347), to run it though his fingers, and reflects that it should not be thought of as film, so much as ‘a scroll, a delicate bit of papyrus that feared discovery’ (A 238). The film, in its auratic, authentic originality, seems to him pre-mechanical. ‘Veterans of the film industry’, he suggests, ‘would swear the whole thing pre-dated Edison’s kinetoscope’ (A 238). There is a magical power in the flimsy ribbon that David passes through his fingers, that contains within itself the very essence of time regained. Similarly, David as writer cannot take his eyes off his beautiful, clean, bulky manuscript in which his narrative is contained. ‘It never fails to be a touching thing’, he says, ‘my book on a pinewood table, poetic in its loneliness, totally still, Cézannesque in the timeless light it emits’ (A 346). Americana turns around the potential for art objects to transform, to transmogrify, to find in the trampled chaos of things a new centre, a timeless auratic depth: to find in the ‘schizogram’ that Sullivan presents, kaleidoscopic container as she is of the jumbled ingredients of America, an impalpable, imperishable being, that can gestate us all. Powerful as this drive towards art-as-redemption might be, however, and as centrally concerned as the novel is with the possibility of a transformative poetics that might inhabit it, it turns also around the prospect of the failure of art, and the cultural impossibility of the kinds of modernist selffashioning that are found in Joyce and in Proust. As I have already suggested, however hard the narrative works to find a transcendent space in which young David and old David might come together, in which America might be refashioned in the guise of a new reconciliation, it comes up time and time again against the irreconcilability of David and David, auteur and novelist. The film that might forge this reconciled space, that might return David to himself via the gaze of a transfigured Sullivan, turns out to be unscreenable. Like Brand’s novel, which contains ‘words of the same color as the paper on which they were written’ (A 347), David’s film ends up in ‘silence and darkness’ (A 347); the ‘silence and darkness’ (A 329) in which the truth of Sullivan’s origins, and the origins of the USA, remain obscured. The film as origin, as container of aura and of power, inscribed on sand and bone and parchment,

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slides continuously over into a mere tinny reproduction of the America from which David started out, the America which, like Marlow’s London, he has never really left. The gaps and silences and nuances contained in gesture and stance, those empty places in which a new and authentic, autobiographical America might be articulated, remain silent and dark – they slide from the grasp of screen and film, moving beyond readability, condemning film and page to reproduce what was already there, to spin the tired landscape of corporate America once more through the projector. If the novel is delicately balanced between Sullivan’s stories and David’s film, as opposing structural principles, then the film perhaps fails to incorporate Sullivan into its new frame, fails to make out of her many pieces a new America. Sullivan is part Scotch-Irish, just as she might be the ‘daughter of Black Knife’, or ‘an avenging squaw who would descend the hill after battle’ (A 336) – she contains in her person the narrative that she lives out in her stories. Her body is a facsimile of America, lapped at on either side by the Atlantic and the Pacific, inhabited at its centre by the spectre of David’s mother. The novel works fantastically hard to find a way to bring the multiple significations that inhabit Sullivan into a new filmic universe, but the real drive of the narrative is towards a falling away, towards the collapse of Sullivan’s many parts into an atonal disharmony. When David finally acts out with Sullivan the sexual congress that was denied him with his mother, he goes through the motions convincingly enough, straining joyfully against the ‘abomination’ he is committing, and calling out in orgasm ‘home at last’, like an American Leopold returning to his Molly.12 But the novel is saturated with the disappointment, the anticlimax of this moment, the failure of the filmic and the bodily to converge in a new, transfigured homeland. Just as David’s mission to find the Navaho, living somewhere beyond the borders of the America that he knows, ends up with his playing baseball with some 1970s Californian campus hippies squatting on the edge of a reservation, so the bid to penetrate to the heart of his dark, oedipal obsession ends with a tawdry and unconvincing pornographic fantasy. This collapse of the modernist project of Americana into an acknowledgement of the failure of modernist poetics in 1970s American culture, is contained in the millennial framework that holds the novel together. The projection of David as narrator, standing at the threshold of the twenty-first century, produces millennial echoes that travel throughout the novel. Sullivan’s story of Uncle Malcolm on Somes Sound is shot through with quotations from Revelations, investing her leap into the truth of her ancestry with the judgment of God at the end of history. ‘And the first angel sounded the trumpet’, Sullivan says, ‘and the winds blew and the third part of those creatures died which had life in the sea’ (A 330).13 The entire novel builds to this moment of revelation, builds to the summit of an incredible truth, rendered in art, in which time will be collected into a single instant of judgement, wisdom and knowledge. Yeats’ rough beast, that inhabits the novel with its menacing presence, is slouching its way, after ‘twenty centuries of

Americana 35 stony sleep’, to be born, in the novel, at a moment of poetic rapture.14 But the mythical turn of the century that is fantasised as an end point of the novel, that invests the novel with a religious, millennial aura, is shadowed and undermined by another way of understanding the millennium, not as a mythical but as a cultural watershed. The novel accelerates towards 1999 both as a biblical end point, and as the moment in time when America finally installs itself, irredeemably, as ‘the greatest superstate of them all’, when the people of the world will be ‘on their knees before our crazed power’ (A 120). The prospect of America as a single superpower, bringing the world into its power and its sweep, rewriting all cultural histories into the fabricated truth of its own timeless becoming, is the other vision of the turn of the millennium that haunts the novel. Walter Benjamin comments, in Theses on the Philosophy of History, that ‘every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably’.15 It is precisely this disappearance that is feared and envisaged in Americana, as the novel speeds towards 1999, and towards extinction in the fires of a triumphant America. The cultural histories that are imagined in the novel, that shimmer tantalisingly and delicately beyond the borders of the corporate metropolis, are endangered by the forward rush of the cultural current which produces it, and in the grip of which it struggles to survive. The millennium in this novel is figured simultaneously as the moment of a poetic revelation, the founding of a new, modernist vision of a transfigured America, and as the end of art, the end of possibility; the collapse of difference, singularity and aura into the turning gyre of the changing same. Cliché, tautology and the possibility of fiction The word for moonlight is moonlight. Don DeLillo, The Body Artist16

This prospect of the failure of art under the conditions of burgeoning global capital is at the centre of all three of DeLillo’s early novels. End Zone and Great Jones Street build upon Americana’s sketch of an exhausted culture, partly at the expense of the earlier novel’s continuing investment in the persistence of a modernist spirit into 1970s US culture. The later two novels present us with an American popular culture in which the possibility of aesthetic or political counternarratives has dwindled almost to the point of disappearance. End Zone explores the possibility that football might work metaphorically at the heart of a culture, galvanising its moral aggression and unity of purpose in the aesthetics of mass and spectacle. But in doing so it consistently undermines the artistic and dramatic capacities of football, repeatedly reducing the game to its simple and brutal constituent parts. ‘This is footbawl,’ one of the team members asserts, in the heat of competition, ‘You throw it, you ketch it, you kick it. Footbawl. Footbawl. Footbawl’ (E 128). Football is about

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pure, organised violence; it is about emptying aggression and drive of meaning. ‘We hit and get hit,’ Chester Randall explains. ‘We sweat off excess poundage. We really sweat. Sweeee-et. We hit. We hurl our bodies. We get hit’ (E 180). The language of football is ‘Cree-unch. Creeech. Crunch’, and ‘Yawaba, yawaba, yawaba’, and any metalanguage that might allow us to understand football as a narrative with wider implications is explicitly repressed. As Harkness himself comments early in the novel, the dedication and purity that the game demands both of its players and of its followers might offer a model of concentration of spirit and will, but it does not follow that such a honing of the faculties should open onto any new planes of consciousness. The ‘oneness’ demanded and produced by football might be a ‘good concept’, but Harkness suggests that ‘it could not be truly attractive unless it meant oneness with God or the universe or some equally redoubtable superphenomenon’ (E 19). And if End Zone turns around the failure of football to organise its elements into a shape with wider cultural, aesthetic and theological resonances, then Great Jones Street dramatises the failure of the music industry to articulate any form of resistance to mainstream capitalist culture. Rock music emerges in Great Jones Street as a countercultural mode of expression which has lost the capacity to offer any real dissent from the culture in opposition to which it positions itself. Bucky Wunderlick, the Cobainesque figure at the heart of the novel, is eloquent about the attenuation of countercultural musical forms available to the 1970s artiste. For Bucky, the only way to strike an authentically radical note is to produce music which physically wounds the audience. ‘Any curly-haired boy can write windswept ballads,’ Bucky comments to a TV academic. ‘You have to crush people’s heads. That’s the only way to make those fuckers listen’ (GJS 104). But even this somewhat blunt-edged counter-ideological instrument seems beyond Wunderlick’s reach. The novel dramatises the process by which Wunderlick is irresistibly incorporated into mainstream culture, rather than making music which dents people’s heads from the outside. Even his ode to aesthetic anarchy, which has echoes perhaps of the Futurist conception of art as violence,17 is composed on a pundit’s sofa, where his comic refusal of the language of punditry can be effortlessly reclaimed and commodified as a highly marketable characteristic of bad-boy superstardom. It is perhaps a reflection of this passage from the persistence of modernism to its apparent collapse into an undifferentiated and uncritical popular culture that Joyce, Proust and Yeats, who loom so large over the landscape of Americana, tend to recede somewhat in Great Jones Street and End Zone. In the two later novels, it is Samuel Beckett, rather than his modernist antecedents, who provides a guiding light. Beckett’s writing, in its skeletal prose images and barren stage spaces, lives out the death of modernism, and the collapse of the avant-garde. Where Joyce and Proust produce great edifices in which the Hegelian spirit of the artist is forged and enshrined, Beckett can produce only the most fragile of shelters in which the artist might cower; shelters which themselves are constantly collapsing, returning the artist to

Americana 37 the midst of the world which s/he is endeavouring to see, or to think, from the outside. It is Beckett who recognised that to be an artist is to fail, ‘as no other dare fail’.18 But it may be that Beckett’s writing, in its extraordinary determination to keep a moribund modernist spirit barely alive within itself, is able to draw a transformative poetics from the necessary failure of art. As Bill Gray says in Mao II, Beckett’s writing is somehow able, even in its failure, to ‘shape the way that we think and see’ (M 157). The narrator of Beckett’s late work Worstward Ho accepts that to write again is always to ‘Fail again’, but he produces a poetic environment in which he is able to ‘Fail better’.19 Beckett’s writing labours to conjure art out of the failure of art. His work, particularly his minimalist output of the 1960s and 1970s, emerges from the contradictory imperative that the failure of art can be its only success. When the space of literature itself has been occupied and commodified, failing is the only way of getting ‘better’. But it requires a huge amount of poetic energy to hold this contradiction open for long enough to draw out a few last images, to continue to imagine in the face of the death of the imagination. A logic which requires one to fail very soon returns failure to the success which it opposes; the failure which is art’s only option becomes at the same time the privilege which is denied to it. Failing well condemns one to succeed in all but the most rarefied of atmospheres, and Beckett is perhaps the last writer who is able to produce such an atmosphere – to forge a space in the antinomy between necessary failure and necessary success in which art might struggle on. After Beckett, it is suggested in Mao II, this space is eradicated: the ‘artist is absorbed’, George Haddad tells Bill Gray. ‘Give him a dollar. Put him in a TV commercial’ (M 157). It is this vain struggle to maintain or carve out a withdrawn, failed space, under cultural conditions which forbid any form of withdrawal or retreat, that lies at the heart both of Great Jones Street and End Zone. Wunderlick’s removal to Great Jones Street, and to the mythical ‘house in the mountains’ where he records the ‘Mountain Tapes’, is a bid to withhold himself from a spiritually devalued cultural currency, to put himself out of the loop of the commodified music industry to which he unwittingly belongs.20 His disconnection of the telephone and of the refrigerator in his seedy New York bedsit testifies to his bid to unplug himself from the circuitry of contemporary community. But his voluntary exile from public life, rather than returning him to privacy and unglamorous solitude, produces a negative centre of gravity, a vortical disturbance in the flow of public life, that proves intolerable to the public. A press of interested parties circles around him, and around Great Jones Street, like cosmic matter around a black hole, demanding that he explain or even capitalise upon his absence, forcing him into the communication that he has set out to avoid. It is withdrawal and silence that proves offensive to Wunderlick’s audience, rather than music which might wound or kill, and Wunderlick’s refusal to explain his withdrawal, his refusal to speak or account for himself, whips up a storm of protest. He struggles to maintain, in response to repeated enquiries, that ‘he has no intentions’

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(GJS 7) in so withdrawing himself, that his withdrawal is about, precisely, a lack of intention, a will-lessness. Like Beckett’s early prose and stage protagonists, Wunderlick strives to accomplish something that is simply nothing (e.g. GJS 23), he wants to perform an action that is devoid of significance, that cannot be translated or assimilated into the languages and patterns of behaviour that have been prepared for him by his audience and by his agents, the all powerful ‘Transparanoia Inc.’. Like Beckett’s early character Belacqua, the act of will that Wunderlick is performing is one which is structured around the possibility of freeing himself from the Schopenhauerian tyranny of the will. Both Wunderlick and Belacqua seek to ‘will and gain enlargement from the gin palace of willing’.21 And Wunderlick’s comically vain attempt to occupy a kind of undriven emptiness at the heart of the novel, to live in the space of a formless negation of the demands made upon the artist/ commodity by the audience/consumer, runs closely parallel to that of Victor Krap, the solipsist at the heart of Beckett’s first full length play Eleutheria. Krap, in Beckett’s play, occupies an empty bedsit which, in the first act, takes up half the stage, whilst the other half of the stage is taken up by the opulent living room of the bourgeois Krap family. The drama turns on the one hand around Krap’s attempt to withdraw from bourgeois community into the decrepit solitude of his bedsit, and on the other around the attempt of his family to coax him out of his seclusion, back into the fold. Confounded by the unreadability of Krap’s limp withdrawal, by its aesthetic ungainliness and its refusal to offer itself up as spectacle or narrative, family members, stage managers and finally audience members plead in turn with Krap to explain himself, to act in accordance with some kind of dramatic, familial and social convention. But Krap resists all entreaties, insisting that ‘it’s time that something was simply nothing’.22 By the close of the play, Krap’s empty bedsit has expanded to engulf the Chekhovian, Ibsenesque, bourgeois living room into its minimal gloom, and Krap has ‘turned his emaciated back’ both on the unsatisfied, fee-paying audience and on ‘humanity’.23 Beckett, after this rather unpromising and so far unperformed theatrical debut, went on to build an oeuvre out of the possibilities inherent in staging nothingness, in giving some kind of ambivalent dramatic expression to a refusal to express; but for Wunderlick the scope for non-expression proves somewhat narrower. Transparanoia, and the novel’s many other agencies of control, have too many tendrils coiled too tightly around the Great Jones Street haven for Wunderlick to resist their capillary action, and he gets sucked back into circulation. Where Wunderlick’s manager, Globke, seeks to reassimilate him into mainstream culture in the name of continued revenue, the other petitioners that hound Wunderlick in his retreat seek to exploit his anti-gesture for directly opposite reasons. The various factions of the paramilitary Happy Valley Farm Commune, who are committed to the ‘idea of returning the idea of privacy to the idea of American life’ (GJS 193), see Wunderlick’s stance as a vehicle for their own struggle. Transparanoia seeks to appropriate Wunderlick by returning him to his former rock star

Americana 39 incarnation; the terrorist wing of Happy Valley seeks to appropriate him by translating his silence into a political slogan. Within the logic of the novel, in which the various political economies that turn around the non-space of Wunderlick’s withdrawal are constantly collapsing into one another, these opposite forms of control and appropriation seem sometimes to be indistinguishable. The corporate figure of Globke and the shadowy, paramilitary figure of Dr Pepper seem as likely to merge with one another as to offer one another any serious opposition, but between them they undermine Wunderlick’s bid to produce a gesture that is free of intent. The fate of the Mountain Tapes reflects the tendency for Transparanoia and Happy Valley to conspire against Wunderlick’s drive towards a space of aesthetic withdrawal. As Opel intuits when she smuggles the tapes to Wunderlick’s retreat as a birthday gift, they function as an aesthetic articulation of Wunderlick’s will-lessness. Opel’s gift of the tapes allows Wunderlick to be born again, to separate his body from his umbilical attachment to his art. By finally releasing the Mountain Tapes, by allowing them to stand, in their formlessness and irreproducible singularity, as an aesthetic expression of withdrawal, refusal and uncommodifiable integrity, then Wunderlick himself will be born back into the world, will be able to free his body from his art, and from his Great Jones Street retreat. But Transparanoia and the Happy Valley Farm Commune compete, in opposite ways, to destroy the tapes, the former through duplication and the latter through erasure. Globke breaks into Great Jones Street to steal the unique master copy of the tapes, to hone it and package it for the mass market – to prepare it as Wunderlick comments wryly for a ‘first pressing of a hundred million billion’ (GJS 199). The Happy Valley Farm Commune destroys the tapes, even as they are being mass produced in Cincinnati, with a bomb. And having destroyed the tapes, the commune returns the silence, imagined in the tapes as sound, phrase and rhythm, to the body of the artist, through the administering of the black market lobotomising drug which has been interchangeable with the tapes throughout. But even the suggestion that the tapes might constitute some kind of authentic expression, a form of articulation that exists in the gulf between silence and speech, between withdrawal and performance, is cast into doubt in Great Jones Street. Hidden though the tapes are, behind the various violences of Globke and Pepper, we are given some kind of compromised access to them through the Transparanoia publicity machine. In the ‘edited transcript of lyrics’ that the ‘Divisions of Transparanoia’ release within the pages of the novel itself (GJS 201), the tapes are driven from their sacred hiding place, and the possibility that they might offer us a new way of understanding contemporary music as a countercultural avant-garde is somewhat undermined. The lyrics, which we are instructed by Transparanoia not to quote without permission (GJS 207), read as exhausted gibberish, or nonsense pop. Where the lyrics of the 1971 Wunderlick classic ‘Pee Pee Maw Maw’ read partly as a parody of 1960s and 1970s Beckett ‘Residua’ (‘Least is best’, ‘Nill nully void’), the Mountain Tapes

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have all but forsaken even this echoing of Beckettian aesthetic practice. Here we are abandoned to the banality of infantile repetition (‘Baba/ Baba/ Baba’),24 and short circuited repetitive and tautological structures (‘I smell my nose/ I smell my nose’ ‘I touch my hand’). The final declaration that ‘I close my mouth’ (GJS 206–207), evoking an abandonment of expression that Beckett, despite his agonised longing for silence, never manages to achieve, predicts the gagging effect that Happy Valley’s black market drug will have on Wunderlick at the close of the novel. The tapes are reduced, finally, to the level of the narcotic ‘product’, and the potential to articulate a form of poetic silence is denied to them. The capacity to hollow out the space of a negative aesthetic, to produce a non-expressive form of expression that lives fleetingly beyond the scope or range of Fenig’s spinning, whirring market (GJS 48), is played out and exhausted, the parodic nature of these lyrics might suggest, in the still stirrings of Beckett’s late imaginings. The tapes and the narcotic, which have offered each other a tenuous opposition as art versus commodity, fold into virtual identity as the possibility of expression uncontaminated by the market collapses into Wunderlick’s non-auratic, infantile demand for silence. End Zone turns, similarly, around the constantly failing bid to preserve a withdrawn space at the heart of the work, described by Coach Emmet Creed as an ‘inner world of determination and silence’ (E 200). The novel’s twin concerns, football and nuclear war, seem to lend themselves more to violence, fury, speed and power than to the discovery of an empty, hollowed out retreat. Both football and wars of mass destruction are goal-driven – they drive us relentlessly and chaotically towards the End Zone, towards the telos of a consuming victory which might also be the end of history. We are caught in the novel in this reckless forward propulsion, this historical, narrative force carrying us on, which not only is careless of the injury it might inflict and the violence it might do, but also produces a great pleasure in this damage, and in this carelessness. Harkness’ aesthetic delight in the language and poetics of war, his joyful imagining of global destruction, is mirrored in the pleasure he takes in the bodily contact that football requires and allows, the whack and the crunch, the coming together of bodies at high velocities. But whilst the novel indulges in the erotics and homoerotics of chaotic, unreadable and unimaginable violence,25 the whirl and press is organised around a dead, non-libidinal centre, what T.S. Eliot has described as the ‘still point of the turning world’, and Wunderlick, in the slack calm of his empty flat, calls the ‘stillness at the center of a thing in motion’ (GJS 166).26 The still white heat at the centre of a mushroom cloud is held alongside the stillness at the heart of the football game. As Creed says, ‘football is only brutal from a distance. In the middle of it there’s a calm, a tranquillity’ (E 199). The novel is balanced around this central tranquillity, this pool of timeless calm which is invested with the sacred aura both of the art work and of the temple, and which is weighted against the enveloping turbulence of football, war and history.

Americana 41 If this calm centre is at once a sacred and an aesthetic retreat, then the novel offers two ways of conceiving of this centre, one as a religious and one as a poetic space. The first of these spaces is carved out by the mysterious and enigmatic Coach Creed. Creed is part coach and strategist, part priest, and in his priestly guise predicts a line of DeLillian clerics extending to Father Paulus in Underworld. Conference with Creed, in his windowless monastic cell of a study decorated only by a black and white plate of Saint Teresa of Avila, is ritualised and Jesuitical, dominated by the remembrance of Last Things. Over the course of the novel, and of the season, Creed’s management of the team becomes less driven by the desire to win football matches, and more focused on achieving the ascetic Way of Perfection, that path which Saint Teresa carved out through discipline and self-sacrifice.27 The desert isolation in which the novel is set, the inurement of the players to the ‘slowly gliding drift of identical things’ (E 18), the focus of the mind and the will on the repeated, meaningless task, produces in the novel the slow, gentle, atmosphere of the retreat. The spirit is controlled and subjugated until it almost disappears in the blanket whiteness of the desert snow, even as the body is racked and invigorated by the violence of training, competition and conflict. And if Coach Creed occupies a withdrawn, sacred centre in the novel, then Taft Robinson, the enigmatic African American running back, occupies the space of an aesthetic and philosophical retreat. Where Creed’s study doubles as a monkish chamber, Taft’s bedroom in the team’s dormitory works as a minimalist, late modernist space. The empty grey compartment in which Taft sits silently meditating is cast as a late Beckettian space – calling to mind the rotundas of Imagination Dead Imagine and Ping. Beckett’s rotundas are plain white vaults, situated in a plain white desert space, containing bodies which are placed in relation to each other with finical precision. The Rotunda stories consist, in their entirety, of the exact mapping of these white spaces, and the white bodies that they contain, as they tremble on the brink of Deleuzian imperceptibility in the white void.28 Here, poetry is a kind of mathematics, an aesthetics of arcs, nodes and regions: ‘Two diameters at right angles AB CD divide the white ground into two semicircles ACB BDA’.29 Taft’s grey room, located at the centre of the grey desert, is described with similar exactitude, and tends towards a similar kind of mathematical beauty. ‘I believe in static forms of beauty’, Taft tells Harkness: I like to measure off things and then let them remain. I like to create degrees of silence. Things in this room are simple and static. They’re measured off carefully. (E 239) When Harkness visits Taft in his balanced, measured room, he finds beauty and historical significance in the bare angles that the room creates, in the pure relation between its various planes and the objects and bodies it contains. Whilst Creed’s walls are decorated with the portrait of a saint, Taft’s

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walls are marked only by a piece of tape, intended to hang a painting which never materialises. Harkness is fixated with the relation between the tape and walls, meditating on ‘exactly how the tape had first been applied, at what angle to the ceiling, at what approximate angle to the intersection of that wall with each adjacent wall, at what angle to all other fixed lines in the room’ (E 190). As in Beckett’s Rotunda texts, the intense focus on the mathematical, architectural construction of the built space coexists with an equally sharp focus on the disposal of the human figure within it. Taft himself is described in terms of the angles of incidence achieved by his various parts, determined by ‘hip-length. Leg length. Tendon and tibia’ (E 191), and throughout the novel Harkness insists that significance, that the meaning of history, is found in this geometrical relation between bodies extended in space. History, Harkness claims, is ‘the placement of bodies. What men say is relevant only to the point at which language moves masses of people or a few momentous objects into significant juxtaposition’ (E 45). This reduction of history to the barest mathematical relations between planes and surfaces, to a minimalist aesthetics of incidence, is arranged, in turn, around the space of the missing art work. As Beckett’s Rotunda texts draw their poetic power and aura from the erasure that threatens them, Taft’s room is built and strung around the missing painting that the tape might have secured to the empty walls. Making explicit a preoccupation with Wittgensteinian linguistics that runs through the novel, Harkness speculates that the painting that is evoked and cancelled out by the surplus tape might be a picture of Wittgenstein, surrounded by the Vienna circle. The picture itself, in this scenario, derives its aesthetic power, its capacity to organise the angles of the room around itself, directly from its absence. Harkness’ fantasy of the Wittgenstein poster stems from his perception that Taft is a devoted student or disciple of that which remains unwritten and untellable in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. There are ‘two parts’ to Wittgenstein’s writing, Harkness suggests, paraphrasing Wittgenstein’s own comments on the Tractatus, ‘what is written. What is not written. The man himself seemed to favor second part. Perhaps Taft was a student of that part’ (E 233).30 The absent picture of Wittgenstein, sitting smugly in his body in Vienna, opens here onto the poetic silence that Wittgenstein imagines as the outside of language, and that is the final destination of the Tractatus.31 The separation between body and art, which is desired by Wunderlick and denied by Happy Valley, is played out here in the drama of the missing poster. Bodies in the world collapse soundlessly into the unwritten, unspoken space of the art work, which makes its mark on Taft’s bare world only through the stain that the tape, and eventually the Beckettian residue of the tape (E 233), leaves on the purity of his grey walls. As in Great Jones Street, however, the main emphasis in the novel is on the failure of art, the impossibility of withdrawal from an overarching, spiritually bankrupt economy. The negative centre of gravity established in Taft’s rotunda-esque bedroom trembles always on the brink of disappearance, not

Americana 43 inwards towards aesthetic silence, but outwards, towards the quotidian space of Logos college. Harkness spends the entire novel edging towards Taft, working his way towards the poetic mystery that he represents, but as he finally faces him in the geometric centre of his minimalist cell at the end of the novel, the potential that is harboured in their encounter across the divide between the poetic and the prosaic, the sacred and the profane, America and Africa, seems to leak away. On entering the room, on making this final, freighted approach to Taft, Harkness leaves a silence, in which the word that could express the significance of this encounter might materialise. ‘Sooner or later one of us would say or do something,’ Harkness suggests. ‘Then either or both of us would be in a position to decide exactly what had been said or done’ (E 230–231). But the word or the action that might mark the wordlessness of this encounter, that might articulate its untellability, doesn’t appear to be available. Rather, what Harkness reaches for to fill the void that separates them is football – ‘the common ground’ (E 232). As the silence gathers, all Harkness can do is evoke the banal and infantile delights of the game, and of the mind-numbing routine that they share. In struggling to reach Taft, he is reduced to infantile onomatopoeic imitations of the violence of football, mouthing vacuous sound forms that recall Bucky Wunderlick’s lyrics, or Vladimir and Estragon’s word games as they wait hopelessly for Godot. ‘Thwack thwack thwack,’ he says to Taft. ‘Boosh, boosh, boosh. Thwack thwack’ (E 232). This folding of the profound into the banal is perhaps the dominant movement in all three of DeLillo’s early novels. As language reaches for a mode or form of expression that can take it beyond its functional properties, towards a Wittgensteinian space in which language and the world might be remade, it collapses back insistently into vacuousness and emptiness, into a simple, repetitive, infantile renaming of what is already here. Particularly in Great Jones Street and End Zone, it is the cliché and the tautology that emerge, as a result of this folding or collapsing, as signature tropes. The narrator of End Zone suggests that ‘most lives are guided by clichés. They have a soothing effect on the mind and they express the kind of widely accepted sentiment that, when peeled back, is seen to be a denial of silence’ (E 69). The cliché functions in this way throughout the novels, offering both the reassuring guarantee of a bland consensus, and a denial of the sacred and poetic potential of silence. So the menacing Chess/Dr Pepper, at the end of Great Jones Street, muses that ‘the orchid is a cuntlike plant, don’t you think’ (GJS 251), and Watney confides in Wunderlick, on the proviso that he ‘won’t breathe a word’ of his secret, that he took ‘a walk down Lonely Street to Heartbreak Hotel’ (GJS 232). Similarly, death in End Zone is wreathed about with clichés to the extent that the non-space it occupies or represents is almost hidden from view. The college principal’s wife is involved in a plane crash, and word travels across campus that her plane ‘overshot the runway’, that she is ‘on the critical list’ (‘let me get it straight. Critical list. Overshot the runway. Light plane’) (E 180). It is speculated that she died without regaining

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consciousness, because ‘a lot of times they die without regaining consciousness’, just as she may have been ‘burned beyond recognition’, because ‘that usually happens in that kind of crash’ (E 182). In this trading of the readymade phrase, it is precisely the referent that goes missing. The critical nature of the critical list, the misrecognition occasioned by being burned beyond recognition, the loss of consciousness involved in the failure to regain it, these failures and absences at the heart of the cliché are obscured by the soothing action of the cliché itself. The use of tautology in the novels opens onto a similar paradox, in which the reduction to a form of words produces the elision of the referent, so that language is emptied out through the struggle towards truth, rather than stabilised or concentrated by it. The tautology is the most successful of speech acts – the only speech act, for Wittgenstein, whose ‘truth is certain’.32 But in reaching for such accuracy, it is also an exhausted statement, a vacuous speech act which has no content, which, Wittgenstein says, does not ‘represent any possible situations’.33 In Great Jones Street, for example, Wunderlick tries to persuade Globke that the Mountain Tapes are not susceptible to mass reproduction, and to emphasise the importance of the fact that they were ‘done at a certain time under the weight of a certain emotion’, by insisting that ‘the effect of the tapes is that they are tapes’ (GJS 188). Wunderlick seeks here to condense the tapes, themselves recordings of poetry produced at a ‘certain time’, to their noumenal thingness, to insist that their ‘effect’ arises from their essential purity, their tapeness. But the effect of this tautology, rather than to distil out the singularity and uniqueness of the tapes through the perfection of the speech act, is to suggest the incommunicability of their quintessential quality. The word for the tapes is repeated in the tautology itself, suggesting an endless proliferation of repetitions as language grasps after its referent, whilst the tapes themselves, the objects to which the words refer, slide beyond the reach of their name. The Happy Valley Farm Commune makes use of the tautology to similar effect, when it insists that it is unacceptable for Wunderlick to release the Mountain Tapes – his poetic articulation of silence. Chess/Dr Pepper tells Bucky that ‘there’s no silence with the tapes on the market’, remarking that ‘silence is silence’ (GJS 246). As Chess/Pepper’s language noisily proliferates here, in its striving for perfect reference, it is precisely silence that is eradicated – the silence that can perhaps be summoned into being only in the space fashioned within and beyond the language of the art work. It may be that this tendency, throughout DeLillo’s early novels, simultaneously to evoke and to deny the possibility of a poetic or critical fiction, presents his readers with some kind of choice. Are we to find in the novels a mechanism for retrieving their poetic potential from its collapse into exhausted cliché and vacuous tautology, or are we to regard them as the graveyards of such possibility? Are they an aesthetic protest against that which threatens the possibility of poetry, or does their constantly collapsing movement simply mark the end of the art work, as a fait accompli? Indeed, the critical response

Americana 45 to these novels has tended to organise itself around this choice. Jeremy Green, for example, takes something akin to the latter line when he argues that Americana, End Zone and Great Jones Street are driven by fantasies of escape from a cultural predicament which remains ‘inescapable’.34 In fact, for Green, it is the struggle of DeLillo’s would be modernists to escape the postmodern condition that clarifies, intensifies and confirms the irredeemable bankruptcy of the latter. Green suggests that ‘stepping out of the commodified world of media images and mass identification’, as characters such as Wunderlick seek to do, ‘proves ultimately to confirm its predominance’.35 For Green, the novels are caught in a self-tightening leash, like dogs with no learning curve. The harder they pull against the cultural impossibility of poetic freedom, the more insistently and painfully such impossibility asserts itself. The constriction comes as an automatic effect of the struggle, of the pathetic eagerness. But critics such as Mark Osteen take something more akin to the former line. For Osteen, DeLillo’s novels maintain the cultural and aesthetic capacity to offer a critique of the degraded culture upon which they reflect. So he reads Americana as ‘suggesting how novels (and perhaps films) can avoid becoming mere merchandise’;36 he proposes that End Zone ‘finally escapes its ludic frame’, and through its refusal of conventional, teleological narrative, ‘defuses the bomb hidden in most endings and thus begins the operations necessary to defuse nuclear weapons as well’;37 and he claims that Great Jones Street, far from signalling the collapse of art into a devalued marketplace, produces ‘the “moral form” that may enable both its readers and its author to master commerce’.38 On the other hand, however, it may be that we should not and cannot choose between an uncritical DeLillo – a DeLillo who articulates, despite himself, the failure of critique – and a critical DeLillo who offers us a moral form to master a spiritually bankrupt culture. Tautology and cliché, as the markers of an exhausted, worn out aesthetic, may not present themselves to the critical reader simply as symptoms of a cultural malaise which are either to be yielded to or overcome. Instead, it may be within the blank horizons of the tautology itself, or in the depths of the cliché, that both the failures and the possibilities of DeLillo’s early fiction lie. Osteen’s somewhat improbable suggestion that End Zone offers us a model for the defusing of nuclear weaponry is based upon his tendency to pit a redemptive literature against a fallen culture, to cast DeLillian magic as a poetic antidote to a pervasive cultural dread. But to read End Zone as offering some kind of magical escape from the cultural conditions determined by Soviet and US ownership of the bomb is to overlook the sense that salvation and damnation, God and the bomb, are inextricably fused in the novel. Major Staley, a disciple of the bomb who plays war games with Harkness in End Zone, comments that the cold war has opened onto a scenario in which God has become, himself, a weapon. Where it ‘used to be that the gods punished men by using the forces of nature against them’, he is now ‘the force of nature itself, the fusion of tritium and deuterium. Now he’s the weapon’ (E 80). DeLillo’s dramatisation

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of the movement of American and global culture towards the end zone of nuclear war suggests that, as culture reaches its maturity, the oppositions from which it was born finally reveal their fundamental, tautological sameness. In the end zone, salvation and damnation are one. The end of history as a final redemptive union with an all knowing God, and the end of history as total nuclear annihilation, reveal themselves to be the same. ‘God is the weapon’ turns out to be a tautology which hems us in, confines us in the vacuousness which is our final, historical destination. To produce a reading which undoes this tautology, which defuses it, is to undermine the force of DeLillo’s dramatisation of the lockstep movement of history towards a biblical revelation which is also a global holocaust. But whilst there is no ground outside or beyond the tautology in DeLillo’s early novels, they nevertheless contain pockets of silence, flaws that are woven tightly into the seamless texture of a culture which is propelling itself towards closure. Gaps, silences and nuances make themselves felt not outside or beyond the tautology or the cliché, but through the movement of the tautology itself. It may be that, as the narrator of End Zone suggests, the cliché is a ‘denial of silence’ (E 69) – that it serves to cover over the vast emptiness of deathly silence which inhabits us both as threat and as immanent poetic promise – but it is also within and through the cliché that this deathliness grazes the surface of the text, or moves within its fibres. It is a seven day long game of ‘Bang You’re Dead’, for example, a child’s game forged from boredom and repetition and mannered cliché, that leads to one of the most transfiguring epiphanies in End Zone. Harkness, who ‘dies well’ and thus is ‘killed quite often’ is given a kind of glimpse of death itself, through the mechanics of this game, which takes place, itself, in the emptiness and sameness of his desert exile, in the midst of the ‘slowly gliding drift of identical things’. Death rises to the surface here, death as beauty, death as possibility, breaching the unbroken surface, offering a glimpse of something bottomless and unknown that is contained within the practiced, the repeated, the deeply familiar (E 31–34). Throughout the novels, the routine, the banal and the vacuous tumble open in this way to reveal the unnameable tenderness and beauty that inhabits the culture, but that cannot be articulated by a language which is condemned to strive for the accuracy of the tautology. The onomatopoeic ‘bang’ of the child’s game refers to itself, to the noise that the word makes, but it contains also a death that exceeds the horizons of the tautology, a poetic death that the language cannot administer or control. Harkness experiences this kind of surplus to an exhausted and clichéd language as a child, when he is forced by his father to stare for years at a sign that reads ‘when the going gets tough the tough get going’. There may be no escape from this sign, which is taped to Harkness’ bedroom wall like Creed’s Teresa and Taft’s missing Wittgenstein. Harkness cannot find a way beyond its blunt, repetitive, violence – it represents, in all its blandness, a cultural orthodoxy that hems him in as effectively as the walls, or as the desert. But he finds that, through looking at it, through living within it, it can open to him, can reveal

Americana 47 the depths that it hides. The ‘sentiment’ of the sign, Harkness says, ‘of course had little appeal’, but: It seemed that beauty flew from the words themselves, the letters, consonants swallowing vowels, aggression and tenderness, a semi-selfre-creation from line to line, word to word, letter to letter. All meaning faded. The words became pictures. It was a sinister thing to discover, at such an age, that words can escape their meanings. A strange beauty that sign began to express. (E 17) The cliché opens here onto that which it strives to conceal. The phrase, as a kind of asymmetrical tautology, works to build itself from itself, to knit together a chunk of language that can express, with the most sinewy efficiency, the desirability of getting tough, of ‘getting cracking’, of ‘hanging in there’ (E 17). But the effort of the language to close itself to all that it is not, to recreate itself tautologically from line to line in a working model of what it is to be tough, has the effect of emptying the phrase out, of opening it to tenderness and beauty. Throughout DeLillo’s early work, it is as this void opens up, as the art work performs its poetic capacity to hold within it something which remains unsaid, that the novels rehearse both their critique and their non-critique of American culture. Brand’s novel in Americana is written, like the novel that Harkness fantasises in End Zone, on blanked out pages, and David Bell’s film remains silent and dark. Such a failure to articulate might be read as the end of the avant-garde, the silencing of the dissenting voice, and, indeed, 1970s DeLillian Americana does dramatise the movement of culture towards compliant, uncritical inarticulacy. But the silencing of the art work runs hand in hand with the process by which the art work asserts its unique right to silence. The cultural, political and economic forces which drive the novels, like those produced by machine in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four,39 towards an uncritical, tautological duplication of the existing ideology, are also those which cause the novels to give way to the silent space of the art work, that space which remains silent even as it is given expression by DeLillo’s collapsing forms. And as the novels register, in this way, a simultaneous expression of and resistance to the historical forces which are propelling us towards a global, American becoming, they preserve, as stories written on blank pages, those possible histories that have been denied and silenced in the making of America. As Wunderlick is sitting in his anechoic studio in the mountains, making the Mountain Tapes, he is given, through the rigour of poetic isolation, a glimpse of the silence that inhabits the moment. He gains the briefest intuition of the ‘astral madness’ that you might find if you could ‘stretch a given minute’, if you could ferret in its ‘unstuck components’ (GJS 121). DeLillo’s early novels organise themselves around this silence, this unsticking of the components of history. Echoes answer back, from the emptiness

48 The 1970s that is seamed into the almost unbroken surface of things, of histories and futures that are under threat of disappearance in the fungible geography of a new global America. At the end of Great Jones Street, as Wunderlick is thrown, through the effects of the Happy Valley narcotic, into an unworded void, he is given a vision of New York that is full of historical potential. Wunderlick’s flaneurish, drugged wanderings through the streets of a Manhattan that is stripped of language take him to the tip of the island, where the harbour reveals to him the city’s economic base – its mode of production. The harbour, he suggests, as a trading interface between nations, and between old and new worlds, reveals the ‘city’s power, its lust for money and filth’ (GJS 262). But through this bald depiction of the economic relation between America and the rest of the world, Wunderlick sees the geography of New York anew, as a kind of blank manuscript on which the history of peoples has yet to be written. He distinguishes, through the haze of wordlessness and harbour fog, ‘the lone mellow promise of an island’ (GJS 262), a land as yet uncolonised and unwritten. And as he traverses the city, he sees, against this backdrop of New York as blank slate, a jumble of histories growing up upon it. He sees the history of immigration, of movement and growth, written spectrally in the streets that are laced across the virgin island: ‘Great Jones Street, Bond Street, Chrystie Street, Essex Street’, he says, reading off the street names as he crosses the city, ‘it was sixteenth century London we’d been slouching through’ (GJS 248). He reads in the streets a political and economic history of the city – he finds, as he enters the city’s older and poorer precincts, the remnants of a ‘European pastureland’, he sees the ‘oldest immigrants’ living in ‘tower blocks, a long way from fertile pavement’ (GJS 259). But this jumble of histories, scrawled across the mellow island filled with unlived promise, are still contingent, in this vision of the city, still in process. Entry into wordlessness, into void, has afforded Wunderlick a clear sight of the relations of production at work in the city. It has allowed him to read the city clearly and accurately as an expression of economic forces. But it has also given the city to him as a material text which is still organised around an immanent possibility, an emptiness in which the history that still remains unlived is harboured, and which allows us to reread what has already been written, as it gestures to the form of that which has yet to be imagined. Throughout Americana, End Zone and Great Jones Street, the vast multiplicity of private histories that contribute to the public history of America can be heard jostling, in this way, around the not yet written end of history, that missing element that is preserved in the art work as silence and void. David Bell’s journey into the heart of America, and his journey towards himself as narrator at the turn of the millennium, is a journey which is inhabited by this missing element, just as it is driven by it. David as filmmaker, and DeLillo as novelist, stand at the beginning of the 1970s, looking forward through the decades to the second coming, and to the dawn of the third millennium. What they see, in this slice of time, is the gradual homogenisation of

Americana 49 culture, the disappearance of geographical and cultural spaces that remain beyond the sphere of US control. The need to preserve singularity, to assert material historical and cultural difference as a form of resistance to the colonising power of the USA, is held against and within this relentless movement towards culture as cliché and tautology. As David looks at himself, across the gulf between 1971 and 1999, he faces the possibility that his relationship with himself will become yet another of the tautologies that proliferate in these novels. His film, that flimsy ribbon that binds David to David, is threatened by extinction within the sameness that the tautology witnesses and produces. But it is also the silence and dark of David’s film, and of the DeLillian blanked out novel, that gives a withdrawn articulation to all those differences, shades and nuances that inhabit culture and language. It is the silence that moves within the tautology, the wordless surplus that the tautology itself creates, that ensures that David is only ever partly David, God is only partly the weapon, America is only partly the world. The dark silence of the art work opens, from within the closure of American culture, onto the emptiness of an unrevealed future.

2

The historical counterfunction Ratner’s Star, Players, Running Dog

Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man’s original virtue. Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism1 Maybe America didn’t need art and inner miracles. It had so many outer ones. Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift 2

Messages to ourselves What doesn’t come to me from me has come to the wrong address. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable 3

If DeLillo spends the first half of the 1970s writing ambivalent Americana, then the works written in the second half of the decade, differing as they do both from each other and from the novels that precede them, might be thought of as branching out, towards the work of the 1980s and 1990s. Ratner’s Star, first published in 1976, builds upon the frantic picaresque of Americana, depicting a surreal, dreamlike journey, not from US east coast to Midwest and back, but to the far edges of space and time. In its quest to discover and exceed the limits both of the universe, and of the artistic and scientific discourses that allow us to know about the universe, the novel develops a manifesto for what might be thought of as a DeLillian aesthetics of disappearance.4 Where Americana and End Zone seek to preserve the silent, deathly space of the modernist art work in the midst of the 1970s’ American tumult, Ratner’s Star engages with a long history of abstract mathematical thought – with mathematics as ‘the only avant-garde remaining in the whole province of art’ (RS 85) – to discover that point at which thought collapses into its own empty impossibility. Billy Twillig, the child prodigy at the centre of the novel, repeatedly insists that his branch of mathematics – pure number theory – has no application. Zorgs, the numbers that he has invented, are ‘useless’, Billy insists; ‘in other words, they don’t apply’ (RS 20). Rather than regarding numbers as signs which make useful reference to the world, the novel is fascinated by their non-referential, formal beauty, their intricate substructures, their endlessly involuted internal mechanics. The novel works

The historical counterfunction 51 to develop such structures, to build a beautifully balanced, symmetrical mathematical system of interlocking patterns, echoes, repetitions and harmonies. But however much pleasure is produced by balance, symmetry and pattern in the novel, the beauty of form is itself structured around the immanent limits at which abstract formal structures reveal the absence that inhabits them and unravels them. Ratner’s Star is organised, with extraordinarily delicate precision, around a poetic exploration of the point at which language, poetry and thought meet with the unseeable, the unreadable and the unthinkable. As such, the novel can be read as developing a vocabulary of poetic disappearance that DeLillo draws on throughout the novels of the 1980s and 1990s. The other two novels of the late 1970s head in rather a different direction. Where Ratner’s Star is modelled on a somewhat crazed mixture of Pythagoras, Lewis Carroll, astronomy and mathematics, Players (1977) and Running Dog (1978) are written partly in the more familiar genre of the American political thriller. Building on the struggle between corporate and paramilitary interests dramatised in Great Jones Street, the two later novels turn around the fraught relationship between individuals and the governmental or insurrectionary forces that regulate their behaviour. Players focuses on the efforts of a 1970s New York couple, Pammy and Lyle Wynant, to step out of role, to find an alternative to the life prescribed for them by their relations with Wall Street and with capital. Lyle becomes involved in an ambivalent relationship with anticapitalist terrorists, whilst Pammy heads off to rural Maine, rather like David Bell, in search of the ‘moral core’ of America (P 20). Running Dog, similarly, constitutes an exploration of the possibilities and limits of political and personal dissent. The novel shares its name with a fictional anti-establishment magazine at its heart – Running Dog – which itself takes its title from Mao Tse Tung’s public denunciations of ‘US imperialism and its running dogs’.5 The novel’s plot turns around the involvement of the magazine in an attempt to procure and sell on a pornographic film which, allegedly, contains an orgy scene involving Hitler, and which was shot, allegedly, in the bunker under the Reich Chancellery during the final hours of Nazi rule. Throughout the novel, various government agencies and anti-government, underworld forces jockey against each other to bid for ownership of the film, and Running Dog magazine is caught in an uncertain position between competing factions – appearing both as a quasi-Maoist organ critiquing the corrupt commodification of history, sexuality and fascism, and as a defunct, once radical organisation, which has become a slave to the apparatuses of power, itself a lackey and a running dog. The two central characters in the novel, Running Dog journalist Moll Robbins and government (double) agent Glen Selvy, find themselves hemmed in by the uncertain power relations that are played out between the magazine, the government, and anti-government factions. Both Robbins and Selvy seek to remove themselves from any form of corrupt political organisation, either in order to offer a political critique of such organisation (Robbins), or to find a personal, clear, empty space that is free from the interpellative

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power of state or counterstate apparatuses (Selvy), but the novel turns around the continuing failure of the capacity to dissent or abstain from central forms of organisation and control. Both Running Dog and Players, then, engage with a failing struggle to escape political control, to discover and articulate a space of pure personal becoming, a kind of absolute disobedience or resistance to those narratives that seek to position and control the individual. In doing so, they develop some of the themes that will become central preoccupations of DeLillo’s later writing. The developing interest, in Players, in terrorism and its relation to the globalisation of state power and control, becomes a central concern in novels such as Mao II, and in DeLillo’s more recent work on Baader-Meinhof;6 the grounding in Mao Tse Tung that underpins Running Dog also emerges in Mao II and throughout the later novels. The struggle to develop a means of authoring the self, in the teeth of governmental conspiracies to produce and control the individual, is the central concern of Libra, and the interest in the recuperation and commodification of the figure of Hitler is central to White Noise. Taken together, then, Ratner’s Star, Players, and Running Dog could be seen as a bridge between the early Americana and the range of DeLillo’s more mature work in the 1980s and 1990s, developing both his thematic interest in political conspiracy, and his formal concern with a negative poetics. To read these novels as a kind of historical bridge, as neat stepping stones in the progression from juvenilia to maturity, however, might be to overlook the fierceness with which they resist inclusion in the histories to which they nevertheless belong. It might be to tame them, to incorporate them into a historical progression which they themselves work so hard to refuse. All three novels are organised around what Percival describes, in Running Dog, as the ‘historical counterfunction’ (RD 74). They are all involved in the attempt to write counterhistories, to put into motion a form of historical experience contrary to that which is ordained by any of the official spokespersons. Players and Running Dog look for counternarratives in paramilitary organisations, in ancient, desert spaces, or, for Glen Selvy (Running Dog) and Jack (Players), in ritual suicide. In Ratner’s Star, the counterfuction is found in the mathematical avant-garde, in that ‘contrapuntal faculty’ upon which Billy suggests that his mathematics relies (RS 129). But all three novels find that the will to dissent is strangely bound up with the failure of the transgressive gesture. The relentless struggle to disobey is somehow transformed, repeatedly, into a kind of ready compliance, just as the novels themselves, for all their formal inventiveness and diversity, can be read so neatly into the seamless narrative of DeLillo’s becoming as a novelist. Billy’s mathematics may work in counterpoint, wheeling endlessly away from any form of notation which seeks to contain his thinking, blazing a path towards the unknown and the unnameable, but the articulation of the ‘manifold freedom’ of mathematics ensnares one, always, in the ‘very strictures it persistently upholds’ (RS 13). Pure dissent, in all three novels, starts to look theoretically impossible, as the transgressive gesture becomes embroiled, at the very moment that it is

The historical counterfunction 53 made, in political or intellectual formulations which undermine its refusal or form, or of formula. Oscar Wilde evokes something like this tendency for the transgressive to become confused with the compliant when he suggests, in The Soul of Man under Socialism, that ‘disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man’s original virtue’. Wilde here, in his characteristically epigrammatic fashion, suggests that disobedience is virtue – that the two rely upon one another so heavily that they are indistinguishable from one another. In pushing the intimate connection between disobedience and virtue to its limits here, Wilde produces a formula which unsettles the basis upon which Judaeo-Christian history and ethics are based. He goes on, in the next sentence, to undermine some of the theoretical radicalism of this observation, suggesting that disobedience can be regarded as a kind of praxis. ‘It is through disobedience that progress has been made’, he says, ‘through disobedience and through rebellion’.7 But the force of Wilde’s equation of disobedience with virtue remains. If disobedience is virtue, how can ‘progress’ be made, and in what direction? Towards virtue – conformity with God’s law – or towards disobedience – the wilful refusal of such law? Is it possible to move in both directions at once? To suggest that it is, to suggest that eating the apple in the garden of Eden is not simply humanity’s original sin, but also the inauguration of a human compulsion to disobedience that will drive history through to a final realisation of God’s will, is the compact genius of Wilde’s thought here. In demonstrating so clearly and forcefully the shared origins and destination of disobedience and virtue in Christian thought, Wilde’s epigram produces a remarkably contained model of human history: it is good to be bad, because it is only through the exercise of our free, dissident will that we can move history along towards its final destination, as conceived by God himself. But at the same time, the very historical reach of the thought tends to empty the terms it employs of their historical value: what is the point of being bad, if misbehaving is only another way of standing in line? How do we even know when we are being bad? The epigram seeks simultaneously to maintain the value of disobedience as disobedience, and to recuperate it into a completed history in which it reveals its true nature as obedience, as a force for the good. In doing so, the concept of material progress through free, bloody minded rebellion, is drained of its dissident energy. These contradictions, which are tightly woven into the history of disobedience, are also those which govern Milton’s great dramatisation of dissent, Paradise Lost – the reference that is surely uppermost in Wilde’s mind here. Indeed, part of the beauty of Wilde’s phrase is that it encapsulates, in its brevity, some of the vast antinomies of Milton’s epic. Viewed in a certain light, the entire poem appears as an attempt to preserve human disobedience, in its shockingly daring refusal of divine law, from its eventual conformity with such law. The massive edifice of the poem is constructed to allow for a single moment of pure, delirious disobedience; Adam and Eve choose to

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eat the apple of the tree of knowledge, and there is nothing that God can do about it. There is nothing virtuous about Eve’s lust for the forbidden here, or about Adam’s lust for the forbidden in Eve. As God himself feels compelled to admit to Jesus, in Book III of the poem, Adam and Eve ‘themselves decreed/Their own revolt, not I’.8 It is this admission that Milton writes the poem to secure, and from it all the libidinal, perverse, rebellious, satanic energies of the work flow. But such freedom to disobey comes, for Milton, at a high price. Free will can be understood only as a function of divine omniscience. Freedom without God’s law would be no kind of freedom, because the value of free will derives, itself, from God. Pure freedom, without a divine ethical and juridical structure, would be meaningless, for Milton, and thus unrecognisable as freedom. As a result, the poem has to devote as much energy to establishing an absolute and unaccountable divine power as it does to securing our moment of disobedience. The extraordinary delicacy of the work derives from its balancing of the opposition between freedom from and servitude to God’s law – an opposition which can only itself derive from its eventual, but poetically deferred, cancellation. The poem is built around the collapsing oppositions that mark the end of history – man becoming one with God, time becoming timelessness, disobedience becoming virtue. The poet knows that it is the eventual collapse of oppositions into God’s reconciled world view that enables such oppositions to be experienced as oppositions – it is this special knowledge that allows him to ‘sing’ of ‘Man’s first disobedience’ in the first place.9 But the poet struggles tirelessly, to hold disobedience and virtue apart, to live blindly in the moment of freedom, creativity, invention, and disobedience that lies at the heart of the poem – the moment that is both guaranteed and annulled by God’s law. The contradictions that both Milton and Wilde encounter here are produced by the striving of their thought to apprehend the totality. Both reach out beyond the boundaries of a system of thought, in order to gain an understanding of the kind of harmony and symmetry that regulate the system. Such an attempt to apprehend the totality of knowledge is also at the heart of Ratner’s Star – a novel which engages throughout with Milton. ‘What we need at this stage of our perceptual development’, the astral engineer Nyquist says early in the novel, ‘is an overarching symmetry. Something that constitutes what appears to be – even if it isn’t – a totally harmonious picture of the world system’ (RS 49). What Nyquist discovers, though, like Milton and Wilde, is that the discovery of a perfectly balanced context to our fleeting, singular existences, threatens as much to consign the totality to a kind of exhausted redundancy as it promises to establish it as absolutely meaningful. ‘There’s always the view’, he concedes, ‘that an ultimate symmetry is to be avoided rather than sought, the reason being that this structural balance represents not victory over chaos and death but death itself ’ (RS 50). At the limits of any system the elements of that system are prone to sudden reversals. The system that is absolutely full can appear to be totally empty. Total order becomes wildly anarchic. An affirmation of life becomes a declaration

The historical counterfunction 55 of death. Ratner’s Star is driven by a hunger for knowledge, by a frantic need to know everything, to divine the mechanics of the universe. Ratner himself talks of his crazed longing for knowledge. ‘I started out with binoculars, viewing the sky,’ he says. ‘It seemed remarkable to a boy like me, underfed and pale, with a small mental vista, that there was something bigger than Brooklyn’. As the lust for understanding overtakes him, he feels both the power of knowledge, and the poverty of its absence. ‘Knowledge’, he says, ‘made me punch my fists against the wall in awe and shame’ (RS 218). But the accumulation of knowledge in the novel itself leads to a kind of impoverishment, a kind of dampening of the intellectual spirit. In approaching the limits of knowledge, in grasping the universe as a harmonious, selfregulating whole, a system in which all elements are present and knowable, Ratner suggests that he does not experience affirmation or enlightenment, but rather that absolute knowledge becomes synonymous with a vast emptiness. A lifetime of dedication to science, in which he ‘corresponds with the leading minds’, leaves Ratner still punching the walls, ‘plentifully replete as I was with knowledge of the physical world’ (RS 220). Knowledge, he finds, does not vindicate or validate his rebellious spirit, or satisfy the hunger that led him to learn and learn. Rather, it threatens to extinguish it, to negate it, to turn it inside out. And so Ratner is drawn to an anti-enlightenment mysticism, drawn to cast a veil over the limits of the universe, to assume that, in the vast symmetrical whole of the universe there are things that remain unknown, and unknowable. ‘There is always something to be discovered,’ Ratner says, ‘a hidden essence. A truth beneath the truth’ (RS 221). For Ratner, at least, the struggle towards knowledge that compels him to leave Brooklyn is threatened rather than emboldened by the prospect of its own success. Just as the rank disobedience of our original sin is transmuted into lame compliance at the end of time, so Ratner’s intellectual approach to the limits of the universe, where he suggests that the ‘opposites of the world’ collapse into the ‘union of those opposites’ (RS 218), threatens him with an extinction of the questing spirit, a threat which leads him to conceal such limits, to cloak them with a mystic veil. The will to adventure, the desire to learn, the ‘freedom to invent’ (RS 194) that Endor tells Billy is his most precious gift, these rely, perhaps, on the permeability of the universe, the contingency of its limits, the secrecy of its mechanics. In order truly to decree our own revolt, perhaps, we have to inhabit a universe that is not yet knowable, to live in a history that is not yet over. Indeed, it is partly this desire to experience the limits of the universe as surplus to our own forms of knowledge that leads the scientists of ‘Field Experiment Number One’ to invest the message from Ratner’s Star with such significance. The force of the message, its apparent capacity to contain within itself an absolute truth, stems from the perception that it comes from somewhere else, and someone other. Endor tells Billy that he must use the ‘total effort of his imagination’ to break the code in which the message is encrypted because, he says, it will ‘tell us our place in this largest of all

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possible universes’ (RS 194). And Simeon Goldfloss suggests to Billy that the message is ‘our future’. ‘Once you break the code,’ Goldfloss says to Billy, ‘we’ll know everything they know. In that sense the star is our future’ (RS 101). The message has this capacity to tell us our place in the universe, and to tell us our future, because it offers itself as at once knowable and unknowable, readable and unreadable, revealed and unrevealed. In the message the alien other can speak to us as other. Mathematics, the language in which the message is written, is a universal, interstellar language. The beauty of mathematics is that it provides, through its sheer, unmediated, logical perfection, a language that can bring together the utterly dissimilar, can effect communication across unbridgeable divides. And by the same token, it offers a medium in which communication occurs between subjects who remain remote from one another, un-united, disidentified. The message comes to us from the beyond, it tells us where we are heading, it marks for us the limits of our space and time. But at the same time its authors remain beyond our grasp. They do not become us. Unlike God, they do not reveal, at the critical moment, that they have been us all along. The message offers us a living future, rather than offering us an end point to history that cancels out history, that negates free will, that makes willing foot-soldiers of us all. It does this because, even whilst it speaks to us, its language remains foreign. Like psychoanalysis for Freud, or literature for Proust, the message ‘speaks a language that is foreign’.10 The future that the star people offer us is a future that has not already been seen. It is not simply the working out of symmetries and harmonies that have already been given to us, the unravelling of a historical plot that has already been written. Rather, it tells us of a future that is undreamt and undreamable in our philosophy. It is a dream that, in the words of Nût, exceeds our grasp. ‘If your dreams don’t exceed your grasp,’ Nût tells Billy, ‘all human life is futile’ (RS 125). The star people stand, nakedly clothed in the transparent language of mathematics, both inside and outside the limits of space and time. The message from the star people itself reflects this capacity for numbers to reach beyond their own boundaries, to summon an outside that remains foreign and strange even when it is brought into some kind of communication. The message is simply a number of pulses in the sequence 14 – 28 – 57, pulses which add up to the number 101. Billy’s reading of this numbermessage demonstrates the tendency of numbers to unfold beyond their own limits: 142857 does not just yield the number 101, but it is also a very familiar ‘nonrepeating decimal’. The number 3.142857 is produced by the division of 22 by 7, better known as pi. As Nût comments, however many millions of decimal places pi has been calculated to, there is ‘never any semblance of lawful progression’ (RS 124). The number 142857 is the beginning of a number stream which is endless, which reaches beyond the furthest boundaries. It is one of central preoccupations of Pythagorean mysticism, and one of the most compelling curiosities of number theory, that pi, lying as it does at the very heart of the geometric structure of the

The historical counterfunction 57 physical world, will not obey any structural law. It endlessly exceeds itself. Or as Beckett’s Molloy suggests, the ‘division of twenty-two by seven’ is when ‘the true division begins’, and the ‘pages fill with the true ciphers at last’ – those which tell you, not only that you know nothing, but also that ‘you are beyond knowing anything’.11 Pi tells us about the world, it is hardwired into the way that we understand the most basic principles of shape and dimension, but it remains foreign and unknowable, remains, like the message from the Ratnerians, beyond our grasp. But if the message speaks, in this way, of the uncontainability of number, of a kind of wilful numerical disobedience, it also suggests an opposite tendency, the tendency for number to become self-referring, self-duplicating, and hermetically sealed. As Billy himself points out, the number 101 is a palindrome (RS 99). Recalling the Wittgensteinian, palindromic Monadanom in End Zone – the ‘thing that’s everything’ (E 170) – the palindromic nature of the number 101 suggests its closure, its selfreferring inwardness, its obedience to its own shape and form. Not only is the number a palindrome, but it is perfectly symmetrical. It ‘not only reads the same forward and back but rightside up and upside down. And not only when looked at directly but also when reflected in a mirror’ (RS 99). And the number’s own internal architecture – the ‘reproductive structure within it’ – tends, in a peculiarly Pythagorean manner, to reaffirm its own self-reflective, palindromic bind. It ‘continues to yield palindromes not only when squared and cubed but when raised to even higher powers’ (RS 99), as if it has containment and self-referral written into its deepest structures.12 This tendency of the number, and of the message, to read itself back into itself, to set itself as the guardian of its own limits, is played out throughout the second half of the novel. As the novel progresses, like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, from ‘Adventures’ (Part One) to ‘Reflections’ (Part Two), the status and meaning of the message changes. If the first half of the novel is conducted above ground, and is organised around a reaching out towards the star people, then the second half is about burrowing inwards, like Kafka’s animal in ‘The Burrow’, into the earth, into the core of ourselves. As the team bury deeper underground, the message as message – as a poem with a specific content that Billy needs to exercise his mathematical imagination to interpret – becomes increasingly unimportant. In its place there is a growing sense that mathematics itself might contain, already, everything that we need to know. Number does not have anything to tell us, it has no knowledge to impart. Rather, it simply offers a model, a perfect system, a self-regulating number-world. As Edna Lown declares to Billy at the opening of the second half of the novel, ‘mathematics has no content’. Rather than using the message to exceed the limits of what is already known, to tell us our future, number itself becomes its own, replete universe, the object as well as the method of analysis. ‘The focus of our thought,’ she says, ‘the object of our examination, our analysis, our passion if you will, is the notation itself ’ (RS 286). And, of course, the increased focus on the inward gaze leads, eventually and inevitably, to the discovery that the message has not come

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from somewhere and someone else at all – that the message has, in fact come from ourselves. As Mainwaring puts it, ‘We get back only what we ourselves give [ . . . ] We’ve reconstructed the [alien species] and it turns out to be us’ (RS 405). If Americana is framed by a message from David Bell to David Bell – a message that spans the decades from 1971 to 1999 – then the terrain of Ratner’s Star is marked out by a self-referring message which comes from the beginning to the end of time. Rather than beaming in from an utterly other space and time that lies beyond the scope of our imagination or our dreams, the message is sent from the infancy of our species to its dotage – a message whose content, one suspects, is nothing more or less than an indication of the moment in historical time at which history will come to an end. Rather than offering any kind of excess, the message points, from the inside of a world system, only as far as its own unbreachable limits. And, as in Americana again, this determining of a far historical horizon is organised within a millennial framework. The line from Mark, scrawled on the walls of the Brooklyn scream lady – ‘lest coming of a sudden he find you asleep’ (RS 250) – rings throughout the entire novel. ‘Watch ye therefore’, Mark warns to the sinner facing the prospect of a second coming: for ye know not when the master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at cockcrowing, or in the morning: Lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping. And what I say unto you I say unto all, Watch.13 If, as Dyne suggests, the cycloid in which the novel is set might be regarded as a giant clock radio (RS 24) – another kind of watch – then the historical message to ourselves that the novel constitutes might be thought of as a kind of wake up call. The message is an indication of the moment at which historical time closes in on itself, banishing dreams, and asserting, with the second coming of Christ, the end of the imagination, the end of the possibility of difference, the end of disobedience. The historical counterfunction, then, is held, in these novels, partly within the horizons of its own cancellation, its own reabsorption into that which it seeks to resist. The labour of disidentification, the articulation of protest against the narrative shape that official histories impose upon us, is intimately bound up with the experience of identification. In Ratner’s Star, the mode of identification and disidentification is mathematical formalism, and its scope tends towards the universal. The mathematical imagination, in tracing the forms in which thought and language endlessly overflow their own boundaries, opens onto a utopian poetry of ideological surplus, of disappearance into the not yet knowable. But it does this through the employment of a formalism that always threatens to become emptied out, self-referring, tautological. As Adorno and Horkheimer comment in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, ‘mathematical formalism’ can lead to a predicament in which ‘cognition is restricted to its repetition; and thought becomes mere tautology’ – a mere message to itself.14 In Ratner’s Star, as in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, it is

The historical counterfunction 59 a characteristic of the very movement of enlightenment thought that enlightenment itself returns, insistently, to ‘mythology, which it never really knew how to elude’.15 In Players and Running Dog, the mode of identification and disidentification is historical, and its scope is narrowly historically defined. Both novels are engaged with a critique of the history of forms of expression, and particularly of the history of film, from the perspective of late 1970s America. Their conspiratorial and counter-conspiratorial plots are threaded and strung though a working reflection on the ways in which film is mediated by history, and history is mediated by film. The scope for counterexpression – the struggle for transgressive self-authorship upon which the main characters are engaged – is read through a critique of the historical, artistic forms which allow for the articulation of dissent. If the message that determines the shape of Ratner’s Star is transmitted by radio from the beginning of time, then that which orchestrates the political intrigue of Running Dog is the jumpy, camped up, self-consciously silent film that Hitler sends, from Europe at the end of the Second World War, to a 1970s America on the brink of a new globalisation. The power of this confrontation, between Hitler and the market representatives who are preparing to package him as a commodity, derives partly from what it suggests about the possibilities and the limitations of film as a medium. The novel turns around the question of what this ‘ribbon of film’ (RD 105) does when it opens a line of communication, from a European colonial power on the brink of collapse, to an American power in the process of imperial expansion. Can there be a form of expression, an artistic articulation of history, that can help us to engage with history as an unfinished text, to find in the relation between Hitler’s Germany and Nixon’s/Ford’s America a space for critical reflection and self-invention? In replaying the past, does film open the past to retelling, revealing new and previously unimagined nuances in the material texture of history? Or does film collapse history into a single instant, an empty message? Is film as a medium simultaneously a symptom and an agent of the historical collapse of specifically differentiated histories, so Hitler’s projection into 1970s America has the effect simply of lifting the weight of the intervening decades? If, as the narrator of Players suggests, film produces a weightless history that ‘has an easy time [ . . . ] contending with the burdens of the present day’ (P 9), then perhaps this is because film has contributed to the production of a global culture in which material difference has been effaced, in which even the colossal towers of the World Trade Center seem diaphanous and impermanent, ‘no less transient for all their bulk than some routine distortion of the light’ (P 19). All three novels look for ways of resisting the momentum of the historical drive toward the vacuity of the tautology, the endlessly replayable instant. But they belong, themselves, to the historical conditions that they critique. Caught at the end of the 1970s, waiting, in fear and trembling, for the static time of the future to ‘collapse right in on us’ (P 17), the novels search for counterfunctional forms in which to maintain difference, whilst performing,

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historically, the disappearance of the historical categories they seek to maintain. Dreams beyond our grasp Sleep was the only industry in life which did not diminish one’s possibilities. Don DeLillo, Americana16

Given this logic of collapsing oppositions, in which disobedience becomes woven into obedience, and the alien other is incorporated within the self, the question that emerges is how far the historical counterfunction in these novels is able to free itself from those functions that it opposes – how far the novels are able to reflect critically upon a culture which is in the process of incorporating its own margins. Nyquist says to Billy that, when trying to imagine what the universe looks like, we are led to think that ‘it pulsates in cycles of expansion and contraction, every beginning and end defined in fire’ (RS 49). In calling to mind the cyclical history imagined in Yeats’ A Vision – another one of the guiding texts for Ratner’s Star – this image of the universe as a great systolic diastolic machine has the effect of negating the energy both of expansion and contraction. Expansion is simply expansion towards the inevitable contraction which is its end, and both expansion and contraction are contained within the fiery skin of the universe, which appears as an organ without a body, pumping for nothing. Expansion for Nyquist here is contained within the boundaries of its imminent collapse in the way that, for Adorno, the revolutionary potential of modernist art is threatened, from the outset, with its own conversion into a defence of the existing order. Adorno suggests, in Aesthetic Theory, that the revolutionary art movements of ‘around 1910’, which set out on a ‘sea of the formerly inconceivable’, did not arrive at the ‘promised happiness of adventure’, but rather achieved an exhaustion of their own categories, at which point the drive towards freedom is recalibrated as the establishment of order, and ‘expansion appears as contraction’.17 Ratner’s Star is organised around an examination of this Yeatsian, Adornian moment at which the drive towards the ‘formerly inconceivable’ is rerouted into a statement of the already conceived – that point at which the questing, adventuring spirit finds that its destination is only a defence of its own limits. The primary means of approaching this critical moment of reversal is through the dream poetics which organises the novel. If Nût claims that human life is futile when our dreams do not exceed our grasp, then Ratner’s Star can be seen as a form of somnambulant experiment in which modes of futility and excess are measured against each other. The question of how far the counterfunction can express opposition towards official histories is determined partly by this experimentation – this dreamwork. The dream is the form in which the imagination moves beyond itself, towards the unknown, unconscious expanses whose hiddenness is, for some, our only

The historical counterfunction 61 defence against the futility of the already conceived. It is also, however, the archetypal model for the collapse of fictional adventure into a simple, tautological reflection of the status quo (as in ‘she woke up, and it was all a dream’). Like Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – one of the most important models for Ratner’s Star – the entire novel is organised as a dream, which expands and contracts, like Nyquist’s universe, or Alice’s body, moving into and beyond the dreamer’s grasp. Just as the anarchic, chaotic and sexually transgressive madness of Alice – a madness in which the Eucharist is transformed, breathtakingly, into a hallucinogenic narcotic18 – at once proliferates from the river bank where Alice sleeps, and returns meekly to it on her awakening at the novel’s close,19 so the transgalactic wandering of Ratner’s Star, in a sense, comes from and returns to the Brooklyn of 1979. That Ratner’s Star might be conceived of as a Brooklyn dream is suggested by the opening paragraph of the novel. As the novel begins, it finds itself heading towards a kind of dreamscape: ahead was the somnolent horizon, pulsing in the dust and fumes, a fiction whose limits were determined by one’s perspective, not unlike those imaginary quantities (the square root of minus one, for instance) that lead to fresh dimensions. (RS 3) This opening suggests the deep connection in the novel between dreams and mathematics. Billy heads across the novel’s sleepy horizon, into the madness and the ‘fresh dimensions’ of dreams and of numbers, the unthinkability of the square root of minus one. But if Billy is entering into a dream here, throughout the novel it is possible to read the elements of the dream back to the realities of his ‘waking’ Brooklyn life. Indeed, the entire dream can be read as a Freudian ‘displacement’ of Billy’s oedipal attraction to and horror of the ‘Brooklyn scream lady’, who evokes ‘some cavernous fear’ (RS 249), who goes alarmingly barefoot, like Bell’s mother in Americana (A 195, RS 72), and who is the erotic double of Billy’s own mother. The scream lady is a deranged woman who lives in Billy’s tenement block, and whose wild screams float into Billy’s apartment, and to the close knit family scene that is depicted there, through an ‘airshaft’ (RS 72). This airshaft, the frighteningly porous boundary between the safe and the dangerous, between the familiar and the unfamiliar, appears in Billy’s dream as the forbidden grill located in his ‘canister’. This grill is the ‘emergency exit point for the whole sector’, and it is through this grill that Billy descends as he moves from the first to the second parts of the novel, as he progresses, perhaps, from a dream to a dream within a dream (RS 281). And if the grill, the canister, and the entire cycloid, can be read as dream versions of Billy’s familial scene, then Ratner himself can be read as a dream version of the scream lady, and by extension a dream version of the frighteningly eroticised mother. One of the most alarming of the scream lady’s characteristics is her ‘collapsed face’. In a surreal dramatisation

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of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘faciality’, the scream lady’s face is ‘abysmally collapsed, as though it had been blown in by some natural force’ (RS 72). For Deleuze and Guattari, the ‘face digs the hole that subjectification needs in order to break through; it constitutes the black hole of subjectivity as consciousness or passion’.20 The scream lady’s collapsed face, like the grill in Billy’s apartment, betokens a kind of oedipal void in Billy’s self, a cavernous hole in the world. And in Billy’s dream, Ratner, the inventor and orchestrator of the dream world, has this same ‘collapsed’ face (RS 210). Doctors attend Ratner in the cycloid at all times, because his face has to be repeatedly injected in order to keep it in a recognisable shape, to prevent the kind of implosion of the real that is threatened by the dream. Throughout the novel, features of the dream return, in this way, to a version of Billy’s ‘waking’ life, as if the surrealism of the novel, its descent into deeper and deeper sleep, is simply a way of working through Billy’s unconscious desires, as if the novel never really leaves Brooklyn, and the primal scene. If the dream structure of the novel returns Ratner and the cycloid to Billy’s Brooklyn apartment, however, the novel’s dreamwork also takes us outwards, away from Brooklyn, towards the bottomless depths of the unconscious and the unknowable. There is an intimate connection between dreams, science and poetry in the novel. The novel is in some senses shaped by Cyril Kyriakos’ ongoing attempt to produce a definition of science, to produce a Fregian form of conceptual notation that could fully absorb science into itself. But it is the work of the dream to take science and poetry beyond the boundaries of definition, to allow a mathematical avant-garde to exceed all such forms of containment.21 Freudian psychoanalysis provides one of the dominant intertexts for the novel, and Freud’s interpretation of dreams – the work of translating unconscious and inexpressible drives and desires from the world of the dream into the lucid, scientific language of psychoanalysis – is never very far away from the surface of the novel. But the dream, like the poem, works to evade the interpretive frameworks of Cyril, Frege or Freud, becoming entangled with mathematical science itself as a form which tends towards the formless. Space Brain – the computer which drives Field Experiment Number One – is a brain which is in the throes of a dream. The computer lives out Nût’s injunction that our dreams should exceed our grasp, inventing programmes that stretch out ‘beyond its own hardware’ (RS 61) – inventing a science that exceeds all limits. As LoQuadro suggests, the computer’s ability to grow beyond its own electronic capacity ‘concerns the true nature of expansion’ (RS 65). The ideal of a science that could be fully defined, of a form of notation that could articulate absolute knowledge or full enlightenment, is unrealisable, Space Brain suggests to LoQuadro, because knowledge itself has no limits. Knowledge continues to expand beyond any Yeatsian encounter with its own contraction, ‘it grows and grows. It curls into itself and bends back and then thrusts outward in a new direction. It refuses to be contained’ (RS 65). The computer lives out this never ending expansion, producing new knowledge endlessly, in the form of a dream. The

The historical counterfunction 63 ‘void core’ of Space Brain, according to LoQuadro, is where ‘the dream originates’ (RS 75), the dream that can take us beyond our grasp, beyond the very concept of enlightenment into an ever expanding form of intellectual jouissance, or what Billy might think of as zorgasm. This interrelation between dreaming, poetry and science is held within a fine tracery of reference to dream narratives that underpins the novel. If the dream leads the reader beyond the novel’s pulsating horizon towards an ‘undiscovered primal dreamscape’ (RS 266), then it does so partly by evoking a tradition of transgressive, inventive dreams. The scream lady, again, provides the first text in this chain. In her encounters with Billy, she passes on to him a number of condensed mystical writings. The scream lady’s texts, written as they are in a kind of kabbalistic, sacred esoterica, offer themselves as a key to the novel. Drawn from Confucius, the Bible, Marx and Mao, and reflecting on the passage of history from the dawn of civilisation to the globalisation of US power and the second coming, the texts suggest a secret means of encrypting the novel’s madness and unreadability. These messages from the scream lady expand throughout the novel’s dreamwork, catching echoes of the other mystical dream texts that orchestrate the movement of the novel. The scream lady herself is represented, early in the novel, in the figure of Viverrine Gentian, ‘an extremely old woman reading a book’ (RS 56). Like the scream lady, Gentian passes on to Billy ancient and cryptic lore, this time in the form of quotations from the early seventeenth century dream text that she is reading, Johannes Kepler’s Somnium. The doubling between the scream lady and Gentian is then doubled again in the content of Kepler’s narrative – a dream tale in which a 14 year old boy is initiated into the secrets of a radical new astronomy by an old woman (to quote DeLillo, Gentian and Kepler, a ‘dried up old crone’),22 before making a voyage to the moon during a lunar eclipse that foreshadows the eclipse that closes Ratner’s Star. This sense that the scream lady is duplicating herself in a kind of mise en abyme, leading, through dream narrative within dream narrative, towards a new and unimaginable science, is amplified by the multiple somnastronomical texts that accrete around Kepler’s dream text. Carroll’s Alice may offer one of the dream models for Ratner’s Star, but another Carroll text that holds the novel together is his dream geometry, Euclid and his Modern Rivals. Published in 1879, it coincides with the publication of Gottlob Frege’s Conceptual Notation, and with the date of Einstein’s birth (a coincidence which suggests 1979 as the year in which the novel is set).23 But if Frege’s Conceptual Notation offers a model for Lown and Bolin’s attempt to produce Logicon – their own form of perfectly logical and universal mathematical language – then Carroll’s text contributes to the tendency for the novel to exceed, in dream from, all existing notation. Whilst Kepler takes us in dreams to a new astronomy, Carroll’s dream takes us towards a new and radical form of nonEuclidian geometry. This capacity for dreams to open onto new organisations of space and time proliferates, under the guiding spirit of Pythagorean mathematical mysticism, throughout the novel. Nût’s discovery of ‘Nûtean

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surfaces’ in the dreamworld of Ratner’s Star is predicated on the work of Dedekind and Riemann, who themselves, Nût suggests, were ‘dreams in living form’ (RS 125). D’Arco suggests to Billy, as he lulls him into the sleep that will take us into the second section of the novel – the dream within a dream, or Kafkaesque, Carrollian, Pythagorean hole within a hole – that the ‘structure of the atom was conceived in a dream’ (RS 265). And Billy reflects, sleepily, on the possibility that Descartes’s ‘life fulfilled in mathematics and philosophy’, a life which reinvents thought more radically, perhaps, than any other, evolved from ‘a series of three dreams’, which gestated, eventually, a ‘poem that pointed a way to the tasks of science’ (RS 64).24 The novel, then, seeks to follow the logic of the dream, to allow it to take us, from Billy’s Brooklyn apartment, and his oedipal confrontation with the scream lady, to an unwritten geography beyond the furthest limits of the universe – to the impossible space of the unthinkable thought, the undreamable dream. But as the grounding in Kepler and Descartes, and all the way back to Pythagoras, Thales, Heraclitus and Confucius might suggest, this process of dreaming one’s way through barriers, of ‘breaking through the breakthrough’ (RS 66), does not only head forward to a new becoming, towards the new future offered by the Ratnerians, but also tunnels backwards, through written history, to the origins that lie before the origins, the truth that lies, for Ratner, beneath the truth. Billy describes the mystical, awe inspiring, impossible experience of thinking a new thought as ‘feeling the idea unerase itself’ (RS 238). In tracing the sinuous passage of the dream, the novel follows this work of unerasing, this unending building into new space. But the dream which takes the novel beyond its grasp takes it, also, like the message from the Raternians, to the place where it has always been. Billy might experience thinking as an encounter with an idea in the process of becoming – an idea that pulls him into the space of the new thought, remaking his mind as it does so. But this process of remaking, this fashioning of the new and unimaginable, is also a return to the most ancient forms in which thought has been cast. The idea that unerases itself in the novel is ‘an idea with a history’, an idea which obeys the ‘rule of ancient numeration’ (RS 238). Dreamthought takes Billy forward into a new world, but it also takes him backwards, to the totemic, mystical origins of knowledge, causing him to ‘tumble through [him]self’, like Alice, with ‘breathless ease’ (RS 238). Billy’s ‘stage four primal’ dream that begins the second half of the novel is a dream which points not forward, towards the ‘tasks of science’, but backward, towards our ‘earliest being’ – a dream in which we ‘connect with [ . . . ] our own racial history’, and in which we return to ‘pure fable, myth, archetype, model, mold’ (RS 264 –265). As Cyril Kyriakos discovers, in his vain struggle to find an all-encompassing definition of science, the work of inventing ourselves anew, in the spirit of an enlightenment science, returns us, relentlessly, to the historical thought forms from which we seek to escape. The past, he suggests, ‘continues to live not only in remote cultural pockets but more and more in the midst of our supercivilized urban centers’

The historical counterfunction 65 (RS 36). We do not travel steadily away from the totemic, the mystical, the sacred, but find, as thought continues to grow, that the old forms re-emerge. ‘Primitive kinship systems’, Cyril goes on to suggest, invoking the Freud of Totem and Taboo, ‘are not necessarily antiscientific’ (RS 36). It is the ritual behaviour and totemic art found in primitive kinship systems that determines, for Freud, the ongoing negotiation between socially licensed forms of behaviour, and those repressed, incestuous desires whose transgressive potential must be neutralised in order to maintain order. The totem, as an early form of sacred art, marks out the boundary between the thinkable and the unthinkable, between the acceptable and the taboo.25 As science continues to expand, in Cyril’s ‘definition’, and in Spacebrain’s uncontainable dream, it is the totemic, the sacred, the mystical, that reimposes itself. The more insistently science moves beyond itself, unsettling the boundary between the thinkable and the unthinkable, the more insistently the totemic resurfaces, returning the scientific to the mythological, reasserting the taboo. Perhaps the clearest manifestation, in Ratner’s Star, of this tendency for the dream work simultaneously to transgress and to police the boundaries of the thinkable, is the work of the ‘counter-evolutionist’, Maurice Wu. Wu, a kind of intellectual potholer, experiences in his tunnelling, archaeological work the unerasing of the idea that Billy finds in mathematics. He tunnels in caves, he suggests, in order to ‘remake himself’ (RS 381). In the dark silence of the cave, he is able to ‘build within himself a separate presence, something unremembered’, to ‘reinvent the human brain’ (RS 381). Wu’s potholing is a dreamtunnelling into a new body, a new mind – a discovery of an unremembered self. But, predictably perhaps, this clambering towards a self which is ‘set adrift’ (RS 381) from history, is also a tunnelling back through the history of the human mind, an ‘advancement backward’ (RS 388). It is an evolutionary leap towards the Ratnerians, towards an undreamt future, which is also counter-evolutionary, a burrowing through time, a ‘nullifying plunge through history’s other end to all those ancient and naïve astronomies of bone and stone’ (RS 382). Like the counter-archaeologist and the latent historian in Great Jones Street, Wu’s search for an untarnished self, held within what becomes, in The Names, an ‘uncycled memory’ (N 284), takes him back to the earliest beginnings, to the origins of human history from which the novel’s ‘message’ turns out to be sent. In terms of Wu’s counter-evolutionary theory, in which ‘man’ becomes ‘more advanced the deeper we dig’, Wu’s tunnelling through rock and through history takes him back towards a Yeatsian beginning which is also a final destination – a counter-Darwinian origin at which the species has become sufficiently advanced to send a message through time, to inform itself of the date of its own demise. This echoing, fanning movement, expanding and contracting towards and away from self, to the beginning and the end of time, takes Wu through the history of thought, writing, and art, to the sacred origins of inscription. The process of tunnelling for Wu, like the work of fiction for the novel’s novelist Jean Venable, is one of scratching, crawling towards the ‘secret memory of death’ (RS 394), which

66 The 1970s we all bear within us, and which is the genesis and destination of all forms of thought, all forms of inscription. Approaching this death, for Venable and for Wu, requires us to ‘“remember through” the ochre and soot of cave art to the very reason why these earliest of artists descended to the most remote parts of caves and applied their pigments to nearly inaccessible walls’ (RS 394). Wu’s tunnelling, like the movement of the novel more generally, is driven by a desire to think through cyclical, pulsating, gyrating historical forms to that which lies behind them, to approach that secret, unremembered memory that underlies being in the world, but that is unincorporable into being itself. The crawl towards a memory beyond recall is a kind of burrowing through these forms, searching for the yet to come that is threaded through the ancient. Wu’s archaeology is imbued with an awed respect for bronze, for stone, for those ancient totemic works of art in which the taboo, the secret memory of death and of forbidden desire, is both preserved and fended off. But it is driven, above all, by the need to think through the history of science and art, to remember through form to the point at which, like Wittgenstein’s ladder, form can be kicked away26 – that point at which form gives way to the formlessness of the undreamt dream, the dream beyond our grasp. This mole-like dreamtunnelling from the novel’s Brooklyn source, backwards and forwards through time in search of the unnarratable and the unrecallable, might offer a means of responding to the question with which this section began – that of how far the novel’s dreamwork can open onto an unincorporable, historical counterfunction. Wu’s burrowing tends towards an exhaustion of the system, towards the point at which the universe as system collapses into an exhausted futility; but it is motivated by the drive to find, in a completed written history, what he calls the ‘lost historical category’ (RS 387). The formal process by which the dream tends to exceed itself at the very moment in which it confirms its own boundaries is also the process by which the writing of history both banishes and preserves those ‘latent’ histories, those unwritten and unremembered singularities, in which the counterfunctional might be located. The lost historical category, by virtue of its very absence, exerts a pressure on history, as a black hole exerts a gravitational influence on space. The novel’s dreamwork is organised around the possibility of producing fictional forms in which the lost category can be preserved in narrative, in the condition of its very lostness. As so often in earlier DeLillo, the guiding spirit for this work of preservation is Wittgenstein – who writes, himself, according to DeLillo, in a kind of Martian.27 The mathematician Edna Lown might be thought of as the cycloid’s version of Wittgenstein. She lives out, in her somewhat schizophrenic way, the contradiction between early and late Wittgenstein, between the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus and the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations. Lown’s commitment to the development of Logicon as a form of conceptual notation – as a universal logical language – might align her with the later Wittgenstein, who, in opposition to his own arguments in the Tractatus, insists

The historical counterfunction 67 28

that ‘Nothing is hidden’, that ‘everything lies open to view’.29 Lown as writer of Logicon echoes this sense that there is nothing missing in our linguistic grasp of the universe. ‘Everything,’ she insists, ‘everything is here’ (RS 405). The entire impetus behind Logicon is this fundamental conviction that everything is capable of being expressed. But Lown as a writer, herself, of philosophical investigations in a brief note form that closely resembles Wittgenstein’s early work, demonstrates a continued preoccupation with that which is left out of speech, a preoccupation which suggests that, despite herself, she remains in the thrall of the Tractatus. Wittgenstein himself explains very clearly how the shift between his early and later work turns around the space of the hidden, the not yet seen. The ‘wrong conception’ that he finds in the Tractatus, he says, is ‘the following’: that we can hit upon something that we today cannot yet see, that we can discover something wholly new. That is a mistake. The truth of the matter is that we have already got everything, and we have got it actually present; we need not wait for anything. We make our moves in the realm of the grammar of our ordinary language, and this grammar is already there. Thus we have already got everything and need not wait for the future.30 The sense that it is not necessary to wait for the future – that it is not important to interpret the message from the Ratnerians in which the future of the race might be encrypted – is clearly central to the Logicon project. But Lown’s own philosophical-poetic investigations are steeped in that possibility, denied by later Wittgenstein, that there is something not yet imagined or dreamt to be found in the space marked out by the untellable – that unwritten geography so central to the early Wittgenstein, and to the Wittgenstein imagined in DeLillo’s earlier novel End Zone. Wittgenstein says, in a letter to Ludwig von Ficker that is paraphrased in End Zone, that the Tractatus contains, as well as everything that it does say, ‘everything which I have not written’.31 If the Tractatus ends with the epigrammatic claim that ‘what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence’,32 then it is the silence that the work both contains and does not contain that is, for Wittgenstein, its most important contribution to philosophy. And it is Wittgenstein’s famous paean to silence that seems to offer the guiding spirit to Lown’s notes, notes which promise to ‘leave unexamined what has remained unsaid’ (RS 383). This contradiction, embodied in the figure of Lown, between late and early Wittgenstein, between the conviction that nothing is hidden, and the possibility that the silence of philosophy might still harbour the lost historical category, is one which frames the entire novel. The drive towards completion, towards absolute knowledge, is inhabited by the persistence of the lost category, in the way that the art work, for a young Samuel Beckett, constitutes a ‘total object, complete with missing parts’.33 Billy’s mathematics, like Jean Venable’s novel, is organised around the horizon at which thought disappears,

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or, in Deleuzian fashion, becomes imperceptible. Billy’s thought is so abstract, he repeatedly tells those admirers who want to ‘hear some mathematics’, to ‘hear [him] say a thing or two’, that ‘it can’t be put on paper or even talked about’ (RS 46). And if Billy’s science evades the page, so does Venable’s fiction – which, like Brand’s novel in Americana, is written on blank pages (RS 398, A 347). For Venable, Billy and Lown, it is only through the preservation of such silences, even in the very midst of the continued drive towards expression, that the experience of disidentity, the refusal of the existing categories, can be articulated. Adorno, disapproving of Wittgenstein’s penchant for nonexpression, suggests that, ‘if philosophy can be defined at all, it is an effort to express things which one cannot speak about’, a determination to ‘express the nonidentical despite the fact that expressing it identifies it at the same time’.34 Hegel, Adorno suggests, takes this risk, whereas Wittgenstein flees from the impossible demand that we express the non-identical, into the ‘powerless reserve’ of poetic silence.35 But such a response to Wittgenstein’s refusal of expression overlooks the ethical, political dimension of his theorisation of silence in the Tractatus – a dimension which suggests some correspondences between Wittgenstein’s understanding of non-expression and Adorno’s own conception of the determinate negation. The Wittgensteinian poetics that stretches from the Tractatus, through Kafka and Beckett to DeLillo, develops a mode of expression in which the non-identical can be held as a nuance within the texture of the identified, as an engaged form of resistance to identification which, itself, is ‘not written’, which is ‘passed over in silence’. Ratner’s Star is a novel which oscillates rapidly between two poles, between the enlightenment determination that the world is comprehensible, and the mystical conviction that its meaning is contained in secrets which remain hidden from us. The former tends towards the founding of a totality which, as in Milton, produces an absolute identification with the law – an identification which cancels out the possibility of disobedience, or transgression. The latter leads towards the hypostasising of the hidden and the secret in lore, in mythology, in the production of totems and doctrines which banish that which they seek to preserve. It is the poetics of non-expression, the aesthetics of disappearance – the blank page and the ungraspable dream – that points, in DeLillo, beyond the limits of this contradiction. If we are to decree our own revolt, if we are to find in history the countertext that might take us towards the wholly new, then Ratner’s Star suggests that it may be to the unwritten novel within the novel, the hole within the hole, that we have to look. Lost historical categories Nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’36

The question that emerges, then, is how far we can understand the poetics of non-expression that DeLillo develops throughout the novels of the 1970s

The historical counterfunction 69 as being engaged in a critical relationship with existing forms of political identification and control – how, and in what ways, the lost historical categories that are given a kind of ghostly articulation here are set against those official histories which determine the possibilities of fiction in 1970s America. The development of the latent art work, from Brand’s novel, David Bell’s film and Bucky Wunderlick’s music to Jean Venable’s fiction and Billy Twillig’s mathematics, might suggest exactly the kind of relinquishment of expression of which Adorno accuses Wittgenstein. The tendency in Ratner’s Star towards an all-encompassing vision which collapses, endlessly, into the failure of vision, might suggest, in turn, that Ratner’s Star represents the apogee of this development – living out a kind of grand abandonment of the very possibility of engaging with one’s immediate historical contexts. But to view the pulsating, echoing dream structure of Ratner’s Star as a system which is drained of political energy – as Logicon is ‘drained of meaning’ (RS 347) – is to overlook the extent to which the novel, like Players and Running Dog, is involved in a critique of the specific, historical development of US state power. Whilst the three novels are very different – Players and Running Dog developing an analysis of poetic form which is much more explicitly involved in a critique of contemporary American history – all the novels written in the second half of the 1970s are engaged, fundamentally, with their political contexts. In all three novels, the counterfunctional is bound up with the failure of expression; but the quality of this failure – its poetic texture and aura – reflects the specific historical and ideological forms which determine it. In Ratner’s Star, the agent of state power whose presence determines the movement and the valency of the non-expressive and the counterfunctional, is Elux Troxl – the ‘notary public’ and representative of the ‘Honduran cartel’ – whose insidious influence, like that of the ‘postmaster’ in The Crying of Lot 49, can be felt everywhere in the novel. If the pioneers of Field Experiment Number One, digging into the space of the lost historical category, seek a means of exceeding their own intellectual limits, of expanding beyond their own hardware, then Elux Troxl demonstrates a similar capacity to overflow his own forms of demarcation. ‘Elux Troxl’, he insists, is ‘not my name’. Like the names in Nabokov’s Lolita, Troxl’s name is merely an ‘approximation’,37 a ‘nom de nom’, nothing more than the ‘sound-identity’ he has ‘assigned’ to his unimaginable real name. But whilst the dream tunnellers’ modes of excess are determined by the ongoing bid to free themselves from the coils of existing forms of knowledge, Troxl’s expansion beyond his own name is organised around his attempt to exert a kind of normalising control over the transgressive movements of the adventurers. The echoes which reverberate from Brooklyn and from the scream lady’s cryptic messages may travel outwards, swelling and multiplying towards the very edges of the universe, but the excessive, rebellious tendency of this proliferation outwards is always held in check by the presence of Troxl, who acts as a kind of sponge, reabsorbing the echoing movements of the novel into his own, regulating sonic

70 The 1970s economy. As a Honduran businessman, who, like Pynchon’s Pierce Inverarity has a hidden or explicit financial interest in almost every commodity that appears in the novel, Troxl appears as a shady, politically indeterminate figure. But despite the sense that he works underground, trading in the blackest and least legitimate of markets, there is also a clear sense that he is intimately bound up with forms of US state power and control. His intention to use the excessive, poetic power of Space Brain to ‘regulate the money-curve of the world’ (RS 146), suggests that he is in the process of developing a protoglobal economy, and this relationship between Troxl and US led international money markets is underpinned by his involvement with US military power. Resonating with the paranoia about Orwellian US state control that characterises parts of the scream lady’s scripture (‘Secret weapons held sub ground NY under neath sub / way & electric line voltage tunnels/Secret TV in / walls & inter/de/ception of mail by name less agent / person nil of danger / US net work’), Troxl as nameless agent clearly represents the intrusion of the state into the poetic movement of the novel. The echoes which take the dreams of the novel beyond its grasp are, themselves, monitored and controlled by Troxl, who has access to the ‘U.S. Defense department’s submarine communications system’ (RS 346). Troxl, acting as an agent for the US military, uses the communications system, and its ‘echolocation quantifier’, it is suggested, to control the echoing movement of the novel, as he uses Space Brain to regulate the money curve; suggesting, in turn, that the echoes that bounce around in the novel point neither towards the Ratnerians, nor towards the limits of our own history, but towards the economic, cultural and military forms of US state control whose influence extends even to the heart of stage four primal dreams. Perhaps the most pervasive way in which Troxl’s influence can be felt, as an agent for the reappropriation of the inexpressible and the excessive into forms of state control, is in his alchemical, Swiftian, Freudian conversion of shit into money. Again, the cue for this work of translation comes from the scream lady’s hieroglyphs. Her writings include the line ‘(press/king) of U.S. of / S/hit/ler & secret (seek/credit) dung of U.S.’ (RS 73). The combination here of secrecy with the quest (seek), with economic credit, and with the historical legacy of Hitler in the form of hidden, excremental waste, is powerfully suggestive for an understanding both of Ratner’s Star, and of DeLillo’s later 1970s novels more generally. There is a preoccupation, throughout Ratner’s Star, with excrement, and with all forms of biological ingestion and expulsion. Billy, in particular, has an obsession with excrement that is bound up, in the Freudian subtext of the novel, with his own infantile sexuality. ‘Excrement’, he admits to himself, ‘worried him a bit’ (RS 37). Despite his insistence that ‘he did not have reveries about excrement’, he thinks of ‘fecal matter’ as a magical, totemic substance, a substance which, like ‘deities, infernal beings and totemic animals’, defies ‘systematic naming’ (RS 38). ‘It was as though’, he suggests, ‘the many infantile names for fecal matter and urine were concessions to the fact that the real names (whichever these were)

The historical counterfunction 71 possessed a sacred power that inhibited all but the most ceremonial utterance’ (RS 38). Like science, then, like the lost historical category, like Troxl himself, shit occupies a shrouded, nameless, spaceless space. For Freud, such infantile investment in excrement is indicative of a form of erotic transgression in which the ‘erotogenicity of the anal zone is exceptionally strong’.38 Excrement becomes valuable for children, according to Freud, because the retention of excrement causes anal stimulation, a nascent form of sexual excitement that the child quickly realises is forbidden or taboo. Giving the excrement up to the parent becomes indicative of obedience, a sign that one has relinquished forbidden pleasure in favour of the normative symbolic order. The retention of the fecal matter, investment in its sacred, unnameable properties, is a refusal of such order, in favour of that unspeakable, erotic possibility that defies systematic naming.39 As the novel continues, this investment in the transgressive, defiant properties of shit becomes increasingly pervasive. Wu’s tunnelling towards the unspeakable in the second half of the novel is a tunnelling through shit. The passage towards the lost historical category, towards the shrouded, the taboo, is directly through waste, the Kristevan abject, that which remains outside the bodily economies of language and thought.40 But even as Wu tunnels through his bat caves, being splashed with the guano that falls all around him, musing on the lost historical category, the spectre of the parent, or the state, as the agent of recuperation, reappropriation, and translation, is never very far away. ‘Lost historical categories,’ Wu thinks to himself: One might extend this search for lost categories to a subject as choicely off-putting as guano. The history of guano mining. Worldwide guano markets. Effects of guano on agriculture, trade, society. Bird matter vs. bat matter. Soil renewal and patterns of economic decline. Techniques of vacuum pumping bat guano by the ton into enormous cylinders which are hauled out of caves by an aerial conveyor system, and the profits thereof. (RS 387) Wu is reflecting here on the possibility that shit-mining, as an industry that underpins the global economy, is one of those histories that remains unwritten, a kind of gap in the way that we understand social relations. But his reflections touch upon precisely that secret US dung of which the scream lady warned – an economic secret that is jealously guarded rather than merely lost. As well as marking the space of unwritten histories, the guano points towards those covert practices by which the dissenting spirit is brought into line with official histories. Guano emerges as a heavily policed margin – a limit-boundary in which the tendency towards escape, disobedience and non-expression is overseen and counteracted by a covert, authoritarian, state agency. For Freud, the admonitory presence of the parent leads the rebellious child, eventually, to give up its investment in the transgressive potential of shit, whereupon the idea of shit is converted into the idea of money.41

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In Ratner’s Star, the admonitory presence is the US state, and the state as represented in the figure of Elux Troxl. Troxl looms over the novel, secretly converting all of its transgressive, poetic energy into money, or the ‘idea of money’ (RS 324), redirecting all of its Deleuzian lines of flight to the very heart of the state. As the novel continues, Troxl buys up every inch of its fictional space, acquiring control of the Center for the Refinement of Ideational Structures, the Affiliated Friends of the Logicon Project, and, finally, Field Experiment Number One itself (RS 413). Such an absolute takeover of the project, Mainwaring suggests, will effectively cancel its research, its tunnelling into the lost historical category. The project ‘will either become defunct or will be restructured beyond present recognition’ (RS 413). And, Mainwaring goes on to suggest, the driving engine behind Troxl’s extraordinary economic power is his Freudian transformation of shit into gold: ‘Guano stockpiling, price-fixing and eventual distribution’, Mainwaring says, ‘the whole operation computerized to an extent and level of complexity never before known’ (RS 413). In this way, the lost historical category in Ratner’s Star emerges as the negative image of state power. The dreams that travel in echoes from 1970s Brooklyn and from the Brooklyn scream lady extend themselves into those spaces that have yet to be thought or dreamt, but this poetic extension exists only as a function of those economic and political forces which control and oversee the production of official histories. The non-expressive in the novel is not a simple denial of speech, but is rather an ongoing negative practice, a drive towards the transgressive and the non-identical which opens onto silence, but which is determined by the authoritarian politics of identification. This dialectical relation between forms of transgressive expression and forms of state control, which is coloured in Ratner’s Star by the novel’s dreamlike surrealism, emerges with perhaps more clarity in Players and Running Dog. The passing reference in the scream lady’s writings to Hitler, and to the excremental relation between Nazi and US forms of governance, might suggest a more local timeline to Ratner’s Star than its overt universal trajectory, a timeline that becomes the explicit concern of the two later novels. If there is a secret, excremental, historical relation between Germany in 1945 and late 1970s America latent in Ratner’s Star – a lost historical category – then the two later novels are organised around the ambivalent attempt to excavate it. Whilst Ratner’s Star opens with the ‘pulsing’ of the ‘somnolent horizon’ that marks the limits of fiction (RS 3), Players is driven by the pulse of a more locally defined history. At the ‘inmost crypt’ of New York’s financial district, that economic engine that, in 1977, is in the process of producing a new world order, Lyle Wynant suggests that he can hear the ‘amplitude pulse of history’ (P 132). This pulse pushes history forward in both novels, as if history itself were a current in which the bodies of the novel’s players are caught, a liquid medium. Both novels focus tightly on the bodily experience of motion, the experience of occupying one’s body in this stream of time. In Players, ‘transients’ wrestle in the streets of the financial district,

The historical counterfunction 73 their grappling a ‘slow motion film of reaching and mistimed grips’ (P 110), and Pammy focuses on her tap dancing, concentrating on ‘movement and the forces affecting movement’, working through dance to ‘unblock’ her nervous system, to ‘believe in her breathing’ (P 79). All of these stylised forms of movement, of acting in one’s body, take place in this stream of time that flows from Europe in 1945, pumped by the heart of the New York financial district. This historical current propels the novels towards a future which has arrived ‘ahead of schedule’ (P 84), towards a way of living in space and time that was unimaginable under the regimes of European colonialism. As Lyle says to Pammy, bewildered by the experience of time in the city, ‘it’s unbelievably late. I’ve never seen it so late. It’s really late out there. You should see. Go to the window and look’ (P 71). If the end of the Second World War marks the end of a phase of industrial capitalism, then the lateness that Lyall finds so disorientating here is surely that of ‘late capitalism’; that of a new form of global, information economy which threatens to loose the world from its moorings, to convert the whole experience of urban living, its concrete, metal and glass, into stylised ‘distortions of the light’ (P 19). Looking at ‘the district’ through the windows of his apartment – a built space which, like Wunderlick’s apartment in Great Jones Street, offers only the flimsiest of internal refuges from the ‘outward’ condition of ‘lateness’ – Lyle sees the ‘end of organized time’ (P 71). The search for the historical counterfunction in these novels is a search for a means of putting oneself outside of this flow, of escaping the rush from 1945 towards the end of history. The signholding man outside Federal Hall who emerges repeatedly in Players is a manifest sign, himself, of this struggle to pit a counternarrative against the historical tide. Standing in the heart of the city, where Wall Street meets Federal Hall, the signholding man braces himself against the flow. Sweat running down his temples, ‘trailing pale outlines in his flushed skin’ (P 150), the man holds his sign against the wind as if it is a sail, and he is tacking laboriously upstream. The sign has ‘narrow wooden slats fastened to each vertical border’, which ‘make it steady in the breeze’, and which allow the man to withstand the ‘oceanic gusts’ which are channelled by the ‘tight high buildings’ of the financial district (P 27). Written on the sign is a scrambled counternarrative, a ‘Recent History of the Workers of the World’ (P 151–2) which, like the writings of the scream lady, gesture towards the novel’s centre of gravity, its counterfunctional heart. Working at the same time as a form of information that counters the flow pulsing from Wall Street, and as a kind of dam that physically strains against the prevailing historical wind, the sign traces an erratic history of the rise of industrial capitalism from the mid nineteenth century plantations to the beginning of the Nazi era. Focusing jointly on the exploitation of workers in the name of capital, and on the revolutionary activity of workers themselves, of anarchists, anti-capitalists and terrorists, the sign offers a physical and narrative frame upon which the novel might build a counternarrative. It offers a way of reading the damaged façade of 23 Wall Street – the ‘grim

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reminder’ (P 152) of the terrorist attack on Wall Street on September 16, 1920 – as a hieroglyph that points towards a continuing form of revolutionary, anti-capitalist resistance. But whilst the signholding man might represent a nostalgic image of the lone pioneer, maintaining a hidden historical truth in the face of an overwhelming historical lie, the enduring image of the sign is one of futility. The man has been holding his sign on Wall Street for eighteen years, Lyle discovers, and the ‘life inside his eyes had dissolved’ (P 150). The signholding man, and the historical narrative that he represents, has withered, hardened into a form of words that no longer has a secret power, that can no longer mobilise any effective resistance to the status quo. Like Running Dog magazine in Running Dog, the signholding man might suggest that those discursive modes have atrophied which seek to produce and maintain narratives that speak an alternative history to that which is flowing out of Wall Street. Running Dog takes its cue from Mao, and it is grounded in the possibility of ideological and material dissent from capitalist hegemony, but already by the late 1970s the cultural scope for the expression of disidentification with the US state is under threat of erasure. This threat does not come primarily from state censorship, or from any material diminishment of the rights to expression. The signholding man has been standing in the crowds outside Federal Hall for eighteen years, and Running Dog still trumpets its defiance of US imperialism in its very name. Rather, the threat derives from the sense that the counterfunction is itself effortlessly reabsorbed into that which its seeks to resist – the history of oppression and revolutionary violence with which the signholding man struggles to hold back the tide is simply incorporated into the new truth of international capital. The rhythms of insurgency and counter-insurgency that choreograph the movement of both Players and Running Dog harmonise and resonate with one another without ever really threatening to produce any kind of externality to the state apparatus. Radial Matrix, the covert wing of the legitimate government agency PAC/ORD in Running Dog, may, like Space Brain, have exceeded the limits of its official role. Whilst Space Brain has expanded beyond its own hardware, Radial Matrix has ‘become a breakaway unit of the U.S. intelligence’, has become ‘completely autonomous’ (RD 75). Through this autonomy, Radial Matrix might seem to open onto precisely the kind of underground, oppositional space that was once the province of Running Dog magazine. The organisation is responsible, Percival tells Moll Robbins, for ‘terrorist operations, defector recruitment, political contributions, penetration of foreign communications networks and postal agencies’ (RD 74). But, like the indeterminate machinations of the postmaster and notary public Elux Troxl, the counterfunctional possibilities of Radial Matrix are fed, insistently, back into a reassertion of the covert power of the state. Rather than offering any autonomous opposition, Radial Matrix lives out the process by which all acts of insurgency turn out, at their limits, to be a form of civil service. Percival suggests that, ‘if you study the history of reform’, it will become apparent

The historical counterfunction 75 that ‘there’s always a counteraction built in. A low-lying surly passion. Always people ready to invent new secrets, new bureaucracies of terror’ (RD 74). But in Percival’s version of this history, as in Milton’s Paradise Lost, the ‘counteraction’, the willed act of disobedience, is only ever a means of keeping the engine of history ticking over, of confirming its inevitability. The real role of Radial Matrix, Percival suggests, is simply to ‘satisfy the historical counterfunction’, to ‘fill those small dark places’ (RD 74). In the context of this relentless reappropriation of the oppositional into the mechanism of the state, the novels’ search for the historical counterfunction – for a form of ‘counteraction’ which is not always already ‘satisfied’ – looks to a different location. The signholding man, Running Dog magazine, Radial Matrix, these forms of narrative opposition to the accelerating history of global economics are no longer the most effective guardians of the historical counterfunction or the lost historical category. Even revolutionary violence – the terrorism that provides the backdrop to the novels, the FALN, BaaderMeinhof, anti-capitalists, anarchists – suffers the same form of incorporation. The terrorist assassination of George Sedbauer makes scarcely an impact on the trading floor of Players; there is always another George waiting to take his place, as fungible capital simply grows around and absorbs the violence that is perpetrated against it. Even when the George who comes along is a double agent, simultaneously terrorist and stockbroker, it makes little difference, as the border between international capital and organised terror appears uncertain and porous, itself manipulable by a new capitalist economy that expands, like Space Brain, Troxl and Radial Matrix, beyond its own limits. The terror that the novels look to, then, rather than organised violence, is that inchoate form of terror towards which Wu crawls in Ratner’s Star, that ‘limbic region of emotional disorganisation’ that is ‘another way of saying terror’ (RS 381); the fundamental ur-terror that Cyril insists has to be maintained within any definition of science (RS 36); the terror that is preserved, in Jean Venable’s novel, within the ‘secret memory of death’ from which all fiction is born (RS 394). Without some kind of access to this form of terror, this origin of thought and poesy that lies beyond the reach of international capital, the urge towards the counterfunctional, the novels suggest, will be simply recycled, like Troxl’s Guano, into a function of the money curve. In Players and Running Dog, it is this deathly form of terror that promises to harbour the lost historical category, the unincorporated, negative historical image around which the counterfunctional might organise itself. Both novels move towards this necro-geography, as towards the space where the gesture of resistance, of disobedience, remains beyond the rhythmic collapse of the oppositional that characterises DeLillo’s early work. The suicide that is found at the horizon of both novels – Jack setting fire to himself in full lotus in an echo of the Vietnamese Buddhist martyr Quang Duc (P 197–199), Selvy disembowelling himself with a Filipino guerrilla bolo in the sand and bleached bone of the desert (RD 238 –239) – is a ritualised means of marking out the possibility of death as protest. Throughout DeLillo’s oeuvre, the

76 The 1970s image of Quang Duc’s self-immolation, captured in Malcolm Browne’s notorious photograph, returns to haunt the fiction, as a form of resistance that cannot be simply reincorporated (see Figure 1). Browne’s photograph suggests how unreachable his death is: Quang Duc’s body seems to make a hole in the photograph, to exist in a suspension which cannot be touched by the flames which appear rather to issue from him than to consume him. Again and again in DeLillo’s fiction, the burning man marks out the only form of resistance to a market that is described in Cosmopolis as ‘total’. The market cannot ‘claim’ the ‘burning man’, or ‘assimilate his act’. The suicidal protest in DeLillo is a thing ‘beyond reach’, a thing which has the potential to ‘change everything’ (C 99–100). But if the novel heads, in one direction, towards ritual suicide as an inassimilable counterfunctional gesture, then this movement is balanced against an opposite movement towards death not as suicide, but as latent narrative possibility. Venable’s ‘secret memory of death’ is preserved, in these novels, not simply through suicidal protest, but also through the work of art, and particularly through the possibilities of cinema. As Selvy approaches death in the desert, he acknowledges that film rather than suicide might contain a memory of death. Preparing to draw the sharpened bolo across his stomach, he has a ‘strong sense of something being played out’. Death is already familiar to him, here, already known, because it has been already encountered as a ‘memory’ in a ‘film’ (RD 239). In both Players and Running Dog, film promises, in this way, to contain death, to articulate it as a kind of ghostly memory. Film promises to hold death within the fibres of the art work, to keep it alive and present in a way that suicide, perhaps, cannot. This promise, however, is a deeply unstable and ambivalent one. In Players and Running Dog, the influence that film exerts on narrative is both destructive and constitutive of the lost historical category. Film may preserve a ‘secret memory of death’, but it also threatens to eradicate death, to produce a kind of complete presence which does not allow for the possibility of absence, or rupture, or silence. The conspiratorial manoeuvres performed by Radial Matrix and the other players in Running Dog are organised, of course, around the attempt to procure a film – the lost pornographic footage of Hitler’s last hours in the bunker. The power of this film lies partly in the possibility that it might bring Hitler’s body into a contemporary motion, the kind of ‘late’ historical motion which determines the balanced movement of the wrestlers in Players. In bringing Hitler to America, and to 1970s New York, Radial Matrix et al. move towards a flattening out of history. If, as Jean Baudrillard suggests, ‘America was created in the hope of escaping from history’,42 then this absorption of historical time into a new cinematic temporality might be a vehicle for such escape. Film, that medium that was exploited so effectively by the Nazis for state propaganda, becomes the means by which a new US empire prepares the materiality of European history for consumption under the sign of commercial pornography. But, whilst film might operate as an agent for the cancelling of historical difference, it is also the case that, through

The historical counterfunction 77 the very processes by which it makes such cancellation possible, the cinematic image holds within itself a kind of empty time – a Proustian temps perdu. The temporality of the moving image is one which creates, at once, a kind of simultaneity and a kind of historical vacuum. It is this capacity for film to contain within itself a form of lost time, even whilst it works to eradicate the very concept of historical time itself, that points towards the latent narrative possibility, the non-expressive articulation of the lost historical category. If, as Percival suggests, the conspiratorial operations of Radial Matrix tend towards a ‘filling in’ of those ‘small dark places’ in which the counterfunctional spirit might be preserved as terror and death, then film offers a means of maintaining these places in their darkness, their emptiness, and their silence. In Players and Running Dog, the coincidence of temporal simultaneity and evacuation in the moving image is articulated most clearly and most poignantly in the films that both novels contain – the movie on the plane with which Players opens, and the screening of the Hitler film with which Running Dog closes. Building on the experience of the photographic in Americana – a novel which is itself built around David Bell’s silent, dark film – these films are organised around a kind of historical disjuncture, a continuously collapsing separation between now and then, between the past and the future. The first of these films is projected in the disjointed prologue to Players. The anonymous players are cooped up in the prologue to the novel on an aeroplane. The scene is set in the bar area, from which the players can see, but not hear, the inflight film which is being played in the adjacent section of the aircraft. This film predicts the events of the fictional narrative of Players which is waiting, overleaf, to unfold. It is a drama in which players (golfers, in the case of the film) become unwittingly involved in a terrorist massacre. The inflight film is a genre piece, a kind of Dirty Harry, a 1970s political thriller which has clear similarities with the genre in which Players itself is partly written. But the sense that the players are being drawn into a contemporaneous narrative field, an appropriate cinematic genre, is entirely undermined by the absence of sound. The players share the bar area with a pianist, who improvises a musical accompaniment to the events on screen, and this disjunction between sound and vision produces an extraordinary separation in the frame within which the players are held, a kind of double time. The violence of the film’s opening is ‘expert and intense’ (P 9), belonging to the grainy mimesis of Dirty Harry; but the accompanying music entirely retunes the violence, rendering it light and comic, draining it of its contemporary political torque. As the golfers are mown down one by one, the soundtrack switches between a ‘chase theme’ and a ‘lighthearted lament’, dragging the image into a cinematic history, and a poetics of movement, which belongs to Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton rather than to Clint Eastwood. The choreography of the slick, violent thriller becomes the jumpy, flickering motion of Chaplin’s Modern Times; a motion mirrored in the light, comic kick in the arse given by one of the spectating players

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to another ‘with a stylised jerkiness that’s appropriately Chaplinesque in nature’ (P 5). This separation in the frame has two more or less opposite effects. On the one hand, the collapse of the contemporary, generic cinematic violence into the 1930s slapstick knockabout has the effect of consigning the film to a kind of non-time, the empty time of self-reflexive cinema. As the narrator comments: to the glamour of revolutionary violence, to the secret longing it evokes in the most docile soul, the piano’s shiny tinkle brings an irony too apt to be ignored. The simple innocence of this music undermines the photogenic terror, reducing it to an empty swirl. (P 8) Here, the disjunction between sound and vision opens a kind of plug-hole which drains the historical specificity of the terror on the screen, emptying it in a swirl. This is film incorporating history into its simultaneity, preparing the materiality of revolution and protest for absorption into the levelled out flatness of film time, its ‘simple innocence’. Terrorism and comedy, 1930s Europe and 1970s America, these political and historical differences melt into one another in the space of the film itself – a plastic filmic geography in which everything is translatable into everything else, in which terror becomes high-jinx through the slightest modulation in the representational field. As in Americana, this is the power of the cinema to ‘annihilate time and distance’ (A 86), to bend the present back into the past. On the other hand, however, the hole that is opened up by this disjunction forms a kind of historical vacuum, a small dark place which cannot be filled in, and which promises to organise a new history around itself. Experiencing this combination of film and music, the players are ‘prompted to remember something’, although this act of recall may be more mythic than subjective, a spool of biograph dreams. It flows through us. Upright pianos in a thousand nickelodeons. Heart-throbbing romance and knock-about comedy and nerve-racking suspense. (P 9) Here, the historical and cultural gulf between Charlie Chaplin and Clint Eastwood yawns rather than closes. What ‘flows through us’ here is the mythical, poetic history of film itself, a kind of antihistorical counternarrative which produces a dramatic dislocation between now and then, a historical gulf which arises through the capacity for film to abolish temporal difference, to confuse now and then, to replay then as if it was now. Film may be an agent for the collapse of historical time, but in forging a historical simultaneity, film produces its own kind of weightless history, another way of imagining

The historical counterfunction 79 the passage from the 1930s to the 1970s. It is this contradiction, between the disappearance of historical narrative and the production of a mythical, cinematic counternarrative, that allows these films to articulate a kind of temporal gap. The swirling, vertiginous fall from Eastwood to Chaplin holds within itself a form of uncycled memory, that film memory that comes to Selvy as he approaches death; a memory that inhabits the collapse of history and the disintegration of linear narrative like a kind of ghost, like an unlocatable, poetic supplement. It brings into narrative itself an evacuated, dark silence, the kind of deathly gap which makes one’s stomach lurch to cross. It is perhaps the investment, throughout Players, in the possibilities of slow motion that gives the most eloquent expression to this lost historical dimension. If Bucky Wunderlick’s music, in Great Jones Street, is organised around the ‘astral madness’ that might be found between the ‘unstuck components’ of a stretched moment (GJS 121), then film provides access to the inexpressible emptiness that inhabits historical time through the poetics of slow motion. Dorothy Richardson comments, on seeing an early slow motion film in 1928, on the capacity of slow motion to produce a kind of measured weightlessness, a freedom from the constraints of space and time. Slow motion, Richardson suggests, allows for the ‘revelation of the miraculous commonplace’. Film of ‘Mr Jones winning the high jump’ becomes, through the work of slow motion, a light sculpture of an ‘elastic body’ moving ‘poised in the air’. Slow motion, Richardson says, is a ‘vehicle for revealing to mankind that in man which is unbounded’.43 It is precisely this freedom from bounds that is given to the players of Players, through the suspended time of slow motion film. Like the wrestlers who fight in slow motion, suspended in the current of historical time that is flowing from Wall Street, the terrorists in the newly silent inflight film move in the unique, weightless, suspended time of the moving image. Their ‘bodies tumble in slow motion’, becoming ‘near animals struggling toward some fundamental transition, their incomparable crude beauty a result of carefully detailed stress’ (P 8). As slow motion is produced by the speeding up of the film as it moves through the body of the camera, so cinematic weightlessness is produced, in Players, from the speeding time of late capitalism. The players who congregate in the prologue to the novel are already, from the beginning, held in a kind of cinematic time, a kind of weightless motion conjured from capital. The reckless speed of flight is transformed into a kind of suspended stasis, as the players inhabit a ‘frame of arrested motion’ (P 3). The time of flight lifts them from the onrushing narratives of their lives – the ‘mail waiting to be opened’, and the ‘telephones ringing’ (P 10) – into the disjunct time of the film, the time of slow motion. As the film rushes through the projector gate, emulating the speeded up time of contemporary history, dragging the players into its mimetic field, slow motion promises to open up the moment itself, against the flow and the stress of contemporary flight and speed; to find the weightless, anti-gravitational emptiness of the falling drop or the tumbling body that is preserved in the evacuated historical counternarrative of film time.

80 The 1970s This focus on the contradictory historical possibilities of film reaches its most intense pitch in Running Dog, with the screening of Hitler’s silent film. The encounter that this film sets up, between Hitler in 1945 and America in 1978, might stand as an exemplary moment in DeLillo’s 1970s fiction, framing the historical movement of a decade’s prose. The screening is staged, at the outset, within an opposition between weight and weightlessness, force and freefall. As Lightbourne comments, the acquisition of the ribbon of film itself involves the most skilful manipulation of those underground, covert matrices of influence and power which fuel the engine of government. ‘I set things in motion’, he says of his efforts to acquire the film, ‘I put powerful forces to work’ (RD 237–238). But whilst the film as commodity has connections with underworld power that reach very deep, the screening itself opens onto the weightless world of the image, a world of absolute ‘freedom from all the duties and conditions of the nonmovie world’ (RD 225). Preparing to watch the film, waiting for the screen to ‘go bright’, Moll Robbins feels the ‘special kind of anticipation she’d enjoyed since childhood’ – the knowledge that ‘a two-dimensional city would materialize out of the darkness, afloat in various kinds of time, all different from the system in which real events occur’ (RD 225). This structuring opposition between the powerful forces which produce official histories, and the unanchored space and time of film, which, for Moll, come to us as a mythical memory ‘from a place that we knew before’ (RD 225), is then rebuilt within the screening itself. The film, of course, is not a pornographic movie at all, but instead turns out to be a performance given by Hitler to those with whom he shares the bunker under the Reich Chancellery in the hours immediately before his death. With the camera shaking under the impact of Russian shelling, as if it were travelling through historical turbulence, the inhabitants of the bunker – children and adults, Eva Braun, Mussolini, Hitler, von Graf ’s portrait of Frederick the Great – are heading towards the event which, from a certain perspective, breaks the back of the twentieth century. Hitler is rushing towards the instant of his death, that moment from which the post-war world emerges, and as he looks into the camera he is looking knowingly towards us, as towards those who will inherit his legacy. But he does not choose to address us, as David Bell addresses the future that he sees waiting in the lens. Rather, he turns to those that will die with him, and does a light, comic routine. Turning from his audience in 1970s New York to his audience in 1940s Berlin, Hitler does an impression of Charlie Chaplin. This form of comic mimicry lives out the uncanny disjuncture between historical time and film time that is found at the heart of both Players and Running Dog. Hitler’s film is caught in the powerful historical current that flows from the 1940s to the 1970s, but it also resists the current, creating a kind of weightless backwash that sucks its American audience into its own evacuated geography of artifice, that place which, like Selvy and Robbins, we knew before, and which is exempt from the duties and conditions imposed upon us by the ways in which history is told and understood in the

The historical counterfunction 81 ‘non-movie world’. Hitler’s impression itself travels in two directions, both towards and away from the American audience that is watching over his shoulder. By doubling as Chaplin, with the ‘oversized shoes’ and the ‘baggy pants’, Hitler is, in a sense, preparing himself for his translation into an image; he is accepting entry into a historical narrative that will situate his life and death in the seamless historical development from European colonisation to the growth of global markets and US cultural and economic imperialism. By appearing before his German audience as the Great Dictator, Hitler is signalling to the American audience over his shoulder his acceptance of Chaplin’s stylised, parodic likeness. His adoption of his filmic self, his apparent willingness to fuse with the version of himself that will pass forward to future generations, even extends to a reproduction of the technological limitations of the cinematic medium. Although it seems that he is speaking to his audience in the bunker as he mimics Chaplin mimicking him, it soon becomes evident to his American audience that he is ‘only moving his lips – an allusion to the silent movies’ (RD 237). The Hitler who stands in his flesh in Germany in 1945 is performing for the amusement of both German and American audiences his translation into an icon of silent cinema, and his absorption, as such, into the narrative that will shape him and market him for history. But this sense that Hitler’s performance marks his entry into the historical current is held against the opposite sense that his filmic incarnation reveals a discontinuity in the passage between then and now – a kind of historical fault which unsettles the official timeline from 1945 to 1978 and delivers us into a temporality in which we might be able to imagine a different relationality between Germany and America, the 1940s and the 1970s. This dialectical relation between historical continuity and discontinuity is captured sharply as Hitler makes his first appearance on film, standing at the threshold of the room in which the action takes place, waiting to make his appearance before his German audience: This footage has the mysterious aura of an event that cuts across time. This is because the man [Hitler], standing beyond the doorway, is not yet visible to the audience of adults and children in the immediate vicinity. The other audience, watching in a dark room in New York in the 1970s, is aware of this, and they feel a curious sense of preview. They are seeing the man ‘first.’ (RD 234) This sense of preview, this direct line of communication, is what film has given to the contemporary imagination; for a culture which is informed by the moving image, it can be difficult to distinguish between seeing and seeing again. Standing at the threshold, Hitler hesitates between two frames, unsettling the relation between original and copy. It seems as if he might just as easily step into New York in the 1970s, as into the bunker where he will meet his death. Cutting across time, film seems to offer an immunity

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to death, to create a kind of historical continuity, in a way that, for example, von Graf’s portrait of Frederick the Great hanging in the bunker cannot. The death that intervenes between the end of the Nazi period and the beginning of the post-war period – the death that might form a kind of historical rupture – is threatened with erasure, as film suggests its capacity to absorb the historical past into the contemporary moment, to create the conditions for an eternal present. Where the von Graf portrait which represents, for Hitler, an idealised version of German history, is locked in its time, a weighty physical object created under the material conditions of its historical moment, this ribbon of film promises to bleed through time, to reproduce the light of 1945 in a darkened room in the 1970s. At the same time, however, the direct line of communication opened here works the other way. The mysterious feeling that the American audience are seeing Hitler ‘first’ situates the Americans in the bunker, just as effectively as it releases Hitler from it. Death as rupture, as the absolute absence that inhabits the texture of every moment, is both erased by the work of the film, and brought into a kind of non-expressive articulation, a kind of negative existence. The light projected on the wall drops the American audience through the time of film itself, returns them to the end of the Nazi period, drags them into the space of imminent and immanent death, the space in which a certain kind of time, the time of European colonialism, comes to an end. If there is a missing historical narrative, an unarticulated set of possibilities that inhabit the passage from European to US imperialism, that flicker as unrealised historical potential at the death of a specific form of fascism, then the film promises both to erase and to preserve this lostness – to hide and to reveal the lost historical category. Hitler’s mimicry of the Chaplinesque silent movie delivers him to us as a living, moving image; but it also transports us, through the ‘spool of biograph dreams’, the ‘upright pianos in a thousand nickelodeons’, to a kind of dead time, a weightless moment of pure historical possibility at which the narrative that takes us from Hitler to now has yet to be written. As the novel and the film bring us to this boundary, to this limbic region, the passage from 1945 to 1978 appears as yawning, empty time, a time yet to be imagined or dreamt. DeLillo’s 1970s fiction is organised around the latent, inexpressible space of this unrealised possibility, this lost historical category. From Americana to Running Dog, DeLillo’s fiction traces the ways in which time starts to speed up, as we are projected towards the future, towards the 1980s, towards the apocalypse. Reading these novels, one is caught in the grip of this rush towards the future. But at the same time, even as the novels produce a sense of speed and propulsion, we are delivered also to a kind of suspended calm, a kind of absence from history, a kind of death. Like David Bell in Americana, like Billy Twillig in Ratner’s Star, these novels are continually falling through themselves with ‘breathless ease’, falling into a silence and a darkness that cannot be filled in, and that is ejected from the historical current. Like the ‘rudimentary tremble’ that courses through the fuselage of the aeroplane upon

The historical counterfunction 83 which the players find themselves at the opening of Players, these novels carry the vibrations of a historical engine. We are in the grip of a powerful authorial and historical becoming. But it is the very force of this becoming, the heavy speed of this propulsion towards the end zone, that delivers us to a kind of weightlessness, a kind of arrested motion. In the novels of the 1970s, DeLillo discovers a historical counterfunction in the power of history itself. These novels look forward to the 1980s, to the 1990s, to ‘now’, and they offer themselves for absorption into the oeuvre, and into the canon. But they also hold themselves back, resist the current, decree their own revolt from the diktats of history.

Part II

The 1980s

Figure 2 Lee Harvey Oswald. Reproduced with permission of Corbis.

3

Writing and apostasy The Names

But when thou dost anneal in glass thy story, Making thy life to shine within The holy Preacher’s; then the light and glorie More rev’rend grows, & more doth win: Which else shows watrish, bleak, & thin. George Herbert, ‘The Windows’1 Loss of faith. That’s what this is all about. Don DeLillo, Mao II2 The apostate manages his own escape by revealing a secret of the organization. Don DeLillo, The Names3

The dramatis personae of DeLillo’s novel Players (1977), cloaked as they are at the opening of the novel in the anonymity, the in-between-ness, of air travel, find that they are summoned from the weightlessness of flight by the power of the name. The players are recalled from their airy suspense to the onward rushing narratives of their lives and of the novel, by ‘mail waiting to be opened’, by ‘telephones ringing’, by the ‘chance utterance of a name’ (P 10). The calling of a name is one of the acts by which the characters are interpellated, drawn into history, communication and interaction, leaving light, caricatured copies of themselves behind. Reading Players, one is tempted retrospectively to match the central characters with these ghostly apparitions who cavort in the prologue, to call them by their names. But however hard one tries, the anonymous figures cling on to something of their anonymity. The name, it seems, can only demand a limited amount of cohesion from its subjects. Certain of their gestures, their moments – certain versions of themselves – are necessarily left behind, to play namelessly in empty time with the other vagrants, the other transients. If the name is an interpellating force, for Althusser the means by which the subject is ideologically constituted (‘It says: this is who you are: you are Peter! This is what you must do!’),4 then it is possible to read DeLillo’s 1983 novel The Names as an exercise in interpellation, or in Althusserian ‘hailing’.

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Players finds itself hesitating at the fag end of a decade, still held in the frame of the 1970s, feeling the force of an American future tug at it like a strong current; The Names has crossed the boundary between the 1970s and 1980s, has cast itself into the time of the new decade, entered more fully the temporality of ‘late capitalism’. It calls out the new names, rolling DeLillo’s oeuvre across the threshold, reshaping it. Charles Maitland complains to the narrator, James Axton, that, as empires are born and die, ‘they keep changing the names’ (N 239). Persia becomes Iran, Rhodesia becomes Zimbabwe, Leopoldville becomes Kinshasa. These changes, for Maitland, are a ‘rescinding of memory’, a means of ‘overthrow’, of ‘re-speak’ (N 240). Every time another ‘people’s republic emerges from the dust’, he says, ‘I have the feeling someone has tampered with my childhood’ (N 240). This process by which geopolitical change is both registered and effected by the development of new language is one of the central preoccupations of the novel. If language change is a ‘rescinding of memory’, an aggressive form of despoliation, then the novel balances the older linguistic forms in which fidelity to endangered historical truths might be couched against the new language that flows, as in Players and Running Dog, out of Wall Street and Washington. In rushing into the time of the 1980s, The Names performs the process by which the new language of global America, its armoury of names, sweeps across Europe and into Asia, towards the boundary with the Soviet Union. The group of US expatriate businessmen about whom the novel turns, stationed in Greece and active across Europe, Asia and Africa, communicate with each other throughout with chattering telexes, those language machines which prepare the global landscape for entry into the truths of 1980s international capital. They speak in the ‘cross argots’ that mingle ‘the hard-edged and aggressive language of business’ with the ‘technical cant’ of weapons manufacturing, suggesting to James Axton that economic and military conquest is the ‘same game’ (N 47). ‘All those grave Zaireans,’ Axton reflects, ‘those Pakistanis with their sensual lips and bright smiles, voices in melodic ascent, what sweet natured technocrats they made, running the plants we’d designed and financed, using our very jargon’ (N 48). The USA, in the guise of economic colonists such as Axton, Maitland and Keller, brings a presence and a language and a promise of power to those countries that they colonise and control, and in doing so it ensures that local power struggles are manipulated according to its political and economic interests. Axton the risk analyst is a student of the balance of power, in areas of global strategic importance. He and his colleagues are ‘right in the middle’, the ‘handlers of huge sums of delicate money. Recyclers of petrodollars’ (N 98). The conflict between Greece and Turkey, unrest in Iran and Iraq, upheavals in the political organisation of postcolonial Africa, these disputes turn around questions of ownership of land and mineral resources, the naming of the land, the ways in which we understand the relationship between geography, history and religion. The job of Axton and his colleagues is to study and to manipulate these delicate balances; to sculpt and shape them so that oil, money and power flow to the

Writing and apostasy 89 USA, in tides regulated by the ‘profit curve’ (N 268) as plotted by corporate America. It is clearly the case that the denial of the past that Maitland finds in the renaming of postcolonial African and Middle Eastern nations can be understood as the struggle of such nations away from colonial occupation and towards self-government. But the involvement of Maitland, Axton and others in the political and economic balance of these new ‘people’s republics’ – and of the post-war geopolitical map more generally – is to ensure that the postcolonial world is organised in accordance with US interests. The US conglomerate for which Axton works – a blend of multinational corporation and military intelligence agency that has a reach as uncannily penetrating as Elux Troxl’s in Ratner’s Star – is known, alarmingly, as ‘the parent’. In this scenario, those countries which David Keller describes with paternal fondness as ‘my countries’ (N 232) – and which have more recently, in their disobedience, become known to some as the ‘axis of evil’ – are cast as so many children, developing under the variously benign and stern tutelage of the USA. And it is the parent, of course, who confers the name. The temporality of The Names is determined, to an extent, by this passage towards the new world order being prepared by the ideologues, economists and military personnel of the USA. The novel is written partly from the perspective of a narrator who occupies a future which is never revealed to us, but which lies, one is led to assume, somewhere in the middle of the decade that, in the novel, is in the process of becoming. If the novel’s expatriates feel that their local cultural involvements are fed directly into the engine that is producing world politics – that everything they do ‘has a serious frame’ (N 98) – then their activities are located in fictional and non-fictional time by a narrator who has a privileged view of the outcome of such involvement. ‘This summer’, the narrator informs us, the summer in which we sat on [David Keller’s] broad terrace, was the period after the shah left Iran, before the hostages were taken, before the Grand Mosque and Afghanistan [ . . . ] This was the summer before the crowds attacked the U.S. embassies in Islamabad and Tripoli, before the assassinations of American technicians in Turkey, before Liberia, the executions on the beach, the stoning of dead bodies, the evacuation of personnel from the Mainland Bank. (N 66–67) From the moment that we ‘enter narrative time’ (N 4) at the opening of the novel, the events that Axton as embodied character struggles to shape are placed in this way, by Axton as disembodied narrator, within the rapid current of the narrative flow towards the future occupied by the latter. Where the cast of Players hesitates on the brink of an unrevealed future, the characters in The Names are drawn continually into the time that they have not yet lived – towards the frame that is inhabited by Axton as narrator. Their struggle to manipulate the cultures that they occupy, to prepare them for

90 The 1980s exploitation and assimilation, are fed into this relentless marching onward of violence, terror, and forced occupation that, the novel suggests, marks the passage of the cold war and the globalisation of capital – a passage for which the price of a barrel of oil provides the ‘index’ (N 66). The year over which the narrative takes place – summer 1979 to summer 1980 – sees the realisation of many of the events that are held in store in the above quotation. The hostage crisis in Tehran (beginning November 4, 1979), the build-up towards the Iran–Iraq war (beginning September 22, 1980), the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union on Christmas Eve (December 24, 1979), this is the ‘history’ that Maitland suggests is ‘in the air’ as the expats live out their year (N 97). Their activities are placed within this massive wheeling forward of history, driven by the three way struggle between radicalised Islamic states; a Soviet Union bidding to take control of Afghan land that would give it access to the Middle East and from there, perhaps, to Europe; and a USA fighting to hem in the USSR, to maintain an economically advantageous balance of power in the Middle East, and to control the production and distribution of the world’s oil supply. If there is a ‘blind might’ that ‘courses headlong through that entire year’ (N 330), then the novel’s players are caught in the texture of this power, shaped and thrilled by the structural vibrations of this historical speed. The names that are spoken in The Names, then, the language that summons the characters to their own historical becoming, and that promises to rewrite the international landscape as a global America, studded with Hiltons, Intercontinentals and US military bases, can be seen to emanate from the future occupied by Axton as narrator. From his ghostly, absent place somewhere in the middle of the decade, he sucks the novel towards his new time and his new language, as the older David Bell draws his younger self towards the turn of the millennium in Americana, or as the ‘very flesh’ of the anonymous players in Players is summoned out of the air by ‘the chance utterance of a name’. As DeLillo’s oeuvre rolls on, from the 1970s to 1980s, this forward momentum gathers pace and energy, with the increasing urgency and force both of DeLillo’s writing, and of the globalisation of American capital. DeLillo suggests that the turn of the decade inaugurates a new phase in his writing, in which his novels become ‘more deeply motivated’, and carry a ‘stronger sense of commitment’ than those of the 1970s,5 and critics such as Douglas Keesey agree, claiming that the novels of the 1980s constitute a ‘fiction that more truly expresses DeLillo’s unique vision’.6 It is as if the arrival of the 1980s sees a kind of DeLillian becoming, in which his oeuvre starts to come into focus and clarity, alongside the dawning of the ReaganThatcher era, and the establishment of a new, monetarist world market.7 The quality of DeLillo’s writing, in this scenario, starts to distil in the 1980s, drawing his earlier work towards it, reshaping it in the light of the writer that DeLillo is to become, the vision that will identify him as unique, in a manner that is perhaps consonant with the process of overthrow and respeak that Maitland finds in the shaping and developing of the geopolitical world.

Writing and apostasy 91 The novel is pulled along towards the political space occupied by Axton as narrator, towards Desert One (the botched attempt to free US hostages in Iran), towards the moment that ‘Iraqi ground troops move into Iran at four points along the border’ (N 233), just as it heads towards the moment of Axton’s and DeLillo’s own becoming as artists. If the novel travels towards the time and space of its narration, then it heads also to the moment that Axton accepts the task of writing the novel itself; the moment (anticipated but not realised in the narrative) when he turns from risk analysis and economic colonisation, to ‘some kind of higher typing’ (N 318). This sense that The Names constitutes an acceleration towards forms of becoming, however, is held against the opposite sense that the novel is involved in developing new poetic strategies to resist the pull toward such authorial and political homogenisation. It may be that the novel is organised around the crossing of the boundary between the 1970s and the 1980s – the crossing of a historical line that divides Axton from himself as narrator – but it is also, and at the same time, choreographed around Axton’s movement away from himself as narrator, around a denial of coherent selfhood, a refusal of the drive towards the globalisation of capital. New Year’s Day 1980, the ritualised marker of this transition from one time frame to another, falls right in the middle of the novel (N 192–195). The turning of the decade is written into and through the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and Axton’s penetration into the deathly heart of the underground, murderous cult around which the plot of the novel turns (Axton finds members of the cult with Tap on Christmas Day (December 25) 1979 – the day after Russia invades Afghanistan – and returns to their village alone on New Year’s Day 1980). The advent of the new year occupies a kind of deathly centre to the text, a hesitation, a pause, and it is from this still moment that the novel builds in both directions, forwards towards homogenisation, and backwards towards older linguistic modes which articulate a kind of fidelity to the discrete forms which are being rewritten, or overcome. The tense in which the novel is written marks this bidirectional movement. Axton’s resistance, as character, to the forward momentum demanded by Axton as narrator can be felt in the very fabric of the text, in the ways in which the narrator’s use of tense causes a divided temporality. The novel is written in a kind of continuous present – as the narrator suggests at the opening of his story, he intends to ‘enter narrative time’ (N 4). But the narrator slips repeatedly out of narrative time, both in the emphatic, stylised lists of future events towards which his timebound, unknowing characters are hurtling (‘Desert One was still to come’ (N 233)), and in his subtler but very frequent evocation of a grammatically ambiguous future mood in his narration. Repeatedly, in the course of his story, Axton moves out of consecutive reportage, to anticipate what the characters are about to do in the next minutes, or hours, or days. ‘The following evening’, he says, ‘we would all go to the airport’ (N 87). Or describing an evening that he spends talking with Owen Bradermas, the narrator exhibits a kind of claustrophobic impatience, as if the slow, speculative, late night conversation

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so characteristic of Greek evenings in the novel is bogging him down too much in his narration – as if he must demonstrate his freedom from the temporality that he describes. As Owen talks relentlessly about the cult, the narrator drifts away, relieving himself from Bradermas’ stifling obsession. Owen ‘said something about madness or sadness’, and Axton says that he ‘tried to listen’, but the narrator slips forward in narrative time to his hotel and his bed – ‘I would go down the hill with him in the small beam of his flashlight [ . . . ] Then on to my hotel, one flight up, the room at the end of the hall’ – before being recalled, by Owen, to conventional reportage: ‘Owen was talking again’ (N 118). Throughout the narrative Axton as narrator intrudes in this way into the narrative, anticipating future events, pulling himself and his story towards himself, occupying himself like a kind of ghost who remembers forward. But balanced against this tendency for the narrative to skip forward towards Axton as narrator, is the tendency for Axton as character to drag himself away from the future, towards a kind of static time, towards a physical occupation of the moment, and of remembered time, which resists the onward thrust of narration. Where Axton as narrator appears anxious for the story to move on, Axton as character is equally anxious to slow things down, to experience in his ‘connection to the physical world’ a Heidegerrian sense of ‘Being here’ (N 32),8 to anchor himself in the time and space that lies before the turn of the decade. If New Year’s Day 1980 lies at the centre of the novel, then the manipulation of tense suggests that Axton and Axton lie on either side of the divide, pulling against each other in opposite directions. This narratological disjunction between Axton as character and Axton as narrator, spanning the boundary between the 1970s and 1980s, determines the many other forms of dislocation that Axton experiences. The predicament whereby character and narrator inhabit the same name – their different temporalities locked into a single linguistic and geographical field – produces a general condition of ec-stasis (‘ecstasy, see the Greek, a displacing’ (N 307)), or of being ‘beside oneself ’. As Axton makes his way through narrative time, he finds that ‘I could almost see myself, glowing in borrowed light. A voice, my own but outside me, speaking other than words, commented somehow on the action’ (N 206). This voice, which is cast beyond the boundaries of the body – the body that glows in Greek light, in the light of Heidegerrian dasein – might be thought of as the narrative voice; a voice which speaks the new names that are inassimilable into the field occupied by Axton as character, that are not even recognisable to him as language. But it is also the voice of Axton as a ‘man living apart’ (N 44) – a man who cannot live within his own flesh, realise his own possibilities, or ‘allow [him]self the full pleasure of things’ (N 16). As Axton says to Owen Bradermas, ‘My life is going by and I can’t get a grip on it. It eludes me, it defeats me’ (A 300). Everything about Axton exhibits this failure to cohere, this disjunction in the frame. He may be heading towards the deferred point at which he writes his own story – towards the prospect of ‘some kind of higher typing’ – but

Writing and apostasy 93 the only writing he actually manages as character is the ghost writing of military documents. And if his writing is contentless, disengaged, the grafting of empty names onto the work of others, then his work for ‘the parent’ is even more dissociated. His occupation of those countries with which he has ‘involvements’ – his immersion in Mediterranean heat and light – is always filtered through his allegiance to an American centre. The island light in which he glows is always, as Axton himself suggests, a borrowed light. He is in Europe, but, at all times, he is also in the United States, a fractured condition which is given a kind of concrete manifestation in the Hiltons that are spread throughout the region, the little Americas that occupy the land, and that house all those expats like second skins as they go about their business. And this sense that Axton inhabits two geopolitical frames, American and European, reaches a climax with the revelation that his engagement in local politics has actually been unwitting espionage rather than risk analysis. A double agent, then, conspiring even against himself. Of all the conditions which attend Axton’s alienation from himself, however, the breakdown of his marriage is perhaps the most significant. This failure of love and of fidelity is arguably the failure that opens the temporal and geographical breach around which the novel is organised. The estrangement between Jim Axton and Kathryn is laid out at the opening of the novel in the ‘27 Depravities’ – a list which, like the scream lady’s writings in Ratner’s Star, offers a kind of broken frame upon which the novel might be hung (and which is based perhaps on Christian Articles of Faith, or more germanely on T.E. Lawrence’s ‘27 Articles’ – a guide to Christians for the effective exploitation and colonisation of the Arab world).9 The list offers a litany of complaints against Axton – a map to a gulf between spouses – and elements from the list recur throughout the novel, returning us to the marital separation as the original fault line against which the other disjunctions in the narration are measured. But the power of this corpus of grievances stems not just from its concise diagnosis of a relationship’s failure, but also from the fact that it is compiled not by Kathryn but by Jim himself. If Axton is condemned, in his double role as narrator and character, constantly to ventriloquise himself, to put words in his own mouth, then this list is Axton’s ventriloquism of Kathryn’s accusation of him, a catechism which Axton speaks, what is more, with a ‘female voice’. The narrator claims that he formulates the list because he ‘wanted to get inside [Kathryn], see myself through her, learn the things she knew’ (N 18), but of course the list offers him no such access to the mind of another. Rather it performs as symptom the condition of being ‘beside oneself ’ that is both the cause and the effect of the breakdown of the marriage. Indeed, many of the allegations on the list are illustrated, themselves, by the writing of the list, as if the list is a kind of tautological, self-fulfilling document. If Axton might imagine that Kathryn might think of him as ‘self-satisfied ’ (number one on the list), then surely the construction of a dialogue in which Axton takes the part both of self and other is exemplary of a certain kind of self-referring self satisfaction. Or the complaints that that ‘you pretend’

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(number six), that ‘you don’t allow yourself the full pleasure of things’ (number eleven), that ‘you keep studying your son for clues to your own nature’ (number twelve), these are all attributes which the writing of the list not only names but also performs through the action of naming, attributes which belong to a ‘man living apart’. Axton says that he ‘sometimes had to remind himself it was my list not hers’ (N 17), and this confusion between his own agency and that of the identities he assumes seems again to be exemplary of his ecstatic condition. The list is another example of ghost writing (the ‘inauthentic’ ghost writing, incidentally, which leads Axton, in the voice of Kathryn, to accuse himself of being an ‘Underachiever’ (number twenty-five)). The attempt to get into the mind or the life of another is frustrated rather than realised through this experiment in ventriloquism, because the incursion into the subject position of the other not only evacuates the space of the self, but also ends up recreating the other as self. For Axton being ‘beside himself ’ means not only that he cannot occupy his own flesh, live in his own life, but also that the other, and indeed the world, becomes simply another version of himself. Axton finds that it is impossible to occupy his life, but it is equally impossible to escape it. Every gesture of self-abandonment becomes a form of self-satisfaction, a poverty of selfhood becomes a surfeit; the loss of self leads one to find images of oneself everywhere. As Axton comments of his own list, ‘what a funhouse mirror is love’ (N 18). This separation at the heart of the novel, this failure of relations, offers another way of reading the struggle in the narrative between two temporal fields, the bidirectional movement towards and away from the future occupied by the narrator. Axton as character and Axton as narrator occupy opposite sides in the breakdown of the marriage. Axton as character is in denial that the relationship is over. His boss George Rowser urges him repeatedly to get divorced; Rowser himself has had a divorce, and says of his family that ‘I don’t even remember them. If they walked down the street together, I’d go right by’ (N 47). But it is precisely this dissolution of memory that Axton as character fights against. Where the narrator speaks from a future time in which his immediate connection with Kathryn has lapsed, Axton as character is still looking for ways to occupy the history that they share. Even the erotic fantasies that he has about his wife speak of this desire to inhabit her body as a kind of static, carved Greek time. The beauty that he finds in her is ‘rhythmic and correct’, a ‘simple thing of curves, human surfaces, the shape those island Greeks pursued in their Parian marble’ (N 26). Axton’s travels to Greece and the Middle East, his work for the parent, his unwitting intelligence gathering for the CIA, these are all functions of his attempt to immerse himself in the carved bodily presence of his family, to enter the lives of his wife and son, those whom he causes to say in the depravities ‘We make you wonder if you are the outsider in this group’ (N 8, 17). As he says of his days in Greece, ‘they are Kathryn’s days’ (N 232). If his alienated condition causes him to deny himself the full pleasure of things, then his time in Greece with Kathryn is structured around an attempt to ‘feel’ his ‘connections to

Writing and apostasy 95 the physical world’, to resist the narrative flow towards the lapsed, disembodied narrator. Kathryn’s vaguely absurdist digging into the Greek soil works, itself, as a form of anti-modern immersion in the archaeological, archaic soil, and Axton’s visits to Greece and to the island are inspired by his desperate bid to plant himself back in his marriage, to glow, as a body, not just in borrowed light but also in remembered light. If the ‘layered Minoan soil, ochre and rust and soot, and shards of painted pottery’ that Kathryn sifts through in her journey into the dim past inspire the ‘passions that saturate the world’ (N 49), then it is towards this physically embodied passion that Axton as character struggles. The big Greek Eliades acts as a guide to this immersion in pleasure. Eliades teaches Axton how to eat a peach, how to allow the pleasures of eating to ‘overflow the conditions attending them’ (N 57). The eating of a peach, to the man seeking to experience the full pleasure of things, becomes a ‘baffling delight’, producing ‘the kind of pleasure that’s so intense it seems to need another context’. ‘Ordinary things’, says Axton in his confusion, his bafflement, ‘aren’t supposed to be this gratifying’. It takes Eliades, the great hairy Balkan who ‘eats with relish’, like the Hellenic Bloom of Joyce’s Ulysses, ‘the inner organs of beasts and fowls’ (N 234),10 to educate Axton in the truth that the ‘pleasure is in the moment more than in the thing’ (N 56). Axton as character, struggling against the current that sweeps him towards the future, towards the 1980s, struggles throughout to rediscover his wife and son by training himself, against the grain of his own depravities, to live in his body and in the moment, in Greek time and Mediterranean light. As the adoption of Eliades as a mythical guide to the inhabitation of flesh might suggest, this struggle between Axton and Axton, between the past and the future, between embodied existence and disembodied reflection, is mapped, throughout, onto the relationship between the USA and Greece, between North America and the Middle East. If the depravities perform, as symptom, a condition of separation and alienation, then the final item on the list, ‘American’ (N 17, 328), might stand in for all the others. The narrative flow towards Axton as narrator is a current which takes us towards Americanisation and globalisation; it takes us towards Virilian speed, towards impermanence, mobility and dislocation.11 If Axton is beside himself, then so, too, is America. In colonising the world, it vacates itself in the same way that Axton does in the depravities. The novel balances this movement towards a disjunct American future against the deep time, the static ‘Greek time’ (N 56), in which Axton as character seeks to plant himself. Owen Bradermas suggests, at the opening of the text, that ‘I’ve come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version’ (N 23), and this tension between impermanent American flimsiness and durable European solidity is sustained until the end of the novel. Axton suggests that ‘one of the mysteries of the Aegean is that things seem more significant than they do elsewhere, deeper, more complete in themselves’ (N 234), and Bradermas expands on this impression, arguing that the light itself, the

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borrowed light in which Axton sees himself illuminated, has a quality which lends itself to a sense of permanence and clarity. ‘Correctness of detail,’ Bradermas suggests, ‘this is what the light provides. Look to small things for your truth, your joy. This is the Greek specific’ (N 26). The American experience is speed, movement, cultural mobility, and it is expressed in paperbacks, in photography, in film; the Greek experience is stillness etched in crystalline light, and it is expressed in stone. The further east we travel in the novel, the more emphatic this lapidary etching of experience into stone becomes, as if the journey eastward is a gradual transition backwards from one medium to another, a reversal of what Axton calls the ‘evolution of seeing’ (N 179). Bradermas’ fascination with epigraphy, with the chiselling of language, thought and identity into the living rock, accordingly takes him further and further east – from Greece to Jordan, to the inscriptions at Qasr Hallabat, located halfway between the anagrammatic Zarqa and Azraq (N 75–76); and from Jordan to India, to the poem of the Mewar kingdom etched in stone around Rajsamand lake in Udaypur (N 280–283). If America is the paperback and Europe is the hardcover, then ancient Egyptian and Indian civilisations are published in stone. This sense that the novel is constructed in the space of a struggle between a Greek and an American specific can be felt throughout. Where the tense of the narration is tuned to allow for the simultaneous articulation of two time frames – those of Axton as character and as narrator – the novel is built in such a way that western and eastern influences on the placement of bodies in space can be felt running against each other, constantly interfering with one another. A conflict between stasis and movement is played out in the space and light of the novel itself. The dispersal of bodies in space and time is held, with extraordinary delicacy, between two codes, between ancient and modern, American and European, in such a way that every gesture becomes charged with the historical and cultural difference that pervades the very air. The fictional Greek island that Kathryn inhabits in the first third of the novel is named Kouros, and this name calls up an association with the Greek Kouros that underlies bodily attitudes throughout the novel, particularly in relation to Axton’s son Tap. The Kouros is a ‘type’ of Greek sculpture, a formal, balanced depiction of a standing youth, that ‘runs through archaic Greek sculpture like a chief theme in music’, and that depicts both god and man contained in the human form (see Figure 3).12 Accentuating the connection between the name of the island and the history of Greek sculpture, Axton says that: It was Tap who’d told me the name of the island derived from a colossal statue found toppled near an ancient gravesite about a hundred years ago. It was a traditional kouros, a sturdy young man with braided hair who stood with his arms close to his nude body, his left foot forward, an archaic smile on his face. (N 36–37)

Writing and apostasy 97 If the statue provides the name of the island, however, it also provides a form in which Axton can see Tap, an archaic Greek frame within which to position and balance his son’s body. The depravities suggest that Axton is in the habit of studying his son for clues to his own nature, and what he looks for in Tap is a sign that he is becoming Greeker. His search for an ‘essential Thomas Axton’, and by extension an essential James Axton, is a search for a Greek version of them both, and it is the Kouros that provides such a form. Axton suggests that the ‘essential James Axton now stood before me’, when he discovers his son, on arrival to the island, standing in a strangely static, mannequin like pose, balanced with his ‘left foot forward’ (N 14); a bodily copy of the statue which contained the figure of godly Greek youth for centuries, the statue for which the island is named. This tendency to fix bodies in space in the form of a Greek specific, and in the form of Greek statuary, however, is continually worried at by the opposite tendency towards movement, towards fluency, towards modernity. The highly strung balance of the novel derives to a large extent from this tension between archaic stasis and contemporary movement. The urge towards the sculptural as a still historical frame in which to place the body is countered by the urge towards movement, which makes Figure 3 A Kouros sculpture. Photograph by Gerard Mackworth-Young.

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the body anew, which removes it from the form and shape in which it has already been known by plunging it into the formlessness of the new. The peach might be an object in the novel which takes Axton to the still pleasure of the moment, but peaches crop up repeatedly in scenes which are choreographed around the beauty and formlessness of movement. For example, the narrator dwells on a scene, for its ‘simple beauty’, in which a ‘man finishing a peach tossed the pit into the sidecar of a motorcycle as it turned the corner where he happened to be standing’ (N 33). The simple beauty here lies not in stasis but in speed, in the coming together of moving elements in such a way that the form in which one might grasp their beauty dissolves around the fleeting, unrepeatable coincidence of bodies moving and becoming in space and time. As with the sight, earlier in the novel, of two motorcycles travelling at the same time into the hills in opposite directions, leaving behind ‘two trails of dust’ – a sight which entrances Kathryn by its beauty – the aesthetic balance of these scenes derives from the tension between the shaping of their elements, and their continual ‘disintegration’, their return to dust, in the flow of time (N 25). And this tension between stasis and movement is held, itself, in the opposition, that binds the novel, between the perfect and the imperfect, between the Acropolis and the city. Like the tenses they name, perfection and imperfection in the novel are understood in terms of the realised, the static, the complete, and that which is contingent, yet to be completed, still in motion. Axton’s narration opens and closes with the disjuncture between the still Acropolis, ‘that sombre rock’ which holds an entire civilisation in the ‘weight and moment’ of its perfectly proportioned stone, and the ‘modern city, imperfect, blaring’, which washes, in choppy tides of gaudily dressed tourists, against the ‘monumental gateway’ (N 3). The relation between Axton and Axton, then, determines and is determined by a host of other oppositions that frame the novel: those between west and east; between ancient and modern; between stasis and movement; between perfect and imperfect. Indeed, if there is an overarching shape to the novel, it is that of two opposing blocks, separated by an absence, a gulf; a yawning blank as vast as the Arabian Empty Quarter that the expats fly over in their endless, weightless travels. This topography asserts itself time and time again. Just as the cast of the Players find themselves, in their prologue, in the in-between-ness of air travel, the opposing blocks which constitute The Names are organised, similarly, around the kind of vacuum produced by flight. The airport lies at the heart of the novel, as a gateway between places and time zones, a vast ‘container for emptiness’ (N 253), which, in turn, holds inside it the extraordinary power and the utter weightlessness of flight itself. At the centre, between the opposing time and weight of continental landmasses, the airport and the aeroplane occupy a kind of no-place and non-time. The time of travel is time totally lost to us. We don’t remember it. We take no sense impressions with us, no voices, none of the windy blast of aircraft on the tarmac, or

Writing and apostasy 99 the white noise of flight, or the hours waiting. Nothing sticks to us but smoke in our hair and clothes. It is dead time. It never happened until it happens again. Then it never happened. (N 7) In the middle, then, between times and places, between west and east, lies dead time – a kind of deathly absence which is repeatedly experienced but never recalled, and which is threaded into the very fibres of movement, and of life. And if air travel is an ultra-modern way of approaching this deathly space that intervenes between oppositions, then the other dead centre around which the novel is organised is that carved out by the cult; the cult that occupies both the novel’s Conradian dark heart, and gives it its very title (whilst at the same time withholding it); the cult which Axton stumbles on at the centre of the novel, in the dead time of the boundary between 1979 and 1980. Everything that happens in the novel is organised around this centre, shaped around the work of the cult. That the novel should share the secret, withheld title of the cult suggests, indeed, that the cult and the novel are one; that the novel both emerges from and disappears into the murderous, nameless vacuum of the cult, as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (another novel whose title shares its name with its unspeakable centre) is sucked into the silently screaming mouth of Kurtz.13 But what is the work of the cult? In a way, of course, it is very simple. The cult carries out random murders, by matching the initials of a selected victim with the initials of a place name. Death occurs in the space of a correspondence between body, place, and language, in the coming together of subject, land and name. But what it is about this activity that should produce such a powerful centre of gravity – that should exert the kind of force that causes the novel to orbit around it as if, in Axton’s metaphor, it were a black hole (N 286) – proves somewhat difficult to articulate. Those who become obsessed with the cult experience their obsession as something which is only ever almost grasped, as if it occupies a temporal, geographical region – like the precise moment at which one decade becomes another, or at which a living person becomes a corpse – that will not quite emerge into expression, that remains as an inarticulable, impossible, but utterly necessary, interstitial space between one place and another, one state of being and the next. ‘What is it about the cult’, Owen Bradermas asks himself repeatedly, ‘that I almost understand’? And Andhal, a former member of the group, suggests in a kind of response that: something in our method finds a home in your unconscious mind. A recognition. This curious recognition is not subject to conscious scrutiny. Our program evokes something that you seem to understand and find familiar, something that you can’t analyse. (N 208)

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This sense that the meaning of the cult’s operations are difficult to articulate or to grasp, however, is not just an inconvenient feature of their work – a function of their clandestine secrecy – but it is itself the substance of their faith, the spirit of their doctrine. As Axton is drawn into Bradermas’ obsession with the cult, Bradermas warns him repeatedly that he must not ‘look for meaning’ (N 168), or for ‘answers’ (N 169), as if the meaning of the cult, the answer to its curiously powerful question, lies precisely in its refusal to be drawn into communication. As Andhal tells Axton, ‘we are working at a preverbal level, although we use words, of course, we use them all the time’ (N 208). With the strengthening of the cult’s subterranean, gravitational influence on the novel, it is this capacity to find a preverbal or subverbal space within words themselves that becomes the key to the cult’s power. The meaning of the cult cannot be approached directly, or spoken in words, because it works at the very point at which language meets with the world, at the blank, empty, in-between space in which language and the world are knotted together (with the knot, perhaps, which, through Sanskrit, gives us the word grantha, and which eventually gives us the word for book (N 291) ). The cult’s aim is to access ‘the secret power’ of the alphabet, that power locked in written and inscribed words that so drives Bradermas and Axton, the power that letters have to attach themselves to the world. Owen’s fascination with epigraphy is driven by the mystery, the secrecy of this connection between words and things, and the capacity of inscription to somehow harness the mystery, to make it ‘stonebound’. When he visits the vast Sanskrit inscriptions in Rajsamand, where the ‘terrible and fierce’ history of the Mewar kingdom is written in a thousand lines of stone poetry, Owen says that ‘he could not help imagining that all this marble had been quarried, cut, laid in place, the pavilions built, arches raised, the lake made, to provide a setting for the words’ (N 284). In imagining that the words in which the Mewar history are written are somehow the dominant force in the landscape, here, Owen is pitting the interpellative and creative power of language directly against the physical, bodily matter of which history is made. Owen imagines that the words, naked, unadorned and unrealised (the word as spirit, the word which was ‘in the beginning’) have somehow commanded the stone in which they are carved to accrete around them, that they have called the landscape into being, the lake and the hills, that they have produced the history of suffering endured by the Mewar people. The poetry of epigraphy, for Owen, is in the tense balance of this struggle between spirit and stone, between the limitless power of the word to invent, and the weight of the worldly material in which such power is both realised and delimited. The insight achieved by the cult is to realise that this connection between word and thing is not realised in stone, is not articulable in any form of inscription, however ancient or terrible or sacred, but is rather found in death, the absence that inhabits all acts of writing, the utter annihilation that underlies all moments of being.

Writing and apostasy 101 The methodology of the cult, then, is organised around finding the space and time at which names, people and places meet, and marking them with a death – a death that is already there. If the cult are working at a preverbal level, it is because they seek to inhabit that interval, that mysterious, magnetic space, that glues names to things, that negotiates between the demands of language and the demands of the ‘physical world’, the world with which Axton seeks a ‘connection’. It is in the deathly space that the cult have marked out with murder, that space with no air and no light, that the struggle between names and things takes place. This is a place with no life of its own, but from which all life is born; a shrouded space where the world is germinated from the biblical coming together of letter and matter. In committing a random murder, driven by nothing other than the interpellative power of the name, the cult aims to strike a perfect aesthetic balance by returning a death to a death. And if the cult seeks to locate this space, to dwell in it, then it is around this pivotal space that the novel finds its aesthetic balance. The cult lies at the heart of the novel, in the deathly space of the interval between 1979 and 1980, between the opposing geographies of Axton as narrator and Axton as character; and as it occupies this middle space, it comes to represent, itself, the space of a death which the novel is seeking somehow poetically to articulate, to put to work. Jacques Derrida suggests, in Of Grammatology, that writing ‘marks the dead time within the presence of the living present, within the general form of presence’. In writing, in poetry, Derrida suggests, ‘the dead time is at work’.14 The topographical arrangement of The Names, the recurrent spatial form in which opposing blocks are organised around an empty centre, is animated by the possibility of putting this ‘dead time’ to work, of giving some kind of expression to the dead time that Axton finds embodied and disembodied in air travel. Indeed, James Axton’s own death is held, in a kind of poised, undied stasis, at the heart of the novel. It is when Axton visits the Roman theatre in Jebel Amman, midway through the novel, that the key to the cult’s practices coheres suddenly in his mind, like the idea that ‘unerases’ itself in Billy Twillig’s mathematical imagination (RS 238). In the vast sweep of the theatre – an open, performative arena that, as in Lake Rajsamand, puts the historical relation between language and space into play – Axton makes the connection between ‘initials, names, places’, the linguistic connection between Jebel Amman (JA) and James Axton (JA) that makes the amphitheatre, for Axton, a place of death (N 158). This discovery of a latent death at the heart of the novel promises to provide it with a kind of aesthetic becoming, to allow it to ‘accrue to a rounded truth’ (N 329). The condition of disjunction and alienation suffered by Axton, the experience of being beside himself, is given a form of dramatic expression as Axton encounters the spectre of his death in Jebel Amman. Axton as character and Axton as narrator, at this moment in the novel, seem to be regarding each other across the death that intervenes between them, as across a kind of Stygian gulf. Throughout the novel, as the Axton that is bound

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in narrative time feels the presence of Axton as narrator haunting him, he understands the relation between versions of himself as one that is determined and interrupted by death. Reflecting on the habitual, repeated cycles of his life with Kathryn, their quiet, nightly preparations for bed, Axton feels this doubling of himself as a duplication in which he appears both as the character performing an action in the flow of time, and as a xeroxed version of himself performing the same action the following night, and the night after, and the night after that. This sense of doubling, the experience of being at once inside oneself and already beyond, already living in the time to come, reproduces exactly the condition of narrator/narrated in which Axton is fashioned and dismembered. He says of his nightly routine that ‘the moment referred back to itself at the same time as it pointed forward’, just as the tense of his narration produces a kind of remembering forward. And he reflects that this experience of remembering forward works as a ‘curious reminder that I am going to die’ (N 82). The doubling of subjectivity, the intuition of oneself becoming over time, the experience of being haunted by a future self towards which one travels, these are inhabited at every moment by the threat of extinction, the unnameable instant of death which intervenes insistently between self and self. As Axton encounters this death-in-life in the amphitheatre, however, there is a sense in which the aesthetic economy of the novel is offering to absorb the instant of death, to articulate it in such a way that the novel might arrive at a Proustian ‘rounded truth’, an experience of being which extends and accumulates across empty time. Sitting in the amphitheatre, Axton experiences a form of epiphanic solitude; not the kind of ‘complicated solitude’ in which he stands beside himself in ‘borrowed light’ (N 206), but a solitude in which he might become himself. ‘I felt solitude begin to return’, he says, ‘a sense of elements gathering, first things’. With this revelation of an origin and ground to the self, Axton says that he ‘perceived solitude as a collection of things rather than an absence of things’; ‘I felt’, he says, ‘I was being put together. I was alone and absolutely myself ’ (N 162). The encounter with death in the dramatic space of the amphitheatre offers Axton a moment of elemental, essential becoming; a beautifully still, empty, clear moment in which character, narrator, and the death that separates them, are incorporated into the perfectly balanced aesthetic economy of the novel. As the epiphanic nature of this moment of revelation might suggest, its evocation of first things, the possibility that the novel’s economy may produce a kind of fullness of being is intimately related to its treatment of the sacred.15 The narrator sees his novel, in some respects, as a container for a hard won truth; he describes the characters with which he peoples his narration, including his wife, his son and himself, as ‘people I’ve tried to know twice, the second time in memory and language’ (N 329). In thinking of the novel in this way as a kind of echo chamber, as a place to contain a double vision within a rounded, realised truth, the narrator suggests that the ecstasy which he has experienced as a loss of self, or as a fracture within the

Writing and apostasy 103 self, can be recalibrated as a kind of religious ecstasy, a double vision that is also a beatific vision. The chamber of the novel appears, in this redrafting, as a carved place of worship which, like George Herbert’s Temple or the Kouroi of the Ancient Greeks, effects a kind of conjoining of spirit and body, past and future – a fusing of those oppositions of which the novel is made. Indeed, this sense that the church might reconcile the torn halves of the novel, the disjunction between narrator and narrated, is implied by Owen himself, whose search for a form in which to embody his own obsessional questing is a driving force in the novel.16 Owen traces his own condition of alienation back to his loss of the church which, in his childhood, offered him ‘safety and twice-seen light’ (N 173). As the narrator sees his novel as a place in which to see things twice, Owen regards this church as a container of remembered light. The light streaming through the windows of the church, like that ‘annealed’ light in Herbert’s poem ‘The Windows’,17 ‘was a memory of light’: a memory you could see in the present moment, feel in the warmth on your hands, it was light too dense to be an immediate account of things, it carried history in it, it was light filtered through dusty time. (N 172) It is perhaps the search for this fusion of oppositions, this containment of past and future in a softly glowing light, that draws Owen to epigraphy and to the work of the cult. His childhood experience of glossolalia – the speaking in tongues that is another manifestation of ecstasy in the novel – haunts Owen, as a possibility that he is unable to realise.18 It is the terrifying and uncanny spectacle of loved ones speaking in strange and estranged voices that drives Owen in terror from the protection of the church, and his search for sacred forms is a desperate attempt finally to yield to the horrifyingly abandoned ecstasy of glossolalia, to a form of speech that is all speech, a kind of total and incomprehensible communication. The closest he comes to experiencing this reconciliation, this yielding, is in his recitation of the poem of the Mewar kingdom at Lake Rajsamand, in harmony with the voice of his young male guide; an erotic moment of transcultural doubleness which evokes both the fear of glossolalia and the beauty of twice seen light that are the twin manifestations of the sacred in the novel. As Owen and the boy read the ancient script together, there is a blending of the ancient and the contemporary that evokes that performative moment in the Roman amphitheatre, and that gestures to the form in which all the oppositions in the novel might be reconciled: It was in the sound, how old this was, strange, distant other, but also almost known, almost striking through to him from some uncycled memory where the nightmares lay, the ones in which he could not speak as the others did, could not understand what they were saying. (N 284)

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As Owen revisits the primal fear he experiences on seeing his parents speaking in a foreign tongue, he is offered a tantalising shape in which fear and alienation might be overcome, a form of transcendent memory in which the future is contained in the past, in which death is contained in life, a kind of song which returns two-ness and uncanny estrangement to a simple, harmonic unity. Figured here, in this uncycled memory that bleeds out of the stillness of stone and the movement of song, is a form which might combine the static and the fluid, the Greek and American specific, first things and last; which might combine a biblical ecstasy with a contemporary Baudrillardian ecstasy of communication.19 Like the ‘secret memory of death’ that Jean Venable suggests is the origin of fiction in Ratner’s Star, this is a memory which cannot be incorporate or recycled, which does not offer itself up for expression, but which might nevertheless provide a still form in which to reconcile the contradictions of the novel, in which to free oneself from the condition of disjunct ecstasy. In this uncycled memory, the ancient, sacred language that is bound in stone and marble might find some connection with the virtual language that is fashioned by the expats’ telex machines, that empty language of occupation which threatens to sweep all before it. It might offer a form in which to resituate the bankrupt language of global capital in relation to a history and a landscape as old as the Olduvai Gorge (N 82). Whilst the novel is driven by an investment in the sacred, however – and by Owen’s quest to rediscover the safety of religious faith by overcoming his fear of glossolalia – it is marked, perhaps decisively, by a failure of faith rather than its consummation. The interruptive presence of death in the living present, that deathly space marked out by the cult, might offer a kind of aesthetic balance to the novel. To put death to work, in Derrida’s phrase, might be to bring the unspeakable into a kind of articulation, a kind of communicative ecstasy or jouissance. But to put death to work at the heart of the work is also, and at the same time, to threaten the work itself with the prospect of its continual extinction. The uncycled memory that offers Owen a fleeting glimpse of reconciled wholeness is also a kind of nonexpression, an unremembering which casts the novel back into darkness, silence and death, rather than bringing it into the light of redemption, or resurrection. To balance the novel around the terrain marked out by the cult, that region between signifier and signified which might be thought of as the space which determines the very possibility of writing itself, might be to bring the cult into communication and sacred light; but it also threatens to draw the novel into its own dark namelessness, its own ethical, political and relational vacuum. The approach to the cult in the novel, like one’s approach to death itself, is always marked by this doubleness, and this danger. The novel emerges from and heads towards the cult, just as life emerges from and heads towards death. But in attempting to penetrate into the space of the cult, to cross the boundary that separates darkness from light, and

Writing and apostasy 105 life from death, one is threatened by the prospect of an utter extinction, an absolute failure. As, for Derrida and for Maurice Blanchot, the space of literature is organised around the space of death, that terrain which it is both necessary and impossible to approach,20 so The Names is organised around a centre which continually evades a meeting which it nevertheless demands. This aporia is made manifest in the figure of Andhal, the ‘representative’ of the cult who seeks to achieve an ‘interface with the world’ (N 212). Andhal seems to promise, at least to the filmmaker Frank Volterra, the possibility of access to the cult. He offers a route to the dark centre of the novel that may provide the kind of interrelation between opposites that Owen Bradermas finds in sacred architecture and verse. If the film that Volterra almost makes, and the novel that Axton narrates, both emerge in twice seen light from the secret operations of the cult, then it is Andhal who offers the cult up to the possibility of narration in film and in prose, to the possibility of a ‘kind of higher typing’. Indeed, it is Andhal who provides, in writing on stone as it happens, the name of the book in which he features – the name of names, perhaps. It is Andhal who scrawls ‘Ta Onómata’, Greek for ‘the names’, on the rock in the village at the heart of the novel, in the space of the boundary between 1979 and 1980 (N 188). If there is a kind of hesitancy at the boundary between cult and world, between life and death, then Andhal seems to offer a passage across the threshold, to build that ‘delicate and endless bridge’ which Blanchot finds arching, in the work of art, over the boundary between life and death, between the nameable and the unnameable.21 But the price of Andhal’s communication with Volterra and with Axton, of course, is expulsion from the cult. Andhal is an ‘apostate’ who ‘manages his escape by revealing the secret of the organisation’ (N 216). The moment that Andhal opens the cult to the gaze of the narrator, the moment that the novel brings its centre into the light, is the very moment at which both Andhal and the novel break the commandments of their faith, and sacrifice any possibility of privileged access. As a result, the heart of the cult, the heart of the novel, perpetually escapes its own grasp. To write, in this novel, is to apostatise. It is necessary to write in order to reach the centre, but once one has written one has forsaken any possibility of access to the centre, because access itself relies upon a vow of silence. Indeed, the very title of the novel is necessarily the mark of an apostate, a mark which is erased by the true believers as soon as it is inscribed (N 216). The naming of The Names not only is the sign of Andhal’s attempt to communicate, but also signifies a structural failure to communicate; it marks both Andhal’s abandonment of the cult, and the cult’s abandonment of the name that he has corrupted through prohibited expression. The title of the novel refers both to the cult at its heart, and to the cult’s withdrawal from the name, its command that the name must be put perpetually under erasure. The experience of ecstasy, then, is one that always delivers a form of lapsed disjunction from self, even whilst it points towards a sacred, unified

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becoming. The cult performs, in its dark way, the possibilities of writing, and of fiction; it suggests the ways in which writing might draw on the unrevealed, the preverbal, in order to call forth forms in which the fractured ephemerality of being in time can be transformed into a rounded truth. It suggests a form in which the random, violent crimes that constitute the cult’s ‘method’ can open onto a new state of ethical being, a transfigured condition in which, as Kathryn’s father asserts on his deathbed (paraphrasing the Septimus Warren Smith of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway), ‘all the criminals are forgiven’ (N 32).22 The cult suggests ways in which the interstices of experience – the gaps between west and east, self and other, life and death – might be articulated, yielded up, put to work; but it can only cast this shadow of completion and perfection on pain of its continual failure, its devastating encounter with what Blanchot describes as ‘the profound distance of the work from itself, the remove due to which it always escapes what it is’.23 The possibility of a second coming, of a full ethical becoming, is always deferred through the work’s confrontation with the limits of poetic articulation, so the cult murders are returned to mindless terror, and the oppositions from which the novel are made fall back into their alienated, agonistic positions. The ‘rounded truth’ towards which Axton suggests that he is travelling in the novel will continually evade him, as the conditions that allow for the movement towards truth, towards death, towards the centre, are also those that guarantee that such a centre will never be reached. The novel does not arrive at a higher typing or a rounded truth, it does not find a way of expressing the work of the cult members in such a way that they might remain ‘true to themselves’ (N 249), as Volterra hoped his film might. Rather, the novel reaches only as far as the vanishing point at which the possibility of fidelity to oneself, or to another, meets with the necessary loss of self, the necessary and unbridgeable divide between self and other. The novel is an ethical struggle towards faith, towards a mutual harmony between cultures and histories, towards aesthetic and political balance, but it is a struggle that is always in motion, a faith that knows itself only through the movement of its continual apostasy. It is an ethics that can find its only guarantee in a Wittgensteinian silence.24 Towards the end of the novel, Owen Bradermas suggests that the ‘world’ has become ‘self-referring’. Recalling the movement towards tautology in End Zone, a movement in which God becomes synonymous with the nuclear weapon rather than an escape from its terror, Bradermas expands his point: The world has become self-referring. You know this. This thing has seeped into the texture of the world. The world for thousands of years was our space, our refuge. Men hid from themselves in the world. We hid from God or death. The world was where we lived, the self was where we went mad and died. But now the world has made a self of its own. Why, how, never mind. What happens to us now the world has a self? How do we say the simplest things without falling into a trap? Where do we go,

Writing and apostasy 107 how do we live, who do we believe? This is my vision, a self-referring world, a world in which there is no escape. (N 297) Owen’s vision here follows the structure of the simultaneous evacuation and doubling of the self that had already been established by Axton in the depravities. He imagines a world which has been thoroughly absorbed, renamed by ‘the parent’, by the west, by ‘America’. It is a world which is beside itself, a world which the USA has made into a self for itself, the image that the USA sees in the ‘funhouse mirror’ of a colonising, usurping love. In imagining such a world, such a self, Owen realises that there could be no ‘escape’. The self-reference that haunts the novel, in which the names refer to the names, is a tautological, self-validating condition in which ‘it doesn’t matter whether we lie or tell the truth’ (N 81). The relation between things and words is no longer between the massiveness of the land and the interpellating spirit of the word, that relation which Owen finds so moving at Lake Rajsamand. Rather, it has become a self-validating relation between word and word, in which there is no tension between fiction and non-fiction, in which the thing becomes reducible to the word. The ‘chance utterance of a name’ that pulls the players of Players out of the air has become all powerful, in this vision. The names that are meted out by telex are, as in the ecstasy of glossolalia, all names and one: the thousand names of God, and the Name of Names. The Greek specific, the ground, air and light in which Axton seeks refuge from himself, has been overwhelmed here – has lost its specificity – as the triumphant expat colonisers rewrite the world as language, inaugurating a self-referring condition in which, as Baudrillard imagines, there is ‘no more spectacle, no more stage, no more theatre, no more illusion’, in which ‘everything becomes immediately transparent, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication’. In such a self-referring, tautological word, Baudrillard suggests, ‘we no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication’.25 This ghastly spectre of self-reference, however, this loss of dialectical relation between language and the world, is held at bay, in the novel, by the movement of poetic apostasy. The threat and the promise that drive the novel is that The Names (Axton’s narration) might become ‘The Names’ (the cult that lies at its heart). This moment of conjunction not only promises a kind of perfect aesthetic balance, but also suggests the moment of the globalisation of US power – the establishment of an absolute and inescapable self-reference shadowed forth in the depravities. But the novel’s articulation and analysis of the relation between the names and the names, between Axton and Axton, west and east, between language and stone, is one which returns, insistently, to the failure of selfreference, the incompleteness of the movement towards tautology. However hard the novel works to produce perfect self-reference, the structure of its poetics brings it back to the disjuncture between word and thing, the failure of reference which ensures the land cannot become one with the word

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which names it. The novel is an obsessive quest to find ways of articulating faith, unity and harmony; but it is in its poetic performance of the recurrence of apostasy that its ‘offering’ of ‘language’ is made (N 331). It is in its failure to become itself, its failure to produce a sacred language in which to speak the name of God, that the novel points to the continuing possibility of language, of poetry, and of fiction.

4

Death and the avant-garde White Noise

The man who draws up a programme for the future is a reactionary. Karl Marx1 A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history. Walter Benjamin2

If the first stirrings of The Names are found in DeLillo’s preceding novel Players, in the ‘chance utterance of a name’ (P 10), then White Noise first shows itself, in preview, or in a kind of reverse déjà vu, in The Names, the novel which directly precedes it. James Axton, the narrator of The Names, opens his narration by describing the peculiar way that time is experienced during intercontinental travel. The time of air travel, he suggests, is ‘dead time’ – ‘time totally lost to us’ – and in this evocation of the deathly temporality that inhabits what Walter Benjamin calls the ‘continuum of history’, the presence of DeLillo’s next novel can be felt, lurking in the wings: This is time totally lost to us. We don’t remember it. We take no sense impressions with us, no voices, none of the windy blast of aircraft on the tarmac, or the white noise of flight, or the hours waiting. Nothing sticks to us but smoke in our hair and clothes. It is dead time. It never happens until it happens again. Then it never happened. (N 7) From its first, prophetic appearance in DeLillo’s oeuvre, then, white noise is bound up with death, and with a confused, reverse temporality. The white noise of flight is a sonic accompaniment to a kind of absence from history, a sound which does not cling, has no historical purchase, no echo or reverberation. Here, in The Names, DeLillo’s narrator gestures forward to the novel that is to come, predicting its appearance like one of those tabloid horoscopes that crop up so often in White Noise. But the prediction itself is loaded with a kind of negation, or undoing. White Noise is to come, the narrator suggests;

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even whilst it is happening in The Names it is deferred to the future, to 1984, where it waits to happen again. But when it happens again, when this prophecy of a second coming finally comes true, even then it will not happen, will not have happened, will never have happened. White Noise, like death itself, is always to come. This suggestion that White Noise might take place, or fail to take place, in a kind of historical vacuum, a suggestion made prophetically and obliquely in The Names, finds echoes from the very beginning of the later novel. Where the temporality of The Names is precisely conditioned throughout by the relationship between Axton as character and Axton as narrator, that of White Noise is set adrift from the start, disorientated and aimless, consigned to the ‘dead time’ that Axton finds in flight, to the emptiness of a historical fault, a flaw in the temporal texture. In The Names, Axton as narrator guides Axton as character towards his older self, across the boundary between the 1970s and 1980s, and towards some kind of authorial becoming, however fatuous. But in White Noise, we are thrown into a narrative time with no co-ordinates, with no assigned beginning or end. Gladney, the narrator and protagonist of White Noise, does not progress towards the scene of his own writing, as Axton at least attempts to do. Rather we are cast into the slack tide of a plotless narrative, which is light on historical detail and lacking in temporal tension. The opening of the novel tells us that ‘The station wagons arrived at noon’ (WN 3), and despite the faint historical call to the US frontier held in the image of circling wagons that the opening chapter goes on to evoke, the noon in question remains suspended, historically and temporally. It is never brought into a historical or narrative plot, in the way that all such moments are in The Names. The noon that opens the narrative, floating as it is in the impossible and unmappable space between morning and afternoon, remains disjunct and generalised, like the other temporal markers that run throughout the novel. Whenever we are welcomed into a new narrative scene, the narrator will tend to orient us with the vapid, displaced phrase ‘this was the day’: ‘this was the day Wilder started crying’ (WN 75); ‘this was the week a policeman saw a body thrown from a UFO’ (WN 234); ‘this was the night the insane asylum burned down’ (WN 239). The narrative ends by ejecting us into an unanchored day that might just as well be placed at its beginning or middle: ‘this was the day Wilder got on his plastic tricycle’ (WN 322). It is true that in White Noise, as in The Names, the experience of being in time, of living through even these displaced days, is determined by repetition, by a sense of compulsive recurrence. In both novels, a happening or an event, is read and understood through the possibility of its happening again. To this extent, the early appearance of white noise in The Names is uncannily prophetic. But in The Names, the occurrence of repetition, of seeing and seeing again, is organised around the possibility of reaching a kind of knowledge. Owen Bradermas experiences ‘twice seen light’ as a form of sacred revelation, and the narrator employs twice seeing and twice telling as means of arriving at a secularised truth – at what he

Death and the avant-garde 111 calls a ‘second life’ (N 329). The Names tries and fails to make itself into a cage for twice seen light, a camera lucida in which it is possible for Axton to ‘know’ himself ‘twice’ (N 329). In White Noise, however, the experience of déjà vu, the insistent recurrence of the same in the midst of the drifting, unanchored days, is not contained within any such narrative cage. Rather, déjà vu becomes, in White Noise, a symptom of the failure of narrative and of history to cohere, or to ‘accrue to a rounded truth’ (N 329). We wake up, at the opening of the narrative, in media res, cast into the moment, into the day, into a kind of eternal present. But finding ourselves adrift in unbounded narrative time does not allow us to occupy the moment, to live for the now, to seize the day. Instead, we feel constantly as if we have been here before, as if the present which we occupy is somehow second hand, already elsewhere. If, in The Names, white noise never happens until it happens again, then in White Noise, the condition of being stranded in the moment can only be approached through a peculiar sense that the moment is not inhabitable as anything other than a shadow of itself. White Noise is set in an eternal present which fails, eternally, to become present. This temporal condition, in which we are simultaneously buried in the moment and alienated from it, is determined in the novel by death. Gladney, as narrator and character, seeks immersion in the empty time of his narrative as an antidote to his fear of death, or as an antidote to death itself. ‘Let’s enjoy these aimless days while we can’ (WN 18), he tells himself as he goes about his small-town family life. ‘Let the seasons drift,’ he says, ‘do not advance the action according to a plan’ (WN 98). Gladney here is taking responsibility for the novel’s episodic plotlessness, its lack of drive and tension. In a familiar DeLilloism that might give us a sense of déjà lu, Jack tells us elsewhere in the novel that ‘all plots tend to move deathward’ (WN 26). With the Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Jack is proposing here that ‘the aim of all life is death’;3 that the plot of a life, like ‘political plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots’ (WN 26), derives its tension and its narrative possibility from the deathly end towards which it tends, that bourn from which no traveller returns. Fearing what he describes as ‘some deft acceleration’ (WN 26), some incremental speeding towards the death that consummates and annihilates the plot, Jack tries to slow things down, to wallow in the dense layers of family life, the intimate forms of recognition and communion in which he feels grounded, spatialised. But it is the very attempt to ward death off by resisting the tendency to plot that allows another kind of death to enter the novel. The aimless temporality that is produced by Jack’s refusal to plot is itself the dead time, the lost time that Axton describes in The Names. Removing the hours and the moments of the narrative from an onward rushing plot does not allow one to accrue them, to save them up for one of the novel’s many rainy days. Rather it produces a temporality that obeys the deathly logic of déjà vu, that condemns each moment to be somehow emptied out, in search of its real origin in a spectral elsewhere that, as Freud tells us, can never be found.4 The refusal to plot causes time itself to

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die, to become its own ghost. In a confusion between symptom and cure that becomes very familiar in DeLillo, the attempt to ward death off, to live in drifting seasons, produces a plotless time which is itself deathly; it is as if the aimless days of the novel are days that are already in the province of death. As Jack remarks at one point in the novel, employing the erotic language of entry and inhabitation that his wife Babette finds so offensive in the cheap pornography that they read together, ‘death has entered. It is already inside you’ (WN 141–142). It is perhaps this historical scenario, in which time is both endless and at an end, and in which death has entered life, that lends the novel its millennial character. The time in which the novel takes place is the extended time of the end, the empty, trembling, stretched time of a history that is on the point of extinction. The ‘postmodern sunsets’ (WN 227) that decorate the sky in the evenings, that put the sky ‘under a spell, powerful and storied’, are evocative of a world at an end (WN 324). They form the perfect sky in which ‘armies’ might fight ‘at the end of the world’ (WN 318), or against which ‘some voice or noise would crack [ . . . ] and we would be lifted out of death’ (WN 234). At the close of the novel, under the light of a final brilliant sunset, Jack and his family go to stand on a bridge above the expressway, where they join a silent audience to gaze up at the sky, and down at the cars speeding below them, ‘coming from the west, from out of the towering light’ (WN 325). The massed ranks of people stand gazing at the cars pouring towards them from the west, from the future that seems on the very point of arrival, watching them ‘as if for a sign’ (WN 325). The cars appear as emissaries from the endless time that lies just beyond the glowing, lowering horizon, beyond death and beyond the end of history. It is as if they might bring some ‘residue’ of the posthistorical calm with them, some particle of a final, eternal sunset carried on their ‘painted surfaces’ (WN 325). The déjà vu that infects the time of the novel is symptomatic of this intimate contact with the end, this trembling on the brink of millennial catastrophe. Jack asks Murray Jay Siskind, the wry observer of contemporary phenomena and for many critics the novel’s spokesperson for the postmodern, why there should be such a high incidence of déjà vu during the novel, and particularly during the ‘airborne toxic event’. Murray responds by suggesting that it is ‘because death is in the air’ (WN 151). ‘Maybe when we die,’ Murray goes on to speculate, ‘the first thing we’ll say is, “I know this feeling. I was here before”’ (WN 151). It is as we reach the end of history, as millennial death and darkness fall from the air, that we experience this simultaneous stretching and evacuating of the moment. Death, the second coming, the end of history, these release us into a form of endless continuation, an immaterial, despatialised temporality. As we approach this limit, as we move into the space of the limit, we meet our death as the already familiar, as that which does not happen until it happens again. The sunset – that livid, ‘violet’ moment that throbs, for T.S. Eliot, ‘between two lives’ marking the space of the end and the space of transition5 – the sunset expands in White Noise, stretches and

Death and the avant-garde 113 yawns, threatening to engulf the entire novel in its timeless time, the empty time in which everything is already familiar, and yet nothing is quite itself. It is as the sunsets crank up their millennial immediacy, as they make the ‘aesthetic leap from already brilliant sunsets to broad towering ruddled visionary skyscapes, tinged with dread’ (WN 170), that they begin to elongate, and to distend. ‘Sunsets used to last five minutes,’ Babette says to Jack in her Kierkegaardian fear and trembling, ‘now they last an hour’ (WN 170). If the experience of déjà vu, the simultaneous doubling and evacuating of the moment, is bound up with this awed approach to a sublime, biblical revelation, however, it is also staged as a symptom of history itself, as an end product or side effect of industrial capitalism. The end of history that is envisaged in the novel is both visited upon us from beyond, and immanent in written history, self-inflicted, produced from within. It is both a biblical event, shrouded with the sacred awe that imbues The Names, and a technological, ecological event brought about by ‘progress’, by industrial, military and cultural advancement. The ‘unbearably beautiful’ sunsets which illuminate the time of the end in a golden, transfiguring light are, after all, caused by an ecological disaster, by the residue from the ‘toxic airborne event’ that forms the central episode of the novel. Similarly, the experiences of déjà vu that ripple through the novel in a kind of domino effect are caused not only by a late-historical proximity to God, but also as a symptom of exposure to Nyolene D. As Marion Muirhead suggests, in an article entitled ‘Deft Acceleration’, one of the ways in which this technological, cultural force expresses itself is in the experience of speed. Muirhead suggests that it is ‘technology’, rather than any approach to the sacred or the sublime, that is ‘responsible for the acceleration of time and the omnipotence of death’ in White Noise.6 But if the acceleration towards the end of history that the novel charts is driven by a kind of technological speed, it is important to recognise that the speed that is encountered here, the force that drives the novel on, is of a strangely dematerialised, despatialised variety. The curious temporality of the novel is partly inspired, as the title of Muirhead’s article might suggest, by Gladney’s denial of a certain kind of speed. It is the very refusal to accelerate that leads towards a new kind of acceleration. The aimless, stretched temporality of the novel is in part produced by Gladney’s attempt to resist the ‘deft acceleration’ that he fears is around the corner, that acceleration towards the death that, for Freud, is the ‘aim’ of all life. Indeed, by the time we reach the close of the narrative, speed itself, and the Newtonian, Freudian laws that govern speed as a function of space time and of narrative, become an object of nostalgia for Gladney, rather than simply of fear. The new kind of speed, and the new kind of all pervasive death that the novel encounters are such that old-fashioned speed starts to appear rather desirable. The cars that pour from the towered sky of the future at the close of the novel still belong, in part, to the old world of space time that is under threat in this novel; they translate the speed towards which the novel is heading back into a language that obeys the reassuring laws of Newtonian motion, even as they carry on their

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surfaces a ‘sign’ of the new kind of speed that is to come. The narrator describes the ‘consciousness of the highway’ as belonging to the ‘broad-ribboned modernist stream’, reflecting that ‘in speed there was sense’ (WN 322–323). But the kind of speed which the narrative anticipates and produces is a speed that belongs to the senseless, distended, empty time of déjà vu, the simultaneously rushing and static time of the ‘postmodern sunset’. It is characterised by the movement of electrons and electronic information, by waves and radiation, rather than by the heavy momentum of steel and aluminium on the highway. The kind of dizzying speed that is summoned partly by Gladney’s fearful resistance to Freudian acceleration, and partly by the cultural, economic and historical mutations brought about by ‘advanced’ capitalism, is unanchored, and weightless. It is the kind of speed that Paul Virilio identifies as both the ‘location’ of culture, and the ‘law’, ‘the world’s destiny and its destination’. The awesome speed evoked by White Noise and by Paul Virilio is the result of a ‘loss of material space’, a loss which ‘leads to the government of nothing but time’, which casts us into an endless moment, a moment in which we can gain, however, no real purchase.7 The end of history that White Noise evokes, then, is one in which sublime revelation appears to be compounded with the weightlessly speeding, looping temporality of global capitalism. In DeLillo’s oeuvre up to this point, in Americana, in Ratner’s Star, in The Names, the millennial threat or promise of a second coming has been balanced, to some extent, against the foundation of a global America, as if the two were opposing outcomes to history; as if revelation and globalisation were possibilities that remained distinct from one another. In White Noise, these alternative outcomes – and indeed all of those oppositions which fuel the dialectical progress of history – appear to reveal their sameness. Redemption from above seems to collapse into the everlasting continuation of a new, global economy; movement seems to reveal its identity with stasis; transformation with the persistence of the same. It is perhaps because of this sense that White Noise arrives at the point of a historical vacuity that the novel achieved such resonance on its publication in 1984. The transformation of space into time, of material into information, and the corresponding loss of any identifiable real upon which political activity might be based, these perceived features of the novel struck a chord, on its initial reception, with the increasing currency of postmodern theory. Certain episodes in the novel – that of the ‘most photographed barn in America’, for example, or the episode in which ‘Simuvac’ personnel prioritise the game of simulated evacuation over the life-saving potential of the ‘real thing’ – gave a lucid and comic articulation to concepts that were becoming widely disseminated in 1980s American and European culture. For many of the contemporary readers and critics of White Noise, the novel appeared as a lock-step dramatisation of the theory of Jean Baudrillard. Its representations of déjà vu, in which happenings refer themselves to other happenings, and its evocation of barns which are visible only in their multiple photographic representations, seemed to many to exemplify and illuminate Baudrillard’s

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theorisation of the simulacra. If, as Frank Lentricchia suggests in 1991, ‘postmodernism’ is ‘our key term of cultural self-consciousness’,9 and if the ‘undesirability of the distinction between the real and the fictional’ is the ‘key meaning of being an American’,10 then White Noise seems to distil ‘postmodern man’s essence’, and to offer itself as a ‘pure American product’.11 This perception that the novel gives expression to a form of global American postmodernity, in which history has become a vacuous fiction – as ungraspable as the phantom original seeing which underlies the haunting experience of déjà vu – such a reading of the novel suggests, again, that White Noise marks something of a departure in DeLillo’s oeuvre. Where his earlier novels are more clearly engaged both with the weighty power of official history, and with the possibility of discovering historical counternarratives in which some kind of resistance to the march of global capital might be couched, White Noise opens onto a kind of historical gap, a pocket of empty time where the 1980s should be. Even if the novel contains some residual engagement with a contemporary history that is not yet at an end, such engagement is very difficult to evaluate, or to understand, partly because the comedy and pathos of the novel derives from its dramatisation of the failure of those rhetorical modes which have made both the narrating and the critique of history possible. Much of the comic frisson of this novel, much of its effect, derives from its capacity to depict a time and a culture that is in the process of falling through itself. It is Jack Gladney’s failed and in any case ambivalent attempt to bring a pragmatic historical and ethical structure to bear on a culture which belongs more readily to the crazed reasoning of his teenage children that gives the novel its stamp and its tone. Heinrich’s careless dismissal of a demonstrable difference between the real and the fictional, between rain and shine, between a simulated and an actual odour, this can seem the only appropriate response to a contemporary culture which has become ‘unaccountable’ (WN 34). Babette’s diffident response to the disastrous, her hassled, absent-minded unconcern at the apocalyptic threat that hangs over the novel’s small town America, offers a model of the way that the narrative finds itself comically absent and dislocated even from its own fear – a stranger in the very midst of its own dying (WN 142). On one of the many occasions in the novel when the family are told by the ‘authorities’ to boil their water, as a result of some unspecified catastrophe, Babette comments breezily that ‘they’re always saying boil your water’. There is a curious reluctance to interrogate what such a piece of advice might indicate, or whether it is wise to follow it. ‘It’s the new thing,’ she says, ‘like turn your wheel in the direction of the skid’ (WN 34). For all her existential fear of death, Babette’s relation with the culture in which she finds herself adrift is determined by her good natured, amused confusion, and by her suspension of an engaged critical faculty. There is no attempt to make sense of the rules that govern safe existence, no sense, indeed, that the rules themselves make rational sense. Rather, the curiously detached acknowledgement that history is sliding out of control, careening down the highway towards a senseless, deathly speed,

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is accompanied here by a counter-intuitive, bright willingness to steer into the skid. There seems, to Babette, no way of angling oneself against the slide, of brushing history against the grain, or of employing any kind of agency to alter the course of the plummet towards death. Even for Jack, who continues wearily to crank up his old-world critical apparatus in order to grapple with each outrageous new-world anomaly that comes along, the bottom line is really a form of shrugging helplessness before the irrational. When his daughter Denise suggests that cities are ‘kept’ in the ‘lower end’ of states, so that water can flow down to them from the mountains which are put in the north for that reason, he finds himself unable to correct her. He cannot ground himself securely enough in his own experience of space and time to disprove any theory, even one which is based on such a comprehensive misunderstanding of geopolitical dynamics. Her theory, he thinks, ‘makes a curious kind of sense’, as if she is ‘somehow, eerily, right’ (WN 236). Despite this apparent suspension of the laws governing geographical and historical processes, however, it remains possible both to read a residual historical narrative in White Noise, and to situate the novel in relation to ongoing historical forces which, to an extent, determine its conditions of possibility. The historical current that flows with such urgency out of Wall Street in Players and Running Dog, which drives the novels along and fills the sail of the signholding man, this force can still be felt in the thinner air of White Noise. Even in the supermarket, that hermetic, brilliant white space that seems to offer immunity from history and from culture like an igloo at the end of the world, even here it is possible to feel the effects of a history that is continuing to move forward. At the opening of the novel, as Jack and Murray colloquise in the supermarket, the narrator fills us in on the background noise. At one point, we are told, ‘a checkout girl said, “Leon, parsley,” and he answered [ . . . ] “seventy-nine.” His breast pocket was crammed with felt tip pens’ (WN 19). This snippet of detail suggests that the episode takes place before the information revolution that occurred in the mid 1980s, transforming the way that supermarkets operate, allowing them to price goods electronically, and to build up huge data profiles on their ‘loyal’ customers.12 Despite the sanitised, posthistorical sheen of the supermarket interior, this little exchange might seem quaint to us now, contingent, steam age. A time when Leon and the checkout girl conspired to price the goods and add up the bill, a time when the felt-tip pen had a certain economic might, seems evocative of an innocent age to the consumer informed by the culture of the bar code. By the end of the novel, this age has passed. The narrative closes with a great rearrangement of the supermarket shelves, which casts the shoppers into mournful confusion as they try to understand the altered layout, to divine the new, faintly cybernetic logic which places the scouring pads with the hand soap (WN 326). With this rearrangement, it is suggested, a new electronic age is inaugurated, in which one of the remaining possibilities for communal contact and agency caught in that poignant little exchange between Leon and his colleague has been eradicated. It is as

Death and the avant-garde 117 if the introduction of the bar code turns consumers themselves into products, shuffling automata whose choices and ‘lifestyles’ are determined by the demands of the supermarket, rather than vice versa. The electronic, automated market aims at eliminating the scope for secrecy, for error, for thinking and seeing awry. The shoppers look blindly at the goods, trying to work out what they are, trying to understand what they want, but, ‘in the end’, the narrator suggests, ‘it doesn’t matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly’ (WN 326). This sense that technology is not simply an end point in White Noise, not just a Virilian destination, but also a narrative that is still in progress, can be felt elsewhere in the novel. Indeed, the persistence of a ghostly historical narrative can be felt perhaps most clearly in those places in the novel where the historical seems most emphatically to have been suspended. Jack and Murray’s trip to see the ‘Most Photographed Barn in America’, for example, offers to give them access to a kind of self-referring, historical closure that is not unlike the timelessness promised by the supermarket. Where, for Murray, the supermarket is ‘sealed off, self contained, timeless’ (WN 38), the photographed barn offers entry into a kind of suspended history, an eternal now. What the visitor to the barn sees, Murray suggests, is a barn out of time. ‘We see only what the others see,’ he suggests, ‘the thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future’ (WN 12). If, for Heinrich, ‘there’s no past, present or future outside our own mind’ (WN 23), then for Murray both the supermarket and the photographed barn are products of a culture whose technological advances have led it to a kind of self-referring stasis, in which the past and the future have collapsed into the now. To join the crowds who take pictures of the barn is to immerse oneself in the timelessness of the photographic image. But even during the episode of the photographed barn, the photographic apparatus itself declares its belonging to a history of technology, an ongoing, material history which unsettles the sense that photography opens onto timelessness. As Jack and Murray regard the barn, and the mise en abyme of photographers ‘taking pictures of taking pictures’, they ‘listen to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of levers that advanced the film’ (WN 13). Here, the photographic mise en abyme which sucks the novel into its empty time is held against the sound of shutter release buttons, and the evocative, mechanical, Barthesian rustle of the manually advanced film – the ‘mechanical sounds’ of photographic apparatus that, for Barthes, is the ‘noise of Time’.13 As the timelessness of the supermarket is undermined by the continuing historical development of information technology, so here that faint rustle works to embed the camera into a history, to return it to the current of time that continues to ‘advance’, as the film advances in the body of the camera. The rustling of the film itself, the tactile crackling of celluloid as it passes from one roll to the other in the body of the camera, comes as a form of sense memory to a reader who belongs to the sonically quite different era of the automatic

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film advance, and of digital photography. The sound evokes a continuing history of the material conditions of photography, and by extension a history of seeing. Indeed, the novel itself contains a mini-history of the camera, which takes us from the box camera, through the manual SLR, to the Instamatic sported by Heinrich (WN 130). The late infancy of photography is glimpsed by Jack, when he finds a batch of family photo albums, ‘one or two of them at least fifty years old’, which open a kind of window onto a blinding early twentieth century light. The photos, Jack says, are of children wincing in the sun, women in sun hats, men shading their eyes from the glare as if the past possessed some quality of light we no longer experience, a Sunday dazzle that caused people in their churchgoing clothes to tighten their faces and stand at an angle to the future, somewhat averted it seemed, wearing fixed and fine-drawn smiles, skeptical of something in the nature of the box camera. (WN 30) This rather beautiful passage suggests, against Murray’s conception of timelessness of the photograph, that photography might offer access to the light and the space of another time, even whilst it threatens to elide the very possibility of temporal difference. Where Babette finds herself unable to steer against the slide of history, this passage sees through the viewfinder of the box camera, against the grain of the onward advance of technology to which the camera itself belongs, to a moment which resists the flow, which anchors itself in the singular brightness of its day. These specimens of an earlier humanity, standing in their church clothes at an angle to the current – sceptical of the camera that drags them towards the future – are immediately evocative of Benjamin’s reading of Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus. For Benjamin, Klee’s Angel stands with his face ‘turned toward the past’. The Angel ‘wants to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed’. But the ‘storm that we call progress’ has become ‘caught in his wings’, irresistibly propelling him ‘into the future to which his back is turned’.14 Like the coming together of different orders of history captured in the box camera ‘aimed at the Parthenon’ that closes The Names (N 329), these photographs suggest that the onward movement towards the technology of timeless seeing might carry within it, even in the evacuated temporality of White Noise, a history of seeing that still clings, that angles itself, like Benjamin’s Angel, against the storm which blows us towards a static, dematerialised future. This persistence of the historical in those technologies that are characterised as erosive of the power of history can be felt stirring throughout the novel. The ATM, the ‘microcomputer’ which, like the holographic scanner in the supermarket threatens to reduce us to the ‘sum total’ of our ‘data’ (WN 141), these technologies continue to attach themselves to their historical conditions of production, both in White Noise, and in a parabola of technological development that stretches across DeLillo’s oeuvre. The ‘ATM’, for example,

Death and the avant-garde 119 that seems to offer Jack entry into a virtual future of computerised ‘networks’, ‘circuits’, ‘streams’ and ‘harmonies’ (WN 46) becomes, by the time of DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis, an embarrassing obsolescence, ‘aged and burdened by its own historical memory’ (C 54). The term ‘automated teller machine’ reveals itself in Cosmopolis to be ‘part of the process that the device was meant to replace’. By 2003 it is ‘anti-futuristic, so cumbrous and mechanical that even the acronym seem[s] dated’ (C 54). And if technology is haunted by the history that it is working to eliminate, so the emptily circling postmodern culture that the novel depicts – a culture in the process of reducing itself to its own horoscope – is haunted by those political histories that it seems unable to accommodate. Very often in the novel, the weightless, ahistorical episodes seem to call to a more historically grounded context to which they belong, but which it seems beyond the power of the narrator to articulate. The resonance, for example, between the language of sex and that of death in the novel, the repeated moments which draw these two things together, calls out to the mid 1980s experience of AIDS. Jonathan Dollimore speculates, in Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture, that ‘the connection of sex and death has renewed relevance in our own AIDS-inflicted age’,15 but such specific historical relevance, such a historically driven kind of death, can only achieve a kind of disjointed articulation in White Noise. AIDS remains on the margins in DeLillo’s novel, unable to make it over the burning horizon. It appears, in fact, only in the midst of unplaceable, unattributable, suspended white noise, haunting some of those extracts from radio and television that periodically irrupt into the narrative, emerging from the buzzing static at one point simply as ‘Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome’ (WN 303). If AIDS is one of the ‘epidemics of strange new diseases’ (WN 136) that a smug Jehovah’s Witness warns Jack about whilst the family shelters from the airborne toxic event, then one of the symptoms of the historical condition that the novel depicts is a failure to understand or locate AIDS historically. It is either sucked into the ahistoricism of a biblical end-of-the-world scenario – that scenario which is touted in the mid 1980s by right-wing homophobes – or it is left on the staticky margins as an aspect of the historical context with which the novel is unable to engage. The historical context that inhabits the novel in this way, that flickers at its edges, on the verge of articulation, reaches back from the immediate moment of the mid 1980s, to the end of the Second World War. Indeed, the geohistorical terrain that forms the explicit ground of Players and Running Dog – that runs from Europe in the 1940s to the contemporary USA – is visible in White Noise, detectable through the temporal disturbance, the historical distortions of déjà vu. What Jack describes as his ‘involvement with Hitler’, his ‘shrewd’ decision to ‘invent’ Hitler as an intellectual commodity in the US academic marketplace, is an involvement which loops 1940s Europe and 1980s America together, which feeds them into one another. The ‘College on the Hill’ promises to absorb Hitler into its well-heeled, politically neutral economy, to appropriate him as a historical artefact which is no

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more resistant to incorporation than Elvis. Conversely, Jack understands his engagement with Hitler, with 1940s Europe, with Germany and the German language, partly as a means of grounding himself in a history that seems to him more permanent and enduring than the eternal American present in which he lives. Germany, Hitler, and the mass death for which Hitler was responsible, haunt the ‘now’ of White Noise, offering a phantom backdrop and a context to Blacksmith in the 1980s, just as the College on the Hill works smoothly to incorporate Hitler into its tanned, loose-limbed well-being. Hitler’s Germany works as a point of origin, a spectral form of original seeing which underlies the already seen of Blacksmith, of the College on the Hill. If Jack’s ambivalent search for a form of grounding in Nazi Germany tends to collapse Hitler into an expanding present, however, there is, throughout the novel, a flickering sense of a more embedded timeline that runs from 1945 to 1984, that might separate them from one another. In fact, one of the only dates explicitly named in the novel roughly bisects this period. When Jack introduces himself in the novel’s first, unnumbered episode, he says that he ‘invented Hitler studies in North America in March of 1968’ (WN 4). This date, the date on which Gladney ‘invented’ a form of correspondence between Germany and post-war North America, has, of course, a number of interrelated associations which resonate with postwar developments in the global balance of power, and which find a number of echoes in White Noise. One of the more powerful of these associations is related to the Vietnam War. March 1968 is the month that Lyndon B. Johnson announced his decision not to run for re-election to the US presidency (March 31, 1968), and his intention to begin the protracted retreat from Vietnam that would eventually lead to the end of the war.16 It is also the month of the My Lai massacre (March 16, 1968), in which US troops murdered somewhere between 200 and 600 Vietnamese men, women and children, in an unprovoked attack.17 Photographs of the atrocity by Ronald Haeberle, and reporting of the incident by Seymour Hersch, provoked national and international outrage, and gave momentum to the anti-war demonstrations that were, by that time, having an effect on US policy. The Haeberle images, of infant corpses lying casually butchered on dirt tracks, became iconic representations of US colonial barbarism in South East Asia, and themselves find a certain resonance with the photographic images of piled corpses that are so closely associated with Nazi atrocities in Auschwitz and elsewhere. To this extent, March 1968 is a pivotal moment in the passage from European colonialism to the cold war, and the global conflict between the USA and the USSR. The Haeberle images distil a historical continuity between the Second World War and Vietnam, a kind of transgenerational haunting, a way of narrating the movement from nineteenth century colonialism to the postwar US and Soviet occupation of strategic European and Asian states, a progression which has mass civilian death as a constant.18 This Vietnam context to 1968 coincides, of course, with the escalation of the civil rights movement in the USA, and with the development of

Death and the avant-garde 121 widespread protest and unrest. March 1968 is the month in which the student demonstrations began in France, demonstrations which were to lead to the ‘night of the barricades’ in Paris in May 1968, which itself, for some, was the last chance for a European socialist revolution, a sudden incandescence of revolutionary possibility in the steady historical progression towards the globalisation of capital. The demonstrations were linked to US activity in Vietnam – they spread from the Nanterre campus demonstration against the Vietnam War, which was put down by French police on March 28, 1968 – but they were also driven by wider concerns about the location of power, the distribution of capital, and the cultural possibilities for intellectual autonomy and dissent. As Bill Readings suggests in The University in Ruins, the student demonstrations protested not just against US military activity, but also against planned changes to the French university system, changes which were aimed at eroding the autonomy of the university, and at increasing the efficiency of ‘social engineering’ by the state.19 March 1968, then, is a moment in the passage from European to American power that is evocative both of transition, and of protest. The moment that Jack inaugurates Hitler studies is one at which both the historical progression towards a globalised America, and the scope for personal and intellectual dissent from such progression, reaches a critical stage. This range of associations does not find any direct articulation in White Noise. By 1984, perhaps, it is precisely the capacity for a particular form of historical articulation that has been lost. But 1968 echoes through the novel, making itself felt in its absence. The Vietnam War and the My Lai massacre haunt the novel, and find expression in echoes, in subliminal allusions. Vietnam emerges repeatedly in the novel as a phantom that is resurrected by the tabloids, as a staple feature of the occult landscape trafficked by the supermarket press. If the army helicopters chopping the darkened air of the toxic event might call up filmic images of US helicopters in Vietnam, this faint connection is made explicit only in the crazed, infantile language of the tabloid news. The toxic event gives rise to a rash of sightings of UFOs, one of which is reported by ‘Officer Walker’, who witnessed a body being thrown from an alien craft. Walker is able, under hypnosis, to make a connection between unidentified aliens, the toxic event, and the repressed history of Vietnam – a connection which eludes the novel’s ‘official’ narrative. Officer Walker, ‘a Vietnam vet’, is reported to have said that the ‘bizarre scene’ of the UFO dropping a body from a hatch ‘reminded him of helicopter crews throwing Vietcong suspects out of the door’ (WN 234). As, in another tabloid, it is reported that the ‘spirit of Lyndon B. Johnson will contact CBS executives to arrange an interview on live TV’ (WN 145), this memory of brutality in Vietnam is buried in the cultural unconscious, finding expression only as fantasy, or as a form of déjà vu. Officer Walker goes on to comment that, as he witnessed the unidentified craft, he ‘sensed an eerie message being psychically transmitted to his brain’ (WN 234), as if this is what has become of historical transmission in White Noise.

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If the tabloids can at least find a language, however bankrupt, with which to name Vietnam, elsewhere in the novel it is visible only in gestures, or in images. When Jack and Heinrich watch the insane asylum burn down, for example, their enjoyment of the scene is complicated by the sight of a ghostly, mad woman, burning on the lawn: A woman in a fiery nightgown walked across the lawn. We gasped, almost in appreciation. She was white-haired and slight, fringed in burning air, and we could see she was mad, so lost to dreams and furies that the fire around her head seemed almost incidental. No one said a word. In all the heat and noise of detonating wood, she brought a silence to her [ . . . ] A fire captain hurried toward her, then circled out slightly, disconcerted, as if she were not the person, after all, he had expected to meet here. She went down in a white burst, like a tea cup breaking. (WN 240) This beautiful passage is evocative in a number of ways. The ghostly woman, fringed in burning air, carries with her a mystical, biblical resonance. The fringe of light beatifies her, whilst her apparent ignorance of the heat that consumes her lends her a sacred immunity, a kind of imperishability redolent of the burning bush. But the mad, lost woman, so white and thin, so absent from the scene of her own death, appears also as the spectral body of history itself, a figure who draws a silence around herself as she dies unawares, a silence which makes her unapproachable, out of time. We do not expect to meet her here; she has been sent from another place and time, of which she cannot speak. The figure of the burning woman may call up, again, images of napalmed Vietnamese, and the spectacle of a body burning alive gathers other DeLillo moments to itself, moments which are themselves engaged with Vietnam. From the passage in Players, when another Jack burns himself alive, the burning figure recurs repeatedly in DeLillo, alluding always to those protesters against the Vietnam War, such as Quang Duc, who chose death by fire as a suicidal form of political resistance (see Figure 1). But such historical valence is wreathed, in this passage, in silence, in the failure to articulate that is radiated by this woman, lost, as she is, to dreams and furies. And if Vietnam, and protest against Vietnam, is shadowed forth in this image of the burning woman, then the My Lai massacre shows itself, faintly, in dumb show, elsewhere in the novel. When Jack’s 11 year old daughter Steffie acts as a volunteer victim for one of the Simuvac evacuations, those aftershock, déjà vu tremors by which the Blanchottian disaster is registered in White Noise, she becomes, like the burning woman, a deathly figure who calls to a history from which she has been displaced. Finding his daughter acting out her victimhood, lying ‘in the middle of the street, on her back, her arm flung out, her head tilted the other way’, Jack muses on how ‘natural she looked, how deeply imbued with the idea of a sweeping disaster’ (WN 205). For Jack, this adoption of the victim pose is Steffie’s means of ‘envisioning the

Death and the avant-garde 123 future’ (WN 205), of casting herself into that future which, for Blanchot, ‘belongs to the disaster’ – an evacuated, eternal disaster which, even when ‘it comes upon us, does not come’.20 But the pose also belongs to a mute history of victimhood, a photographic history of atrocities and mass graves, and of those civilians lying dead in the street dressed in casual clothes in My Lai in March 1968. Such history vibrates in these images of the simulated victim, and the burning woman; they tremble with a historical memory that cannot surface, that has no more direct means of transmission. If the atrocities in Vietnam show and conceal themselves in the novel in a kind of suspended form of historical reference, then the campus revolutionary activity in Europe and the USA that clusters around the month of March 1968 speaks in White Noise only in its disappearance. If Jack invented Hitler studies at a time when the university was promising to mobilise a form of revolt against the post-war order, when the continuum from European to American economic power looked vulnerable before the explosive power of intellectual rebellion, then the time in which the novel is set is one in which the university has been emptied of its revolutionary, counter-ideological potential. To commemorate March 1968 as the moment when Hitler studies is inaugurated is to summon the ghost of an alternative history; to commune, like a tabloid medium, with the spirit of a rebellion that haunts a postwar historical narrative that never came to pass. The College on the Hill, by the mid 1980s, has become a guarantor of the status quo; a defender of unequal distribution of wealth rather than a centre of revolutionary activity. The college ‘occupies an ever serene edge of the townscape, semidetached, more or less scenic, suspended in political calm’ (WN 85). The wealthy stationwagoners who drop their children at the college at the beginning of each academic year are giving their offspring over to a force which will produce them in their likeness. The parents, with their ‘conscientious suntans’, witness the commencement of the year in a spirit of complacent self-regard. They ‘feel a sense of renewal, of communal recognition’, seeing ‘images of themselves in every direction’ (WN 3). Even the hedonism of the students, their drug-taking and globe-trotting and casual intimacy, are effortlessly incorporated into their training to become good Americans, to become what they already are. The ideological and economic incorporation of the university is such, in fact, that there is a confusion throughout the novel between the college and the supermarket, between shopping and thinking. The selfreferring, sealed, white interior of the supermarket appears as the university perfected, a realisation of Black Knife’s prophecy of the self-referring university made in Americana (A 119–120). Jack and Murray conduct their inquiries into the condition of things as readily and as often in the supermarket as they do on campus; whenever Jack goes to the supermarket, he encounters Murray wandering through the aisles making notes. Murray himself suggests this collapse of the university into the supermarket, when he conflates all elements of his life in Blacksmith into one model of consumption as reflection. ‘In Blacksmith,’ he says, ‘in the supermarket, in the rooming house,

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on the Hill. I feel I’m learning things every day. Death, disease, afterlife, outer space. It’s all much clearer here. I can think and see’ (WN 36). In this model of the university as supermarket, the possibilities for oppositional politics offered by 1968 seem a long way off indeed. The thinking and seeing that Murray finds in the marketplace is one that does not rely on or allow for any distance between culture and critique; the university and the supermarket are no longer oppositional here, but become part of an all encompassing cultural hegemony. Murray’s thinking and seeing shades very easily into the thinking and seeing of those shuffling automata on the last page of the novel; those shopper students who belong to an automated culture that has so effectively incorporated its critical margins that it no longer matters ‘what they see or think they see’ (WN 326). White Noise might be read, then, as a novel in which the persistence of history is witnessed in its absence. The stirrings and tremblings of historical possibility are a kind of accompaniment to the weightless temporality of a world at the end of time. This condition, in which persistence becomes a spectral companion to endedness – like the burning woman both imperishable and already perished – is given a kind of articulation in the novel by its association with the history of the avant-garde – another evacuated historical narrative which announces its continuing possibility through the exaggerated reports of its own death. Murray’s suggestion that the supermarket offers an environment in which it is possible to ‘think and see’ predicts, in another instance of reverse déjà vu in DeLillo’s oeuvre, a comment by the fictional novelist Bill Gray – a character in DeLillo’s 1992 novel Mao II. For Gray, Samuel Beckett – that writer who watches over the death throes of the avant-garde – is the ‘last writer to shape the way we think and see’. After Beckett, Gray suggests, the ‘artist is absorbed’, ‘processed and incorporated’ (M 157). This verbal echo, bouncing back like the Ratnerian’s message from the future, might suggest that Murray’s thinking and seeing can be situated within a history of the avant-garde – a history in which the supermarket becomes the last bastion of a critical, rarefied high art, as well as the site of the triumphant commodification of culture. It is Jack, in fact, who first makes this link between commodification and the avant-garde explicit in the novel itself. When Murray arrives at the College on the Hill, he expresses his surprise at the extent to which the university has abandoned its commitment to the development of specialised fields of knowledge, finding instead the language and the ‘learning outcomes’ of its disciplines ready made in the everyday. ‘There are full professors in this place’, Murray says to Jack, ‘who read nothing but cereal boxes’; to which Jack replies, ‘It’s the only avantgarde we’ve got’ (WN 10). The specialised, the critical, the marginal, these have been recuperated into the mainstream, the banal, the quotidian. In the supermarket, several pages later, Murray acknowledges the force of this response. The plain white packaging of the ‘economy’ goods that Murray favours, the white cans of peaches labelled ‘CANNED PEACHES’, strike him as ‘the new austerity’ (WN 18). The supermarket, in which ‘everything is white’,

Death and the avant-garde 125 the stark, blank features, the self-reference, the repetition, this strikes Murray as a Warholesque spectacle that articulates a new ‘spiritual consensus’. ‘You were right, Jack,’ he says, ‘this is the last avant-garde. Bold new forms. The power to shock’ (WN 19). The supermarket here suggests, indeed, the late work of Samuel Beckett, as much as it evokes Warhol. Beckett’s later short prose, such as Imagination Dead Imagine or The Lost Ones, fleetingly conjures bare white worlds, empty, stark, brilliant spaces where a little life struggles on, on the very point of disappearance, of collapse into the nonexpression that they barely resist. As Brian McHale has suggested, The Lost Ones, in which lost souls shuffle around a brightly lit interior avidly but vainly searching for something to appease the desire to search, could be set only in a ‘kind of minimalist shopping mall’, and the searchers themselves resemble nothing more than ‘quintessential shoppers’.21 This connection, then, between Beckett and DeLillo, between the brilliant white supermarket of White Noise and the high-art mall of The Lost Ones, suggests that in both texts the avant-gardist urge towards critical resistance to commodified culture is recognisable only in the throes of its disappearance. The possibility of the avant-garde, of an intellectual and literary space that is not already incorporated, is articulable only as a white shadow under harsh strip lighting, a shadow that is, as in Beckett, ‘all white in the whiteness’. In this scenario, the very possibility of a dialectical exchange between belonging and alienation – the contradictory exchange between ‘resistance and accommodation’ that Paul Mann describes as ‘the avant-garde’s most basic structure and driving force’22 – has already been forsaken. The rustle of film advancing in the camera, the rustle of history that murmurs in White Noise like a papery requiem, haunts the novel like those ‘dead voices’ that plague Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, the voices that ‘murmur’ and ‘rustle’, that ‘make a noise like wings, like leaves, like sand, like leaves’.23 The voices of the dead, in Beckett and in DeLillo, haunt the margins of the text only to tell us what has already happened – to tell us that the outside has been rerouted into the inside, that there is no escape from the supermarket, from the world as market. The whispering, rustling voices of the dead have been translated, by the end of White Noise, into the flat bleep of the electronic point of sale, that musical accompaniment to a thriving economy. By the end of the novel, the ‘language of waves and radiation’ – the electronic language of holographic scanners and of white noise – is ‘how the dead speak to the living’ (WN 326). Death itself, in the novel, is on the point of being incorporated, has already been incorporated. The death that threatens us here is a death ‘made’, like Nyolene D, ‘in the laboratory’ (WN 127), not that death dispensed by the grim reaper, or by a messenger from God. Dying, like thinking, becomes a form of shopping. Where, for the modernist avant-garde, death appears as a form of possibility – for Virginia Woolf an ‘attempt to communicate’, for Maurice Blanchot the space of literature itself – in White Noise, death has been brought in from the cold, cancelled out by life insurance. ‘At a certain income level,’ as Jack wryly comments, ‘there is no death as we know it. Just documents

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changing hands’ (WN 6). In White Noise, the very possibility of transformation, of critique, has collapsed into the failure of such possibility. The transfiguring, apocalyptic light that bathes the evenings in this novel, the Nashian brightness that falls swirling from the air, is one that knows no difference from the brilliant light of the supermarket, the light that casts no shadows, and allows for no secrets. In this reading of the novel, White Noise appears as the epitaph to fiction’s possibility, a novel that takes place in the impossible space of its lingering death. If, for Walter Benjamin, historical materialism relies upon the capacity to ‘blast open the continuum of history’, to burst out of the continuous time prepared for us by capital into the space of the material present, then this novel seems predicated upon the failure to emerge from such a continuum, or to free itself from its coils. Where, for Marx, a future that is not simply reactionary must remain unwritten, beyond the reach of any continuum and unrecruitable to any conceivable programme, the future in White Noise becomes simply a feature of the past. Gladney’s involvement with Hitler is one which threatens to fold 1984 and 1945 into one another, to produce a continuous time in which the moment of 1968 – that moment which promised to blast open the continuum – ‘threatens to disappear irretrievably’.24 As Albert Speer’s ‘Theory of Ruin Value’ promised to produce a form of architecture that would bear the stamp of a Nazi aesthetic even in its destruction – allowing the Nazi era to extend beyond its time, to colonise the future – so Blacksmith village is held in the thrall of a historical continuum, a kind of endless déjà vu, from which it cannot escape.25 The year 1984 is connected to 1945 by what Hitler described as the ‘bridge of tradition’, attaching the Third Reich to ‘future generations’.26 The curious absence of an ethical response to Hitler – the confinement of any acknowledgement of fascist atrocities to those mute, ghostly images of simulated victims lying in piles – is a symptom of this historical continuity. In a cultural scenario where a critical or reflective space has been incorporated, there appears to be no grounds from which to pass judgement on Hitler, or to construct a postwar response to the Holocaust. To draw from this the conclusion that White Noise is an ethically bankrupt work, however, or to suggest that it marks the death of the avant-garde as a final destination, as a fait accompli, would be to misread the nature of the relationship between death and the avant-garde in the novel. If everything is at an end in this novel, then it is equally the case that nothing ever ends. The death of the avant-garde, as well as the location and valency of death in the avant-garde, is not something that is brought to a conclusion here, that is put to rest. Rather, the novel takes place in the ongoing process of this death. Its ethical and aesthetic possibilities emerge from death, rather than being simply annulled by it. Indeed, it may be that the death of the avant-garde has always been the condition of its possibility. As Paul Mann comments, in The Theory Death of the Avant-Garde, the story of the avantgarde should not be understood as a teleology, or as a ‘thematics of success

Death and the avant-garde 127 or failure, revolt or complicity, truth or illusion’. It is against the spirit of the avant-garde to suggest that, whilst once it flourished, now it is exhausted. Rather, the avant-garde might be more accurately understood as an ‘inexhaustible discourse of exhaustion’, a movement which discovers in death ‘not its termination but its most productive, voluble, self conscious and lucrative stage’.27 To conceive of a historical moment at which the avant-garde was alive and well, to hold up 1922, or 1968, as a moment at which it might have ‘succeeded’, would be to ground the avant-garde historically and geographically, to suggest that it has a story to tell, a message to pass on; but the avant-garde does not have and has never had any grounds, or anything to tell us. The avant-garde draws whatever critical capacity it has from the continual collapse and reformulation of boundaries and distinctions, from the collapsing movement between centre and margin. The ethical power of the avant-garde is drawn not from a set of rules that it passes on, but from its destabilisation of the limits of culture, those limits from which our ethical imperatives derive. To situate it as a concrete, hypostasised opposition, at a grounded space and time from which it can confidently speak, would be to subject it to a death from which it could not recover, a death in which it would not be able to persist. The avant-garde, in White Noise, is continually dying, and always already dead. The possibility of a critical, marginal, oppositional fiction is perceptible in the novel only as the absence of such possibility; but this perceptible disappearing, this ghostly persistence of a possibility that is being continually eradicated, is perhaps the signature of the avant-garde, and the condition of its continuation. This sense that possibility lives on, in White Noise, in the guise of its own annulment, is borne out by the repeated confusion in the novel between symptom and cure. In this novel, symptom and cure threaten to become tautologous; critique and non-critique reveal themselves, in Derrida’s phrase, to be ‘fundamentally the same’.28 The historical conditions which lead to the failure of any form of resistance to the globalisation of capital – the most grievous symptom, perhaps, of so-called ‘postmodernity’ – are also those that enable such resistance to continue. This collapse of the opposition between resistance and accommodation into some form of uneasy identity reaches a kind of climax in the novel when Jack sets out to kill Willy Mink, aka Mr Gray, the seducer of Babette and the pusher of dylar. Jack’s decision to kill Mink is based on his bid, at the close of the novel, to produce a ‘reality I could control’ (WN 297). He sets out not only to kill Mink, but also, like a kind of 1980s Frankenstein, to kill death itself, to pit Eros against Thanatos. In killing Mink he can assert his sexual power by revenging his cuckoldry; he can establish himself, in Murray’s terminology, as a sexually powerful killer rather than an impotent dier, and he can steal a lifetime supply of dylar into the bargain. The gun with which he intends to conjure such a magic deterrent to all the forms of failure that the novel charts will create, he fondly imagines, a ‘second reality for me to inhabit’, a reality in which the ‘air was bright, swirling around my head’ (WN 297). Jack wants to conceive,

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through a murderous intercourse, precisely the kind of second life that Axton seeks to create, in The Names, through fiction, through art. The pen here (with another faint echo from Mao II) becomes the gun. But if Jack’s journey to ‘Germantown’, to find Mink and to face down death, is in part a bid to break out of Benjamin’s continuum, to wrest power away from death in order to see and make the world anew, it is also swathed, from the very start, in a kind of weird and disconcerting familiarity. The curious doubling echoes between this scene, and the scene in Nabokov’s Lolita, in which Humbert murders his sexual foe Quilty, lend the episode a feeling of déjà lu, and this strange, dreamy sense of preview is enhanced by the fact that the murder is to take place in Germantown, with a German gun. Jack’s attempt to head out of the LeClairian loop of the novel towards freedom and self-creation takes him, alarmingly, right back to Germany, and to German death, the very clinging morass that has sucked him into its historical vacuity. As Jack careers towards this Germanic showdown, the narrative begins to register a kind of stuttering, a disruption in the flow of time, as if the proximity to death is causing it to suffer, itself, a form of déjà vu. The closer that Jack gets to Mink, and to the murder by which he plans to give himself birth, the more the narrative struggles to keep up with itself, casting itself repeatedly backwards, evacuating the moment. ‘This was my plan,’ the narrator repeats, again and again. ‘look peripherally into rooms, enter unannounced’ (WN 310); ‘swivel my head to look peripherally into rooms, locate Mr Gray under his real name, enter unannounced’ (WN 311). The closer that Jack gets to the centre of the action, the more the narrator runs through the elements of the plan, compulsively repeating himself, somehow deferring the plan itself, knowing it only through this clustering of repetitions. As Jack edges towards murder and death, as he ‘advances into the area of flickering light’ (WN 311) in which he plans to murder Mink, he feels himself ‘advance in consciousness’ (WN 310), he feels himself crawling through history, like the rustling film advancing in all those cameras taking photographs of the American barn. (‘Do not advance the action’, Jack had warned himself earlier in the novel, ‘according to a plan’). With the verbal and etymological echo of the French avance, this forward motion suggests the going before of the avant, of the avant-garde. This is Jack casting himself beyond the far limits of the novel, towards the deathly space of a critical margin. But the very process by which Jack advances in consciousness is one that is bound up with déjà vu, with the always already seen. The avant becomes both the marker of an advancement, and the sign of that which has come before. This eerie identity between advancement and retrogression finds a kind of expression in the double speed of this episode. As Jack advances towards his primal encounter with Mink, everything starts to speed up. The frantic, repetitive narrative speeds to catch up with itself, to follow Jack as he blasts open the continuum. But this speeding of the narrative does not produce weighty velocity. Rather it produces a kind of dreamy slow motion. As the narrative gains pace, it becomes cinematic. The film rushes through the

Death and the avant-garde 129 camera, frames per second accelerating into a rapid, mechanical blur. But, as in DeLillo’s earlier novel Players, the mechanical speed of the camera translates itself, by a kind of photographic miracle, into the weightless revelation of slow motion. Swirling particles swim past Jack’s head as he moves through time and space, ‘racing through the room, racing slowly’ (WN 310). And as speed gives way to this strange, distended, empty time, Jack experiences a kind of epiphany, in which the texture of the moment itself becomes unstuck. ‘Things glowed,’ he says, ‘a secret life rising out of them. Water struck the roof in elongated orbs, splashing drams. I knew for the first time in my life what rain really was. I knew what wet was’ (WN 310). This is Jack, at last, answering his son from the other end of the novel, the son who said that ‘now’ was not a moment that was susceptible of being occupied, the son who caused him to doubt whether it was ‘really’ raining and what it would mean to ‘get what is called wet’ (WN 24). This is Jack entering into Benjamin’s ‘now’, blasting open the continuum of history, occupying a ‘present which its not a transition, in which time has come to a stop’. From this slowing, racing, majestic vantage point, Jack is able to ‘see things new’, to see ‘things in their actual state’ (WN 310). Slow motion has brought him, with a kind of ‘smashing intensity’, ‘nearer to death’, and ‘nearer to second sight’ (WN 309). But it is crucial to recognise that this vision that Jack achieves, this second sight, is not one that is won through an opposition to the historical conditions that determine the novel’s empty, circling time. Jack does not find, here, a way of steering against the skid, or of angling himself against the future. White Noise does not pit the possibility of revelation, of modernist epiphany, and of historically grounded resistance, against the threat of an empty, postmodern ahistoricism. Rather, revelations and illuminations are held, in White Noise, delicately within the texture of the already seen. The counternarrative suggested by photography, that opens a historical window to those strangers standing in the blinding sun of the early century, is a counternarrative that is seamed into the technological progression towards global capital; a kind of ghostly, spectral counternarrative conjured from within. The seeing anew that Jack experiences is also, and at the same time, a form of seeing again; the possibility of occupying the Benjaminian moment is an effect of the evacuation of the moment; weightless stasis is an effect of speed; second sight is also déjà vu. It is this troubling equation of resistance with accommodation, of critique with non-critique, that finally determines the novel’s engagement with its historical contexts. The now that Jack approaches, as he advances towards death across the fire-retardant carpet of a cheap motel, is one that promises to grant him a historical vision. The spectral, gestural histories that are afloat, suspended in the white noise of this novel, might be reseen from this vantage point, might cohere into a new form of possibility. Not only might a Benjaminian material history reveal itself, a way of rethinking the passage from 1945 to 1984, but also as time slows down, as the moment yawns, the novel performs the possibility of making history anew, and of casting

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ourselves into a new future which has not yet been written, for which a programme has not yet been devised. This historical potential, this critical possibility, however, is a condition and an effect of the failure of critique, the evacuation of history. The weightless speed which affords Jack a form of revolutionary seeing is precisely the weightless speed of the electronic globalisation of capital. Possibility itself is knowable here only through its exhaustion. White Noise is a novel which vibrates with a kind of latent critical potential. It is a picture of an emptying now, which is crowded with historical ghosts who wait to be animated, to be given a voice. In drawing this scene, the novel suggests the ways in which fiction might give a kind of life to these historical spirits. Its melancholic comedy is shot through with sudden moments at which the dead seem on the point of speech. But, in the lost time of White Noise, time marooned in the middle of a decade and in the middle of an oeuvre, this appeal to the ongoing capacity of fiction to animate us, to make for us a second life, is also, and at the same time, a return of ashes to ashes, a return of dust to dust.

5

Becoming historical Libra

The man who draws up a programme for the future is a reactionary. Karl Marx1 Clues to Oswald’s motives can be found in his family history, his education or lack of it, his acts, his writings, and the recollections of those who had close contacts with him throughout his life. The Warren Report2 Writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any liveable or lived experience. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Literature and Life’3

Is it possible to become historical? We know, of course, that it happens. History must surely go through the process of becoming in order to arrive at the condition of being historical. Historical figures, as much as historical plots, wheel into themselves, until they reach that mystical point at which they ‘enter history’, the point at which they assume the heavy responsibility of being what they are. But it is also surely the case that the very possibility of becoming involves a denial of history, just as history does not allow for the process of becoming. History can read becoming only through the filter of that which has already become. As Walter Benjamin comments, a historical fact only ‘becomes historical posthumously’.4 To watch history become is to witness the unfolding of a story that has been told a thousand times, to watch time travel along invisible wires. There is a tyranny in history, the tyranny of the narrow way, that denies one the freedom to become, that freedom which, for Deleuze, characterises ‘literary’ writing. Writing, for Deleuze, must resist ‘the imposition of a form on the matter of lived experience’,5 must refuse the formal coherence in which history finds itself articulated. It must defer indefinitely that dark, shrouded moment at which ‘becoming’ becomes ‘historical’. Writing with ‘literary intent’ is ‘a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed’.6 Plotting a historical narrative involves charting the ways in which people and things become historical; drafting a kind of aetiology of the historical condition; finding

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that Einstein, as a child, was good at physics, that Marx was something of a rebel. But literary writing involves us in an exploration of the contradiction that inhabits the process of becoming historical; it requires us to prise becoming away from the history that waits to fashion for it a grave form; it requires us to understand and to experience becoming as a process of invention without rule, as a language which moves endlessly beyond the constraints of its own syntax. Such a contradiction between history and becoming is central to DeLillo’s oeuvre, and in particular to his ninth novel, Libra; a novel in whose very title it is possible to hear a balanced tension between liberty and zodiacal predestination. Appropriately enough, Libra can be felt waiting to begin from the earliest stirrings of DeLillo’s writing. If White Noise can be heard moving prenatally in The Names, then Libra is incubating in DeLillo’s oeuvre from the moment of his becoming as a novelist. DeLillo’s first novel Americana closes with David Bell returning to New York, via Texas, from his rambling journey into the Midwest. Having driven through the night in a rented car, Bell arrives on the final page of the novel in Dallas, where he makes a parting gesture towards the Kennedy assassination: In the morning I headed west along Main Street, turned left onto Elm and pressed my hand against the horn. I kept it there as I drove past the School Book Depository, through Dealey Plaza and beneath the triple underpass. I kept blowing the horn all along Stemmons Freeway and out past Parkland Hospital. At Love Field I turned in the car. (A 377) Bell’s drive here follows the path of JFK’s motorcade, past the point at which Kennedy was shot, then along the route to the hospital at which he was pronounced dead, and finally to Love Field, where Oswald practised firing the Mannlicher rifle with which he shot the president. As DeLillo’s work progresses, such acts of homage to Kennedy are made again and again, in variously covert and cryptic ways, until in Libra, in 1988, the assassination finally surfaces as the prismatic event in which DeLillo’s oeuvre can begin to cohere, to take shape. Those ‘six point nine seconds of heat and light’ (L 15) in which the crowded event of the assassination is held, preserved in Abraham Zapruder’s jumpy cine film, have come, by 1988, to offer a means of piecing DeLillo’s work together, as Jack Ruby asks to be pieced together by the Warren Commission (L 215).7 Nicholas Branch, one of the fictional authors of the assassination as it is imagined by DeLillo, recognises that the event ‘sheds a powerful and lasting light, exposing patterns and links’ (L 58). It is to this powerful light that DeLillo holds his oeuvre in 1988, in its penetrating beam that his work starts to become itself, to reveal its underlying patterns and links. It is put to DeLillo, in an interview with Anthony de Curtis in 1988, that the Kennedy assassination seems, almost uncannily, to fall into line with the concerns of his fiction. ‘Do you think’, de Curtis

Becoming historical 133 asks, ‘you could have invented it if it hadn’t happened?’ To which DeLillo responds, ‘it invented me’.8 To suggest that Libra’s account of the assassination offers a means of ‘inventing’ DeLillo as author, and of fashioning for his oeuvre a shape and a form, however, would be to make light of the extent to which this novel is interested in the process of becoming itself; a process which resists the possibility of such a shape, or such a form. It may be that the assassination throws a light in which DeLillo’s novels might gather themselves together, but it may also be the case that Kennedy’s death marks a moment in history at which narrative fails to cohere. Branch’s comment that Zapruder’s film captures the ‘seven seconds that broke the back of the American century’ (L 181) testifies to this capacity for the assassination to offer itself as at once a shaping and a violently destructive force. DeLillo and the assassination might be interwoven; the becoming of DeLillo’s authorial voice might be conditioned and determined by the sharp, clearly defined moment at which history was made in Dealey Plaza, at Zapruder frame 313. But that moment is also one that will not yield itself up to definition, a moment which violently destroys the possibility of definition. As much as Libra is interested in the possibility of becoming in the light of the assassination, of tracing in its powerful light the connections and repetitions that hold both DeLillo’s oeuvre and post-war American history together, it is also interested in the instant of Kennedy’s death as a moment which resists the cohesive power of narrative. DeLillo’s oeuvre rolls towards Libra, as the moment at which the assassination can finally surface as an integrating force; but it is also in Libra, in the impenetrable seconds of the event, that the oeuvre whirls asunder, that the very possibility of an authorial becoming collapses back into those discrete strands from which DeLillo’s writing is made. Libra is a bidirectional novel; a novel which rolls moment upon moment towards the becoming of history, the becoming of the author, whilst also rolling backwards, away from the point of entry into history, clinging to the moment itself as that which resists incorporation, which refuses to enter into the narrative stream. If this bidirectional rhythm characterises the movement towards and away from a DeLillian becoming, then it also choreographs the struggle of Libra’s central character, Oswald, to ‘enter history’, to author his own becoming. Oswald’s struggle to become is bound up, throughout, with the figure of Kennedy, as if the two are strange doubles of each other, and the difficulty of Oswald’s relation with Kennedy is suggested, from the beginning, by the peculiar resonance in Libra of the word ‘whirl’. It is a whirl which connects Oswald to Kennedy, which takes him towards and away from his destiny. Kennedy complains that his presidency, in a time of ‘deep division’ in American history, pulled him in two directions. The lines from Shakespeare’s play King John that, according to contemporary journalist James Reston, Kennedy kept in 1963 on a scrap of paper in his pocket, seem to predict that the opposing forces that he strains to hold together will end in his annihilation. The warring factions in the country will ‘pull two ways’, he fears,

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until ‘They whirl asunder and dismember me’ (L 393).9 The Shakespearian whirl that surrounds the spotlit president on November 22, at the close of the novel, is felt from the beginning, as it turns around the figure of Oswald. As a child, the narrator tells us, Oswald spends ‘serious time at the library’, looking for ‘subjects and ideas of historic scope, ideas that touched his life, his true life, the whirl of time inside him’ (L 33). The whirl of time that turns inside Oswald is one that drives him forward, that fuels his insistent desire to become. The novel follows this force as it drives Oswald towards his future, as violently and heavily as the subway car that projects him into the dark in the opening paragraph of the novel. ‘He liked to stand’, the narrator says, ‘at the front of the first car, hands flat against the glass. The train smashed through the dark’ (L 3). This blind force, propelling Oswald out of the present into the obscured future is held, however, against the backwards tending nature of the historical novel. It may be that Oswald is smashing through the dark, driven by an unstoppable momentum into an unknowable future, but he is also travelling on rails, travelling right towards that point of convergence with Kennedy that is whispered, from the beginning, in that twice prophetic word ‘whirl’.10 Oswald’s furious whirl waits to be matched up with Kennedy’s and with Shakespeare’s, waits to be translated by history from a wild and unknowing desire into a precise law of motion. The blind force of Oswald’s struggle to become is fed directly into the fate which we know awaits him, a historical destiny which washes back over all those moments of uncertainty and longing and hopeful questing, inserting them into the text of a historical inevitability which renders their pathos merely ironic. The narrative structure of the novel is organised in such a way that it is possible to feel the stress of this double movement in the texture of every moment, deep in the fibres of the language. Oswald’s life is both already over, and ‘a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed’, and this contradiction is registered at every level of the text. The historical current tugs like an undertow at every decision that Oswald takes, pulling every moment of becoming, every wrong move and random accident into line with the already over, with the only of all possible worlds. In order to produce this effect, DeLillo hems the figure of Oswald in on all sides by authors, by figures who script him, who piece him together. The two most powerful authorial influences within the novel work in opposite directions: Nicholas Branch, the CIA employee who is writing a secret history of the assassination, works retrospectively, piecing Oswald together after the event from CIA files; Win Everett and his co-conspirators Laurence Parmenter and T-Jay Mackey work prospectively, inventing Oswald as the ‘lone gunman’, scripting him ‘out of ordinary pocket litter’ (L 28), goading and herding him into position in the sniper’s nest in the Texas School Book Depository in time for November 22, 1963. Oswald is caught between the frames of these two opposing plots, these narratives which meet at Zapruder frame 313. But if these two conflicting plots organise Oswald’s becoming

Becoming historical 135 within the horizons of the novel, there is yet another layer of authorial control that extends beyond its borders. Lying behind Win Everett and Nicholas Branch, those mannequin authors, it is possible to feel the presence of DeLillo as author, both inventing Oswald as a fictional character, and incorporating Oswald into the oeuvre, an oeuvre in the process of adopting a definitive shape authenticated by a DeLillian signature. And behind the fictional representation of Oswald it is possible to feel history itself as author. DeLillo’s fictional Oswald is shadowed, influenced, and to some extent written by the ‘real’ Oswald, the Oswald whose life was determined by political and historical forces which spanned the globe, which broke the back of the twentieth century, which have brought us to where we are now. This structure of layered authorship that surrounds Oswald, squeezing and finessing him from every angle, is bisected, in turn, by another structural principle. The novel is made of two interwoven parts which slowly, steadily and massively converge, again, at Zapruder frame 313. The two parts are delivered in alternate episodes, one organised in terms of space, the other organised in terms of time. The geographical sections – entitled ‘In the Bronx’, ‘In Moscow’, ‘In Dallas’ – follow Oswald on his smashing route through the dark, from childhood to death. Like the dehistoricised episodes of White Noise, or Benjy’s fractured narrative in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, these sections cast Oswald into an aimless, plotless moment. Covering a time span of two decades, this is a stretched, sometimes breathless biography, full of confusion, swamped in the details of place, deprived of a larger perspective, as lost and chaotic as Oswald himself. The temporal sections – entitled ‘17 April’, ‘22 November’ – follow the machinations of the conspirators as they guide Oswald into position in the Book Depository, in order that he might take the fall as patsy, and suggest to the world a connection between the assassination of the president and insurrectionary forces sponsored by Castro’s Cuba. These sections span only two hundred and twenty-two days, from the second anniversary of the failed American invasion of Cuba (17 April, 1963), to the funerals of Kennedy and Oswald (25 November, 1963). They are densely plotted, driven by a heavy momentum, shaped and crafted by men who are granted a privileged access to the secret, underground networks that hold the world together, and that determine the shape that history will take. If, in Oswald’s spatial sections, ‘things have an almost dreamy sense of connection to each other’, those who shape the plot in the novel’s temporal sections belong to a world where ‘the plan was tighter’ and the connections are evident and manipulable. Where the geographical sections dramatise Oswald’s desperate, flailing struggle to enter history, the temporal sections are crafted by men who believe that history itself is ‘in their care’ (L 127). Oswald’s search, then, for what Joyce’s Dedalus describes as a ‘mode of life or art’ in which to express himself ‘freely’ and ‘wholly’, is held within a kind of vice of authorship, a pincer action of authorial control.11 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’,

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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. As, for Castro, ‘the revolution must be a school of unfettered thought’, so Oswald seeks a form of thought that is not determined by any historical precedent. As, for Marx, a revolutionary future is one for which it is impossible to draw up a programme, so Oswald looks to make for himself an unwritten future, a new, unfettered age in which he might become himself. Oswald’s struggle to become is one that strives, in Deleuze’s terms, to remain true to the spirit of a revolutionary writing, of a radical fiction. To become, for Deleuze and for DeLillo’s Oswald, ‘is not to attain a form’, but is rather to find what Deleuze describes as a ‘zone’ of ‘undiscernibility, or indifferentiation’; a place where one is ‘singularized’ in a manner that is ‘unforeseen and nonpreexistent’;12 a place that is so far adrift from the official models, from the normative form, that it becomes imperceptible. But this struggle runs, at every point, into the teeth of those forms of authorial control that are preparing the future for Oswald, that are inventing for him a historical shape that is determined precisely by its readability, its perceptibility. Oswald’s becoming as pure fiction, as a form of invention without rule, is repeatedly returned to historical and discursive formulae which deny the radical, revolutionary possibility of fiction. Indeed, the very process by which Oswald seeks to slip the leash of those forces that are scripting him is that which forces him deeper and deeper into the role which he has been assigned. Oswald writes in his ‘Historic Diary’ that he has a ‘far mean streak of indepence brought on by negleck’. The whirl of time inside Oswald is also this streak of wounded yearning for self-invention, a yearning that achieves a strangely powerful and poignant articulation in Oswald’s smashed syntax, his dyslexic, disobedient language; what strange freight is carried by that word ‘negleck’. But the form that this seam of turbulent independence takes is one that delivers Oswald directly into the bonds of a historical straitjacket. The revolution, thinks Oswald, time and time again, must be a school of unfettered thought. But, of course, this Dedalean search for release from ideological fetters takes Oswald to Marx, and from Marx to Castro, and to Castro’s speech to the University of Havana in 1962, where Castro rallies the students with his rhetorical demand that ‘the revolution must be a school of courageous men! The revolution must be a school of unfettered thought’. This speech is printed in English translation in The Militant, in April 1962, the publication which an armed, militant Oswald holds to the camera in the photograph which becomes one of the most famous front covers of Life, and a defining image of the assassination (see Figure 2). The same speech is reprinted in a pamphlet which Oswald distributes on the streets of New Orleans as part of his ‘Fair Play for Cuba’ campaign, and which he discusses in his radio interview with William Stuckey on August 17, 1963. ‘The Revolution must be a school of unfettered thought’ is a slogan which becomes iconic of Oswald’s struggle for self-creation, but it also leaves a paper trail, a trail of recorded, photographic and written evidence that tightens the noose around Oswald’s

Becoming historical 137 neck, and that establishes him, in the mind of the nation and of the world, as a pro-Castro revolutionary who assassinated the president; it is a slogan that wheels him smoothly into his role as patsy, and helps him to become precisely the lone gunman whom Win Everett sets out to script from pocket litter. Even Oswald’s self-diagnosed streak of independence, recorded with such vulnerable hubris in the ‘Historic Diary’, becomes incorporated into the historical plot, providing the title of Michael Hastings’ play about the assassination, A Far Mean Streak of Indepence Brought on by Negleck. This tense contradiction between the Oswald in the process of becoming, and the Oswald that is invented by the authorial forces which surround him, is registered in the influence of the multiple intertexts and narrative voices that exert pressure on the narrative throughout the novel. 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. Indeed, his influence can appear so powerful, at times, as to virtually drown out the sound of Oswald’s voice, as well as those of Everett, Parmenter, and Mackey. The first excursion of the narrative into the conspirator’s underworld demonstrates the penetrating power of Branch’s voice. The section entitled ‘April 17’, the initial date of the temporal section, and the moment that the idea of the assassination crystallises in Everett’s mind, opens with an introduction to Branch, as the CIA historian of the assassination who sits in his ‘room of theories’ in 1988 (the year, incidentally, in which Libra is published). It is through the frame of Branch’s secret account of the assassination that we are first granted access to the Spring of 1963, and to the first stirrings of the plot. The 17 April towards which we are being drawn by the narrative is invoked, in the first instance, by Branch. Sitting in his room in the late 1980s, Branch enters a date on the home computer the Agency has provided for the sake of convenient tracking. April 17, 1963. The names appear at once, with backgrounds, connections, locations. The bright hot skies. The shady streets of handsome old homes framed in native oak. (L 16) The skies of spring and summer 1963, under which the assassination is to incubate and form, are sighted here through Branch’s perspective, as if through a long range scope. The summoning of the date, April 17, 1963, calls up the skies and the streets of Texas, and it is this association that takes us, with the first sentence of the next paragraph, into Win Everett’s kitchen: ‘American kitchens’, the narrative continues. ‘This one has a breakfast nook, where a man named Walter Everett Jr. was sitting, thinking’ (L 16). This moment is a seam in the narration, a fold at which the authorial voices of Branch and Everett connect. As the novel continues, this direct sense that we are gaining access to Everett’s thoughts through the filter of Branch’s research

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tends gradually to fade. In both halves of the novel, agency slips from Branch to the characters that he animates with the help of his CIA computer. Everett, Mackey and Parmenter develop an authorial voice of their own, as does Oswald. But 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. In the heart of the novel, as Oswald and the conspirators are buried deeply in their respective halves of the plot, Branch can feel far away, banished to the very fringes of the future; but then some faint ripple will wave through the air, and we glimpse him, and feel his presence as a force in the sky. As Oswald sweats in police custody, after the assassination, when the action is at its most embedded, he is visited in his cell by FBI agents: ‘they stared up his ass. They came and shaved hair from his genitals, placing the samples carefully in plastic baggies’ (L 415). But then, something in the tone reminds us of Branch, who sits in his room of theories 234 pages earlier, gazing at ‘a microphotograph of three strands of Lee H. Oswald’s pubic hair’ (L 181). And with this irruption of the Branch plot into the Oswald plot, everything is suddenly recalibrated. The moment in the cell is not one at which Oswald’s innermost secrets are penetrated, or his freedom taken away; rather, his freedom, his secrets, his very life, have been put together, by Branch, from that pubic hair, constructed, painstakingly, from the moment of penetration and of depilation. The whirl of secrets that Oswald has been keeping, that have driven the novel to this moment of revelation, turn out to be spectral, already seen; secrets conjured from the moment that they are given away. This periodic penetration of Branch’s retrospective voice into the onward movement of the novel is itself attached to various intertexts, which also shape Oswald’s becoming. The Branchian perspective is informed, of course, by the CIA, by the massive weight of historical data, speculation, and fictional accounts that gather around the assassination, and it is often possible to feel the pressure of these texts as they work backwards, through Branch, towards Oswald. The most powerful of these is the Warren Commission Report. The report saturates Libra, slipping its tendrils in and around almost every moment of the text, pulling the events of Oswald’s life and of the assassination towards the shape that is dictated by its retrospective account. If the Warren Report, in Branch’s well-known phrase, might be thought of as ‘the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he’d moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred’ (L 181), then the report washes through the novel, influencing all of the various authors who are at work inside its borders, turning Libra into a pale reflection of a Joycean epic. Oswald’s own written version of his life, his ‘Historic Diary’, might be thought of as his struggle towards a literary becoming, his Joycean portrait of the revolutionary as a young man. The writing of the ‘Historic Diary’, as it is imagined in Libra, is an agonised burst of frenzied and fretful creativity. Like so many of

Becoming historical 139 DeLillo’s writers, Oswald writes the diary through the night. ‘Stateless, word blind, still a little desperate,’ the narrator tells us, Oswald ‘got up in the middle of a spring night and wrote the historic diary’ (L 210). He wrote it in ‘two sittings’, in order, like Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four (another powerful intertext for Libra) to ‘explain himself to posterity’ (L 211). The narrative follows Oswald into the writing of the diary, the text that projects Oswald forward to the undreamt future, to commune with what Orwell’s Smith describes, in his diary, as the ‘unborn’.13 It is the text in which Oswald struggles to articulate his far, mean streak of independence, to transform the neglect from which he has suffered into the spirit of a new, self-fashioning art. Libra follows the writing as it forms on the page, in the characteristic shape of Oswald’s hand, his unique signature. ‘The lines,’ we are told, ‘mainly in block letters, wander and slant across the page’, ‘crossed out words, smudged words, words that run together’ (L 149). The pages, Oswald feels, are ‘crowded, smudged, urgent, a true picture of his state of mind, of his rage and frustration’ (L 210). Extracts from the diary thread their way into the account of Oswald’s becoming as a Soviet, reborn like Christ from a failed suicide attempt. It leads the narrative from his first contact with the Soviets via his intourist guide Rimma (‘She is flabbergassed, but aggrees to help’ (L 150)), through the ‘days of utter loneliness’ in Moscow following his suicide attempt, to his marriage to Marina, and the birth of their daughter (‘Dawn. Marina Wakes me. Its her time’ (L 210)). But this struggling to become, through death itself, this making for oneself, out of smudged words, a new skin, has always already happened. Oswald’s agonising crawl towards an unwritten future is also a projection backwards, an echo answering back from a historical limit that defines and delimits Oswald, a written border that he cannot cross. The ‘Historic Diary’ is Warren Commission exhibit 24, and is published in full, with photographs of each page of Oswald’s ‘miserable’ handwriting, and careful transcriptions of his ‘wretched’ grammar, in volume 16 of the Warren Commission’s Hearings and Exhibits, pages 94–105. In the description of Oswald’s words – ‘the page is crowded with words, top to bottom, out to either edge’ (L 149) – it is easy to hear Branch, speaking from his room of theories, gazing at a transcript of the diary, reconstructing the struggle, reading backwards through the Warren Report to the dark days of Oswald’s struggle to become Russian, his battle with death and with grammar. In the calm assessment of the Warren Report that Oswald had ‘probably’ written the diary ‘with future readers in mind’,14 there is a failure of hope, as if Winston Smith’s diary had fallen into the hands of the thought police. Whilst the retrospective influence of the ‘Historic Diary’, as Warren Commission exhibit, is fairly close to the surface in Libra, the Warren Report has roots which travel much deeper into the novel, and which are much more difficult to separate from the other narrative elements that constitute the text. Oswald’s intuition that the ‘shadow of his own life keeps falling across his path’ (L 133), his sense, even as he heads across the

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ocean to embark upon his defection and his estrangement from everything American, that he is shadowed by a later version of himself, suggests how thoroughly interwoven the Warren Report is with the scene of Oswald’s becoming. On the SS Marion Lykes, bound for Le Havre, en route to Moscow, DeLillo’s Oswald isolates himself from the three other passengers on board. Thinking that ‘they have begun to feel the bond of being American’ (L 133), Oswald avoids them, asserting again his far mean streak. He abhors their delight in ‘their democratic values, their moral strength’, and ‘this is why he will not eat with them or share their conversation’ (L 134). But this gesture of defiance is drawn from the Warren Report; it is already incorporated, already defused. The affidavits of the three other passengers on the Marion Lykes are included in the report: George B. Church Jr. comments that ‘Lee Harvey Oswald missed quite a few meals because he was seasick much of the time’, that ‘when we did have meals with Oswald, he was rather withdrawn’, and that, therefore, ‘I did not converse with him a great deal’.15 Similarly, when DeLillo’s Oswald sits stunned in a locker room in Atsugi, telling his fellow Marine, in a kind of daze, that ‘I believe I shot myself’ (L 91), the shock of the moment, the force of another attempt to become through suicide, is somehow dampened by the realisation that this strangely alienated, disjointed line is a direct quote from the Warren Report. ‘I believe I shot myself ’ is a quote attributed to Oswald by Paul Edward Murphy in his affidavit to the commission.16 Or an interviewer makes a note on a card, as Oswald hunts for a job in New Orleans, just before his fated arrival at 544 Camp Street. ‘Suit,’ the interviewer writes. ‘Tie. Polite’ (L 306). A tiny detail, a throwaway remark, but this interviewer’s note is drawn from Appendix 13 to the Warren Report, page 725.17 Or the narrator describes Marguerite Oswald’s frustration at the refusal of the US administration to help her find Oswald when he is missing in Moscow. ‘She is only trying to analyze a whole condensed program of things that are not correct’ (L 200), the narrator says, directly quoting from Marguerite’s testimony to the commission.18 Whole chunks of dialogue, lumps of Marguerite Oswald’s singular speech, background details, casual asides, all can be traced in this way back to the report, as if it is a mastertext that absorbs all the struggle and woe and childish hope of Oswald’s becoming into its sombre finality. Even Oswald’s extraordinary syntax seems tamed by the commission, robbed of its power to disturb by the report’s finical attention to its wild vagaries. A word like ‘flabbergassed’, in all its weird suggestiveness, becomes wooden and closed in the hands of the Warren Commission, like a joke one is forced to repeat out loud in class. Deleuze suggests that literary syntax will always refuse to obey the normative order. For Deleuze, literary language involves ‘the becoming other of language’, the ‘decomposition or destruction of the maternal language’, the ‘invention of a new language within language’.19 Oswald’s grammar, like Tap’s violently creative spelling in The Names (N 335–339), performs exactly this explosion of the language, this discovery of a new language within language, the articulation of a ‘world inside the world’. But the Warren Report works to harbour the strangeness of Oswald’s speech,

Becoming historical 141 to recreate it and recuperate it in its search for a rational explanation of his ‘motives’. The effect of the Warren Commission’s exhaustive cataloguing of Oswald’s scrappy oeuvre is to translate his crazed language back into the mother tongue. These translations make their way into Libra, in the editing of Oswald’s language, the refashioning of his signature, the correction of his spelling (L 335). There is something terribly defeated and sad in the appearance, towards the end of the novel, of the displaced and edited line ‘I have a far mean streak of independence brought on by neglect’ (L 335). What a falling off was there. Whilst the Warren Report is the most powerful intertext in Libra, however, it is also a conduit for the other voices and texts that press upon the novel from the outside, that marshal Oswald into his historical shape. If the authorial influence of Branch and Everett draws on the Warren Report from within the novel, then it is partly through the report that the external authorial forces that are brought to bear on Oswald make themselves felt. It is through the commission that the voice of history as author is transcribed, just as, behind the solitary figure of Branch as researcher, it is possible to divine the authorial figure of DeLillo alone in his room, bent over the twentysix volumes of the report. The texts that cluster around Oswald in the process of his becoming historical, publications such as the Militant and the Worker, works by Marx, by Trotsky, by Castro, by Orwell and Wells and Dostoevsky, appear in Libra, in quotations, allusions and gestural references, and this kind of bibliography of Oswald’s becoming is drawn, again, from the Warren Report. The report tells us that ‘Oswald’s fare consisted of books by Marx, Lenin, “and similar things”’, and that ‘he read books of a historical nature, including H.G. Wells’ two volume “Outline of History”, and biographies of Hitler, Kennedy and Krushchev’.20 It watches as ‘his reading acquired direction’, with the choice of ‘books like “Das Kapital” and Orwell’s “Animal Farm” and “1984”’.21 From the days when Oswald spent ‘serious time in the library’, searching for ‘ideas of historic scope’ (L 33), Libra follows Oswald’s search for a political discourse that would take him beyond the boundaries of his closed American life, a kind of writing and thinking that might ‘touch’ the ‘whirl of time inside him’ (L 33). But the bibliography that is produced by the Warren Report suggests how ineluctably Oswald’s earnest and curiously committed search for a means of thinking himself into freedom leads him to a set of texts that are historically determined, that are profoundly entwined in the historical, geographical and political forces that are preparing Oswald for sacrifice. His reading of Marx, Castro and Dostoevsky mirrors his frantic movements across the globe, from North America to Europe to Asia to the USSR to South America, as if Oswald’s reading and travelling are a joint project, a search for a geographical and intellectual space beyond the orbit of US control, beyond the reach of those who ‘shape and hammer you’ (L 244); a place in which, like Axton in The Names, he might ‘see himself plain’ (L 244, N 206). But, like Axton again, the further that Oswald travels away from America, from an orthodox, western, central intelligence,

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the more insistently he is sucked into the magnetic field of the CIA, and into an American historical plot that has chosen for him a central role. One of the extraordinary features of Libra is its capacity to produce a connected historical narrative, that stems from the immediate post-war to 1988, and that has the Kennedy assassination as the hub, the focal point and the driving force. From the US invasion of Guatemala in 1954, to the Cuban missile crisis, to the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, against the backdrop of hostilities in Vietnam, the cold war, and the threat of nuclear apocalypse, the novel generates an atmosphere of massive pregnancy, a sense of an unstoppable wheeling towards the assassination as the event which mediates the struggle between communist east and capitalist west in the wake of 1945. At the heart of this huge historical machine is Oswald, blinking in the headlights, Ozzie the rabbit, looking for his warren, absolutely unaware that his dabbling in Marx, his stumbling passion for Castro, is not taking him beyond the borders of the nation state, but rather delivering him, as a patsy, to its very heart. In the words of Marx and Castro and Trotsky as they appear in Libra, filtered through the lens of the Warren Report, it is possible to read this process whereby history shapes Oswald, scripts him and prepares him for his role. The report acts in this way as a means of establishing the truth of the assassination, in all its massive connections and interrelations and detours, and of demonstrating the ways in which this historical truth bears down on Oswald. But if the report is a means of imposing non-fictional historical narrative onto the contingencies and obscurities of a single life, then it is also a device through which Oswald might be created as fiction. Whilst Branch’s reading of the report is geared to producing a secret and definitively accurate account of the assassination for the CIA, then DeLillo, Branch’s double, uses the report as a means of absorbing Oswald into his oeuvre; a means of clawing backwards into Oswald’s skin in order to make that mutually constructive leap between the assassination and an authentic DeLillian signature. It is the Warren Report that allows DeLillo to invent Oswald, and through Oswald, to invent his oeuvre. There is sometimes an uncanny quality to the echoing resonance between DeLillo and the Warren Report, between DeLillo’s and Oswald’s styles. Isn’t there something characteristically DeLillian about the very notion of a far, mean streak, something about the phrasing that is already suggestive of DeLillo, as if the ‘Historic Diary’ and DeLillo’s writing are destined to converge, like Kennedy and Oswald, under the stern aegis of the Warren Commission? Such curious convergences between DeLillo and the Warren Report reach a long way back. Indeed, the image of a displaced, empty shoe, that appears at the heart both of the Warren Report and of DeLillo’s oeuvre, might suggest an almost mystical union between DeLillo and Warren. DeLillo’s first novel Americana begins with an empty shoe. At a party that opens the novel, Bell watches transfixed as Sullivan, the woman who doubles as his mother, and with whom he has an erotic obsession, removes one of her shoes:

Becoming historical 143 She slipped her right foot out of her shoe and then, with an exquisite nonchalance, tucked her leg way up behind her against the wall so that it disappeared, storklike, behind the shroud of her trenchcoat. She remained that way, on one leg, a cryptic shoe moored beneath her. (A 7) The shoe haunts and fascinates Bell. It returns again and again in the novel until we find the buried, primal moment that underlies and decrypts it, a moment at which a youthful, Proustian, oedipal Bell witnesses his mother, deranged and curiously lustful, spitting on ice cubes in the family kitchen. It is this scene, this moment of maddeningly erotic transgression and confusion, that the entirety of Americana strives to recapture, a scene in which the mother stands at the refrigerator door, ‘wearing just one shoe. The other was on the floor, a black shoe, upright, near the wall’ (A 195). Whilst Americana works to decipher the shoe, to fill in its emptiness, there remains something unresolved about it, something beyond the recuperative power of Bell’s film, or of DeLillo’s early writing. The emptiness of the shoe stretches out beyond Americana, and surfaces in other moments, in other novels. In White Noise, for example, one of Gladney’s ex-wives sits ‘with her legs tucked under her’, flicking cigarette ash ‘into her shoes’ which sit, empty, beneath her (WN 89). And then, when we get to Libra, and to Branch’s opening evocation of the mysterious power of the assassination, the empty shoe emerges again as an emblem of the impenetrability of the past and of the primal scene, its cryptic, gnomic, curiously sacred unknowability. Listing the unreadable fragments that the assassination leaves behind, the aberrations in the ‘heartland of the real’, Branch conjures the picture of a witness ‘who leaves her shoes on the hood of a bleeding policeman’s car’ (L 15). The disjunct, out of placeness of these shoes, cryptic and empty, summons, for Branch, a ‘strangeness’ that is ‘almost holy’ (L 15). Sitting at the heart of the assassination these shoes gather around themselves a string of DeLillian, oedipal associations. They speak of the impenetrability of the primal scene, the primary trauma which all other traumas are destined to repeat, to mimic as déjà vu. They carry the freight of Oswald’s unresolved oedipal crisis, the oedipal fixations that determine the becoming of Hitler and Elvis in White Noise, and reach back to the sexual confusion of Billy Twillig in Ratner’s Star, the dark, obscure mother love that he tries to sublimate through the enlightening power of mathematics. As in Americana, Libra sets out, from this opening, to work its way into the emptiness of those shoes, to find a narrative means of delving beneath the shroud, of penetrating the sacred, mythical darkness that lies at the heart of history. It takes the entire weight of the narrative, the historical momentum of the manifold, interweaving plots, to bring us back to the shoes, to see them again, enshrined in that heartland where the crises of the assassination and of DeLillo’s oeuvre might be resolved. It is as we reach the close of Libra that there is a coming together, a welding of DeLillo’s oeuvre with the Warren Report, and with the history

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of the assassination, a joining that is, itself, almost holy. As Oswald shoots Patrolman Tippit, as Tippit lies bleeding on the ground, a woman named Helen arrives on the scene, propelled like an automaton by historical inevitability, driven irresistibly to her moment in history. Her movements take on a kind of doubleness, a weird grace, as she advances towards Oswald and Tippit; her every contingent gesture charged with the power of a fated becoming. She sees Tippit’s blood ‘take oval shape’ in the street (L 410). She ‘picks up her purse and work shoes’ and goes to help him. She ‘moves around the body’, and, in a moment of wonderfully delicate, understated poetry, she places ‘her shoes on the hood of her car’ (L 410). The recovery of this absent minded, forgotten gesture (the ‘two small white canvas shoes’ remain abandoned on ‘the hood of patrolman Tippit’s car’ (L 411)) brings the threads of fiction and non-fiction together, performing what Oswald thinks of as ‘the convergence of factors’ (L 409). The empty shoes, that have lain at the heart of two decades’ prose, that become iconic of the unknowability of history (already, as Tippit lies dying, ‘two men from homicide’ have started to discuss ‘what these objects could possibly mean’ (L 411)), here form a suture between DeLillo and the Warren Report, a linking which suggests the replete becoming of history. Helen Markham, in her testimony to the commission that is buried in the depths of the report, recalls those lost shoes. She saw, she says, Tippit’s blood take an ‘oval shape’ on the ground, and rushed to help him. She ‘had [her] workshoes in [her] hand’, and she ‘laid them up on the squad car’,22 a gift to the future that waits until 1988 to be bestowed. Such a powerful convergence, such a sense of destined interrelation between history and fiction, might suggest that Libra represents a denial of that in history which is contingent, unrecuperable, untellable. Senator Percival of Running Dog, whose wife, incidentally, has spent ‘eight or nine years reading the Warren Report’ (RD 71), suggests that the ‘historical counterfunction’ operates in ‘those small dark places’, those obscure depths in history that cannot be plumbed. But the coming together here of a DeLillian voice which has reached its ‘maturity’ with the Warren Report’s bid for encyclopaedic comprehensiveness suggests that Libra moves towards the point at which history becomes a finished text, a text in which everything has been recuperated. Libra promises to become, like Branch’s description of the Warren Report, a ‘novel in which nothing is left out’ (L 182). In the contradiction that inhabits the concept of becoming historical, Libra can appear to prioritise the final shape over the process of becoming, to strive for the perfected account rather than to live in the ‘midst of being formed’.23 Powerful as this movement towards perfectedness is in Libra, however, it is balanced on the Libran scales by an equally powerful opposite movement, in which the frame of the novel collapses back into those dark, shrouded spaces, the very spaces that Branch and the Warren Report promise to fill in. Just as the Warren Report tends to fragment under the tremendous weight of its own research rather than to reach the condition of a definitive account – to testify, despite itself, to the mathematically sublime, impossibly multiple nature of lived

Becoming historical 145 experience – so Libra’s invention of a DeLillian voice contains within itself a tumbling backwards into the unnarratability of the discrete moment, the singular moment that cannot be recuperated by the authenticating power of any signature. The miraculous effect of the empty shoes is drawn not just from their capacity to bring things together, to make the factors converge, but also from their evocation of a still living mystery, their performance of something that remains missing, that remains incomplete. In a contradiction that runs throughout the book, Helen’s approach to Tippit’s squad car, workshoes in hand, is both a moment of recuperation – in which the primal scene is revisited and absorbed into the narrative frame – and a moment of loss, in which the frame tumbles into the depths of the moment it is seeking to reclaim. When we see the shoes again, through the frames of Warren, DeLillo and Branch, we are also seeing them for the first time, in the heat of the moment, with the uproar all around us. Helen is just as capable of returning us to the incompletion and mayhem of 1963, with the blood trickling and flowing (in a visual echo of Nicholas Roeg’s film Don’t Look Now) towards its oval shape, as we are able to bring her testimony into the frame of 1988, or of 2006, or of ‘now’. This reversibility, whereby history is at once already over and in the process of a tumultuous and endless becoming, finds itself expressed most insistently in the figure of Oswald. The repetitions, through the novel, of the word ‘whirl’, attest to the centrifugal forces which choreograph Oswald’s fate. The whirl of time inside Oswald reaches forward to the Shakespearian whirl that prophesies Kennedy’s destiny. In doing so, it suggests the gathering tendencies of the novel, its capacity to produce a completed historical account. But the word whirl appears, also, at the centre both of Libra and of Oswald’s ‘Historic Diary’, where it suggests the draining away of any such completion, of any perfect match between the destinies of Oswald and Kennedy. Oswald’s attempted suicide in his hotel room in Moscow might appear as a form of mythical metamorphosis, a kind of rebirth en route towards the fulfilment of his destiny, his coming together with Kennedy under the clear Dallas skies. But the death that is glimpsed at this moment, the death that inhabits the centre of any narrative plot, is also one which speaks of Oswald’s refusal of his fate, his refusal to become historical. As he soaks his ‘rist’ in ‘cold water to numb the pain’, then makes the incision, he writes, in Libra and in the ‘Historic Diary’, that ‘somewhere, a violin plays, as I watch my life whirl away’ (L 152).24 The whirl here performs not a massive historical coming together, but Oswald’s disappearance from the rushing swirl, the converging plot. As Oswald suggests, at yet another whirling moment in the novel, the ‘whirl of time, the true life inside him’ was his ‘leverage, his only control’ (L 46). The whirl levers him, here, away from those authorial, historical figures that are scripting him, towards his own, secret becoming, a becoming that will not be funnelled into the historical plot, that takes place in the conviction that ‘nobody knew what he knew’ (L 46). The whirl is not towards that moment at which Branch produces Oswald’s

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secrets in retrospect from a bagged pubic hair; it turns the other way, towards a secret Oswaldian place that has not been penetrated, that has not been constructed by the CIA. His suicide attempt emerges here not simply as a way of continuing, as a way of staying in Moscow and refashioning himself as a Soviet, but as a way of secreting his life away, of allowing it to flow in another, deathly direction. In a phrase that pulls together Libra, the ‘Historic Diary’, and Freud’s reflections on the desirability of death, Oswald realises, as his life whirls away to the sound of violins, ‘how sweet it would be to die’ (L 153).25 Death is the sweet place that nobody would know but him, the place towards which the whirl of time inside him leads him most truly; the place in which he could escape from those authorial voices which shape and hammer him, which seek to claim him as theirs. This tendency for Oswald to escape from the historical and fictional frames that Libra prepares for him, to leak out of the container of the plot towards an unrecuperable deathliness, might suggest a failure of fiction here, a failure of the movement towards a historical DeLillian becoming. Just as Helen Markham can pull us out of our comfortable backwards perspective into the chaos of the moment – a lived, contingent chaos which, as Axton realises, is haunted by the spectre of imminent death (N 82) – so Oswald’s secret, deathly becoming threatens to derail the tightly plotted narrative, the gradual convergence of factors. If in one sense this resistance to the plot might threaten the cohesive power of narrative fiction, however, in another sense it is in such resistance that the possibility of fiction itself might lie. As Ernst Bloch comments, in a dialogue with Adorno in 1964, ‘possibility is not hurray-patriotism’. The possibility of art is not found only in affirmation, in the creation of a national perspective, an authorial signature, or in the articulation of a historical truth. For Bloch, ‘the opposite is also in the possible. The hindering element is also in the possible’.26 In order for a fiction to come into being, it must necessarily defy the formal principles that govern it. Just as Oswald goes through two suicides in order to refashion himself as a Soviet, so in a sense, he has to die – to whirl beyond the reach of the plot – in order to be born as a fiction. Win Everett discovers this contradiction at the heart of authorship early on in his career. The mock assassination plot that he drafts moves quickly out of his control, heading, with a life of its own, towards the deathly end of all plots, towards the exploding head of JFK. And Oswald, his main character, is also quickly lost to Everett, as if such bereavement is what it takes for a fiction to be born. Everett finds, virtually as soon as he dreams Oswald up, that it is ‘not possible to hide from the fact that Lee Oswald existed independent of the plot’ (L 178). Everett experiences a ‘sensation of the eeriest panic’ as he watches his text, his script, disappear into the night, into the rain-slick streets. If Oswald is ‘the fiction he’d been devising’, then Everett is forced to recognise that Oswald is a ‘fiction living prematurely in the world’ (L 179), a fiction with secrets and motives of its own, beyond the reach of the author.

Becoming historical 147 All the authors in the novel are brought, sooner or later, against this antinomy: for fiction to become, it must disobey, it must lose itself in the historical depths, in the small dark places; it must die. For Branch and DeLillo to bring Oswald into their frames of reference – for these authors to effect the convergence in which history and fiction might come into mutual being – they have to enter into the frame of the other. Like the U2 as it lifts uncannily steeply from the ground into the stratosphere, they have to make the ‘brilliant leap into another skin’ (L 115). The effort to penetrate the assassination is an effort of the imagination. In order to unpack the event, to understand the ‘six point nine seconds of heat and light’ (L 15) contained in Zapruder’s film, it is necessary to enter into that heat and light, to allow oneself to be remade by it. Just as Axton needs to immerse himself in Mediterranean light in order to encounter himself as a character in the process of becoming, to see himself with the ‘correctness of detail’ that the Greek light provides (N 26), so the narrator of Libra works to enter into the light of the Zapruder film, the ‘light of that heightened moment, shadows fixed on the lawn, the limousine shimmering and still’ (L 434). The heat and light of the Zapruder film becomes the living medium in which the assassination is crafted and built: the ‘heat and light’ of the Bay of Pigs invasion (L 72); the ‘heat and light’ of the Texas university campus in which Everett imagines the plot (L 178); the ‘heat and light’ of New Orleans (L 305); the ‘heat and light’ of Dallas on November 22 (L 394). As, in White Noise, it takes Gladney an enormous effort to inhabit the evacuated now of the text, to experience the ‘feel of things as they rained across our skin’ (WN 30), to ‘know for the first time what rain really was’ and what it is to get wet (WN 310), so in Libra, the weight of the narrative is geared towards getting into Oswald’s skin, feeling the heat on his body, the rain on the slick streets. If, for Branch, the Warren Report is a ‘kind of mind-spatter, a poetry of lives muddied and dripping in language’ (L 181), then the poetic energy of the novel is directed towards embodying this spatter, this liquid language. The commission’s mind spatter becomes, in Libra, the ‘grayish spatter’ (L 12) of brain spray left after a murder in a Bronx candy-store, and witnessed by a youthful Oswald. This rainy spatter comes back again and again until, finally, it becomes the spatter of the president’s brains as he takes the head shot on Dealey Plaza. Bobby Hargis, a police officer escorting Kennedy’s motorcade on November 22, testifies to the Warren Commission that when President Kennedy straightened back up in the car the bullet hit him in the head, the one that killed him and it seemed like his head exploded, and I was splattered with blood and brain, and kind of a bloody water. It wasn’t really blood.27 In Libra, this moment takes on the force of an embedded fiction, as ‘the sleet of bone and blood and tissue’ strikes Hargis in the face. Mind spatter

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becomes ‘the feel of things as they rained across our skin’ (WN 30), as ‘the stuff hit [Hargis] like a spray of buckshot and he heard it ping and spatter on his helmet’ (L 399). The delicate choreographing of this embedding, of this tunnelling into Oswald’s skin, is one of the miracles of Libra. At the opening of the novel, the struggle to make the leap from the authorial frames that surround Oswald into the grain of his skin is partial, and only intermittently successful. It is as if the text cannot penetrate deeply enough into the space and time of Oswald’s becoming to gain a firm purchase. We enter Oswald, see briefly through his eyes, before returning to Branch or Everett or Warren or DeLillo, returning to the puppeteers that are pulling his strings. But as the novel continues, and the pressures that surround Oswald increase, they are ratcheted up with a grace and harmony evocative of historical inevitability. These pressures force Oswald ever closer to his destiny, ever closer to the historical forces that control him, but they also force the narrative deeper into his flesh. As he comes closer to Dealey Plaza, to Zapruder frame 313, Oswald himself makes the leap from the spatial to the temporal sections of the novel, as if he is at last entering into the frame of the plot that has been prepared for him. There is a palpable lurch when the temporal section entitled ‘25 September’ opens with the line ‘Lee woke up on the sofa’ (L 340), the sofa in David Ferrie’s living room, as if Oswald has crossed the dividing line of the plot, finally surrendering himself to the power of his authors. But the very mechanical, kinetic pressures that are forcing Oswald into the authorial frame are the ones that drive us into his body, so that there is an equal and opposite fall from the tight temporal plot into the dyspraxic space behind Oswald’s eyes. It is not just that he is coming to us, but that we are being remade as him, entering into the spattered moment of the assassination, whirling into the space of a fiction that has become autonomous, that heads towards its own secret becoming. As Oswald sights the Mannlicher scope on the president’s head from the Book Depository window, through the lambent air of a November day in Dallas, the narrative is offering the assassination to us for the first time. The blur and smudge of the Zapruder film, the cinematic heat and light, has given way to still living air, the bright swirling motes of an autumn afternoon. As the motorcade makes the deep left turn down Elm, we are returned to the moments before the back of the century was broken. The movements of cars and people, the colours and smiles and waves that have been written into the deep grain of history, all are ‘slow and vivid in the sun’ (L 395). Everything in Dealey Plaza is ‘slow and clear’, ‘painfully clear’ (L 395), an aching clarity that produces the extraordinary doubleness of a moment that is both over and underway, a moment that holds a death preserved in its keening clarity, a death that has not yet been died. This sense that Oswald is approaching for the first time the moment in which he becomes historical – that we have been released into the body of a fiction that is in the midst of being formed – creates a vacuum at the heart of the novel, a strange, plunging yawn that lies at the dark, empty centre

Becoming historical 149 of DeLillo’s writing. The texture of the moment comes unstuck, whirls asunder to reveal a gap that cannot be articulated, that lies outside of fiction and of history, but from which the very possibility of fiction and of history emerges. As David Ferrie comments to Oswald, this gap is found between the ‘parallel lines’ of the plot, between Oswald and Kennedy, between time and space. It is a ‘third line’ that ‘has no history’, that ‘comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of the self’ (L 339). The subway car that opens the novel, that smashes Oswald through the dark along the parallel lines of the rails towards his historical destiny, gives way in these moments to another kind of motion, a third line of flight that finds its dromological equivalent in the uncanny aerodynamics of the U2. The U2 comes back repeatedly throughout the novel, where it speaks of the ubiquity of American surveillance, the unseen forces that forge and divine the links and connections in which economic and military power is maintained. If it carries this sense of CIA penetration, however, the U2 is also evocative of a kind of release from what Francis Gary Powers thinks of as he parachutes to the Russian ground, ‘a stranger, in a mask, falling’ (L 116) as the ‘pull of grave events’ (L 116). It offers a kind of immunity to the weighty underground power that drives Oswald along the rails of his becoming. The leap into another skin that the U2 performs is one that takes it beyond the meniscus of the ‘seamless sky’, that allows it, in a Deleuzian sense, to become imperceptible. It leaves behind only the ‘string of soft drawled curses and murmurs of disbelief ’ drawn from the earth bound crowd (L 115). When he divulges the secrets of the U2 to Soviet agents, Oswald describes the voice of the pilot, coming down to us from ‘out there’, from a stratospheric imperceptibility. Like Oswald’s own fractured grammar, the ‘excited syntax’ into which he finds himself able to ‘vanish’ (L 161), the voice of the pilot is ‘splintered’ and ‘blown out’ (L 161), a ‘lesson in physics or ghosts’ (L 161) coming to us from what Deleuze describes as the ‘outside of language’.28 As Oswald approaches the death of Kennedy, as he approaches the moment of his own death live on TV, it is precisely this weightlessness, this eerie release from historical gravity and from official syntax, that the narrative encounters. The historical and political connections between the KGB and the CIA, the set of tightly interwoven links that have delivered Oswald into history and into an endlessly replayable death, silently come asunder as Oswald looks at us through the clear air, through the historical gap between 1963 and 1988, wearing his odd smile. However much we think we own him, this smile seems to say, however completely we absorb him into a connected story that has already been told, it will always be the case that ‘nobody knows what he knew’; his becoming will always be secret, in process, always about to happen, always reaching towards the next moment, the moment that makes a whirling hole in history. It is in the twin moments of Oswald’s death – the event itself and its endless replaying on the television – that this gulf makes itself felt most insistently. As Jack Ruby emerges from the crowd to shoot Oswald at point

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blank range, driven partly by yet another set of underworld connections between the Mafia and the CIA, there is a flickering, a stuttering in the frame that is drawn straight from White Noise, from Jack Gladney’s painful and murderous advance across a hotel carpet towards his nemesis Mink. Ruby’s advance, of course, is into the frame of the Oswald shooting as seen on TV, an advance into a series of moments that have entered into the web of American conspiracy and myth. Ruby registers this doubling, his entry into televisual history, as he approaches Oswald. The flashbulbs are going off, the Virgilian ‘shouts are echoing off the walls’, and it ‘all seemed strange to Jack, already seen’ (L 437), as if he is projecting himself, in a kind of reverse déjà vu, into the future. Oswald shares Ruby’s sense that he is being propelled forward, at the moment of his dying, into the already seen, the completed historical plot for which he has been scripted. As he lies dying, he thinks that ‘he could see himself shot as the camera caught it’ (L 439). Through the pain of his dying, he watches himself on TV, sees himself ‘reacting to the augering heat of the bullet’ (L 439), as if he has finally caught up with that shadow that keeps falling across his path, as if he is advancing towards that historical version of his life and death that has always already been seen. The deathly path of the bullet in his body is laid over the iron rails of the subway car as they appear in the opening pages of the book, as if here the parallel lines finally converge, delivering Oswald to history and somehow leapfrogging the bottomless interruption of his death. ‘What is metal doing in his body’ (L 440), the dying Oswald asks himself, recalling his pleasure in the subway ride in the opening paragraph of the novel; his perception, as he careers into the night around ‘another crazy-ass curve’, that ‘there was so much iron in the sound of those curves he could almost taste it, like a toy that you put in your mouth when you are little’ (L 3). The path of the metal bullet here follows the trajectory of the iron rails of his historical becoming, the metal entering his body. But this sense that Oswald’s death delivers him to history is balanced against the opposite sense that his death tears a hole in the text, a hole in the world. The subway car comes back at the moment of his death, but so does the U2, and with this re-emergence we do not leapfrog the instant of death, but are lifted to its weightlessness, delivered to the unknowable original moment that underlies the experience of déjà vu. Against the moment as it is recuperated, replayed and reseen on the television, the narrative takes us into Oswald’s death, not as a seeable event but as ‘all sensation at the edges breaking up in space’ (L 439). ‘Remember how the pilot looked,’ Oswald thinks, ‘a spaceman in a helmet and rubber suit?’ (L 439). ‘But remember the men watching the jet take off? Could hardly believe how quick it lost itself in mist’ (L 440). As Oswald whirls into his death, he finds a release from the pull of American history. He finds himself ‘high in the sky over Russia’, a ‘stranger, in a mask, falling’ (L 440). The power of this disappearance, this delivery of Oswald into the outside of history and of language, is somehow doubled by its location in the midst of endless mechanical reproduction. When we return to Oswald’s death in

Becoming historical 151 one of the closing moments of the novel, as Beryl Parmenter watches the event replayed on television late into the night, we encounter again, and with a force that is almost holy, the sucking plunge into the bottomless depths of history and language. The ‘little hatless man’ says ‘“Oh” or “No”’ (L 446) as he is shot, he says it again and again, and Beryl watches as the act of repetition makes the ‘horror’ become ‘mechanical’. The whirling of the loop of film, the running of ‘shadows through the machine’, aims mechanically to recuperate this moment, to ‘seal’ the event ‘in the frame’ (L 447), but for Beryl the moment will not be contained. As the ribbon of film in Running Dog brings Hitler into a 1970s living room, so this footage brings Oswald to Beryl; but in so doing, in bringing to her the power of his knowing glance, Beryl feels it suck her into the space of his death, that whirling vacuum that can never yield itself up to film, to language or history; that refuses to become historical. ‘There was something in Oswald’s face,’ she thinks, ‘a glance at the camera before he was shot, that put him here in the audience, among the rest of us’. His glance to the camera, like his dead eye that is ‘swiveled toward the camera’ as he lies on the mortician’s slab (L 299), is a ‘way of telling us that he knows who we are and how we feel’ (L 447). His ‘commentary on the documentary footage even as it is being shot’ seems to lift him from the frame whilst it returns us to the instant of his death, that undiscovered moment when his look ‘becomes another kind of knowledge’, the moment in which he makes us ‘part of his dying’ (L 447). It is this glance that lies at the heart of DeLillo’s oeuvre, from the depths of this dead eye that the possibility of his fiction emerges. If Libra produces a kind of centrifugal force, a whirling, gathering current that brings DeLillo’s oeuvre and post-war history together under the seal of a DeLillian signature, then it is Oswald’s glance that is at the heart of the centrifuge. In finding a way of articulating Oswald, in making the brilliant leap into his skin and into the space behind his eyes, DeLillo gives shape both to an oeuvre, and to the massed historical forces that broke the back of the American century. But the gathering force of Oswald’s glance draws its power from an emptiness at its heart, a deathliness that resists the frame, that takes us beyond the limits of history and of language to the zero that inhabits the very fibres of the system (e.g. L 106, L 151, L 357). Branch and DeLillo, both writing in 1988, bear witness to the increasing difficulty of finding, in Dedalus’s words, a ‘mode of life or art’ in which it is possible to fling oneself beyond the nets of history and language, to give expression to this Oswaldian deathliness that lies beyond their grasp. If Libra might be thought of as ‘the novel James Joyce would have written if he’d moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred’ (L 181), then it is a novel which testifies to a certain attenuation in the scope for forms of countercultural expression. A centenarian Joyce would have lived into the 1980s, where he might have found that the possibilities for avant-garde expression imagined by a youthful Dedalus had diminished in important ways, with the migration of power from Europe to the USA and the USSR. It is easy to imagine that the growth of a global

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market, and of a permanent arms economy, might check the Dedalean flight out of mythical and historical captivity. Libra’s tightly connected historical narrative suggests how deeply imbricated all forms of political and cultural discourse have become, by 1988, in the forces that determine the global distribution of power and capital. The U2 that patrols the sky in Libra declares that even the stratosphere is a border that is policed by US intelligence; that there is no path for either Dedalus or Icarus across the netted boundary towards the sun. All of DeLillo’s 1980s novels work, in importantly different ways, to dramatise the historical process by which the capacity for free expression – for unfettered thought – is attenuated with the growth of US military and economic power. Both The Names and Libra turn around the penetration of US intelligence into Europe and beyond, whilst White Noise and Libra both locate iconic moments in the 1960s as watershed periods in the progress towards a fully mediated US public sphere. In giving expression to these historical shifts in the conditions of possibility that determine the production of critical fiction, however, all three novels suggest ways in which the avant-gardist urge towards the countercultural, the unmappable and the unincorporable, persists under the cultural conditions determined by the cold war and by US cultural imperialism. The figure of the apostate in The Names might suggest that the only means of preserving one’s singularity under these conditions – the only means of expressing a willed, secret withdrawal from the orthodoxy of cultural belonging – is to give such secrecy up; only in the yielding of one’s secrets might secrecy be experienced as that which is already lost. But if writing, in all these novels, is a function of apostasy, it is also the case that DeLillo’s writing is invested with a form of unrevealed possibility which is not yielded up and has not lapsed, a kind of fictional capital that remains unexpended. Branch’s report for the CIA, after all, is not only unpublished, but remains more or less unwritten, as if the revelation of Oswald’s secrets takes place in a form of writing which eludes its governmental addressee, which is not committed to words, or to the rigours of an official syntax. As the spirit of the avant-garde persists, in White Noise, in the very throes of its death, so in all these novels the possibility of a ‘nonpreexistent’ becoming remains alive, wound in the graveclothes of a becoming which is always already historical. It is Oswald’s deathly glance, then – that look which comes to us from the weightless and unrevealed province of death itself – that offers to give a kind of withheld articulation to a decade’s prose. As DeLillo’s oeuvre gathers momentum, as his novels wheel towards the millennium – the moment at which the message that David Bell dispatches in Americana will finally reach its destination – they chart the increasing homogenisation of culture, the incorporation of the critical margin into a globalised America. As Guy Banister suggests in Libra, those who control the forces which lead to the assassination tend to ‘get their politics all mixed up with the second coming of Christ’ (L 64). The forces which drive history towards the millennium are also those which take us towards the political foundation of that ‘pax Americana’ which

Becoming historical 153 Kennedy famously insisted, on June 10, 1963, must not be ‘enforced on the world by American weapons of war’.29 Libra suggests that the historical momentum towards the foundation of a global America was much too weighty to allow Kennedy to deflect it with his quaint reservations about the ethics of American empire building. The second coming, demanded by the authors of the assassination, offers to inaugurate the millennial moment at which all becoming will be incorporated into that history which has already been seen, all reservations and uncertainties and critical resistances brought into line under the transfiguring gaze of an apocalyptic, Roman America. But Oswald’s glance is one which refuses such a second coming, one which returns us, insistently, to that spectral original seeing that underlies all forms of déjà vu, but which will not give itself up to history or to language. Oswald’s glance returns us to an unrecoverable void in history, returns us to a death that is always still in process, always in the midst of being formed. A death that, even now, is slouching its way to Bethlehem to be born, so it might know itself as an unwritten fiction, living prematurely in the world.

Part III

The 1990s

Figure 4 Detail from Pieter Bruegel, The Triumph of Death. © Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

6

Terrorism and globalisation Mao II

You’re either with us or against us in the fight against terror. George W. Bush1 There is a world inside the world. Don DeLillo, Libra2 Terror makes the new future possible. Don DeLillo, Mao II3

Through the operations of a kind of reverse déjà vu – a narratological, historical and psychological phenomenon that has a powerful resonance in DeLillo’s writing – it is the pressure of 2001 that exerts itself most forcefully as we enter into the 1990s, and into DeLillo’s novel Mao II (1992). Like Daniel Deronda, in Gillian Beer’s resonant, Benjaminian phrase, Mao II is ‘haunted by the future’.4 It is difficult to remember or imagine how one read Mao II before the terrorist attacks that occurred in New York, Washington and Pittsburgh on September 11, 2001. The novel that DeLillo publishes at the beginning of the 1990s seems so closely to predict and foreshadow the circumstances and the consequences of the attacks, that it becomes difficult to read it as anything other than, in Coleridge’s words, a ‘voice prophesying war’.5 In offering a kind of working model of the dynamic that balances the globalisation of American capital and power against the growth of a global, fundamentalist terrorism, and in doing so in the context of the end of the cold war, the increasing power of the corporate image, and the declining scope for any form of effective countercultural expression, the novel reads now as if it is preparing, in advance, a way of reading and articulating both the events of September 11, and the ‘new world order’ that comes in their wake. Indeed, the novel seems so closely bound up with September 11, and with the global responses to it that continue to unfold, that it has become a very different work from the one that was published in 1992. The novel has been altered by the future that it seems somehow to intuit. It has become bent, as if we can see it refracted only through the curiously distorting emptiness that haunts the new Manhattan skyline.

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To read Mao II as reaching such an equivalence with the future that it seems to predict, though, might be to make light of the interest in the novel in the future as that which is yet to come. If the novel is bound up with the future that has now been revealed, if it becomes difficult to read the novel without matching it against what ‘actually happened’ after its publication, then it is also the case that it is engaged in an attempt to ferment the future inside itself as unused potential, as a text which, like Bill Gray’s great, hidden novel, remains unpublished, held in store. As Thomas Pynchon has suggested, in relation to the continuing resonance of many of George Orwell’s depictions of the future in Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is important not to confuse prediction with what Pynchon terms ‘prophecy’. ‘There is a game some critics like to play’, Pynchon writes, ‘in which one makes lists of what Orwell did and didn’t “get right”’.6 But, Pynchon says, ‘predictions are only details’.7 What lends Orwell’s writing its prophetic quality, for Pynchon, is the sense that it finds some ‘deeper’ stratum, that it gains some kind of access to the hidden underlying forces that continue to produce history. Its value is not confined to its ability to make predictions, but extends to its capacity to capture the spirit of a future that has not yet been lived out, even now, when 1984 is some way behind us. If Orwell, in Pynchon’s terms, should be considered a prophet, it is not just because he gets some of the details right, but because he penetrates into the space from which the future comes, that space that can never be exhausted by events, and that can never reveal itself in order to prove the seer right or wrong. The prophetic quality of DeLillo’s writing might extend, in a similar way, beyond the point at which it has been redeemed by events. If, for Pynchon, Orwell’s capacity to address the future lies partly in his perception, in 1948, that ‘despite the Axis defeat, the will to fascism had not gone away’, then the continuing relevance of Mao II might lie not just in its sometimes uncanny foreshadowing of specific contemporary events, but in its ability to penetrate into that in history which still remains unrevealed. It may be that the prophetic in Mao II arises from its capacity to gain a kind of deep access to the underlying motive relations between globalisation and terrorism, the relations which give rise to 9/11, to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and feed into the ongoing conflict between Palestine and Israel, but which are not reducible to such material, historical manifestations. If Orwell can glimpse a will to power that lies beneath the fact of the Axis defeat, then Mao II perhaps offers an insight into the conditions that determine the production of George W. Bush’s new ‘Axis of Evil’ (‘Axis II’), an insight that might allow us to understand the processes that script the future as still in train, still negotiable, and still unseen. One of the difficulties that the novel encounters, however, when seeking to penetrate into these deeper structures – into what Bill calls the genetic ‘code of being’ (M 48), the ‘chains’ of molecular historical matter that ‘determine who we are’ (M 6) – is that globalisation itself tends to produce the perception that history is already over, and that the future is already here, revealed to us in all its stark completion. As DeLillo puts it, in an essay

Terrorism and globalisation 159 written in response to September 11, globalisation appears to ‘summon us all to live permanently in the future’.8 It might be that Orwell can see through the contemporary fabric to the intricate mechanics of an underlying historical motor, but one of the cultural conditions that DeLillo’s writing has to reckon with is the pervasive sense that nothing is hidden from us, that history has already reached a kind of extended terminus, an end which nevertheless continues to go on. Under the new conditions determined by the globalisation of capital, the argument goes, there is no longer any tension between underlying historical cause and manifest effect, no narratives left to play themselves out. There is no tension between the molar and the molecular, between the visible and the invisible, between the future and the past. Rather, globalisation opens onto a kind of static, repetitive temporality, in which the oppositions that drive history forward have collapsed into an exhausted, tautological unity. In his essay entitled The Spirit of Terrorism, which is itself written as a response to September 11, Jean Baudrillard expands on this argument. He suggests that the attacks should not be seen so much as inaugurating a new phase in political history, a new form of struggle between America and Islam, or the new ‘clash of civilisations’,9 that might be suggested by George W. Bush’s embarrassing use of the word ‘crusade’ to describe his ‘war on terror’.10 Rather, Baudrillard suggests that the attacks mark our arrival at the final stage of globalisation, a stage at which the opponents in the conflict no longer maintain any difference from one another, and at which the very concept of historical progression has come to an end. The attacks belong to a form of conflict which is no longer ideological or political, but which is rather automatic, self-sustaining and repetitive, characteristic of the convulsive, peristaltic movements of a system which has reached its limits and become entirely self-referring. ‘This is terror against terror,’ Baudrillard suggests. ‘There is no longer any ideology behind it. We are far beyond ideology and causes now’.11 The attacks on the World Trade Center should not, he suggests, be understood primarily as attacks by Islamic fundamentalists against the American Empire, because, although this might be a convenient way, for some, to name the opponents as they currently appear, the attacks are really symptomatic of a global system which is engaged with an endless and permanent battle against itself. The ‘spirit’ of the global terrorism that is recently becoming manifest, Baudrillard suggests, is not that of any form of politically motivated struggle. It is rather the case that, as US and western power expands to reach the limits of its possible global range, it produces, automatically, its own form of counterbalance, not as ideological resistance, but as a kind of viral mutation. It is as though, Baudrillard says, ‘every machinery of domination secreted its own counterapparatus, the agent of its own disappearance’.12 There is a ‘global perfusion of terrorism, which accompanies any system of domination as though it were its shadow, ready to activate itself anywhere, like a double agent’.13 The more powerful and totalising western capital becomes, the more devastating the viral counterapparatus becomes. As it is a direct consequence of

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the global reach of the internet, for example, that global forms of communication become vulnerable to the devastatingly destructive power of the computer virus, so the globalisation of power makes power itself vulnerable. Globalisation conjures the spirit of its own annihilation in the figure of what DeLillo has described as an ‘unboundaried’ global terrorism.14 The ‘war’ that began on September 11 is not one in which there can be a winner or a loser, not one which is part of an unfolding historical narrative. It is not possible, Baudrillard suggests, to read through its fabric to an underlying political will which can be understood or resisted. Rather it is one in which ‘triumphant globalization’ can be seen to be ‘battling against itself ’.15 Under these circumstances, it does indeed become difficult to see how DeLillo can be regarded as what Pynchon describes as a ‘working prophet’ in Mao II. If prophecy is about seeing into a future that has not yet arrived, then how can one continue the work of prophecy when the future is already here, when history has become a perpetual motion machine, a free-wheeling, selfreplicating, post-political and post-ideological mechanism? Baudrillard’s reading of September 11 suggests that the attacks have a millennial quality; that they mark a kind of judgement day, a terminal moment that spells the end of the potential for prophecy, a point at which all has been decided and all uncertainty, dispute or dissent becomes a kind of irrelevancy in the face of automated global processes. Such a millennial moment has been envisaged in DeLillo’s fiction from its earliest beginning. It has been both longed for as a kind of consummation – an orgasmic second coming – and dreaded as a form of ‘terminal nullity’ (E 88), an extinction of the aesthetic, the prophetic spirit. The prophetic in DeLillo’s writing, it could be argued, has been organised around the awed and fearful approach to this moment, but it has drawn its possibility, its geist, from the deferral of the millennial coming, from the sense that history is not yet over, not exhausted or saturated or known through and through. But as we enter the 1990s, with the end of the cold war, the ‘global triumph of liberal power’ casts us into the new, flattened-out time and space of a complete self-realisation.16 The central drama of Mao II is the entry of the narrative into this new space time. Like The Names, Mao II is a novel which takes place in the crossing of the threshold between decades. The Names takes us from the 1970s towards the new international, corporate space of the 1980s and of the Reagan-Thatcher era. Mao II takes us from 1989 to 1990, to that moment at which, for DeLillo, the ‘surge of capital markets’ shaped a new ‘global consciousness’, summoning us to live in the future, in the ‘utopian glow of cyber-capital’, where there is ‘no memory’, where ‘markets are uncontrolled and investment potential has no limit’.17 Like The Names, Mao II orients itself at the decade boundary by reference to major world historical events. It takes us from the Hillsborough football disaster in the UK (April 15, 1989), through the death and funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini in Tehran ( June 1989), the massacre of students in Tiananmen Square ( June 1989), and the escalation of hostilities between East and West Beirut in the second half of 1989, to a bleakly

Terrorism and globalisation 161 elegiac epilogue, set in East Beirut in 1990, on the brink of peace in the Lebanon. In doing so, the novel crosses both temporal and spatial borders. It projects us into the time of unlimited multinational capital, and it also takes us across the boundary between east and west, performing the collapse of the oppositions that had shaped world politics since the end of the Second World War, and witnessing the birth of a borderless world governed by a single superpower. One of the major world events that is passed over in silence, in this passage from 1989 to 1990, is the falling of the Berlin wall, on November 9, 1989, as if the tumbling of that last barrier to the free flow of western capital was so noiseless and already known as to go unnoticed. But as the photographer Brita arrives in East Beirut in 1990, in the stripped down space of the novel’s epilogue, the wall is crossed quietly, and symbolically. In entering East Beirut by taxi at the close of the novel, a taxi, incidentally, whose horn plays the opening bars of ‘California Here I Come’ (M 229), she crosses the ‘Green Line’ that divided East and West Beirut during the civil war which ran in the Lebanon from 1975 to 1990 (M 110). Brita’s penetration into the bombed out city, in order to photograph the leader of a terrorist group, stands in for the broader occupation of the east by the west, and by the western production and commodification of the image. If Brita finds that Beirut is a ‘millennial image mill’ (M 229), a devastated city, plastered with movie posters even though there is ‘no sign of anything resembling a theatre’ (M 229), then it is because she enters, here, into a posthistorical landscape, in which the east has already been occupied, absorbed and assimilated by the west, taken hostage, as Baudrillard puts it, by the power of the image. This sense that Mao II dramatises the arrival of the millennial moment, the end of history, the permanent future – that it depicts the final exhaustion of the conflict between east and west that has determined the political life of a generation – does make it difficult to find in the novel any room for prophecy. If the possibility of the prophetic is to be found in unrevealed depths, in that underlying historical potential which drives dialectical oppositions but which is not contained by them, then Brita’s entry into Beirut in her Californian taxi suggests that the historical recesses in which such potential might be preserved have been colonised, swamped by the flood waters of ‘raw capital’ (U 802) released by the fall of the wall. The future that Mao II enters, as it crosses the boundary between east and west, and between the 1980s and the 1990s, is one that has come about, prematurely, as a result of the exhaustion of categories, the collapse of the oppositions themselves that have told us where we are in the world. The prologue to the novel, in which 6,500 couples are married in a Moonie mass wedding in Yankee Stadium, is organised around this irruption of the future into the now, a future that, as in Players, has ‘collapsed right in on us’ (P 17), arrived ‘ahead of schedule’ (P 84). The photograph of the ceremony that opens the prologue shows the massed couples in the top half of the image composing themselves into snaking lines of couples, boy–girl, curving towards Master to be

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married, to be reborn, and these chains of couples streaming into the open space of the stadium resemble nothing more than strands of DNA. As the couples come ‘marching into the American sunlight’ (M 3), like those cars that come streaming from the future in White Noise (WN 325), they become almost protoplasmic, the unformed, quivering, genetic matter of the future, the molecular information that has yet to build a body around itself, that lives still as the weightless manifestation of the future. As the couples stand ‘wincing in the sun’, like those ghosts who gaze nervously at the box camera in White Noise (M 7, WN 30), there is a ‘sense these chanting thousands have’ that ‘the future is pressing in, collapsing toward them, that they are everywhere surrounded by signs of the fated landscape and human struggle of the Last Days’ (M 7). But this sense that the couples are somehow eroding the barrier between the present and the future, that they are causing the future to stream into the now, is balanced against the opposite sense that the millennial future that they bring with them is indistinguishable from the past; a future which no longer maintains any difference from what has already been seen. As might be suggested by the persistent re-emergence, in this novel, of snatches of prose, of gestures and moments from DeLillo’s earlier fiction, the future here is born from and returns insistently to the past. As the father of the Moonie bride Karen recognises, whilst he searches for the singular figure of his daughter in the endlessly replicated mass of identical couples, the future here is conjured from repetition. ‘They take a time-honored event’, he says, ‘and repeat it, repeat it, repeat it until something new enters the world’ (M 4). With this confusion between the future and the past, between repetition and the emergence of the new, there is a sense, in the prologue, that history has stalled. Progression into the future has become conflated with regression into the past, the unforeseen has been located somehow within the already known. This tendency for the unrevealed and the revealed to become equated with one another, for oppositions to become tautologous, is expanded upon dramatically in the section that follows on from the prologue in Mao II, entitled ‘Part One’. Like the prologue, Part One opens with a photographic image of crowds in a stadium. But where the couples streaming into the ballpark in the prologue are weightless, harbingers of the future in genetic form, the crowds that press against the threshold at the opening to Part One are all weight, all writhing, crushing mass, and they belong not to the future but to the ancient past. If, in the prologue, there is a sense that ‘the future belongs to crowds’ (M 16) – that the sheer, sublime multiplication of numbers, the endless repetition of the human form, can somehow summon us into a floating, unboundaried newness – then Part One opens with an image that returns us to the crowd as a primal, suffocating mass. If the novel dramatises the permeability of thresholds and boundaries – between the 1980s and the 1990s, the past and the future, the east and the west – then this opening image speaks of the power of boundaries to crush, to maim and to kill. The image shows the victims of the Hillsborough disaster, fans here to watch a football

Terrorism and globalisation 163 game between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest, being crushed against the heavy gauge fence that separates the crowd from the field of play. The camera is safe, in the open, already in the future, on ‘our’ side of the threshold. But the dying and the dead are piled against this impermeable border, suffocating under the weight of the bodies of others, and under the heavy weight of their own flesh. As the ex-Moonie bride Karen thinks, watching the disaster unfold live on television in the USA, this scene of mass death evokes an ancient history of suffering. It returns us from 1989, from global televised sport, from the weightlessness of the broadcast image, to a medieval conception of the limits of the body as it occupies space. The broadcast cuts to a freeze frame, and, Karen thinks, the scene composes itself into a painting, turns back from the technological to the pre-technological image. ‘They stop the film’, she says, ‘and it is like a religious painting, the scene could be a fresco in a tourist church, it is balanced and composed and filled with people suffering’ (M 33). The camera ‘shows the fence from a distance, bodies piling up behind it, smothered, sometimes only fingers moving, and it is like a fresco in an old dark church, a crowded twisted vision of a rush to death as only a master of the age could paint it’ (M 34) (see Figure 4). In allowing these images to play against each other – the Yankee Stadium image and the Hillsborough image – across the fenced boundary between the prologue and Part One, the novel is suggesting how profoundly the future that is produced by the crowd is bound up with the past, and how easily it can be returned to it. This violent and disturbing equation between the yet to come and the already seen, between the weightless and the suffocating, resurfaces time and time again in the novel. It is often difficult to tell whether one is moving forwards or backwards, whether one is returning to the beginning – to the original seeing that underlies the occurrence of déjà vu – or whether one is moving into the future of which, in DeLillo’s fiction, the experience of déjà vu is so often an echo. The mass marriage in the prologue, for example, which involves a ‘loss of scale and intimacy’ and in which ‘love and sex are multiplied out’ (M 7), is balanced against the wedding that Brita witnesses in bombed out Beirut in the epilogue (M 239–240). In the ruins of the ancient city, Brita watches a couple celebrate their wedding, escorted not only by bridesmaids and flower girls, but by military vehicles. This progression, from the mass wedding to the individual ceremony, might suggest that the novel returns us, against the future oriented drive of the narrative, from the infinite, empty reproduction with which the novel begins to some original and more authentic version of the ritual, a version which is returned to its proper scale, and in which intimacy, fidelity, love and sex, are restored to some kind of recognisable shape. Indeed, Mark Osteen comments that the Beirut wedding is a ‘moment of joy and freedom’ which ‘suggests that ancient rituals endure despite the glut of images and the din of explosions’.18 But the ways in which the oppositions between the singular and the multiple, between the original and the copy, are articulated in the novel does not easily allow for such a stable notion of progression, either backwards towards the

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original, or forwards towards the copy. Rather, the two versions of the wedding ceremony tend to lay over one another, and interfere with one another, so it becomes difficult to tell which is a parody of which. Brita’s journey to Beirut from the USA, towards the second marriage from the first, is a journey which takes her in two directions at once. Her arrival in Beirut marks the consummation of the global reach of the image; in one sense, her crossing of the line is the performance of a final equivalence between east and west, a proof of the cliché repeated in the novel that ‘New York is just like Beirut’. But if her journey is towards a global future, then it is also a journey towards the distant past, towards ancient civilisations, towards an original genesis. In arriving in Beirut, Brita finishes a journey towards the Holy Land that Bill Gray fails to complete, dying as he does on the way, in the Mediterranean, in the space of the threshold between Europe and Asia. Her arrival in Beirut is an arrival in a future which is also a past. The entire novel can be read in terms of these self-cancelling oppositions. The narrative takes place, for example, in the space of a struggle between the writer and the terrorist. We begin with Brita photographing Bill Gray in the room in which he imagines the world of his novel, and we end with her photographing the terrorist, Abu Rashid, in the room in which he imagines the new future that will be brought about by terrorism. The writer, perhaps, belongs to the past, to the singular, to the unique, to the authentic, whereas the terrorist belongs to the future, to the crowd, to the loss of the very concept of the singular and the unique. But, if the novel draws its energy from the tension of this opposition, it is also the case that such a distinction between the writer and the terrorist is always on the brink of collapse. There is something disquieting, for example, about the echoes between Brita’s sessions with Bill Gray and with Abu Rashid. Her reminder to both that ‘you’re dropping your chin’ (M 40, M 234) suggests how far the photograph flattens out any distinctions between the two men, how the requirements of the surface of the image, its shading and the quality of its light, cancel out any contrasts between them at the level of ‘content’. Or the novel might be understood as taking place between the poles of privilege and deprivation, between the wealth of the west and the poverty of the east. The homeless person who walks into a New York bookshop in the opening chapter of the novel, causing all the bourgeois intellectuals to scatter, to remove themselves from his ‘zone of infection’ (M 20), might be read as the presence, at the heart of the prosperous city, of the poverty, the waste and the disease that the unequal distribution of capital both requires and disguises. But this homeless person claims to be a writer, ‘here to sign my books’, suggesting an unavoidable infectious connection between poverty and wealth, between intellectual privilege and brutal suffering. That Bill Gray should die, en route to Beirut, a writer disguised as a homeless person, is just one of the many parallelisms that reach across this novel, and that undermine any attempt to keep concepts free from infection by contact with their opposites.

Terrorism and globalisation 165 To read Mao II as opening onto such a complete equivalence between the oppositions that shape it, however, might be to overlook the extent to which the novel still maintains the possibility of a future which has not yet been lived; the extent to which it preserves within itself deeper temporal and aesthetic structures that have not yet been summoned to the surface. However closely DeLillo’s dramatisation of the spirit of terrorism resembles Baudrillard’s, and despite the fact that in both DeLillo and Baudrillard there is a tendency to recognise terrorism as a kind of inevitable countersignature to globalisation, it may be that DeLillo’s work does not abandon itself to the automaticity of global culture in quite the same way that Baudrillard’s does. Even in the flattened out spacetime of Mao II there are silent, withdrawn spaces that prevent the automatic self-duplication of culture, spaces which might harbour a new future, a future which is not identical with the past. One space in which such an unwritten future might lie in the novel, of course, is in the pages of Bill Gray’s unpublished novel. This hidden art work is the last in a long line of withheld DeLillian pieces, stretching from Brand’s novel written on ‘blank pages’ in Americana (A 347), through the ‘blanked out pages’ that tell us ‘what we must know’ in End Zone (E 89), through Jean Venable’s unwritten fiction in Ratner’s Star (RS 398), to Nicholas Branch’s unwritten report on the Kennedy assassination in Libra (L 59). It is as if Bill Gray’s novel, held inside Mao II like a world within a world, is pregnant with the weight of an unwritten DeLillian oeuvre, the negative image of the one that we can buy in the shops. Where Brand’s, Venable’s and Branch’s work has remained blank and wordless, however, Gray’s novel has found itself committed to language, to the lapidary weight of sculpted, typewritten words, even if such language remains unrevealed. When Brita makes the journey to Gray’s house at the opening of the novel, to capture the image of the writer in her camera, she is confronted with the hidden fiction as an object, as a thing with mass and density. Scott, the guardian of the withheld novel, the gatekeeper who holds both the author and his work hostage in their dungeon rooms, presents the work, in all its completion, to Brita, as a kind of proof of life: He handed Brita a pale-gray manuscript box, unmarked, and gestured to six identical boxes on the desk and said this was the final version, the typed and corrected and proofread copy of Bill’s new novel. (M 53) These pale grey boxes, lying buried in the heart of the novel, hold Bill’s novel within them, the novel which cannot be allowed to speak, but which, Scott suggests, might carry the only kind of truth available under contemporary conditions. The book must remain captive within its seven identical boxes, Scott suggests, because ‘the withheld work of art is the only eloquence left’ (M 67). It is by withholding the art work, by keeping it beneath the surface

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and out of sight, that it might bear witness to the exhausted possibilities of fiction, that it might, in a phrase borrowed from Branch’s secret report in Libra, ‘take on heat and light’ (M 68, L 15). This suggestion, however, that Bill’s novel might generate aura by remaining hidden, that it is through burying the novel that one can give expression to uncolonised recesses that remain beyond the reach of global capital, is somewhat problematic, if not outright alarming. Scott’s curious zeal in keeping the book and its author hidden feels disturbing, like a kind of perversion of the aesthetic spirit. It is difficult to see what the difference is between Scott’s detention of Bill in his rural retreat, and Rashid’s detention of his poet hostage in his grey box in Beirut. Both seem to remove the possibility of fiction and of poetry from circulation, rather than to preserve it, or to give it a withdrawn, subaltern voice. The identical boxes in which the novel is contained amplify this sense that the withholding of the art work leads to its erasure, rather than to its preservation. The art work’s eloquence, for Scott, lies in its uniqueness. Its aura grows and develops, like Wunderlick’s ‘Mountain Tapes’ in Great Jones Street, as a consequence of its withdrawal from publication, and from reproduction. But the seven boxes that contain the manuscript suggest that the suppression of the novel leads, immediately, to its reduction to the status of a reproducible object. The manuscript boxes, in their matt, ‘unmarked’ containment and their identical multiplicity, call to mind the ‘black latex slabs’ of the World Trade Center towers as Brita sees them from her window, and as they are reproduced in the Warholesque painting entitled Skyscraper III that she encounters in Tokyo (M 165). The suppression of the book detaches the surface of the work, the grey surface of the manuscript boxes, from its depths, from its hidden and singular content, so the manuscript falls into the sterility of duplication and repetition, the multiplication of the geometric shape that is evocative, in this novel, of world trade, of Warhol, and of the commodification of the image. And this process is itself duplicated in Brita’s photographing of Bill, her capturing of the writer’s face on celluloid, in contact sheets of multiple, passport sized photographs that, yet again, are reminiscent of Warhol. If, for Scott, a ‘great man’s face shows the beauty of his work’ (M 61), then for Brita, the process of photographing the writer is one that summons the writing to the reproducible surface. ‘The writer’s face’, she says, ‘is the surface of the work’ (M 26). And for Bill, as for Karen when she is photographed by the crowds in the Yankee Stadium, the experience of being photographed leads to a feeling of duplication in which one is ‘here but also there’,19 in which one loses contact with a ‘deeper’ sense of one’s singularity. ‘Here I am in your lens,’ Bill says to Brita. ‘Already I see myself differently. Twice over or once removed’ (M 44). This tendency for the ‘eloquent’, singular content of the withheld art work to leak away from the surfaces in which it finds itself represented in Mao II might suggest that the power of the untellable and of the unwritten that has been germinating in DeLillo’s oeuvre from the beginning has finally expired,

Terrorism and globalisation 167 or petered out. In Peter Burger’s terms, this expiry of the possibilities of the silent, cunning, exiled art work is historical, and related to the mechanics of what he calls the ‘neo-avant-garde’. Warhol’s trafficking in the commercial image, his reduction of the art work to an infinitely reproducible surface with ‘nothing behind it’,20 is exemplary, for Burger, of a contemporary art which reproduces the structures of the modernist avant-garde, but which has abandoned any commitment to the possibility of a genuine, critical resistance to its cultural contexts. For Burger, it is difficult to distinguish, in Warhol’s work, between a simple reproduction of the commercial image, and a critical reflection on the way such an image comes to mean. Warhol’s ‘painting of 100 Campbell soup cans’, Burger suggests, contains resistance to the commodity society only for the person who wants to see it there. The neo-avant-garde, which stages for a second time the avant-gardiste break with tradition, becomes a manifestation that is void of sense and that permits the positing of any meaning whatever.21 Whilst Mao II engages with the historical conditions of the neo-avant-garde, however, and whilst it performs the process by which Warholesque repetition drains the art work of dialectical tension between surface and depth, it is also the case that DeLillo’s novel looks for other ways of giving Bill’s novel a kind of subaltern voice. Scott’s hysterical policing of the boundary between Bill’s novel and DeLillo’s novel tends to close down the possibility of any kind of exchange between the two, and to produce this predicament whereby the critical possibilities of Bill’s novel are attenuated. But, just as Scott loses control of his hostage – appropriately enough in the revolving doors of an international corporate publishing house (M 103) – the novel within the novel does find a way of making a kind of impression on the surface, a way of making its deeper structures felt without being reduced itself to the status of a flattened, corporate image. Whilst Scott seeks to quarantine Gray’s ‘world within a world’, to maintain its eloquence and its authenticity by shielding it from any contact with the infectious outside world of international capital, Bill himself seeks, despite his reclusive tendencies, to establish a kind of dialogue between his withheld fiction and the world, a dialogue which maintains the critical engagement with commodity society that Burger suggests is missing in the ‘neo-Avant-garde’. If Warhol is the artist that represents the failure of a critical aesthetic in Mao II, then the guiding spirit for this persistence of a countercultural avantgarde in the very midst of the global failure of critique is Samuel Beckett. Bill himself invokes the figure of Beckett, as the last representative of the modernist avant-garde, when he suggests that the equivalence between the novelist and the terrorist is a cultural phenomenon that has come about in the wake of Beckett’s death. ‘Beckett is the last major writer to shape the way we think and see,’ Gray tells Haddad. ‘After him, the major work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings’ (M 157). Like the fall of the Berlin

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wall, Beckett’s death on 21 December, 1989 is passed over in silence in Mao II. Taking place in the heart of the novel, in the space of the threshold between 1989 and 1990 and at the moment when the east enters into a new economic relationship with the west, Beckett’s death suggests here the collapse of oppositions that marks, for Burger, the end of the avant-garde. After Beckett’s death, Bill suggests, aesthetic practices can no longer ‘shape’, or influence culture, but can only helplessly reflect the dark lights of the age. But if Mao II marks the end of a Beckettian aesthetic, it also seeks to keep a Beckettian spirit alive, to draw on Beckett’s legacy to effect a kind of reciprocally transformative relation between the corporate world of the novel and the world of the uncommodifiable and unpublished art work that is held within it. Beckett’s death, like Gray’s latent novel, and like the spectre of Axton’s death that lies in the dark space between 1979 and 1980 in The Names, haunts the threshold in Mao II. It is a mordant presence that represents not only an end, but also a kind of persistence, a deathly well from which both Gray’s novel and Mao II might draw a means of continuing, or, in Beckett’s terminology, of ‘going on’. That both Bill Gray and Hamm, Beckett’s writer of an endless ‘chronicle’ in Endgame, find that there’s ‘no more pain-killer’ and ‘no more medication’ (M 159),22 might suggest that, both for Beckett and for DeLillo, there is no longer any means of relieving, through art or through aspirin, the cultural predicaments that they depict. But Endgame is set in what Bill Gray calls a ‘refuge from the rumble of time’ (M 159), a ‘refuge’ at the end of history in which time is at an end, in which ‘nature’ itself is ‘dead’, but in which time still continues to move forward, to roll on into crevices of the future that remain as yet unlived. Endgame opens, famously, with Clov’s declaration that it is ‘finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished’.23 The entire play takes place in this moment of endedness, just as Mao II takes place in the throes of the millennial moment, those ‘Last Days’ that have been deferred in DeLillo’s oeuvre from Americana onwards. As Beckett’s great prose work The Unnamable finishes with the agonising recognition of simultaneous endedness and continuation contained in the horribly cramped declaration that ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’,24 so Endgame continues to ‘play’ even after it is finished. In evoking Beckett’s death, in holding this moment of endedness within itself like an ‘ancient foetus’, Mao II seeks to draw a kind of continuation from the collapse of oppositions between past and future that the novel performs, to draw the possibility of an unwritten future from the endgame of history. In Beckett’s writing, in both his drama and his prose, this possibility of an unwritten future is drawn from the space of a hidden work within the work. As Endgame contains Hamm’s endless ‘chronicle’, which promises to tell the story of Hamm and Clov that is suppressed in the play itself, so again and again Beckett’s works emerge from a kind of ghost oeuvre that is contained within them. Beckett’s piece Ohio Impromptu (1981), for example, stages a situation in which two men who are nearly identical to one another, named ‘Listener’ and ‘Reader’, face each other across a table upon which lies a book,

Terrorism and globalisation 169 the ‘worn volume’ which contains the script of the play, the script which Reader reads to Listener. Reader and Listener, like Gray and Rashid, are always on the brink of turning into one another, of recognising that the possibilities of dialogue are over, that in the last words of the play, there is ‘nothing left to tell’.25 But the book that lies between Listener and Reader, from which the play emerges as if from a magician’s hat, is never entirely absorbed into the performance, and never exhausted by the arrival of a final equivalence between Listener and Reader, a final cancellation of the difference between them that the work of literature necessitates and guarantees. The book as stage prop, the volume that lies, like Scott’s grey manuscript boxes, on the surface of the art work, a solid object on the stage, never quite establishes an equivalence with the underlying book, the book that generates the play from some unfathomable space of literature. This hidden, withdrawn book from which the stage space is called into being is one which, in the words of Reader, is written in ‘unspoken words’,26 a book which never quite gives all of itself away, or yields itself up to the manuscript in which it is contained on the dramatic surface. In Mao II, similarly, Bill Gray’s novel is never quite contained within the identical manuscript boxes that Scott presents to Brita, or captured in the surface of the image, in the portrait of the great man’s face. Rather, Bill’s novel tends to remain beneath the surface of the narrative, to carve for itself a space beneath the collapsing oppositions that the novel charts. This subterranean, subverbal space not only removes itself from the expressive surface but also, like Hamm’s chronicle or Reader’s book, works to produce that surface, to imagine DeLillo’s novel from its own withheld refuge. This sense of Bill’s book as a generative presence that haunts the novel, that moves restlessly beneath its fabric, can be felt throughout Mao II. When, for example, Bill tries to make contact with Brita against Scott’s will, leaving her a long message on her New York answer machine, the ravaging, prowling presence of his book makes itself powerfully felt. Bill’s message to Brita contains a reflection on the violence of the answer machine message. The capacity of the answer machine to make us all continually available, or answerable, is exemplary, for Bill, of the colonising power of globalisation. The technology of voice mail is a murderous technology, one that ‘destroys the poetry of nobody home’ (M 92), that threatens to overwhelm all those forms of withdrawal or absence that might allow one not to respond to a call, to an interpellation. The violence of the answering machine is linked, for Bill, both to the aggression of global technological capitalism, and to that of global terrorism. ‘Accessing your machine from distant sites’ suggests not only the global reach of information technology, but also the vulnerability to destruction that such a global reach produces. ‘There’s a lot of violence’ in the phrase ‘accessing your machine’, Bill says in his message to Brita. ‘You need a secret code if I’m not mistaken. You enter your code in Brussels and blow up a building in Madrid’ (M 91). The technology of the answering machine seems, to Bill, to threaten the space of withdrawal and difference that intervenes

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between us and them, between Reader and Listener in Ohio Impromptu, or between the senders and the receivers of the message that spans the history of the planet in Ratner’s Star. When leaving his message to Brita, Bill says that ‘there is no sense of a listener, not even the silences a listener creates, a dozen different kinds, dense and expectant and bored and angry’ (M 92). The answer machine, Bill implies here, is one of those technological agents that threatens to annihilate silence as a form of delicately modulated and freighted literary response – like the silence of those blank pages in Jean Venable’s fiction, that even in their blankness ‘differ from each other’ in ‘look, sound and touch’ (RS 398). But even as he is leaving his message, the message itself contains a form of silence within it. Bill’s message to Brita is inhabited by the ravaging spirit of his book, the book that will not give itself up to the surface, that maintains the poetry of nobody home, the aesthetics of no response. As Bill is leaving his message to Brita, he says to her that ‘I keep seeing my book wandering through the halls’ (M 92). The book, locus of withdrawn eloquence, of mute resistance to the demands of the corporate publishing industry, inhabits the message as a kind of Frankenstein’s monster, a mutant beast that won’t go away. ‘There the thing is’, Bill says, ‘creeping feebly’ (M 92), slouching and ‘smooching’ through the room and under the message like the imprisoned spirit of the writing woman who writhes beneath the text in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novel The Yellow Wallpaper. If Bill’s book can be envisaged as a kind of creature that lurks within the fibres of DeLillo’s novel, refusing the interpellating power of the electronic, recorded message, refusing to be summoned to the surface, then it also exerts a kind of influence on the language that it disdains, a kind of power over the published novel that has entered the global marketplace. It is clearly the case that Bill’s book, like the woman behind the wallpaper in Gillman’s novel, or like Frankenstein’s monster in Mary Shelley’s novel, cannot escape its confines, cannot enter as an art work into the light of day. All of its power and its value relies on its withheld condition, its function as a kind of negative image of the revealed work. When Bill imagines his book as an embodied beast, it is, like Shelley’s monster, as an unspeakable, abject double of the body of its creator. But if the book cannot come to the surface, it nevertheless works, as in Gilman and Shelley and Beckett, to transgress the boundary between author and text, between public body and abject body, that subjugates it. As might be suggested by the echo of Gray’s name in the grey boxes that contain the manuscript, Gray is always on the verge of being subsumed by his novel. Gray as the author of a withheld work of art teeters always on the brink of becoming, himself, a character in the work, of being written by the novel instead of writing it. The withheld work of art is suppressed by the dominant, revealed narrative in Mao II, but the latter can also appear to emerge from the former, to be drawn itself from the withheld world within the world, as from a bottomless well. As Bill suggests when he describes his method of composition to Brita, he does not simply write his novel, he ‘writes towards’ it (M 46). Writing, for Bill, is a Wittgensteinian crawling towards

Terrorism and globalisation 171 the ‘innocence’, the clarity, the ethical purity of the work, a kind of tunnelling towards the underground space from which the work springs. It is the crafting of the words, the chiselling of the sentence on the tablet of the page, that draws the writer towards the work. ‘Every sentence’, Bill says, ‘has a truth waiting at the end of it’. It is the movement towards this unspeakable truth lying at the origin and at the end of language that is the work of the writer; the willingness to find oneself remade by the work that one fashions. ‘I’ve always seen myself in sentences,’ Bill goes on, evoking the language of shaping that he ascribes to a Beckettian avant-garde, ‘I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence. The language of my books has shaped me as a man’ (M 48). This mutually shaping relationship between the world of the novel, and the hidden, unrevealed art work that lies beneath it, is at work throughout the novel. Karen’s detaching of a food-encrusted spoon from the surface of a canvas in a New York gallery (M 173) – the migration of the spoon from the space of the painting into the world – is exemplary of the tendency for the uncertain boundary between the art work and the world to be crossed and recrossed. As Karen’s art work-spoon – which is also a ‘real spoon with impacted food that is also real’ (M 173) – is only lightly attached to its burlap setting, so fiction, in the novel, can easily pull free of its enabling conditions. Fiction is always threatening, in Charlie Everson’s words, to ‘bleed out into the world’, to leak into the world from the room in which the captive writer sits and ‘thinks a thought’ (M 132). DeLillo has suggested that ‘Beckett is the last writer whose work extends into the world’,27 but in Mao II, fiction seeks to continue in the spirit of Beckett, to exceed its own boundaries and leak out into the world. In Mao II, as in Libra, fiction promises to ‘take on heat and light’ not through the auratic withdrawal of the work of art upon which Scott insists, but through its capacity to ‘unfold’ into the world, to ‘push out toward the social order’ (M 200). This traffic between the real and the fictional, between the outer world of Mao II and the inner world of Bill’s novel, makes itself felt throughout the novel in echoes, in resonances and assonances that suggest, insistently, that DeLillo’s novel is inhabited by a kind of shadowy undercurrent, by a fictional presence or voice that moves beneath the surface. For the larger part of the novel, this interference between the world of the withheld novel and that of the revealed one is quite subtle and understated. Scott cleans Bill’s typewriter, for example, sitting in the writer’s inner sanctum, after Bill has managed to escape into the world. ‘Scott sat’, we are told, ‘at the desk in the workroom, cleaning the typewriter. He blew on the keys, using a damp rag to lift dust and hair from the felt pad’ (M 139). These repeated actions – the lifting of the keys, the blowing, the lifting of the hair off the pad – tend to bleed out from the workroom, to infect the behaviour and mannerisms of other characters, and of Bill himself. Scott blows the typewriter keys in the writer’s room near New York, and Bill, in a hotel room in London, mimics the gesture, as if he is on a string, still connected to his typewriter. ‘In his room’, the narrator says, ‘Bill took

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off his shirt and blew on the inside of the collar, getting rid of lint and dried hair’ (M 120). As the novel continues, this confusion between the scene of writing and the written scene, between the inner novel and the outer one, becomes more pronounced. The further Bill removes himself from his captivity in the writer’s room, and the further east he travels – from New York to London to Athens to Cyprus and across the water towards Lebanon and Beirut – the more emphatic is the sense that he is becoming a fiction of his own devising, that he is no longer writing his book but instead being written by it. His unpublished work, in this delicate adjustment, is no longer hidden, or withheld from the novel, but instead becomes the origin of it. As he reaches Cyprus, that outpost in his journeying towards the east, and towards the Holy Land, this shift becomes explicit. In a Cyprus restaurant, Bill poses as a character in his own novel, in order to finagle a diagnosis of his lacerated liver from a group of vets on holiday. Bill is recognising here that he can go no further as author, that the final leg of the journey can only be accomplished by himself as character. In order to gain entry to the east, he has to travel as fiction, has to let his novel extend out, across the boundary into the east. This sense that Bill’s movement eastward is also a movement towards ‘the character world’ (M 160) reaches a climax as Bill heads towards Beirut, a climax that is balanced against Brita’s eventual crossing of the Green Line into East Beirut in the novel’s epilogue. Whilst Brita’s entry into Beirut, to photograph Rashid, suggests a kind of flattened out, global equivalence between east and west in which the image provides a universal language, Bill’s entry into Beirut, and into the room of the hostage, is one that is conducted not on the surface, at the level of the image, but deeper down, at the level of a kind of submerged and unconsummated fiction. Where Brita enters Beirut in her American taxi, Bill works his way into Beirut by ‘building chains of thought’, by ‘writing towards’ the hostage, by finding those unspoken places where the writer and the hostage might ‘converge’ (M 160). As Bill finds himself made by language, as he writes through the sentence towards the truth that lies beneath it, so his passage towards the hostage, and towards the terrorists that hold him captive, is through writing rather than by taxi. With a pencil and a pad, Bill works at ‘letting the words lead him into that basement room’. Through tuning himself to the weight and balance of a sentence, Bill seeks to invent his way towards the hostage, to find, beneath language and at the end of a sentence, the ‘places’ where he ‘converges’ with the hostage (M 160). It is true that the attempt to write towards the hostage can tend to cast the room in Beirut as simply a figment of Bill’s imagination, a function of the western sense-making machine. There is something difficult and alarming about the notion that the hostage, the basement room, the boy that keeps the hostage captive, and Rashid himself, should all be somehow invented by Bill, that Beirut should emerge here as a caricature of the racial other, invented from the perspective of the privileged west. Just as Brita finds that Beirut is like New York, that the east holds itself up for

Terrorism and globalisation 173 consumption by the lens as readily as the west, so writing towards the hostage tends to reproduce him in the guise of what the writer already knows. The spoon from which the hostage eats, for example, becomes, in Bill’s imaginative construction of the basement room, a kind of replica of the spoon which Karen detaches from an art work in New York. The ‘bowl and spoon’ that the hostage sees lying ‘at the edge his foam mattress’ (M 109) are fictions that Bill has dreamt up, objects that have been drawn directly from the art work. ‘He pictured precise objects,’ Bill says as he writes towards Beirut, ‘he made them briefly shine with immanence, a bowl for food, a spoon constructed out of thought, perception, feeling, will and imagination’ (M 154). As Marlow never leaves the mouth of the Thames estuary when narrating his journey towards Kurtz, and into Conrad’s heart of darkness, so here the contents of the hostage’s room, in the heart of Beirut, are fashioned from the materials that Bill has to hand, materials drawn from a canvas in New York. If, however, Bill’s attempt to construct the other through the power of the imagination might replicate, in some ways, the colonising effects of Brita’s photographing of Rashid and the boy, in other ways the attempt to find a poetic, subverbal site of ‘convergence’ between the west and the east is the only way in which it is possible, in this novel at least, to enact a transformative encounter with the other as other. It is important that Bill’s journeying towards Beirut, unlike Brita’s, does not end with his disembarkation at Junieh and his penetration into the east. Rather, it ends stranded and suspended in the space of the threshold, in the borderland between the east and the west, between 1989 and 1990. Bill’s writing towards the hostage does not amount to a colonisation of the subaltern voice. What Bill encounters in his attempt to build a bridge between himself and his double (both the hostage-poet as double, and the terrorist as double) is not the space of the other, held up for incorporation into the self, but the space of death. Language leads him not to the basement room, but to Hamlet’s ‘undiscovered country’, that deathly state from whose ‘bourn no traveller returns’. This failure of the attempt to reach across the divide, though, does not necessarily signal a failure of the imagination, or suggest that fiction does not have the power to think towards the other, to write beyond the boundary of the known. It is from Bill’s encounter with death, in the space of the threshold, as he sails across the sea towards Byzantium, and towards Bethlehem to be born for a second time as the hostage, that the transformative and critical possibilities of fiction emerge. As it is the instant of death that harbours the possibilities of fiction in The Names and in Libra, so here Bill’s falling into death is a tumbling not simply into extinction, but into the empty space that lies beneath language itself, the space from which fiction comes, the space which holds within it all that has not yet been seen or known or incorporated into the global marketplace. The struggle to write towards the other leads Bill to death – as he suggests, ‘it was writing that caused his life to disappear’ (M 215) – but it is this disappearance that opens up the possibility of an encounter with the other that does not employ the ethically bankrupt

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language of ‘us’ and ‘them’. The disappearance that writing grants to Bill takes him to the deathly space of writing that intervenes between self and other, between east and west, the space of the hidden book that both joins and separates Listener and Reader in Ohio Impromptu. As Bill approaches death, he experiences it as a swooping dive beneath the surface of the text, towards the buried space of his withheld book, the space from which he comes. With the graceful, rhythmic, vertiginous drops of one alternately resisting and succumbing to sleep, Bill repeatedly falls away from pain, from consciousness, towards the bottomlessness of non-being. ‘He fell away from the pain,’ the narrator says, ‘and tried not to return’ and then, again, ‘he fell away, steeply this time, and changed his mind about not returning’, but the deeper down he goes, the more difficult it is to come back, until he meets with the death that lies beneath the surface of the text, the death that was ‘familiar though never felt before’ (M 216). If this is Bill disappearing from the text, writing himself to the underside of language and of the world, then it is also death coming to meet us. The familiarity of death, the sense of déjà vu which it carries, suggests that the novel has brought death to us, brought us a glimpse of the future, a premonition of our final destination. Reading the novel, one knows what it is like to die. But, whilst all other glimpses of the future in the novel tend to be cancelled out by their equivalence with the already known, to be brought under the novel’s global jurisdiction, this encounter with death, however familiar, however beautifully calm, is an encounter which absolutely refuses to enter into the novel’s economy, to offer itself up for exchange. If, for Bill, the responsibility of the writer is to ‘increase the flow of meaning’, to ‘extend the pitch of consciousness and human possibility’ (M 200), then it is this encounter with death that allows for such extension, that allows for a kind of dialectical flow between oppositions which does not elide their difference. Death reveals itself here, but without entering into language, without giving itself away. It comes to language only to offer itself as that which is always hidden, that which remains beyond the far horizon of the text, which cannot be brought to the surface. It declares itself and hides itself at the same time. Death offers itself as the province which remains beyond the reach of global capital, the space which holds a new future in store, the unrevealed space in which a new relationality between us and them might be preserved as the not yet conscious, as pure historical potential. Death speaks to us, in Malcolm Bull’s wonderful phrase, only as the ‘coming into hiding of the unknown’.28 Jean Baudrillard suggests, in The Spirit of Terrorism, and in a near paraphrase of White Noise, that globalisation tends to lead to a denial of death. Under the conditions of global capital, Baudrillard suggests, death becomes a ‘thing of which we no longer have any idea’, because it has been ‘erased’ from the culture.29 The aim of the terrorist, accordingly, is to return death to the heart of the global machine, in the form of suicide; to ‘defy the system by a gift to which it cannot respond except by its own death and its own collapse’.30 For DeLillo, also, global power gives rise to global terrorism, to

Terrorism and globalisation 175 an almost universal impulse to meet the deathliness and violence of global power with an equal violence and deathliness, a desire to give death as a gift that annihilates and destroys, that empties out the economy with the power of its own violent refusal to yield, and that returns us to the emptiness from which we came. But the death that Bill encounters is the death of the writer, not the death of the terrorist. It is a death that holds within it the possibility of the new, of the not yet seen, that does not seek to destroy, but that seeks to increase, and to extend. Bill returns a death to the heart of global culture, not to destroy that culture, but to locate within the global the persistence of the counterfunctional; to sound those depths beneath the sentence and beneath the surface that have not yet been colonised or mapped, and that might lead us towards a future of which we have not yet dreamt. The deathly gift that Bill bequeaths us in Mao II is a scant, thin thing when measured against the global power to which it offers a kind of mute protest. Of all DeLillo’s novels, it is in Mao II that language comes closest to a kind of exhaustion, and that the contradictions that drive history and narrative forward seem closest to collapse into an exhausted tautology. Bill’s death is almost all we have, in this novel, that is not already incorporated; it is one of the few moments in the text when DeLillo’s language summons a poetic excess that takes us towards the outside of language. In opening itself to the conditions that determine global culture, the novel becomes almost flat, it almost turns itself into an image, into a Warholesque reflective surface. But it is in giving itself up so fully to the self-replicating rhythms of global culture that the novel demonstrates and performs the tenacious capacity of fiction to find the hidden and the undiscovered persisting in the midst of a culture of virtually total surveillance and commodification. In performing the near equivalence of globalisation and terrorism, Mao II offers a glimpse of the end of history, a glimpse of a future that is already here, already a thing of the past. But in doing so, the novel also gives a kind of silent articulation to those places in culture, those deathly retreats, that have not yet been spoken or seen or incorporated, that prevent power and resistance to power, or art and terrorism, from reaching a complete equivalence. Even here, where capital has brought us all into communication, made us all answerable, summoned us into a fungible, compliant and complicit equivalence, it is possible to hear the poetry of nobody home, the poetry of the hidden, the empty, the out-of-reach, that makes a critical mark on the almost uninterrupted surface.

7

The work of death Underworld

The dead time is at work. Jacques Derrida1 Literature is really the work of death in the world. Maurice Blanchot2

Ecstasy and apocalypse Seems there’s been the Russians exploding an A-bomb. So no one knows the day or the hour. Don DeLillo, Underworld 3 Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in. Robert Frost4

It is difficult to resist the feeling when reflecting on DeLillo’s eleventh novel Underworld – his last of the twentieth century and of the second millennium – that it is a work of arrival, of completion, of ascension, and, by extension, a work of death. If Underworld is a novel of arrival, then DeLillo’s first novel, Americana, might be thought of as the point of departure. This early novel is conditioned by an ecstatic gulf that inhabits and dismembers its narrator David Bell. Bell sets out, in 1971, on a crazed journey towards himself grown old, towards a future version of himself who waits at the turn of the millennium, clad complacently in white flannel trousers, marooned in aged calm on an isolated island, able to discover the wanderlust that drives his young self forward only in a forbidding and melancholy backward glance. All the younger Bell’s anger and oedipal energy is directed towards and against this figure who stands implacably at the threshold of the century, like the father that dwells within the self, waiting to ground us, or to welcome us home. From Americana onwards, DeLillo’s fiction has been heading, in a sense, towards that threshold, and towards those trousers, and the range of its struggle towards

The work of death 177 expression, disobedience, dissent – the very wavelength of the prose – has been determined in large part by a disavowal of and longing for the millennial, apocalyptic, orgasmic moment at which the ecstatic breach in the self might be closed, the moment at which one might come together with oneself. From Bell’s prodigal recklessness in Americana, and from Billy Twillig’s urge towards boundless intellectual flight in Ratner’s Star, to James Axton’s struggle towards himself in The Names, and Oswald’s crashing through the dark of his unlived future in a subway train at the opening of Libra, DeLillo’s novels have thrown themselves into the night, towards the shrouded place from which they come, and towards which they cannot but head. DeLillo’s narrators have flung themselves blindly into the dark, full of refusal and of anarchic spirit, resisting the historical current that flows so relentlessly towards the completed American self, defying the paternal figure that they nevertheless accept and obey, filled with a dark and troubling and hidden desire for the mother who stands in league with the father, but who promises also the most delirious, corrupt and forbidden transgression of his law, and of the law of history. From Americana to Libra, then, DeLillo’s novels have angled themselves towards and against the millennial apocalypse, as the moment that brings both completeness, judgement, reconciliation, and an extinction of the transgressive, desiring, resisting spirit. But from the very first moments of Underworld there is a sense that the deferral of the apocalyptic moment is over. If, in Mao II, the arrival of the millennial future is discovered in a kind of anaemic flattening out of history, then in Underworld, the apocalypse announces its arrival through an opposite sense of deep completion. The opening half-line of this epic novel speaks of this completion. It summons an endedness, a profound morbidity which reaches across its vast narrative sweep, from beginning to end, and which sucks the entire work into its apocalyptic jurisdiction. The narrator begins with the extraordinary assertion that ‘He speaks in your voice, American’ (U 11). With the thunderclap of this opening half-line, it is almost possible to hear the angel of history, blowing her trumpet. If, throughout DeLillo’s work, the apocalyptic moment has always been shadowed by the historical catastrophe at which the post-cold war American state achieves a global reach, then this opening assertion – this naked Americanisation of your voice and of my voice, the levelling of all the unguessable singularities and flaws and nuances that make up the sonic and graphic texture of accent, of signature, of character – this extraordinarily violent assertion proclaims the coming of the apocalypse and the founding of an unimpeachable, unboundaried America. J. Edgar Hoover reflects, midway through the novel, that with the development of nuclear weaponry, it is the state, rather than any divine power, that ‘control[s] the means of apocalypse’, the state that becomes the ‘godhead of Annihilation and Ruin’ (U 563). The casual and brutal colonisation of a billion voices with which Underworld begins is an expression of this control, a demonstration of the triumph of a global American power which is also a vast American death.

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With this opening performance of a triumphant America, so much of the dissenting energy that has coursed through DeLillo’s oeuvre finds itself domesticated, brought into line, laid to rest in the peace with which the novel ends (U 827). For the sculptor and artist Klara Sax, the end of the cold war brings down the boundaries that had allowed for the very possibility of a struggle between opposing forces. It was the cold war, she says, that had allowed her generation ‘to measure hope’, and ‘to measure destruction’. With the triumph of American capital, she goes on, the ‘balance of power and the balance of terror seem to be undone, unstuck’ (U 76). Glancing backwards to Mao II, Klara suggests that with the globalisation of American power, ‘things have no limits now. Money has no limits now’ (U 76). With this surging of American capital through limits, and over boundaries, all of the other forms of political, personal, historical and erotic dissent and transgression become recalibrated, rebalanced. In DeLillo’s oeuvre, the relation between dialectical opposites – between narrator and character, between east and west – has taken place across an intervening boundary or obstacle. The oedipal desire which torments Bell in Americana, for example, acts for him as a kind of block; an unnamed and almost unthought obstacle which sets him against his older self, which prevents him from taking up his place in the family romance, the ordained order, the capitalist economy. The confusion that this desire wreaks in him means that ‘nothing connected’ (A 196); it condemns him to an inarticulable ‘tension’ and ‘restlessness’. In the stumbling and unfulfilled sexual encounter that Bell finally has with his mother in the family kitchen – and which he seeks later to perfect in film and in prose – he feels the ‘tightness’ of this repressed longing ‘beginning to yield to the promise of a fantastic release’ (A 196). This release is never achieved in Americana, but from this moment on DeLillo’s fiction has been driven by the promise of a transgressive freedom from erotic constraint, just as it has been violently shaped by the persistence of such constraints. The desire to enter into an unboundaried freedom has been balanced, in DeLillo, against the forces that hem desire in, that control and position the desiring spirit. From the very beginning of Underworld, however, there is a sense that the constraints against which DeLillo’s narrators have struggled have been lifted, as if Underworld enters into a kind of reconciliation, as if there is no longer a struggle or a contradiction between the desiring self, and the patriarchal order. Nick Shay, a kind of David Bell who looks backwards rather than forwards – who has already become his own father – seems to call through the decades to his pre-canonical incarnation at the opening of Underworld, when he describes the reconciliation of his own oedipal crisis, on the birth of his first granddaughter. In a paragraph which resolves itself fully only when read in a dialogue with Bell’s obsessive craving, Shay says that on the birth of the baby girl he felt a ‘soft joy settle in my chest’: Or a solace, maybe, an easing of some perennial clutch or grab, some taint of malehood. All these women now, from my mother in her pale

The work of death 179 green room to this raw arrival kicking in mortal fret, all gathered near the chimneypiece. It was a kindness that the child should be a girl. I felt an expansive ease, an unthrobbing of some knot in my body. (U 120) The unthrobbing of this knot in Shay’s body is a draining of a sexual and aesthetic tension that has stretched across three decades of prose. Bell imagines, as he approaches orgasm in his mother’s arms, that inside his mother’s body was ‘something splintered and bright, something that might have been left by the spiral passage of my own body’ (A 196). The sexual release that Bell feels coming here is also a second birth, another ripping of oneself through the body of the mother. It is a birth into transgressive freedom that, like Christ’s birth at the beginning of the first millennium, signals the ‘beginning of time’ (A 197). Bell’s birth into oedipal disobedience, however, is stilled by the approach of the father. It remains knotted, furled, unborn, until this moment in Underworld, this unthrobbing, this easing of the ‘clutch or grab’ of oedipal desire, and of paternal censure. With his mother stashed safely and finally in the pale green spare room, with her infant likeness, filtered through three generations, ‘naked in her mother’s arms, swimming in a ribbon of light’ (U 120), with the family gathered at the chimneypiece, Shay finally experiences an unknotting, not through a defiance of the father, not in the dark of poetic transgression and mad desire, but in the light, in homeliness, in the discovery of his own paternal, American voice. This birth, coming not at the beginning but at the end of time, at the death of the second millennium, is a birth into death, into the deathliness of a final reconciliation with self. This personal reconciliation, this draining of tension, of desire, and of opposition at the opening of the novel, finds its political echo at the novel’s close. In the epilogue to Underworld, Nick visits a nuclear testing ground in Kazakhstan, once the site of a fierce resistance to US capitalism, but now, in the late 1990s, up for sale to the USA as landfill, as ground upon which to dump American waste. As Nick surveys the wreckage of the Soviet nuclear programme, written on the scarred Kazakh landscape, he ‘begins to feel something drain out of me. Some old opposition, a capacity to resist’ (U 801). This movement in Underworld towards death, reconciliation and final judgement – in terms of the trajectory of Shay’s life, of DeLillo’s oeuvre, and in relation to the passage of world history towards an American apocalypse – finds a visual accompaniment and articulation in Pieter Bruegel’s 1562 painting, The Triumph of Death.5 This painting, which is reproduced in the October 1, 1951 issue of Life magazine, and in which version it catches the attention of a fictional J. Edgar Hoover in the prologue to Underworld, haunts the novel, and infects it with its epic morbidity. The painting makes an oblique appearance earlier in DeLillo’s oeuvre, in Mao II, where a photograph of bodies crushed against a fence during the Hillsborough disaster in Sheffield catches the gesture of a detail from Bruegel’s work (M 17) (see Figure 4). In

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DeLillo’s earlier novel, this fleeting, shadowy glimpse of the medieval image hiding beneath the photographic surface – the ‘crowded twisted vision of a rush to death as only a master of the age could paint it’ (M 34) – remains implicit, almost not there. The novel’s dedication to surface, and to the surface of modernity, is such that the underimage can scarcely rise to the pixelated page. But in Underworld, a novel which seeks to plumb the depths of the culture, to bring what is hidden into the light, Bruegel’s painting surfaces everywhere, offering what amounts to a visual scaffolding, a way of seeing the novel’s bones. As the bodily frame of the sculpted Greek Kouroi offers an underlying shape upon which gesture and attitude is modelled in The Names (see Figure 3), so, in Underworld, Bruegel’s painting – its teeming landscape of suffering and endless death – catches at every gesture in the novel, as if the painting too is climbing skeletally from under the ground, rising to the surface to claim DeLillo’s novel, to return it to a medieval conception of apocalyptic terror. As the face of the dead Esmerelda miraculously reveals itself at the close of the novel – as an underimage that lies beneath a billboard photograph advertising orange juice, transforming a marker of banal multinational capital into a sign of divine redemption – so the Bruegel pushes up to the surface throughout the novel, revealing the apocalyptic dimensions that lie latent in the quotidian. The influence of the painting is particularly pervasive in the prologue to Underworld, which of course is named after the work, and which takes place, in another echo of the opening of Mao II, in the performative arena of a sports stadium. As Hoover stands in the Polo Grounds with the painting in his hands, the teeming crowds celebrating the Giants’ victory are drawn into the plane of the painting, infected with its spirit. The ‘fans pressed together at the clubhouse steps chanting the players’ names’ (U 51), the fans ‘with their hands in the air, holding in their brains’ (U 46), the ‘phalanx of men’ carrying Thomson on their shoulders (U 47), the fans dangling from high walls above the eddying crowd (U 54), they are all drawn into the painting’s field of influence and of reference, coaxed to reveal their hidden affinity with Bruegel’s vision of swarming death. But whilst this juxtaposition or correspondence between the painting and the novel is blatant here, in the prologue, it stretches out right across the novel. Hoover does not see the painting manifested only in the game that is going on around him, in the feverish response to Branca’s ‘shot heard around the world’, but he also makes the connection between the medieval image and the other global shot that inaugurates the narrative – the Soviet test shot that takes place on October 3, 1951, in Kazakhstan. As Hoover gazes at the painting, he ‘thinks of a lonely tower standing on the Kazakh Test Site, the tower armed with the bomb, and he can almost hear the wind blowing across the Central Asian steppes’ (U 50). This sense that Bruegel makes a deathly link between the USA and the Soviets, between east and west, between us and them, reaches not only beyond the boundaries of the US nation state, out to the Kazakh plain where ‘the enemy lives in long coats and fur caps, speaking that old

The work of death 181 weighted language of theirs, liturgical and grave’ (U 50). It reaches also across the novel, from the 1950s to the 1990s, to that moment in the epilogue at which Nick stands, gazing at the blasted Asian landscape, reflecting on the triumph of American capital, and the failure of the urge towards resistance and opposition. And if the painting brings the beginning and the ending into its frame of reference, its millennial completion, then it offers also to absorb the novel’s middle, to produce a form and a shape in which the postwar decades can be given a final expression. Clyde Tolson suggests that Hoover has ‘postcards, magazine pages, framed reproductions and enlarged details’ (U 574) of the painting hanging in his basement, with all the other state secrets, and it is as if this armoury of images drawn from the painting works as a blueprint for the novel, just as Nicholas Branch’s CIA report offers a scaffolding to Libra. When a character from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin is drawn into the narrative of Underworld – a ‘mother clutching weakly at her waist’ (U 425) – the gesture calls to one of those enlarged details from Bruegel’s painting; or when the ‘whole sky is filthy with flung debris’ in Marvin Lundy’s narrative of his quest for the Thomson’s baseball (U 176); or when a fleeing crowd in a Japanese horror movie includes a ‘mother with a baby and a woman with bulging breasts and a man with his arms flung up to shield him from some terror in the sky’ (U 388); or when subway passengers are evacuated out of tunnels into the stalled New York traffic, causing the watching Sister Edgar to reflect that ‘these are the dead who will come out of the earth to lash and cudgel the living’ (U 249); or when the mother of the murdered Esmerelda ‘collapses with flung arms’ when the face of her dead child appears on an advertising hoarding (U 823); or when protesters at Truman Capote’s black and white party, dressed in monks’ cowls and medieval wimples and executioners’ hoods, in raven and skull masks, take control of the dance floor and perform a slow, stately and silent pavane, a dance of measured death (U 575–576). Again and again and again, the painting forces itself up to the surface, bringing with it the savour of last things, of sacred awe, its gestures and images harmonising with the voice of the peripatetic street preacher whose endless sermon echoes gravely throughout the novel, warning us, with Matthew, that ‘nobody knows the day or the hour’ (U 140, 352, 628), that the Revelation is upon us.6 If The Triumph of Death extends, in this way, across the narrative, lending the novel a medieval deathly hue, however, then another, somewhat different painting by Bruegel has a similar kind of permeating presence. This second painting makes an explicit appearance only towards the end of the novel, in the Joycean section entitled ‘Arrangement in Gray and Black’. As Albert Bronzini, a post-war Bloom, wanders flaneurishly around New York, watching children at play in the streets, he finds himself meditating on Bruegel’s painting, Children’s Games (1560), a work which depicts a town entirely given over to teeming gangs of playing children, an infant occupation which transforms the stately thoroughfares and civic buildings into playthings, into mere toys which have not yet realised their unseriousness.7 In its emphasis on youth

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and frivolity – in its comic juxtaposition of sombre municipal life with the aimlessly pleasurable gaming of the children – this painting seems to make a stark contrast to the moral gravity of The Triumph of Death, painted two years later. Indeed, when Albert discusses the painting with the Jesuit Father Paulus, this contrast is implicitly invoked. Paulus sees in the painting an affirmation of the innocence and the incorruptibility of youth. The painting is four hundred years old, he says, but the games the children are playing are ‘games we played ourselves. Games still played today’ (U 673). The painting gives us a glimpse of a kind of infant subculture which is immune to the progress of history, which remains newborn, unchanging, a timeless moral constant founded on leapfrog and follow-the-leader. For Paulus, the children in the painting ‘sidestep time, as it were, and the ravages of progress. I think they operate in another time scheme altogether’ (U 673). They belong to a youthful country in which ‘time as we know it had not yet come into being’ (U 673). But if Paulus reads the painting as a preservation of the possibilities of youth, which pits birth and innocence against death and corruption, elsewhere in the novel this contrast between Bruegel’s two paintings seems less certain. When Bronzini discusses the painting with his then wife Klara Sax, her response is directly opposed to that of Paulus. ‘I don’t know what art history says about this painting’, she says: But I say it’s not that different from the other famous Bruegel, armies of death marching across the landscape. The children are fat, backward, a little sinister to me. It’s some kind of menace, some folly. Kinderspielen. They look like dwarves doing something awful. (U 682) Klara’s assumption that children are not proof against corruption, but already corrupted, already sinister, abject carriers of death, might have to do with her own consciousness of ‘doing something awful’. At the time that she makes this comment, of course, she is in the throes of an affair with Nick Shay, who is placed in relation to her as a child – a school pupil of her husband’s – and even as a son. But the link that Klara establishes here between Children’s Games and The Triumph of Death extends far beyond her own failure to find redemption from history and from judgement in the figure of the child, and points towards the novel’s profoundly apocalyptic sense of an underlying connectedness between birth and death, innocence and corruption, redemption and damnation. Both for Klara and for Bronzini, Bruegel’s gaming children are not the opposite of those sinners who encounter death on judgement day, but are rather deeply connected with them. The game of ‘it’, which is being played in multiple forms in Bruegel’s painting, leads Bronzini to a reflection on the haunted, pestilential nature of children’s games. There is a ‘spectral’ quality to the game of ‘it’, Bronzini thinks, to the stigmatising, Shakespearian term itself, which ‘sees through the rhymes and nonsense words’ of childhood, ‘past the hidings and seekings and pretendings

The work of death 183 to something old and dank, some medieval awe that crawls beneath the midnight skin’ (U 678). Both Bruegel’s newly dead and his newly born occupy some dank, ancient pocket of continuous time just beneath the surface of history, beneath the surface of the novel, which waits only for judgement day, for the imminent apocalypse, to reveal itself. As the birth of Shay’s granddaughter produces a calmly joyous completion that is also an acceptance of death, so Bruegel’s pair of paintings are organised around a secret identity between the beginning and end of life, between the beginning and the end of history, an identity which is ciphered in ritual, in medieval awe. This hidden identity that Klara and Albert intuit between the two paintings infuses the novel, producing a pregnant, apocalyptic continuousness that lies just beneath the skin. Children’s Games, in fact, reaches across the novel, in much the same way as The Triumph of Death, offering itself as another pervasive, medieval underimage. It may be that the tone and measure of the prologue is dominated by The Triumph of Death, but the prologue is organised, nevertheless, around a baseball game. The frenzied marching towards death in the stadium is also a kind of frenzied game. The stadium doubles as the site upon which history is made – the shot heard around the world – and as a playground, upon which, as in Bruegel, the games have swollen out of proportion. And this doubling grows as the novel develops, as the rolling of history towards catastrophe, towards the globalisation of capital, is accompanied by the playing of children’s games – of shots on knucks, hopscotch and skelly, of ringolovio, of hide and seek – and the telling of children’s jokes. So the joke told by a sound engineer in the prologue, about Speedy Gonzalez, the fastest lover een Meyheeko (U 34–35), travels across the whole wheeling terrain of the novel – transmitted in that mysterious way that jokes are passed on in the playground, bleeding through generations and across borders, unchanged and unauthored – to be repeated in the epilogue, in Kazakhstan (U 794). And as we get to the Kazakh plain, at the novel’s close, as the Russian businessman Viktor takes Nick and Brian Glassic to see the children dying from their exposure to Soviet weaponry, we find that the children are ‘playing a game in the dirt’ (U 802). In a ritualised, Bruegelesque gesture that is heavy with pestilential cultural memory, the irradiated children are playing, against the enormous horizon, against the blasted, apocalyptic landscape: ‘the kids are playing follow the leader. A boy falls down, gets up. They all fall down, get up’ (U 802). As the novel draws to its final paragraph, this equivalence between birth and death, between children’s games and the triumph of death, reaches its climax. The omnipotent American voice that opens the novel emerges again, at its close, in the mouths of playing children, those for whom ‘time as we know it has not yet come into being’: And you can glance out the window for a moment, distracted by the sound of small kids playing a made-up game in a neighbour’s yard, some

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The voice of the playing children here – that voice which is yours and mine, which speaks inclusively of beginnings and endings and of final revelations – is the voice of apocalypse, the voice of aged youth and infant death, the voice of a triumphant America. In reaching across the scope of the novel, then, Bruegel’s two paintings offer a frame for the coming together not only of Underworld, but also of DeLillo’s oeuvre as a whole. Their power to produce a continuous history – a looping, self-referring, Möbius-like structure which recalls the Viconian, cyclic movement of Finnegans Wake – mirrors the cohering work of the Thomson baseball, which travels throughout the novel, accreting a pearly narrative homogeneity around its neat, spherical density.8 If the Bruegel paintings offer themselves as collapsible bookends, as beginnings and endings which turn out to be both oppositional and tautologous, then the path of the baseball through the historical terrain of the novel provides a similar kind of service. The novel’s tracking of the baseball back through the decades, from the 1990s to the 1950s, is also a tracking back through the ground of DeLillo’s oeuvre, past the moment when Bell sets out on his Homero-Joycean voyage, towards the immediate post-war that is the starting point for so much of DeLillo’s fiction. To follow the path of the baseball is to excavate DeLillo’s decades, to bring all of those historical elements of which his oeuvre is composed into the light. But this tracking back is also a tracking forward towards millennial revelation, dragging the transgressive Bell towards his older incarnation – a double movement which again exposes the underlying sameness between beginnings and endings, and which demonstrates, as Karl Kraus puts it, that the ‘origin is the goal’.9 Marvin Lundy, the fanatical biographer of the baseball, himself recognises the bidirectional elements of the ball’s flight. ‘Strange,’ he thinks, ‘how he was compiling a record of the object’s recent forward motion whilst simultaneously tracking it backwards to the distant past’ (U 318). The ‘long arching journey of the baseball’ (U 318) is one which, in the words of Lundy’s wife Eleanor, offers to ‘finish the story’, to travel in two directions, to find the ending in the beginning (U 314). Identifying and articulating its complete lineage, right back to those first moments after Thomson struck the ball, is the only way ‘to be sure how the story ends’ (U 314), just as a complete understanding of the universe relies on our tracing its history back to the nano-moment of the big bang. It is perhaps this capacity of the baseball to yield up historical secrets that makes it so valuable to Nick Shay. Part of Shay’s disavowal of his oedipally haunted youth – his childhood either as Shay or as the young Bell – is his insistence on his ability to bring history and desire and consciousness into expression. He asserts, at the opening of the novel, that he ‘lived responsibly in the real’, that he

The work of death 185 ‘didn’t accept this business of life as a fiction’. Angling himself against the obsession, in DeLillo’s fiction, with the latent promise of lost or unrecoverable histories, Nick insists that ‘history was not a matter of missing moments on the tape’. ‘I believed we could know what was happening to us’, he goes on. ‘We were not excluded from our own lives. That is not my head on someone else’s body in the photograph that’s introduced as evidence’. History, he insists, is a ‘single narrative sweep, not ten thousand wisps of disinformation’ (U 82). The recovery of the ball testifies to this narratability of history, its unearthability. But if the path of the baseball offers to bring DeLillo’s decades into a kind of expression – to articulate the passage from the 1950s to the 1990s – then a verbal play on the ‘homer’ that the ball commemorates offers to extend its recuperative power. Through reference to another painting, Rembrandt’s miraculous work Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer (1653),10 the baseball reaches back, in a gesture which recalls the scope of Ratner’s Star, to the very beginnings of western civilisation. ‘Marian caught me once looking at the ball,’ Nick says: I was standing at the bookshelves with the ball in my hand and she thought it was like Hamlet gazing on Yorick’s skull, or maybe Aristotle, even better she said, contemplating the bust of Homer. That was nice, we thought. Rembrandt’s Homer and Thomson’s homer. We smiled at that. (U 132) If Nick’s gesture as he stands holding the ball might suggest a glancing reference to Bruegel through Shakespeare – Yorick’s skull, of course, leads Hamlet to a reflection on the morbid deathliness of children’s games11 – the overriding reference here is to Rembrandt, and to the possibility of historical cultural transmission suggested both by the baseball, and by Rembrandt’s Aristotle. The beauty of Rembrandt’s painting lies partly in the channel of light that it cuts from Homer through Aristotle to Rembrandt, and to us. The liquid, amber light of the painting offers to make history itself lambent and clear, to reach across form and shadow and medium, to bring the epic poetry of Homer, the stone of the sculpted bust, the philosophy of Aristotle, the culture of Ancient Greece and of post-Renaissance Europe, into the texture of the oil on the canvas. It is in this light that Nick seeks to stand, in this rich light that his naked granddaughter swims, as his family gathers near him at his chimneypiece. It is this Rembrandt light that Nick feels pouring through him on his mother’s death. ‘When my mother died,’ Nick says at the novel’s close, ‘I felt expanded, slowly, durably over time. I felt suffused with her truth, spread through, as with water, color or light’ (U 804). If, for David Bell, the agonies of poetic expression and of baulked oedipal desire condemn him to a restlessness in which ‘nothing connected’, then it is in the light of this reclaimed, apocalyptic history – in which the mother ‘has become part of me now’ (U 804) – that Nick is able to see that ‘everything

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is connected’; that birth opens onto death, that the ancients are in communication with the moderns, that we all speak, essentially, with the same voice, under the glimmerglass sky. If Underworld is a novel of apocalypse, however, if it is a novel which celebrates and witnesses the triumph of death, the arrival of the millennial moment, it is nevertheless the case that the currents which drive the novel towards such a revelatory moment of final becoming produce, also, a form of resistance to historical closure, a denial of the power of the interpellating, homogenising American voice. The very process of apocalyptic homogenisation in Underworld creates its own counterprocess, a kind of resistance to apocalyptic closure that is born out of the novel’s experience of ecstasy. The movement towards apocalypse, towards the orgasmic moment of a second and final coming, produces not simply the ecstasy of transcendent awe, the Bruegelesque ecstasy of the flung arms, but it also produces the ecstasy of a kind of doubling of self, a being-beside-oneself that undoes the very movement towards orgasmic unity that gave rise to it. In Underworld, ecstasy is a function of apocalypse, its shadow and its underimage. Even that extraordinary opening half-line – ‘He speaks in your voice, American’ – suggests and enacts this doubleness. The capacity of this opening address to position us all, the very magnitude of its global sweep, summons the dissent and difference which it eradicates. Is there a reader who is able fully to answer this call, a reader whose voice is reducible or equal to the status of being ‘American’? It is not just the European or the African, the Australian or the Asian reader that finds him or herself misrecognised in this (masculine) interpellation, but surely the American reader too; all readers whose voices contain elements that are not assimilable to the global national identity must find themselves set apart from the community that this opening conjures, or imagines. In enacting the power of the American voice to absorb all voices, to speak for everyone in an apocalyptic inclusiveness, the opening of Underworld evokes the mechanics of glossolalia, of speaking in tongues, that recurs repeatedly in DeLillo’s fiction. As Nathaniel Hawthorne suggests in The Scarlet Letter, glossolalia ‘symboliz[es], it would seem, not the power of speech in foreign and unknown languages, but that of addressing the whole human brotherhood in the heart’s native language’.12 Hawthorne draws here, as David Cowart points out, on Milton’s discovery of a ‘native language’ that underlies the ‘jangling noise of words unknown’13 – the multicultural noise that God inflicts on humanity as a punishment for sin. The opening of Underworld suggests that the arrival of the American empire has returned us at last to this native language, given us a new and ancient voice that can contain all language, that can elide all cultural difference. But glossolalia tends, in DeLillo, not to offer us such an all inclusive voice. Rather it condemns us to a form of deep and fearful estrangement, a profoundly unsettling uncanniness that sets one aside from oneself, that, despite Nick’s denial of such an ecstatic condition, does exclude us from our own lives (U 82). Owen Bradermas is haunted, in The Names, by the prospect of speaking in tongues,

The work of death 187 of finding Milton’s and Hawthorne’s ‘native language’ readymade within himself. Invoking the language of capitalist profit, as well as of nuclear weaponry, Owen wants nothing more than to ‘yield’ to this voice, to this spirit (N 305). In Tap’s fictional account of Owen’s struggle to be born into this language, he insists that Owen ‘wanted to yeeld. This is the point! There was nothing in the world he wanted than to yeeld totally, to go across to them, to speak as they were speaking’ (N 336). But Owen finds that he ‘could not speak as the others did. Could not understand what they were saying’ (N 284). The multiplicity that glossolalia must necessarily perform in order to work towards oneness and unity takes Owen away from himself. It abandons him to foreignness, to the ‘jangling noise of words unknown’, rather than delivering him from it. This sense that the foreign inhabits the native, that the unhomely resides within the homely, spreads out across the novel. It is as if the entire narrative wheels away from that opening half-line, discovering, despite itself, all those forms of cultural experience and memory that cannot be articulated by an American voice, that remain unknown, untranslatable, unnameable. The pressure that the novel exerts in its bid to find a collective identity yields not simply a shining American product, but also an inassimilable, unAmerican waste product. Even the joke that spans the novel – that attests to its capacity for a transcultural, transhistorical sense of rhythm, meaning, and humour – speaks also of the limits of translation, carrying the frisson of cultural and historical difference that is preserved in post-Babelian language. The joke about Speedy Gonzalez’ extraordinary rapidity as a lover is already, in the prologue to the novel, an accented joke, laden with a cultural memory that might elude anything as pancontinental as ‘American’ expression. It is already a ‘joke in somebody else’s voice’ (U 217). Speedy is, of course, the fastest lover een Meyheeko (U 34); the texture of the joke, the quality of its punchline, is inseparable, in this first telling, from the accent in which it is told, and from the specific relations between the USA and Central America which condition and inform it. When the joke’s unfortunate US honeymooner finds that he has inadvertently ravished Speedy with his middle finger – the finger with which he had sought to guard his new wife’s genitals against the Mexican’s unwanted attentions – Speedy’s response draws much of its humour and its content from its accent, its stereotyped foreignness. ‘Sen-yor-or,’ he says, ‘you got your finger up my a-ass’ (U 35). It is Speedy’s failure here to speak in an American voice that makes the joke work. The punchline relies on the rich country’s fear of invasion by those they oppress – those fleet, wily, sex crazed men who slide unseen into ‘our’ country and take ‘our women’ – and Speedy’s accent carries an ambivalence that both provokes and seeks to alleviate this fear. Homi Bhabha argues that the derogatory stereotype marks the porous boundary between the powerful and the oppressed – articulating a fear of the potent outsider’s capacity to corrupt the homeland whilst transforming this fear into a mockery which reduces the stereotyped other to a clownish buffoon14 – and Speedy’s Mexican English performs precisely such

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a double manoeuvre. Speedy’s fate, of course, is to be anally raped – his alarming sexual prowess can be admitted only as a function of his sexual humiliation – and in one sense Speedy’s accent is a corollary to this rape. The respectful address and the chirpy delivery suggest that Speedy is glad to have an American finger up his ass, that he is eager to accept his debasement at the hands of his powerful neighbour. But the stereotyped accent, which is deployed as a marker of his powerlessness and abject humility, is also one which carries a threat and an otherness, a resistance to the controlling power of the American voice that keeps Speedy’s subversive sexual threat alive, and that destabilises the very boundary of the culture. His breezy unconcern at the probing American digit is a characteristic of his otherness, of his immunity to the agreed heterosexual cultural protocol that makes him as dangerously uncontainable as his capacity to copulate with such uncanny pace and accuracy. But if this disjunctive cultural untranslatability is at work in the first telling of the joke, then it is much more marked when it resurfaces in Kazakhstan at the end of the novel. When Nick hears the joke being told in Russian to a ‘huddle of burly men’ (he is ‘startled’, he says, ‘to hear the name Speedy Gonzalez’ mixed into the Russian narration) his and our initial startlement is perhaps at the homogeneity of post-cold war global culture. The broadcasting range of Looney Tunes is such that we do indeed all speak with the same voice. As Nick goes on to describe the scene, this sense is maintained of an uncanny mutual recognition-across-difference, of an extraordinary compatibility between post-Soviet Russia and the USA: The joke teller is in uniform, his middle finger extended skyward, his face going ruddy as the plot winds down. He does the punch line very well, speaking the words to his lifted finger, and the line comes back to me as he does it in Russian – back in English, of course, after so many years. The huddled men nod and rock, sending plosive noises from their moon jowls. (U 794) If this little scene is about the translatability and universality of American culture, however, what is perhaps most striking about it in the end is not the capacity of the joke to connect America and Russia, but its marking of their differences, their separateness. The uncanniness of the moment might be triggered by the phenomenon of recognition, but, as with any uncanny experience, its overwhelming quality is one of estrangement, of alienation. The middle finger raised in the air is a gesture which is freighted with untranslatability. It summons the shared referent – Speedy’s ass – but only to mark its spectral absence. Nick hears the joke rolling along in his head in (Mexican, American) English as it is told in (accented?) Russian, and this double, triple, quadruple telling shatters the possibility of a shared understanding of the joke. The meaning of Speedy’s sorry impalement on that

The work of death 189 raised Kazakh middle finger is unguessable to Nick. In drawing in such a startlingly intimate way on American cultural memory, the retelling of the joke makes the familiar unfamiliar, places the culture beside itself. It inhabits the American voice only to rework it, to refashion it, to make it strange and unknown to itself. It is a joke in somebody else’s voice. The mechanics of Underworld as a whole are tuned in such a way that this contradiction in the novel between the inclusive and the diasporic, the unified and the multiple, between the homogeneous and the heterogeneous, becomes its guiding structural principle; the bald antinomy that shapes it, that drives it, and in some senses cancels it out. Throughout the novel, it is the massiveness of the drive towards the founding of an American voice that leads to the reassertion of difference; the quest for a single narrative sweep that opens onto the endlessly proliferating micro-narratives, Nick’s ten thousand wisps of disinformation. As Hoover reflects, somewhat ruefully, the voice of the dominant power has ‘always’ been accompanied by what he thinks of as an ‘undervoice’; a dangerous vocal undertow which is difficult to separate from the official language, but which has the power to corrupt it, to sweep it away. ‘Through the batted century of world wars and massive violence by other means,’ Edgar thinks, ‘there had always been an undervoice that spoke through the cannon fire and the ack-ack and that sometimes grew strong enough to merge with the battle sounds’ (U 563). This undervoice is both public and private, personal and political. It finds itself expressed in political insurgency, as well as in the urge towards sexual dissidence. Echoing Owen’s ambivalent desire to ‘yield’ to glossolalia, to ‘seal the old language and loose the new’ (N 306, 336), Edgar says to his partner Tolson – with whom he has an unconsummated homoerotic relationship – that ‘once you yield to random sexual urges, you want to see everything come loose’ (U 564). Hoover sees his devotion to omnipotent American power and to the dominant American voice as a means of repressing his urge towards anarchic desire. His fanatical need to control the secret behaviour of an entire American generation is read, in the novel, as a function of his repressed homosexuality. But the novel’s machinery, its very ‘wheel-work’ (U 45), reveals, again and again, that the urge towards centralised control itself produces the ecstatic and the transgressive. The street preacher whose deep-timbred biblical warning brushes against virtually every major character in the novel demonstrates this persistence of the transgressive within the movement towards apocalyptic conformity. ‘Nobody knows the day or the hour’, he intones, to Manx Martin, to Cotter Martin, to Rosemary Shay, to Albert Bronzini, gathering together the voices of the novel, with the voice of Matthew’s gospel, in a rush towards the end of time. But even this voice, which speaks which such urgency and biblical authority of the imminence of final judgement, is subject to a kind of undoing, an unfolding into the undercurrent that flows through the novel towards the profane, the abject, the unimagined, the anarchic. Another of the characters who encounters the preacher on the streets of New York is

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Lenny Bruce, the sick, underground comic who is an embodiment of everything that Hoover works to repress and to eradicate. In one of Lenny’s monologues, he does a number about the preacher standing on a corner, saying that ‘nobody knows the day or the hour’ (U 628). Lenny’s response to the preacher testifies to the infectious power of the apocalyptic spirit, its capacity to catch one up in its slipstream. ‘I stand there listening’, Lenny says, ‘and in some funny way I hear myself, all right, or see myself ’. The congregational power of the voice, and of its message, is such that Lenny can’t separate himself from it, he ‘can’t stop doing the voice’. He finds himself, a rich white atheist Jew, mirrored in the voice of the poor, black preacher quoting the New Testament, as if the preacher speaks in a voice which offers to join all of the diverse currents out of which American culture is made. But this process of gathering is also one that relentlessly disperses, that hybridises, that sets the voice against itself. ‘It was as if the voice had been crossed with his own’, Lenny thinks: It was as if cross voices were unavoidable, whether you knew it or not, whether you liked it or not, and maybe this old black man spoke in Lenny’s voice at times, alone, unknowing, in his room, on some level, hearing the bandy scales in his head, the push and shove of Lenny’s own fluted music, and Lenny did the old man’s, spoke in the old man’s, unavoidably. (U 628) Whilst this passage echoes the opening of the novel – Lenny speaks in the preacher’s voice, as ‘he’ speaks in ‘yours’ – it pushes in the opposite direction to that first half-line. There is no ‘American’ community here that might offer to reconcile Lenny’s voice with the preacher’s, that might offer to make homely the unhomeliness of this ecstatic encounter between them. Cross voices – hybridised, estranged voices – are unavoidable, even as they speak of the imminence of Revelation, as they prophesy the approach of the day and the hour. To speak in someone else’s voice, here, is not to forge a shared community, but to enter into the secret, withheld vocal rhythms of the other, to find oneself remade and refashioned by the singular ‘push and shove’ of the subaltern voice, the undervoice. As Lenny describes the preacher’s lecturing to his tiny raggedy audience on the windswept street, he makes explicit this sense that his sermon conjures a doubling of the American voice itself, that it gives a kind of spectral articulation to a national unconscious that cannot be spoken by the official voice of the union. The preacher and his three parishioners – ‘these three lost people of the streets, these wastelings of the lost world’ – belong, Lenny thinks, to ‘the lost country that exists right here in America’ (U 628). As Klara finds that the Bronx she grew up in, that was her home and hearth, has become ‘like a newsreel of some factional war in a remote province’ – a devastated war zone that is ‘totally spooked by otherness’ (U 395) – so here, the very intimate texture of one’s own voice is inhabited by a foreignness, an otherness, which makes it lost to itself.

The work of death 191 It is in the central narrative of Nick’s Bildungsromanic progress towards peace and reconciliation that this working contradiction between belonging and alienation makes itself felt most forcefully. The great historical project of the novel, its recuperative rolling back through the decades, and through DeLillo’s oeuvre, is also a biographical recuperation, the gathering of a single life into that moment of completion by the family hearth, with the granddaughter swimming naked in what David Bell thinks of as ‘timeless light’ (A 346). Nick’s very name, Shay, with its phonic reference to the French chez, gestures towards this domestication of a life, this Homeric returning home of and to oneself. But, of course, the Proustian wheeling mechanism which returns Nick to himself, preserved in the aspic of regained time, is also one which radically separates him from himself, places him beside himself. The name Shay calls through the French chez, to the German heimlich, meaning homely. Heimlich denotes, of course, precisely the kind of safe, contained domesticity that Nick finds by the chimneypiece; but it denotes also, by a quirk of the German language, the very opposite sense, that of the unsafe, the unfamiliar, the frightening, the uncanny. As Freud comments in his famous essay on the unheimlich, ‘heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich’.15 ‘On the one hand’, he explains, the word denotes ‘what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight’, that which is ‘eerie, weird, arousing gruesome fear’.16 Nick’s relationship with his surname carries a similar kind of ambivalence. If, for Freud, homeliness itself is ‘spooked by otherness’, haunted by its own diabolical double, its tautological opposite, then Nick’s name disguises his repressed past, his own unAmerican identity that he shares with his absent Italian father, Jimmy Costanza. When Nick’s brother Matt propounds his theory – his ‘endless premise’ – that their father was ‘living somewhere in Southern California under the usual assumed name’ (U 275), Nick insists that ‘Jimmy was dead under his own name. We were the ones with assumed names’ (U 276). The name Shay, and the homeliness that it offers, is always already an assumption, a word-costume borrowed from his mother that Nick puts on like one of those ‘crisp gray suits’ which he wears to his corporate office job in Phoenix Arizona – a city named for the mythical capacity to refashion oneself. This doubleness that is at work in Nick’s name – this sense that the very striving towards recuperation, sanitation and domestic reconciliation carries within it the opposite movement towards the estranged, the hidden, the grotesque – stretches out right across the novel. The very light that suffuses the work, the light that illuminates Nick on his mother’s death, the Rembrandt light that reveals a panhistorical continuity, is a light which carries a darkness within it; a light in which something remains ‘concealed and kept out of sight’. The rolling of the narrative back through Nick’s life works to bring the repressed otherness that he finds within himself into the light – to gain some kind of access to the lost country in which he grew up, and to those shrouded fractions of time in which he made the ambiguous

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decision to shoot George Manza. But of course, by the same token, the urge to recuperate lost time risks casting oneself into the very darkness of the ‘missing moments on the tape’. Nick’s journey backwards into the past (which, L.P. Hartley reminds us, is ‘a foreign country’ where ‘they do things differently’)17 takes him away from himself, towards the alienation, anonymity and darkness of the third person, as surely as it brings him towards himself, towards the homely, timeless light of the first. Indeed, Nick’s desire to speak with his own, American voice, to inhabit fully and cleanly the first person, is countered by an equally powerful desire to yield to the otherness that inhabits him, to give himself to the unheimlich ‘ghosts’ that ‘walk the halls’ (U 810). As joyfully as he accepts his familial role – the reconciliation that is promised by the death of his mother and the birth of his granddaughter – so too he longs for the ecstasy of self-alienation, for the erotic pleasure of abandoning himself to that in history which is unrecoverable. ‘I long for the days of disorder’, he says at the close of the novel, when his love affair with ‘living responsibly in the real’ has become somewhat tarnished, somewhat regretful: This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did things slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself. (U 810) Throughout the novel, as the narrative wheels forward towards American completion, this opposite movement towards the distant, alienated third person is also at work, creating a kind of transgressive, insurgent undercurrent that leads back towards the forbidden and the taboo, towards oedipal transgression and a wilful refusal of the interpellating power of the patriarchal American voice. Just as Oswald feels, in Libra, that ‘the shadow of his own life keeps falling across his path’ (L 133); just as James Axton feels, in The Names, that ‘I could almost see myself, glowing in borrowed light’, that he could hear a ‘voice, my own but outside me, speaking something other than words, comment[ing] somehow on the action’ (N 206); so Nick feels constantly beside himself in his bidirectional passage through the decades, constantly disengaged from his own voice. Employing that troublingly invasive address to the second person with which the novel opens, Nick reflects that there were times when you detached yourself from the steepest breathing, even, and felt a kind of white shadow, a sliding away into a parallel person, someone made of mind-light who seemed to speak for you. (U 553) The further the narrative takes us back towards the dark lights of Nick’s Bronx youth, to those days when, Nick says, ‘I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin’ (U 810), the wider and the deeper the

The work of death 193 gap between these parallel lives becomes. What begins with a ‘breath of estrangement’ (U 300), that gentle breath of difference from self that comes with the merest workings of the memory, becomes, after the epic wheeling narrative of Underworld has levered Nick away from himself and into the third person, a great, yawning, impassable gulf. Deleuze says that the ‘effect of literature upon language’ is to open up this gap, to make language strange to itself. Literature, he says: opens up a kind of foreign language within language, which is neither another language nor a rediscovered patios, but a becoming other of language, a minorisation of this major language, a delirium that carries it off, a witch’s line that escapes the dominant system.18 If Nick’s working forward towards legitimacy and apocalyptic completion is an earnest attempt to learn the major language, to speak in an American voice, a ‘voice faithful to the genre’ (U 104), then this opposite movement towards uncanny estrangement, towards apostatic, ecstatic difference from self, is one that opens language to Deleuzian otherness, that minorises it, that carries it off. It is one which produces, at the heart of the work, a great, dizzying, vertiginous emptiness, a darkness which no light can penetrate, a silent language which can only be spoken in an ‘unworded voice’ (U 234). One name for this great emptiness, of course – a name which, as Samuel Beckett discovers, can only fail to stand in for the unnameable vacuity that it seeks to signify – is death. It happens again and again in DeLillo’s oeuvre that the ecstatic process by which one is removed from oneself, by which one lapses from the faith of self-identity, is a process that opens onto death. As death lies between James Axton and James Axton, as it separates Oswald from Oswald, as it lies between Valparaiso and Valparaiso in DeLillo’s play Valparaiso, so the gulf that opens in Underworld between Nick Shay and Nick Shay is one which contains a death within it. The young Nick that is lodged in his rippling skin in 1950s New York looks through unlived time towards the aged Nick ensconced in the Arizona desert, and the phenomenon that separates them is death, the death that inhabits and destroys history at every moment of its telling, the death that has to be denied or repressed in order to maintain the fiction of history, of continuous time. It is a condition of living in time that, as one heads relentlessly and recklessly towards the ghost of one’s older incarnation, one risks the possibility of death, the death that lies latent in every unlived second. One faces the ‘elemental truth’ that ‘every breath you take has two possible endings’ (U 160). To look backwards at oneself across lived time, to seek to recuperate or to regain one’s past, is to look across that deathly terrain, to look across the landscape of history that is scarred with all of those undied deaths that separate us from ourselves, and that make a profound mystery out of the phenomenon of the persistent self. The discovery that this emptiness at the heart of the novel contains nothing but darkness and death might threaten to stall the bidirectional

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movement of the narrative. To suggest that the ecstatic in the novel leads us to death is perhaps to confuse it with the very narrative sweep to which it is opposed. It may be to suggest that ecstasy is, after all, indistinguishable from apocalypse, that ecstasy and apocalypse are simply another of the exhausted, deathly tautologies that stretch right across DeLillo’s oeuvre. It may be to suggest that death is, indeed, triumphant, that history has done its worst, that revelation, reconciliation, and completion are at hand. It may be to suggest that death is the outcome whichever way you go, that death is the ‘goal’ that Karl Kraus finds at the ‘origin’. But to discover a complete equivalence between the Bruegelesque, global death that is carried in the American voice with which the novel begins, and the ecstatic death that intervenes between Shay and Shay – the unnameable death that inhabits the very texture of history – would be to overlook a tension, a contradiction, that persists in the novel between a death that is triumphant, and a death that is at work. The forward movement in the novel towards apocalypse, towards death triumphant, is one which seeks to bring death into the light, to name it, to reveal its identity with life. It is a movement which heads towards forced reconciliation, towards judgement, mastery and the exhaustion of the dissenting spirit. The deathliness which inhabits the opposite movement – the ecstatic movement towards estrangement and dissent – is a deathliness of a different quality altogether. It is a death which does not yield itself to the name, but which inhabits language itself as an unincorporable, unthinkable darkness, an unnameable otherness. It is a death which, in Derrida’s phrase, inhabits ‘the general form of all presence’, a death which speaks, wordlessly, of the unguessable latent possibilities which haunt the present. It is a death which is ‘at work’.19 The final word towards which Underworld wheels, as towards a transcendent revelation, is a word that speaks of the triumph of death as surely as does the opening half-line. The ‘Peace’ with which the novel ends suggests that the narrative has reached a final reconciliation. But, in Theodor Adorno’s terms, this peace, this ‘whisper of reconciliation’ (U 827), is a ‘reconciliation under duress’,20 a reconciliation that is arrived at through the twin pressures of American capital – the capital which ‘burns off the nuance in a culture’ (U 785) – and of American military supremacy. It is a reconciliation which, in Hegel’s scathing characterisation of the bourgeois Bildungsroman, is the result of ‘the education of the individual into the realities of the present’, an education in which the once rebellious protagonist ‘enters the concatenation of the world, and acquires for himself an appropriate attitude to it’.21 It is that reconciliation under duress, that Pax Americana, which John F. Kennedy promised would never be ‘enforced on the world by American weapons of war’.22 But if the novel heads towards this peace, if it evokes both the power of the historical movement towards a Pax Americana, and the beauty of the stillness that such reconciliation might offer to the soul who is weary of striving, then it also works to refuse it, to discover the forms in which resistance to such a peace might take. Adorno insists, in his essay ‘Reconciliation under Duress’, that reconciliation can assume its genuine shape only when ‘all is

The work of death 195 well with society’, and ‘when the individual has come into his own and feels at home in his world’.23 Just as Kennedy argues that a ‘genuine peace’ is ‘not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave’,24 so Adorno, in an unlikely accord with the US president, suggests that the striving for peace must be an active one, one grounded in a persistent unhomeliness, one that does not rest, that does not yield to the pressure of the status quo, or to Hegel’s ‘realities of the present’. The ending of Underworld, even in its evocation of final reconciliation, testifies to this refusal to yield, this determination to find peace not in submission to that which is revealed, but in a struggle towards that in history which remains hidden from us. The word with which the novel ends is not the one syllable, apocalyptic word that might open the path towards transcendence, the word which speaks at once of life and death, of everything and nothing. It is not the single word in which the anonymous mystic writer of The Cloud of Unknowing suggests that the ‘mystery of God’ might be revealed (U 295–296).25 Rather it is a word which denotes something which does not exist, something which is not yet a ‘thing in the world’ (U 827), which inhabits the shrouded province of an unrevealed death; it is a word that does not speak of completion, but one which puts us to work, a word that ‘spreads a longing through the raw sprawl of the city’ (U 827), a longing that goes ‘unfulfilled’ (U 803), a longing that ‘makes history’ (U 11). Peace, like death, is a word that harbours a contradiction, a contradiction between capitulation to the dominant power and an ongoing struggle towards an undreamt and unnameable utopian ideal. It is in the space of this contradiction, the contradiction between a death that is triumphant and a death that is at work, that the beauty and the possibility of Underworld is to be found. Uncycled memory Discourse will seem tenable only if it ceaselessly confronts that otherness, a burden both repellent and repelled, a deep well of memory that is unapproachable and intimate: the abject. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror 26 It was in the sound, how old this was, strange, distant, other, but also almost known, almost striking through to him from some uncycled memory where the nightmares lay, the ones in which he could not speak as the others did, could not understand what they were saying. Don DeLillo, The Names27

Nick Shay reflects, near the opening of Underworld, on the etymology of the word waste. ‘Waste is an interesting word’, he thinks, ‘that you can trace through Old English and Old Norse back to the Latin, finding such derivatives as empty, void, vanish and devastate’ (U 120). This brief consideration of the history of the word is resonant in many ways. There is something immediately appealing about the sense that ‘waste’

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should have seen so many various incarnations, that it should have been recycled so many times, and that it should stretch back in such a way to the Latinate roots of the language. Waste, of course, is a central preoccupation of Underworld, and this centrality is related, in no small measure, to its recyclability. If one of the directions in which the narrative heads is towards death triumphant, towards an apocalyptic gathering together of history into a final moment of judgement, then the most persistent metaphor for this gathering together, this reclamation of history, is waste management, the treatment and recycling of waste. Nick’s reflection on the history of the word is apt, then, partly because it suggests an insistent parallel between signifier and signified; it suggests that both word and thing reach back to the roots of the culture, that they both have the capacity for metamorphosis, for reinvention; that they both return, insistently, in new forms. The ‘derivatives’ of the word that Nick chooses to emphasise build upon this sense that both signifier and signified perform the recyclability of history, and its cyclical containability. The word ‘vanish’ might suggest, to Nick at least, the disappearance of his father, one of the gravitational absences around which the novel turns (this evocation of the missing father is strengthened by the fact that Nick suspects that his father was ‘wasted’ (U 106)). But the other derivatives which surround this vanishing – ‘void’ and ‘devastate’ – offer an oblique means of reclaiming the father, of redeeming his abdication from the paternal role. ‘Void’ and ‘devastate’ are bookend words, words that mark the beginning and the end of Judaeo-Christian history, that join beginnings and endings under the umbrella of waste. The word ‘void’ suggests the Hebraic ‘tohu-bohu’ of the opening of Genesis. It connotes the formless, excremental waste at the beginning of time, when the ‘earth was without form and void’.28 The derivative ‘devastate’, on the other hand, summons Revelations, and the devastation that is wreaked at the end of history, when the world is laid waste by the four Angels of history. Just as Bruegel’s paintings gather beginnings and endings into a kind of panhistorical continuity, so the word waste, here, offers to reach across the entire narrative sweep of Christian history, from Genesis to Revelations. It offers to contain everything within its emptiness, and to deliver us at last into the presence of the father who, throughout the passage of time, has been so reluctant to show his face. For many readers of Underworld, this connection between waste, recycling, and the end of history is the substance of the novel. It is the recycling of that which is rejected – the endless capacity of the waste product to return itself to the heart of the culture which seeks to eliminate it – that leads the novel to the recognition that ‘everything is connected’.29 The archaeological work of Underworld, its capacity to bring underlying connections into the light, promises to herald the moment at which there is no longer any distinction between the valued commodity and the despised waste product. It promises to bring us to the apocalyptic point at which the hidden continuity between the treasured and the worthless, between birth and death, between money and shit, is finally revealed. It is David Cowart who offers

The work of death 197 perhaps the most comprehensive and persuasive account of the work of recycling in Underworld. Where many commentators trace the repetition of themes or objects within the novel itself – Peter Knight shows, for example, how the recurrence of orange juice pulls together the disparate threads of the novel30 – Cowart gives an indication of the extent to which Underworld is a massive recycling of DeLillo’s entire oeuvre. From small details, such as the recurrence in Underworld of Frankie’s Tropical Bar which made its first appearance in Running Dog, to the reworking of dominant preoccupations in the oeuvre – such as the threat of nuclear weaponry, the theme of recycling itself, or the unfolding of an oedipal drama – Cowart traces the work of recycling in DeLillo, the tendency to gather and to reuse that makes of Underworld not simply a digest of the oeuvre, but a kind of encyclopaedia of twentieth century literary and political history.31 This marked critical emphasis on the novel’s intertextual recycling – its recuperation, as in Great Jones Street, of waste as aesthetic ‘product’ (GJS 133) – is indeed understandable, as it is the sheer ingenuity of the novel’s capacity to find value, sense and connectedness in the discarded, the random or the hidden that is one of its most miraculous achievements. To give one example of this insistent return of the repressed, or of the discarded, one might follow the path of the innocent shoe as it makes its way through the terrain of Underworld, and out across the rest of the oeuvre. It is a shoe, of course, upon which Father Paulus concentrates in his famous lesson to a youthful Nick Shay on the power of naming. Paulus’ sermon is concerned with the power of language to bring that which has been discarded or overlooked back into circulation. As the word ‘waste’ harbours an entire history within its great etymological wastes, so Paulus demonstrates to Nick the power that language has to bring a humble, ordinary object – in this case a shoe – into the light, into a kind of enhanced presence. Naming the parts of the shoe to Nick as if in a kind of catechism – ceremoniously performing the capacity of precise words to bring the shoe into being, to invent the sole and the tongue, the ‘grommet’, the ‘welt’ and the ‘vamp’ – Paulus sees the exercise as a demonstration that ‘everyday things lie hidden’ because ‘we don’t know what they’re called’ (U 541). The naming of the shoe transforms it from an ugly, undifferentiated lump, ‘about as blank as a closed brown box’ (U 540), into an intricate and beautiful machine composed of scores of different parts, parts glowing with their specificity and their noumenal thingness. But if this episode is the one in which the most overt attention is lavished on the shoe, Paulus’ attempt to name the object, to bless it with a transfiguring and redeeming language, reaches out in subtle ways across the novel. There is something moving, for example, about the distant echo from Paulus’ lesson that is caught at the end of the novel, as Nick watches irradiated children playing follow the leader on the Kazakh plain. Nick observes that one of the children has a ‘hole in the welt above each shoe’ (U 802). This moment suggests a bleaker side to Paulus’ enthusiasm for the power of language to reveal the arcana hidden in the quotidian. The bodies of the

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children themselves are manifestations of an apocalyptic revelation of old secrets, their cancers and deformities the physical signs of military industrial secrets which have finally come out, which have seeped ‘into the land and air, into the marrowed folds of bone’ (U 803). The gift of language, here, might allow Nick to see the welts in the child’s shoe, but it brings to light also the hidden detritus of a culture, those dark, repressed secrets which, for Freud, should have remained ‘concealed and kept out of sight’. The irradiated child himself is blinded – he has ‘spongy caps over the place where his eyes should have been’ (U 802) – as if the victims of weapons testing live out the hiddenness of military secrets as a symptom. If here, at the end of the novel, a connection is established between the naming of the parts of the shoe and the revelation of military secrets, then this group of associations has already been made earlier in the novel, where it includes also the spectre of the vanishing father. Nick and his brother Matt reminisce, in Part Two of the novel, about their father buying Nick a pair of shoes. To check that the shoes fitted correctly, Matt remembers, the clerk put Nick’s feet, inside the shoes, in an X-ray machine: The machine was a fluoroscope and what it did was transmit x rays through the shoe and into the foot, it’s called differential transmission, and it makes a shadowy green image. I just barely remember this. Jimmy’s buying you a pair of shoes and then he’s lifting me up so I can look into the machine and see your feet inside your shoes and your bones inside your feet. (U 197) This is one of those rich, connecting moments that are littered throughout Underworld, a moment which find echoes answering back from almost every corner of the novel, and which would be virtually impossible to exhaust. The faint memory of the shoes that Matt uncovers here resonates with the larger preoccupation with the recuperation and recycling of the past. The shadowy green image of Nick’s bones corresponds to the work of memory in the novel more generally, as if the shoes contain inside themselves the skeleton of a life, the bones of a personal history which can be somehow recovered or reseen. Indeed Nick’s response to Matt’s story – ‘the question is,’ he says, ‘Where are those shoes now?’ (U 198) – is typical of his mania for hunting down objects, such as the baseball, which might give a voice to his missing history. For Nick, the ghost of the missing father, and the trace of that little familial scene in the shoe shop, is somehow contained in those missing shoes. But the associations that are summoned here travel much further than this. Not only do the X-rayed shoes connote the ghost of the missing father, but also, like those of the Kazakh child, they contain radiation which, Matt suggests, may have caused Nick himself to ‘suffer bone damage’ (U 198), to become another of the blind victims of the military industrial complex. And this connection between shoes and radiation extends further to the novel’s

The work of death 199 preoccupation with the cold war and the test firing of atomic weapons. The view of the bones inside Nick’s feet afforded by the X-ray might suggest the burrowing, archaeological work of memory, but it also suggests the flash of a nuclear blast, that intense light which, like the revelation of God at the end of time, affords us an all inclusive vision. The story of the shoe shop recalls the ‘Ballad of Louis Bakey’, told by US bombardier Bakey to Chuckie Wainwright, sometime custodian of the Thomson baseball. The ballad tells the story of a bombing mission, a test firing of an atomic weapon in the Nevada desert. Bakey is flying in a B-52, whose windows are covered in Reynolds Wrap, when the bomb goes off beneath them. Despite the Reynolds Wrap, despite the pillows that the crew hold over their eyes like the spongy caps of the Kazakh child, the light from the blast penetrates the plane, as the X-rays penetrate Nick’s feet. As the blinding light enters the plane, ‘a glow enters the body that’s like the touch of God. And Louis can see the bones in his hand through his closed eyes, through the thick pillow he’s got jammed in his face’ (U 613). Looking around at his fellow airmen, he says, he can see ‘whole skeletons dancing in the flash’ (U 613). This moment testifies to the apocalyptic power of nuclear weaponry, its capacity to bring about the end of history, that moment at which the continuity between inside and outside might be unmasked, the moment at which the skeletal dead rise from the ground to reveal themselves once more. It is a light which, as Eric Demming suggests to Matt Shay, allows one to see ‘with your eyes shut’, to ‘see right through the lids’ (U 410). If the effect of the blast thickens the eyelids of its mute Kazakh victim, then it removes the eyelids of those who witness it. As Heinrich von Kleist says, of Caspar David Friedrich’s wonderful painting Monk at the Sea (1809), that it reveals to him the ‘uniformity and boundlessness’ of the ‘Apocalypse’, making him feel ‘as though his eyelids had been cut off ’,32 so the light of the nuclear blast cuts one’s eyelids away, causing Louis to reflect that his ‘eyes went big and stayed that way and ain’t ever really closed’ (U 614). And the spectacle of the skeletons dancing in the light, that leads us from Nick’s X-rayed shoes to the flying bombardiers, takes us also to Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death, with its dancing skeletons, and thence to the dancing skeletons at Capote’s black and white ball (U 575–576), a connection which extends further to the children that Bronzini sees playing skelly on the New York streets (U 234), to Sister Edgar whose deathly presence in the classroom earns her the nickname ‘Sister Skelly Bone’ (U 717), to the gruesome figure of ‘Skelly Bone Pete’ who crops up periodically throughout DeLillo’s oeuvre (e.g. L 427). As I have already suggested, the connections that Nick’s X-rayed shoe opens onto here stretch beyond any realistic attempt to trace them comprehensively. The idea of the shoe, as it stretches from Paulus’ lesson to the Kazakh child, to the shoe-shop X-ray machine, threatens to engulf the entire narrative, to bring all of the detritus of the novel into an unbearable, apocalyptic presence. Indeed, another shoe that crops up midway through the novel leads Matt Shay to consider precisely this prospect, the prospect of total revelation.

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Whilst Matt is stoned at a ‘bombhead’ party during his stint working at a weapons research establishment, he embarks, perhaps unadvisedly, on an intense and paranoid reflection on ‘someone’s shoe’. Invoking the one-syllable prayer that the Cloud recommends as a reliable vehicle of redemption, Matt insists that his studying of the shoe does not lead to ‘some superficial state’ of paranoia encountered routinely by the stoned of the world, but rather that the shoe takes him somewhere that is ‘real and deep and true’ – ‘all of those one-syllable words that mean we aren’t kidding’. The sight of this single, anonymous shoe on an unknown partygoer’s foot, Matt finds, is ‘familiar in some strange Palaeolithic root-eating way, a thing retained in the snake brain of early experience’ (U 422). It strikes, somehow, at the very hidden heart of experience, that excremental root of history that lies at the bottom of all the excavatory work undertaken in Ratner’s Star. Perhaps because he isn’t quite able to articulate why the shoe should grant him this access to the real, to Hegel’s ‘concatenation of the world’, Matt reflects, recalling Klara’s reaction to Bruegel, that the shoe was ‘sinister’ in its capacity to reveal to him the hidden coils of his own brain. This sinister quality of the shoe leads Matt to a further reflection which calls again to Paulus, and to the power of the shoe to recycle language and experience, to bring what is hidden into the light: maybe the shoe looked sinister because all its meanings and connections and silhouettes were outside Matt’s faculties of knowing. And maybe it looked sinister because it was the left shoe, on the left foot, and this is what sinister meant of course – unlucky, unfavorable, leftward – and the word was asserting its baleful roots, its edible tubers and stems, through the medium of someone’s shoe. (U 422) As language can reveal the shoe to Nick, so here the shoe reveals the baleful rootwork of language. The lone, anonymous shoe becomes a quasi mystical medium for the revelation of all the etymological meanings and buried connections that Matt, in his stoned state, can somehow divine, but which, in their mathematically sublime proliferation, overcome his ‘faculties of knowing’. And once we have become sensitised to the shoe as a connecting medium, we start to see it everywhere in the novel. There’s the orthopaedic shoe that belonged to a neighbour of Klara’s, which reminds her somehow of her mother (U 487), and which perhaps betokens her husband’s limp that she discovers on her wedding day (U 497–498); there’s the ‘rutted and cut instep’ of George Manza’s ‘way-weary shoe’ (U 666); there’s the shoes, poignantly abandoned in a paper bag on a Bronx sidewalk, that belong to an evicted tenant (U 768); there’s a youthful Nick Shay, in the days before the Jesuits transformed his oedipal anger into thomistic self-possession, staving in the wicker seat of a New York train with the ‘heel edge of a shoe’ (U 741); there’s Klara ‘kicking out of her shoes’ as she prepares to have sex with Nick in her spare room (U 732); there’s the neon shoe above the shoe-repair shop in the Bronx with

The work of death 201 the dead neon, the ‘dark and cold’ sign which brings a ‘little sag’ in Manx Martin’s mood (U 351). The proliferation of the shoe seems like it could be endless, but within the parameters of the novel itself, this network of connections remains somehow empty, somehow suspended. The shoe summons ‘meanings and connections’, but the original referent that makes the shoe ‘familiar in some strange Palaeolithic root eating way’, remains elusive. It is only a glancing reference to a solitary shoe, at the opening of the novel, that offers to take us beyond the horizons of Underworld, and back towards an original moment in DeLillo’s oeuvre, an original drama of loss which this insistent recycling of the shoe promises finally to recuperate. As Nick visits Klara in the desert at the opening of the novel – a return to a primal scene which sparks, in a sense, Nick’s wheeling recuperation of lost time – the scene is invested with an overpowering aura of déjà vu. The Klara that he sees before him in the desert is a figure who calls beyond the boundaries of the novel, who calls through substitution upon substitution, back to the figure of a kind of original mother, a maternal presence that haunts the oeuvre. As Nick thinks, on encountering the 72 year old Klara, that he ‘could lift the younger woman’ right out of the casket of her aged body (U 67), so she harbours within her a host of sexualised maternal figures, like Russian dolls, stretching back from Libra, through White Noise and Ratner’s Star, to Americana. Klara says in passing that she is a yachtswoman, who ‘spends a lot of time on the Maine coast’ (U 75), and this detail calls through Pammy Tenant in Players, right back to the sculptor Sullivan in Americana, the woman who discovers her own family secrets during a yachting trip off the Maine coast, and who is herself a substitute for David Bell’s mother, the substitute with whom Bell finally achieves a simulacral consummation of his oedipal desire. And if Sullivan owes her overpowering erotic appeal, for Bell, to her capacity to stand in for his mother, then this capacity comes back, of course, to the figure of the ‘cryptic shoe’ (A 7). It is Sullivan standing storklike above an ‘empty shoe’ (A 10) at the party that opens Americana that entrances Bell, that causes him to draw the connection between Sullivan and his mother – who stands in the novel’s primal scene wearing only one shoe – and that inspires him to embark upon the aesthetic project to recapture the moment of oedipal crisis on film. And, somehow inevitably, as Nick first encounters Klara, that vision of Sullivan grown old, we find that, due to a sprained ankle, she is wearing only one shoe, ‘one white running shoe’ (U 67) that contains within it the oedipal energy of an oeuvre. The figure of the shoe, then, stretches out across the novel and the oeuvre, offering itself as a ‘medium’ through which the novel’s oedipal rootwork might reveal itself. In bringing the hidden to light, the shoe offers to recover the ‘missing moments on the tape’, to produce a new, transfigured version of post-war history, as well as a DeLillian oedipal erotics. The shoe might work as a means of sublimating Bell’s/Shay’s repressed desire, but it also offers to return us to the heart of the Kennedy assassination, to those abandoned shoes

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belonging to Helen Markham, witness to Oswald’s shooting of Patrolman Tippit. In recovering the shoe, the novel seeks also to recover hidden histories, to recuperate and to rearticulate the dissident voice, to give a kind of articulation to the lost historical category that has haunted DeLillo’s writing as a ghostly absence. This kind of recovery is at work throughout the novel. The forms of resistance that have been given a shadowy or gestural articulation throughout DeLillo’s fiction are brought into expression in Underworld, as the novel’s recycling movement brings that which has been concealed into the light. The nexus of associations that gathers around 1968 in White Noise, for example, but which remains implicit in the earlier novel, emerges again in Underworld, where it is overt, self-evident, and clearly articulated. The 1980s university as imagined in White Noise is an institution that has abandoned any counter-ideological role, and that has welcomed the commodification of higher education, the transformation of the university into a marketplace. The history of the university as a ground of resistance to repressive state ideology is preserved in the novel only in ghosted memories, in the weird non-time of déjà vu. The year 1968, as a historical moment at which the university mobilised resistance to government policy on a number of fronts, is evoked in the novel only as a historical possibility that failed to materialise, and that haunts the fringes of historical memory. The history of student protest against the Vietnam War and against civil rights abuses is unrecoverable in the novel, just as the avant-gardist cultural movements that grew from the university protests as they spread from the USA to Europe have evaporated, or transformed themselves into advertising slogans on cereal packets. But in Underworld, the hidden connections that thread through White Noise find themselves revealed, as the narrative wheels back through the decades. A phrase that first appears in DeLillo’s writing in Americana – ‘Better living through chemistry’ (A 130) – is recycled in Underworld, and from it an entire revolutionary political history promises to unfold, to re-emerge. The phrase – an advertising slogan for Du Pont chemical company – is one of the many commercial catchphrases that run through Underworld, and which unravel in the novel to reveal the deathly, countercultural freight that they contain. In the section of Underworld entitled ‘Better Things for Better Living Through Chemistry’, the revolutionary activity of students on campuses across America in 1967 and 1968 is reanimated, rather than effaced. The narrative returns to October 18, 1967, and to the demonstrations against Dow Chemical that took place on that day at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Student demonstrators who have taken control of the local radio station repeatedly chant the slogan ‘Better things for better living’, and Dow Chemical’s slogan, ‘Common Sense, Uncommon Chemistry’ (U 596–604), and in ventriloquising the advertising slogans in this way, the demonstrators unearth the links between Dow Chemical, Du Pont, and the production of napalm and other weaponry for use in Vietnam. The demonstrator’s ironic adoption of the slogans, in the context of an anti-war rally, works to undermine the corporate status quo that the slogans seek to maintain, to refashion the

The work of death 203 language of the military-industrial complex itself. Just as the students advocate the recycling of fertiliser to fashion homemade explosive devices with which to arm the insurgent uprising – ‘we are talking about waste,’ the hijacked radio station says, ‘we are talking about waste and weapons’, the ‘bomb that begins in the asshole of a barnyard pig’ (U 600) – so the recycling of the advertising jingle seeks to explode its sanitised version of the industry, to reveal the death that inhabits its complacent vision of ‘better living’. The transformation of fertiliser into explosives is also the transformation of benign and fatuous corporate language into a weapon against the state. The newly dissident radio station offers to provide a language with which to articulate dissent against the corporate interests that drive the war in Vietnam, a language which might ‘change the rules of what is thinkable’ (U 599), precisely the revolutionary language that is unavailable in White Noise. In returning to this revolutionary scene, Underworld offers also to recycle and refashion the avant-garde forms of expression that are threatened with exhaustion after 1968. The displaced phrase ‘Faculty document 122 authorizes force against students’ that echoes through this episode in Underworld is one that is pregnant with historical significance. It is partly the use of force by police against students in Madison in 1967 that raised the stakes in the demonstrations, and that led, eventually, to the student uprisings in Paris in 1968 – that moment of revolutionary fervour which promised to consolidate insurgent politics with radical movements in poetry and art, and which coincided with the emergence of a neo-avant-garde.33 In returning to 1967, in unearthing and performing the revolutionary potential of that historical moment, Underworld rediscovers also the underground art movements of the time, reanimating an avant-garde spirit. And this wheeling back through the 1960s towards mid-century promises to rescue a whole range of forms of expression, to resuscitate art forms which have perished under the economic and cultural conditions of the post-war period – to return to the original modernist avant-garde which underlies the brief and uncertain reflowering of 1968. If the novel imagines an entire oeuvre of radical art, from Klara’s warplane installation back to the invention of an underground Eisenstein film, then it also adopts a range of styles, from New York street argot and Lenny Bruce’s hipster slang to an uncannily faithful recreation of a Joycean narrative style in Part Six of the novel. As Cowart argues, Underworld sets out to ‘recycle artistic conventions and styles’, to produce a ‘compendium of literary fashion from the turn of the century naturalism, through modernist and postmodernist reaction, to hybridised millennial vision’.34 In performing such a massive work of recycling, Underworld offers to become the ‘megaton novel Joyce would have written if he’d moved to Iowa and lived to be a hundred’ (L 181); it promises to become the ‘novel in which nothing is left out’ (L 182). In bringing everything into the light, in producing the unbearable ‘boundlessness’ that Kleist finds in Friedrich, the novel heralds an apocalyptic moment at which the triumph of American power coincides – perhaps uneasily – with the recovery of transgressive desire,

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of dissident politics, and of a radical avant-garde. The power that DeLillo finds in language to reveal and reclaim that which is hidden or discarded, that power that Paulus passes on to Nick, allows DeLillo’s fiction, for Cowart, to ‘gradually forc[e] back the frontiers of ignorance’, to ‘free us from the unspeakable’.35 Or as Mark Osteen argues, the recycling work of Underworld summons a redemptive end of history, in which ‘the very physical debris left by weapons and waste’ is ‘transformed’ into art works that ‘testify to the uncontainability of human aspiration’. It summons an apocalyptic moment, a universal American deathliness, in which ‘meaning’ is nevertheless ‘saved’ from the ‘triumph of death’.36 To find in the recycling motion of Underworld such a redemptive power, however, might be to overlook the extent to which the dark material of the novel resists the work of recycling, and refuses to be sanitised, purified, or brought into the light. Even in this novel of reclamation and of recovery, there is a powerful sense that dissidence, that erotic pleasure, that the very pleasure of the text, is found in those places in the culture that cannot be recycled, that remain hidden, inassimilable into the light of an American voice. A character in DeLillo’s 1999 play Valparaiso suggests this erotic power of the unsanitised, of the disgusting. Delfina admits that she likes to eat bananas that ‘are slightly overripe’, a ‘little bit rotten, even’. Overripe bananas, she goes on, are ‘funky and sexy and make me think that pleasure is somehow connected to [ . . . ] perishability’ (V 71). This curious but compelling relation between erotic pleasure and the rank, the stinking, the decomposing, is absolutely central to Underworld. The novel is driven by a transgressive erotic attraction to darkness and to filth, to what Kristeva calls the ‘abject’. One of the striking manifestations of this haunting presence of the abject in the novel is the spectral, unnameable container ship that spooks the shores of the novel. It is never clear what the cargo of this ship is, but rumours abound, reverberating through the narrative. The ship might carry mob heroin, it might carry the body of a murdered gangster (the body, perhaps, of Nick’s father?), just as it might carry untreated human sewage. The ship comes back again and again, like the corpse that floats offshore in Ulysses, or like the drowned man in the Wasteland.37 It insistently returns, like a repressed memory, like something too disgusting and too unsettlingly erotic to look at. But it is never absorbed. Its deathly cargo is absolutely beyond the recycling power of the narrative, or even the interpellating power of the name. As the bomb eludes the name, for Oppenheimer, the death that is carried by the ship is unnameable, or nameable only as shit, as ‘merde’, as the abject (U 77). Like the Kristevan abject, the stinking cargo ‘lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated’, cannot be brought on shore, or into the light.38 Confronted with the abject, Kristeva says, one is not able to absorb it into a whole, into a reconciled consciousness. Rather, a ‘vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside oneself ’.39 The erotic fascination with death, dirt, and filth takes one beyond oneself. It condemns one to the kinds of estrangement that Owen Bradermas suffers in The Names,

The work of death 205 to an ecstatic difference from self that no work of recycling can close. It thrusts one into the darkness of ‘uncycled memory’; a ‘deep well of memory’ that, for Kristeva is both ‘unapproachable and intimate’;40 the uncycled memory that Owen finds haunting the experience of glossolalia. The estranging, disorienting power of this ‘deep well’ of uncycled memory, the abject memory which is encountered only in the dark stirrings of an unnameable unconscious, or in the spectral effects of déjà vu, is at work throughout the novel. When Nick has his meeting with Klara in the desert at the opening of the novel, for example, it is possible to feel the uncycling, vortical movement of abjection, even as it inhabits the work of recycling, the Proustian recuperation of the past. As Nick looks at Klara, through the clouded medium of lost time and oedipal desire, he feels that he can recover her wholly; the beauty and delicacy of this encounter lies partly in this complete recovery of a desiring moment. ‘I could see the younger woman,’ Nick says: I could make her rise in some sleight of mind to occupy the space I’d prepared, eyes faintly slanted and papery hands and how she used to smile privately and unbelievingly at the thought of us together. (U 67–68) As, in Ratner’s Star, the power of mathematics allows Billy to uncover an idea, to allow the idea to ‘unerase itself ’ (RS 238), so here the work of memory produces an unerasing. The alienated desert space in which the couple find themselves gives way, somehow; it yields to the distant space of their original encounter. Klara’s face parts to reveal again the original smile that so enticed Nick, the skewy smile that is the signature of their brief encounter. But if this moment is about reclamation, it is also about the unrecoverable, about that ‘subject’ that ‘was not speakable’ (U 73). The smile itself that is reclaimed here is, of course, a gesture not of communication or of shared pleasure, but the marker of a kind of ecstatic distance, a kind of absence from self. Klara’s ‘private’ and ‘unbelieving’ smile (the ‘twisty smile’ (U 749) which is uncannily doubled in the ‘twisty smile’ (U 291) of the swinger with whom Nick has another brief dalliance later and earlier in the novel) is a smile with which she withholds herself, in all of her oedipal, sphinx-like secrecy, from Nick’s gaze. It is a smile that ‘made her seem detached from what she said’ (U 67), as Oswald’s ‘secret smile’ (L 12) in Libra is a ‘smile not connected to things’ (L 43). It is the same smile with which, seven hundred pages later and forty years earlier, she had smiled privately at the two of them together, or whatever she was smiling at, smiling to herself like it was three days later, after the fact, and she was walking down an aisle at the A&P thinking what they’d done, but it wasn’t three days after the fact, it was still the fact, and she had his balls in her hand, squeezing slightly. (U 750)

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The twisty smile that Nick uncovers in Klara’s aged face is one that, even as it takes place in the primal, original scene itself, evacuates both him and her from the space and the time of their coming together. This displaced smile projects Klara into the future, even in the midst of that intimate squeeze. She is already three days distant, already resurrected, reincarnated as another, even as Nick is fucking her, as he is working to immerse himself in the groundless ‘mystery’ of ‘living in her skin’ (U 498). Like that other inscrutable smile that recurs in Underworld – George Manza’s ‘slyest kind of shit eating grin’ (U 132, 780) – Klara’s smile does not deliver her to Nick, but rather marks a deathly, abject absence from history, an unknowability that will not yield to the illuminating power of language or of remembrance. George Manza’s smile, of course, is the undecidable gesture that haunts Nick’s conscience, as it haunts the novel. Manza gives his ‘shit eating grin’ in response to Nick’s asking, as he points a sawn off shot gun at George’s head, whether the gun is loaded. The unreadability of this smile, which carries a suicide in it, as well as a risk – the ‘spirit of a dare’ – doubles in the novel as the unknowability of history, the dark hiddenness of the past. It is this smile that contains, in its sly evasiveness, the ‘long quarter second’ which swallows up a life, which threatens to swallow up history itself. In the interval during which Nick pulls the trigger – ‘in the extended interval of the trigger pull, the long quarter second’ – we are told that he ‘saw into the smile on the other man’s face’ (U 780). But what Nick sees in this smile is not any kind of answer. It does not hold, in terms of Bronzini’s understanding of tactical chess, the ‘deep truth of a position’ (U 698). It does not ground Nick in history, it does not provide a motive for his murder of George Manza, or for George Manza’s suicide. What Nick sees in this shit eating smile is death, abjection, the groundlessness of history. What it communicates to him is the impossibility of constructing a story which might contain or redeem that Zapruderesque quarter-second, which might fit it into the ‘single narrative sweep’ (U 82). And as Nick looks, again, at Klara’s asymmetrical smile, a crooked smile in which ‘mouth and jaw [are] not quite aligned’ (U 75), it is this unrecoverability, this deathly absence at the heart of the smile, that preserves the oedipal eroticism that first attracts him to her. Her compelling sexual allure is located, finally, not in that which is recoverable, but in that which does not show itself, that which remains unspeakable and in hiding. Her smile opens up a gap in the world, like the crack that splits a restaurant wall during that earthquake in Los Angeles that creates such a curiously central faultline in the novel. During the quake, in the ‘long slow lean of the world’ in which ‘the room whistled and groaned’ (U 278), Nick feels estranged from his own body, as if the very cohesive tensions that place him in his flesh were on the point of giving out, of coming unstuck. The memory of the quake, for Nick, is the memory of the ‘work’ that it took ‘to reconcile the forces that pressed against each other’ (U 284), to banish from memory the latent power that the room suddenly displayed to tear itself apart through the forces of its own contradictions, to open a new seam in itself

The work of death 207 through which everything might leak. It is precisely this latent power to tear apart and to force asunder that inhabits Klara’s skewed grin. It is her ‘turned mouth’ that opens a faultline, that shows the ‘kind of erotic flaw that makes you want to lose yourself in the imbalance’ (U 75). For all the reconciled, nostalgic calm that characterises Nick’s meeting with Klara in the desert, it is this moment of threatened abandonment, this ecstatic, vertiginous casting of self into the bottomless, nameless eroticism of Klara’s flawed smile, that is at the heart of their encounter. It is the unspeakable eroticism of Klara’s smile that cracks the frame of their meeting – the frame of the narrative itself – and that opens onto abyssal depths that no amount of recycling can reclaim, or bring into the light. This uncycling movement towards darkness, unspeakable desire, and unrevealed death has a kind of attritional effect on the effort towards transcendence and redemption, towards death triumphant. If Rembrandt’s Aristotle provides a guiding image for the ways in which Underworld might bring history into the light, then Klara’s broken smile contains a darkness which cannot be reached by Rembrandt’s golden light. It carries a weight of abjection which cannot be assimilated into the smooth narrative of aesthetic development fantasised both by the painting and by the novel. Neither Rembrandt’s vision of a seamless merging of sculpture, philosophy, poetry and paint, nor what Cowart calls DeLillo’s ‘compendium of literary fashion’, can accommodate or recycle its deathliness. The dissident refusal carried in Klara’s smile, and in George’s sly grin, will not give itself up to the attempt to fashion a reconciled American voice with which to express a century of sexual and political dissent. If this failure tends to undermine the movement towards a transcendent or redemptive vision, however, it is from such failure that the possibility of a radical, critical fiction emerges in Underworld, a fiction in which death is still at work, and in which the ‘undervoice’ is still at odds with the official voice of global capitalism, still inassimilable to its version of apocalyptic truth. The art work draws its radical critical possibility, in Underworld, not from the movement towards reconciliation and peace, but from disjunction, from the irreconcilability of different forms, from what Klara and Eisenstein think of as the ‘contradictions of being’.41 It is not in Rembrandt’s extraordinary power to reveal historical and formal continuity that the possibility of art is found, or in Underworld’s capacity to recycle the history of twentieth century art, but in the discovery of the discontinuous, the fractured, the irreconciled that haunts history itself. It is this disjunctive quality, this agonistic, contradictory, seismic energy, that characterises the radical work of art in the novel, the work that speaks the novel’s own longing for an avant-garde voice. Klara’s oeuvre, as it emerges from Underworld, is built around a seismic faultline, the erotic flaw that Nick finds in her smile. It is of course the case that Klara’s art work involves a kind of recycling; as Nick comments, invoking another of the slang names for the heroin that may or may not be on board the nameless ship, her career ‘had been marked at times by her methods of transforming and absorbing

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junk’ (U 102). But her working and reworking of material derives its energy from the resistance of the material to transformation and reabsorption, rather than from the capacity of her work to recycle and redeem the worthless and the discarded. Klara’s early work involves a Cézannesque compulsion to paint and repaint the same scene – to paint the spare room in her apartment ‘inch by inch’ (U 712). This prospect of manic repetition, in which the room is depicted on multiple canvases which are stored, in turn, inside the room, might speak of a kind of Warholesque bankruptcy, in which the culture simply reproduces itself in mise en abyme, endlessly and weightlessly. But Klara’s painting of the room acquires its focus when blank repetition gives way to a kind of disjunction, to a kind of erotic disruption or disturbance that opens a crack in the wall, like the cracked walls in Roman Polanski’s horrendously abject film Repulsion (1965). It is when Klara finds herself dreamily ‘naked in her workroom’ – naked, of course, in the frame of her own painting – naked and preparing to have tabooed sex with Nick, that she ‘noticed the room’ (U 732). ‘The room was beautiful in this light,’ she thinks, ‘shadow banded, all lines and gaps, claire-obscure’ (U 733). It is this moment, this intimacy tinged with incestuous estrangement, that delivers the room to Klara. It is this moment that allows her to see the room not simply as a reproducible surface, but as a space which, like the covers of Bill Gray’s books, is ‘banded’ in ‘umbers and rusts’ (U 733, M 20), a space whose clarity and readability is seamed through with obscurity, with a charged erotic darkness. It is this cracked, disjointed room that floats back to her years later, in the Carrolian dream that she has in her lofty apartment in New York, a room ‘out of some early dream, not quite nightmarish’, a room entering into a ‘long slow lean’, a ‘room where things, where objects are called chairs and curtains and beds but are also completely different, unsupported by the usual guarantees’ (U 479). This set of associations contained in Klara’s struggle to paint the room, or in a sense to unpaint towards the abyssal absences and ‘gaps’ that inhabit her encounter with Nick,42 summons one of the paintings that provides the novel with a guiding image, a painting that is held in a kind of dialectical opposition to Rembrandt’s Aristotle. The claire-obscurity of Klara’s room suggests, of course, the chiaroscuro that gives this section of the novel its title – ‘Arrangement in Gray and Black’ – and which provides the cryptic title of Whistler’s famous painting of his mother, that painting which is banded in umbers and rusts, and which holds a Victorian mother prisoner in the cagework of its abstract lines and gaps.43 This painting, like the quaking room that ‘whistles and groans’ under the stress of hidden but massive contradictions, only barely holds itself together, can hardly contain the oppositions that pull against each other even in the midst of the painting’s glacial stillness. Where Rembrandt’s painting seeks to bring formal and historical difference into a reconciled luminescence, Whistler’s painting is riven with irreconciled tectonic contradiction. Klara, finally giving up on her attempt to paint her work room into a kind of clarity, moves Whistler’s painting into

The work of death 209 the workroom, as DeLillo’s men move their ageing mothers into their spare rooms, and this decision heralds a shift in Klara’s work, a recognition of the incommensurability that forms the groundless ground of the art work in this novel. She moves the Whistler into her room, she says, because she liked the formal balances and truthful muted colors and because the picture was so clashingly modern, the seated woman in mobcap and commodious dark dress, a figure lifted out of her time into the abstract arrangements of the twentieth century, long before she was ready, it seemed, but Klara also liked looking right through the tonal components, the high theory of color, the theory of paint itself perhaps – looking into the depths of the picture, at the mother, the woman, the mother herself, the anecdotal aspect of a woman in a chair, thinking, and immensely interesting she was, so Quaker-prim and still, faraway-seeming but only because she was lost, Klara thought, in memory, caught in the midst of a memory trance, a strong and elegiac presence despite the painter’s, the son’s, doctrinal priorities. (U 748) Like the angel in Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus, the mother in Whistler’s painting turns her back to the future, and looks longingly, elegiacally, to a lost era from which she has been displaced. The painting contains a lurching gap, a gulf between the lost age to which this woman belongs, and the ‘abstract arrangements’ that produce and are produced by a modernist revolution in ways of seeing. The mother’s backward gaze sinks a ‘well of memory’ in the modernist plane of painting itself; an unrecoverable, uncycled memory in which the desire of a son for his mother is buried, and which is contained in the chiaroscuro lines that it nevertheless disrupts and unbalances. If, for Walter Benjamin, the storm of ‘progress’ propels Klee’s Angel ‘into the future to which his back is turned’,44 then Whistler’s painting propels his Victorian mother into the space of modernism and modernity. The clashing disjunction that this propelling force produces – the disjunction between realism and modernism, between mother and son, between the doctrinal and the ungovernable, between one century and the next – opens a kind of chasm in the painting and in the novel, a deathly chasm which swallows the art work into its darkness, but from which the possibility of art itself emerges. Virtually all of the significant art works – real and imagined – that are contained in Underworld are built on this faultline. Klara’s giant installation of warplanes painted in the desert, for example, is organised around a kind of breach, a kind of disjunction in the surface of the work. It may be that this installation is predicated on the work of recycling, on the transformation of weapons into art, but its power, its critical capacity, emerges from disruption, from the uncycled incommensurability between the industrial material of the weapons, and the paint which works to ‘rethink’ them (U 84). Klara’s

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desert piece draws its expressiveness from a historical contradiction between the ancientness of the land, the obsolescence of the war machinery, and the time of the paint itself. If the desert installation is a fin de millennial piece – a work ‘painted to remark the end of an age and the beginning of something so different only a vision such as this might suffice to augur it’ (U 126) – then this historical transformation is augured by the ‘push and pull’ that the work orchestrates between paint and metal, between metal and sand. The new age that the work heralds is not contained in the paint; it is not given any kind of expression here, but is rather held as latent possibility in the gap between paint and metal. The paint work stretches from plane to plane, producing pattern, shape and colour that floats free of the warplanes and of the desert. The colour, Nick thinks, is like a ‘circulating fluid’, ‘naming the pace’, producing a ‘surface’ to the work. But this free surface, this wash made of colour and light, constantly gives way to the ‘thick and massy’ metal of the aircraft – the machinery which reasserts the material and historical conditions to which it belongs – just as it ‘loses vigor’ at its edges, ‘melting’ into the desert (U 126). The historical weightlessness of the paint ‘looked hard won’. The ‘struggle to make it’ is exposed in the banded ‘unpainted intervals’, the moments where the separate bodies of the planes, the ‘dead metal strips’ of military hardware, reassert themselves (U 125). This piece does not speak of a triumphant millennialism or the arrival of an apocalyptic end of history; it does not perform the alchemical refashioning of historical waste into a redeemed art form. Rather it opens a seismic gap between the obsolete material of the cold war, and the thinnest skein of paint which overlays it. Again and again, in Underworld, this kind of contradiction surfaces in the art work, this contradiction that is built around an inarticulable gap, an abject gulf. The underground installation which plays multiple copies of the Zapruder film, the screening in Radio City of the missing Eisenstein film Unterwelt, Bronzini’s playing of Saint Saëns’ fin de siècle piano concertos on his obsolete gramophone, even the endless replaying on television of the Texas Highway murder, they all express historical contradiction, all draw from and return to an uncycled memory that inhabits, unspeakably, the texture of contemporary. It is of course the case the Underworld is a novel of synthesis, a novel which rolls into itself, which gathers together an oeuvre and a century. Neil Isaacs writes, in 1985, that DeLillo’s first novel Americana is a work which contains raw DeLillian material, that it waits for a synthesising DeLillian voice to come along and put it together, as Oswald was ‘pieced together’ by the Warren Commission. Americana, Isaacs writes, could be ‘put to use’ only in DeLillo’s ‘more carefully crafted, focused, structured work later on’.45 By the time we get to Underworld, it seems that DeLillo has found a synthesising voice, a voice that can reclaim Americana, as it can reclaim and redeem America. But the work of poetic synthesis that DeLillo undertakes in Underworld is one that takes him, repeatedly, back to the disjunctive. The novel opens, again and again, onto the darkness that it seeks to eradicate.

The work of death 211 As much as Americana is brought into the slipstream of Underworld, as much as DeLillo’s masterpiece offers to bring Americana home, there is a wonderful falling away here, also. There is an extraordinary sense in which the pieces that go towards the making of Underworld assert their singularity, their difference, even whilst they are coaxed to reveal their subterranean connections to one another. Bell’s resistance to assimilation is preserved in Underworld, even in the novel’s denial of the oedipal and the transgressive, even in that final word ‘Peace’. The vast movement towards the American voice, towards articulation, towards synthesis and unity, is shadowed and undermined, at every moment, by a falling back into discrete parts. The darkness and the death that intervenes between the poles of historical contradiction, that separates us from each other and from ourselves, moves under the skin of this novel, and it threatens or promises, at every turn, to engulf us, to return the cycling, synthesising movement of the novel to the unspeakable, to the unnameable that inhabits the culture, and that makes a new future possible. This sense that the novel contains a darkness, a death that is at work, that is seamed through the novel and that ‘crawls beneath the midnight skin’ (U 678), is given a strangely direct articulation in Underworld, in the black pages with which the novel is spaced. Throughout DeLillo’s oeuvre, and throughout this book, the space of the boundary is both the space of death, and the space of possibility. The boundary between the 1970s and 1980s is inhabited, in The Names, by a death, the death that intervenes between Axton and Axton, the death that oversees the very possibility of all forms of inscription. The space between the 1980s and the 1990s, and between the east and west, is marked, in Mao II by the death of Bill Gray, the death which is the only gift that the novelist can bequeath to a culture on the point of saturation. As Derrida argues in Of Grammatology, it is this space between, this impossible, dead interval between one moment and the next, between here and there, between us and them, that gives a kind of birth to the possibility of writing. ‘It is ‘spacing (pause, blank, punctuation, interval in general etc.) which constitutes the origin of signification’, Derrida writes. ‘Spacing (notice that this word speaks the articulation of space and time, the becoming-space of time and the becoming-time of space) is always the unperceived, the nonpresent and the nonconscious’.46 It is from this interval that inhabits time and space, Derrida suggests, that writing emerges, a writing which ‘marks the dead time within the presence of the living present, within the general form of all presence’.47 Throughout DeLillo’s writing, this spacing, this deathly interval, trembles at the brink of perceptibility; in his writing, ‘the dead time is at work’. In Mao II, the death that inhabits the boundary tries to emerge, tries to come to the surface as image, Bruegel’s painting of triumphant death finding itself shadowed forth in the photographing of the contemporary disaster. But in Underworld, there is no such attempt to make death into an image. Rather, the death that claws and ravages beneath the surface, that lies between one word and the next, between the metal and the paint, comes flooding onto the page, in Underworld, simply as black ink. ‘I know what

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darkness is’, Beckett’s Malone says, reflecting on the possibility that death might overtake him before he can finish his narrative: ‘it accumulates, thickens, then suddenly bursts and drowns everything’.48 It is this cloud burst, this torrent of darkness from a ‘sky as black as ink’,49 that punctuates Underworld. Each of the Manx Martin episodes in the novel is fenced about by a black page, the black page which DeLillo borrows from Laurence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy.50 If in Sterne’s novel, the black page marks the death of Yorick, then in Underworld it speaks of a kind of historical death. It marks the unspeakability of the interval, it testifies to the novel’s failure to recuperate the past, to absorb the moment of origin, the missing moments on the tape, into an apocalyptic presence. For all its work of recycling, for all its miraculous power to bring an oeuvre and a historical period together, it is this interval in DeLillo’s writing that speaks most eloquently of the possibility of fiction. It is this empty seam that lies latent in the space and the time of our culture that DeLillo’s writing leaves us with; it is from the well of this emptiness that a new, an unforeseeable future might be drawn.

Coda

Ground Zero

Figure 5 Ground Zero. Photograph by Alex Fuchs.

8

The body of history The Body Artist, Cosmopolis

Finished. It’s finished. It must be nearly finished. Samuel Beckett, Endgame 1 This is not the end. Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis 2 For that future world and for that within it which will have put into question the values of sign, word, and writing, for that which guides our future anterior, there is as yet no exergue. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology 3

As I write, we are in the first decade of a new millennium, a decade with no name. I have heard it called the thousands. I have heard it called the noughties, which makes me shudder for some reason. I have heard it called the zeroes. But I am living, as I write, in a pool of time that remains, for me at least, unnamable. Perhaps you are living safely and happily in the tens, or the twenties. The twenty twenties, affording clear vision. Perhaps things are different for you. Perhaps time has started broadly to correspond, again, to a name, or to a guiding idea. I hope so, I think. Or maybe I don’t. But right now, for me, for us, time has escaped from its boundaries, and is no longer measured in decades. DeLillo’s two novels of the new century – The Body Artist and Cosmopolis – are set in the midst of this unmeasured time. The Joycean science teacher Albert Bronzini tells his students, in Underworld, that ‘we think in decades’. We organise and divide time in this way, he goes on, ‘because we need organizing principles to make us less muddled’ (U 735). But this kind of organising principle – a principle which, throughout DeLillo’s oeuvre has had the imminent arrival of the millennial moment as its guarantor – is exploded in DeLillo’s two most recent novels. Decade boundaries have always provided a kind of frame in DeLillo’s writing, a set of borderlines which hem in the flow of time, which hold off the future that continually threatens to irrupt into the present. To the extent that his novels have been able to ground themselves in the present – or to ‘enter narrative time’

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(N 4), as the narrator of The Names puts it – they have done so by reference to the decade boundary, which both orients the prose, and works to contain it. But the temporality of the new millennium is as yet unframed. The only ground that offers itself now is a groundless ground, a ground zero. We find ourselves, now, on a temporal and spatial ground that is ‘unsupported by the usual guarantees’ (U 479), that is founded on emptiness, and that founds emptiness. In both The Body Artist and Cosmopolis, entry into this new post-millennial temporality produces a kind of spectral disjunction. Both novels are haunted by a history that appears in ghostly form, but that cannot quite make itself present, cannot quite manifest itself. The time of the novels is the stretched, alienated, empty time of mourning; a mourning for the spirits that walk the halls, that speak to us from the last century, the last millennium, but that cannot enter into our space or time. As the time of Hamlet is an out-of-joint time4 – an unmeasurable, doubled and haunted time that is conditioned by the spectral presence of the father, who continues to appear even in the guise of his banishment – so the time of these novels is inhabited by a history, or even a form of temporality, that has become obsolete, and that can only be registered through the work of mourning. In The Body Artist, the mourning is personal, driven by the loss of a loved one. The novel enters into the nontime of bereavement, in which the protagonist, Lauren, refuses, like Hamlet, to cast off her nighted colour.5 As Hamlet continues, with ‘vailed lids’ to ‘seek for [his] noble father in the dust’,6 long after the official time of mourning has passed, so Lauren finds her dead husband still alive in ‘streams of sunlit dust’ (BA 124) that pour into their bedroom, alive in the stalled time of a refusal to relinquish a loved one. In Cosmopolis, the work of mourning is more overtly political. It is less focused and pure than in The Body Artist, finding itself refracted through the broken prismatic surface of a postmillennial city, a city that is entering into the spacetime of cybercapital. If, in The Body Artist, it is the experience of bereavement that leads Lauren to ‘think of time differently’ (BA 107), then in Cosmopolis it is the globalisation of electronic capital that leads to the need for a ‘new theory of time’ (C 86). If, in The Body Artist, the slack directionlessness of bereavement produces a ‘kind of time that had no narrative quality’ (BA 65), then in Cosmopolis it is the virtualisation of currency that collapses the teleological movement of history. In Cosmopolis, it is ‘money’, rather than time, that has ‘lost its narrative quality’ (C 77). These novels, then, take place in the time of mourning, in a kind of evacuated time which has lost its narrative quality, which can neither inherit the legacy of the past, nor move towards the possibility of a new and undiscovered future. It is a time which has lost its sense of identity. At the bare, scorched opening of The Body Artist, before the death that determines the novel has happened, there is still a kind of contact with the last millennium; the time of the twentieth century still lingers on, as if the break with the past has not yet been realised. Lauren reflects aloud, over breakfast, on the

The body of history 217 peculiar persistence of measured, disciplined time, its capacity to tug at her even in the solitude of her nuptial hideaway, and in the bare expanses of the new century. ‘All day yesterday,’ she says to Rey, ‘I thought it was Friday’. Even though they’re ‘out of the city’ and ‘off the calendar’, in a pocket of time and space in which ‘Friday shouldn’t have an identity’, the days still have a colour and a flavour for her here, a Fridayness, in the clear light of a ‘strong bright day after a storm’ (BA 21). But this thin connection between the lucid time of the novel’s opening and the days of the official calendar is sundered, softly and soundlessly, by Rey’s death. Mourning casts Lauren into an endless, divorced moment. The intuitive sense that opens the novel – the perception that ‘Time seems to pass’, that the ‘world happens, unrolling into moments’ (BA 7) – is wiped out by a death which leaves Lauren cast away, marooned in a time which no longer passes or seems to pass. The apparition who comes to Lauren – the blank, reflective personification of her mourning whom she names Mr Tuttle – initiates her into a static time which has no identity, no flavour, no history. Mr Tuttle marks her abandonment of the credo of narrative time, the faith that has for its catechism the mantra that ‘Something is happening. It has happened. It will happen’ (BA 98). For Mr Tuttle, and for Lauren when she is possessed by his spirit, it becomes impossible ‘to imagine time existing in reassuring sequence, passing, flowing, happening, with names and dates and distinctions’ (BA 77). Mr Tuttle takes Lauren into a kind of vacuum, into what Eric thinks of as a ‘little hollow of nontime’ (C 76); an emptied out moment in which one ‘does not feel a sense of future direction’, a moment which has been ejected from the stream. This is an unboundaried time, a time so estranged from the ‘sun-kissed chronology of events’ (BA 83) that it is scarcely recognisable as time, a moment so emptied and void that it is no longer really recognisable as a moment. It is one of the working contradictions of DeLillo’s most recent prose, however, that this evacuation of the moment, this entry into the suspended non-time of posthistorical mourning, is also a delivery into the very fibrous material of the moment itself. The evacuation of the moment does not only eject one from time, but also abandons one to it, to a time whose sinewy dimensions lie naked and exposed. Here, a deficit of time is indistinguishable from a surplus. The voided emptiness of the moment is also its plenary fullness. If ‘time is a thing that grows scarcer every day’ (C 69), then it is also a thing that grows more abundant. This wriggling contradiction is at work in the very texture of The Body Artist, in the hard, bright surface of the prose itself. From the opening of this novel, the emptiness of the moment is conjured from a Woolfian immersion in the moment, from an extraordinarily sharp and precise occupation of the fibres of passing time. The opening breakfast scene, in which Rey and Lauren somnambulate around the kitchen, still ‘puddled in dream melt’ (BA 7), is one which is inhabited by the death that is just around the corner. It is a scene which is, in some ways, already a memory of a scene, already laden with the weight of being the Last Day. The hair that Lauren finds in her mouth – coming as it does from Mr Tuttle,

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from the ghost that is already stirring in the walls – speaks of this intrusion of a future death into the passing moment. This sense that death is already here, already with us at the breakfast table, leads to an extraordinary slowing down of time. The prose reaches for a crispness, a fineness and a brilliance in the depiction of this unshadowed scene, a forensic separation of the components of the morning, that allows for the time of this day to be chiselled out, to stand stoneclad in all its presence and clarity. It is difficult to think of a stretch of prose, since Woolf’s depiction of the fleeting moment, that has stilled time this effectively or this cleanly.7 The birds at the feeder in the cleaned light, the blue jay that catches Lauren’s eye, are held, suspended and revealed in a kind of immaculate stillness. But even here, in this superreal immersion in the moment, the prose encounters an evacuation, a kind of expulsion. The slower the motion becomes, the closer that the prose comes to the tangible quality of the moment itself, the more profound is this emptying out, as if immersion in the moment is loss of the moment, as if the real quality of time is a kind of timelessness. As the prose follows Rey and Lauren around the kitchen, seeking to document their every movement or fleeting gesture, what becomes apparent is that attention to the immediate, to the here and now of things, leads insistently to a deferral to the there and then, as if now can only exist elsewhere, in the future, or in the past. Lauren notices something – say, the quality of the tap water, that ‘it ran silvery and clear and then in seconds turned opaque’ (BA 8) – and the prose will try to follow this observation, to enter into the time of the discovery, the perception of the change in the quality of the water from silvery to dull. But in following the movements of Lauren’s thought so closely, what is encountered is not silver clarity, but a kind of opacity. She ‘seemed to notice’ the water, but the moment at which she does so, at which she encounters the change from one liquid form to another, evades her. It has somehow already passed, or is still to come. ‘It seemed’, she thinks, that in all these months and all these times in which she’d run water from the kitchen tap she’d never noticed how the water ran clear at first and then went not murky exactly but opaque, or maybe it hadn’t happened before, or she’d noticed and forgotten. (BA 8) What is lost, in this obsessively precise tracing of the procedure of noticing, of seeing, is the moment of seeing itself, as if the change from clarity to murk is a transitional moment that is not susceptible of discovery, or one that can only be registered from outside, retroactively or pre-emptively. As is demonstrated again in the exquisite scene later in the novel, in which the prose struggles to trace Lauren’s registering of the path of a paper clip as it falls through the bright air (BA 89–90), the moment of seeing is not at one with itself, but is rather hollowed out and doubled. Dwelling in the moment involves, always, an estrangement from the moment.

The body of history 219 This temporal contradiction between immediacy and deferral, between void and plenum, evacuation and inhabitation, is personified, in The Body Artist, in the figure of Mr Tuttle. If Lauren’s experience of time, her agonising occupation of a temporality which is both overwhelmingly present and spectrally absent, is a response to the death of her husband, then Mr Tuttle is a figure who allows her to tune herself to the disjointed time of mourning, to conceive of it and live in it. Lauren recognises her own predicament through its reflection in Mr Tuttle. Mr Tuttle, Lauren thinks, is a character who, like herself, ‘didn’t know how to measure himself to what we call the Now’ (BA 66). He is removed from the flow of time. His difficulty with verb tenses testifies to his incapacity to think of time as something that flows, that passes in a stream. But Mr Tuttle’s eviction from the now, from narrative time, affords him a contact with time itself, with a time that is shorn of ‘names and dates and distinctions’, which is cleansed, purified and tenseless. What Mr Tuttle lives in is the datelessness, the timelessness of time itself. He lives in a ‘kind of time that is simply and overwhelmingly there, laid out, unoccurring’. He lives in a ‘future’ which is ‘unnamed’, a future that is ‘simultaneous, somehow, with the present’, and with the past (BA 89). Lauren struggles painfully with the contradiction between living in time and lived time, between the moment and the memory of the moment. As she hears the paper clip fall, and remembers hearing the paper clip fall, the tension between lived time and remembered time is excruciating. Once you know you’ve dropped the paper clip, she thinks, ‘you hear it hit the floor, belatedly’. You retrieve the sound, the aural molecules of the falling twist of wire, from the air itself. ‘The sound makes its way to you through an immense web of distances’ (BA 89). The work of retrieving this sound, not as the memory of sound but as the sound itself, immediate and unmemoried, is immense; immense and futile, as the sound cannot remain the sound itself, cannot travel to you across the immense distance of the ‘second or two’ it takes for you to register the fall. The desert that stretches between the sound and the retrieval of the sound is too vast to cross. But for Mr Tuttle, evacuated as he is from the now, the sound and the memory of the sound, the sound in the past and the sound in the future, are indistinguishable. He lives in a kind of unbroken continuum, in which he experiences time as a ‘continuous thing, a continuous whole, and the only way to distinguish one part from another, this from that, now from then, is by making arbitrary divisions’ (BA 91). This sense that Mr Tuttle occupies and represents an unbroken time, a time that is not in process but that forms a kind of groundless ground, a kind of substratum to space-time, is borne out in the texture of his body. Whilst Mr Tuttle is a ghostly presence, a kind of unmade figure, a figment who can speak only by adopting the voices and gestures of others, his spectrality does not find itself manifested in insubstantiality. Rather, his presence is a profoundly material one, even as it seems to cause an emptiness in the air; to be near him is not only to be near an absence, but also to be near the plastic stuff of time itself. If he belongs to ‘another structure’ where

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‘time is something like itself, sheer and bare, empty of shelter’ (BA 92), then his body is a kind of representation of this naked structure. Like the ‘peeled’ body of the Micklewhite kid in Great Jones Street, the boy whose soft boned disfigurement causes him to become ‘pervasively real’ (GJS 161), the body of Mr Tuttle is made of the soft, unmodelled stuff from which the calendared world is made. His is a body that has ‘no protective surface’ (BA 90), a body that does not become in time, that is unborn into the motion of time, but that is somehow naked, prehistorical. The unhistorical body of history itself. As Wunderlick seeks contact with the bodily presence of Micklewhite, by running his hand ‘over the moist surface of his face’ (GJS 162), so Lauren tries to enter into the space and the time of Mr Tuttle’s body, tracing the lineaments of his moist, exposed face, trying to measure herself to the ‘breathless shock of his being here’ (BA 68–69). She seeks to ease her exhausting struggle with temporal contradiction by contact with his sluggish, grub-like body, by finding herself grounded in the mucoid stuff of his nonbeing. And her own body work is an attempt to return, herself, to this naked body of history, to remove her own ‘protective surface’, to ‘sand her body’, to strip it of its ‘names and dates and distinctions’. Her peeling, bleaching, exfoliating work is organised around her struggle to ‘become a blankness, a body slate erased of every past resemblance’ (BA 84). It is a struggle to tune her body to the time of mourning, to enter into Mr Tuttle’s continuum, where past, present and future are distinctions that have not yet been devised, and where time is laid out in its bare, empty completion. The culmination of this body work, this attempt to inhabit the grounded and groundless body of time itself, is reached in Lauren’s performance art piece, Body Time. This performance, like David Bell’s film in Americana, seeks to reach out across the novel, to refashion the ingredients of which it is made, to reshape them in the space and time of a perfected work. As, in Americana, David’s film is inspired by an encounter with something that ‘almost immediately became something else’ (A 205), so Lauren’s body art stems from her experience of being ‘plunged into metamorphosis’, her encountering ‘something that is also something else’ (BA 36). David discovers, in a fleeting glimpse of a ‘woman trimming a hedge’ (A 205), the potential to remodel and transform this image in film, to sculpt it in such a way that he might reclaim, in that accident of gesture, a lost world of forbidden oedipal desire, might coax the gesture to reveal the hidden ‘something else’ that it contains. Lauren’s art is forged, similarly, from the remodelling and reworking of the images that she encounters in her period of mourning. The something that becomes something else, for Lauren, is the image of a Japanese woman ‘watering her garden when the sky shows rain’ (BA 36), and it is this figure that opens Body Time; Lauren’s body moulded to the contours of an ‘ancient Japanese woman on a bare stage, gesturing in the stylised manner of Noh Drama’ (BA 105). As her piece continues, it works to bring the entire novel into its orbit. The elements of which the novel is made find themselves refashioned in this piece, contained within the plastic material of Lauren’s morphing body,

The body of history 221 the body which like Mr Tuttle’s is a blank slate, a body made simply of unoccurring time. But if Lauren’s art work is driven by a compulsion that is similar to David’s, a compulsion to recapture and refashion lost time, in other respects, Lauren’s and David’s art works could hardly be more different. The aesthetic project in Americana is organised around the potential arrival of the millennium, the projected future moment at which David might meet with David, at which art might meet with life in the spirit of a transcendent reconciliation. The scale and range and tone of the earlier novel – its largeness – is enabled and delimited, even in its failure, by the millennial boundary that makes its far horizon, its ‘organizing principle’. But in The Body Artist, and in Body Time, there is no such boundary, and no such organising principle. Rather, Lauren’s piece takes place in a temporality that is unframed, a kind of time that is all time – past, present and future – and no time at all. It takes place in the merest sliver of time, a peeling of postmillennial time that cannot catch up with itself, that can hardly know itself, but that is also endless, a time that is so unboundaried and so fleeting that it moves in the slowest possible motion. The piece is designed in such a way that the audience, trapped in the forcefield of Lauren’s time body, her embodied time, are forced to ‘feel time go by, viscerally, even painfully’ (BA 104). It produces an almost spatial contact with time, the kind of contact that mourning has given to Lauren, the kind of contact that delivers you to time, but to a time that has no narrative quality. Whilst in Americana, the temporality of the novel is held within the narrative frame of two thousand years of Judaeo-Christian history, here time is unanchored and unstoried. The past might happen here – the piece is littered with reshaped elements drawn not only from The Body Artist, but also from the range of DeLillo’s oeuvre – as the future might find itself foreshadowed, but these temporal elements are not given any final shape by virtue of their manifestation in the soft clay of Lauren’s body. Rather, past, present and future merge here, in this body time, in an unbearable corporeal presence which is also a kind of absence. If this temporal condition is determined, to some degree, by the turning of the millennium, by the ejection of DeLillo’s prose from the heavy time of late century into the thin, newborn time of the third millennium, then it is also the case that this new time is produced by the technological conditions of the twenty-first century. It may be that The Body Artist, in its monkish, rural retreat, makes a strong contrast to Cosmopolis, set as the latter is in the speeding buzz of a futuristic city, but both novels take their temporal coordinates from the evolution of technologies which are transforming the social production of space and time in the twenty-first century. Mr Tuttle may be an apparition conjured by Lauren’s mourning, and in his odd unmadeness he may seem cloyingly anti-modern, timeless and ancient in a way. But he comes to Lauren not simply from the near or distant past, but from the new time and space of the internet, of the world wide web. The kind of time that he occupies, that he is, is a time that has been made available by the historical development of electronic audio-visual and computer technology, as much

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as by the psychoanalytical development of the time of mourning. Lauren becomes obsessed by a live video feed that she finds on the web, streamed to her computer from a webcam on a bare stretch of road in Kotka, Finland. This live feed, which is fed itself into Body Time, becomes, for Lauren, a kind of manifestation of her mourning. The capacity of internet technology to link two places in real time, to make such an immediate connection between here and there, speaks for Lauren of the kind of melting of spatial and temporal distinctions that is a consequence and a condition of mourning. Kotka is a ‘place contained in an unyielding frame’; a frame which has a ‘reading of the local time in the digital display in a corner of the screen’. The frame of the computer screen marks the temporal and spatial distinctions between the USA and Finland; but it also collapses the boundaries, breaks the geopolitical frame, brings Kotka pouring into the midst of Lauren’s mourning, Kotka ‘in its realness, in its hours, minutes and seconds’ (BA 38). The internet, and the virtualisation of material conditions that it witnesses and enables, produces a kind of thin simultaneity, a condition in which it is possible, in a phrase that might give DeLillo’s readers an uncanny sense of déjà lu, to be ‘here and also there’ (e.g. RD 9, M 10, U 733). The webcam in Kotka shows a sparsely populated road, a road that ‘approaches and recedes, both realities occurring at once’ (BA 39). This little slip of space and time, hanging in a kind of anonymous suspense, containing a road that, as in the set of Beckett’s Godot, both approaches and recedes, becomes representative of the co-ordinates of cyberspace itself. In the new space and time of electronic globalisation, approaching is indistinguishable from receding, here can morph into there, the very possibility of distance gives way to an unboundaried, simultaneous presence, in which all realities occur at once. And it is from this virtual electronic space that Mr Tuttle comes. He is a figure who has appeared, Lauren thinks, ‘from cyberspace, a man who had emerged from her computer screen in the dead of night. He was from Kotka, in Finland’ (BA 45). Mr Tuttle, the personification of marooned bereavement, finds the internet ready made for him, as if cyberspace has finally produced a form in which to articulate the time of mourning; as if the out-of-joint time of Hamlet has at last found itself realised, here where there is no Hamlet to ‘set things right’, or to retune the temporal frame to the familiar co-ordinates of Renaissance humanism. Throughout both The Body Artist and Cosmopolis, the time of the new millennium, the time for which we need to produce a new theory, is conditioned, in this way, by the development of new technology. If, in The Body Artist, Mr Tuttle’s capacity to mimic and reproduce the speech and gesture of others, to manifest there in the body of here, is held in a quietly ironic counterpoise to the quaintly obsolete reproductive capacities of Lauren’s dictaphone (it’s time, Eric might say, to retire the word dictaphone), then Cosmopolis is structured around the experience of a kind of total obsolescence. In Cosmopolis, technology is obsolete from the moment that it acquires a material form, from the moment it is realised as hardware. The clunky stuff of the embodied world, the skyscraper as well as the telephone handset, is

The body of history 223 always left behind by the spirit of a technology which moves beyond the grasp of its body, which finds itself at home only in the bare, unpeopled space and time represented by the peeled body of Mr Tuttle. DeLillo comments, in a recent essay, that the twin towers of the World Trade Center represented a ‘justification’ of ‘technology’s will to realise in solid form whatever becomes theoretically allowable’.8 The towers themselves sought to capture and to articulate the spirit of a technology which belongs in the unembodied, theoretical future. They appear throughout DeLillo’s oeuvre as a kind of delicate antenna, as a radio tuned in to tomorrow, a structure that can somehow negotiate between the spacetime of the twentieth century, and the unanchored time of electronic global capital.9 But in Cosmopolis, and in the year 2000, the towers are already in the process of disappearing, as if in advance of the terrorist attacks in 2001. Whilst the building has always seemed, in DeLillo’s writing, to carry an astonishingly prophetic sense of its own fragility, an ‘impermanence’ (P 19) and a provisionality that arises from its location at the limit of what becomes theoretically allowable, in Cosmopolis they are virtually vapour, already retreating to the future from which they have come to us on loan, getting ready to leave behind the rubble of Ground Zero in their place (see Figure 5). ‘They were made to be the last tall things,’ Eric thinks, ‘made empty, designed to hasten the future. They weren’t here, exactly. They were in the future, a time beyond geography and touchable money and the people who stack and count it’ (C 36). As the towers prepare for their vanishing act, the very word ‘skyscraper’ starts to reveal its obsolescence, a word which ‘belonged to the olden soul of awe, to the arrowed towers that were a narrative long before [Eric] was born’ (C 9). The towers join a pile of wreckage in Cosmopolis, a heap of the obsolete junk of an ex-century and an ex-history. They join the stethoscopes (‘the lost tools of antiquity’ (C 43)), cash machines, ambulances and phones, walkie-talkies, computers, palmtops and airports, in a great pile of redundancy, of steel and concrete and plastic and words which have been evacuated of their content, which cannot keep up with their guiding spirit. This sense that the novels have arrived at the condition of a total obsolescence suggests that they mark the consummation of DeLillo’s narrative of technological development, a narrative which stretches across his oeuvre. From the mimeograph with which Ted Warburton copies his Trotskyite memos in Americana, through the telexes with which the expats colonise the Middle East in The Names, and the invention of bar code technology in the supermarkets of White Noise, to the development of email and the internet in Underworld, the oeuvre follows a trajectory of virtualisation. It produces a map of the way that information and computer technology prepares history for repackaging, for reabsorption into the weightless time of the moving image, the time of the streaming video feed. The history of technological development over this time is a history which contains within it the gradual erosion of history, the attenuation of a dialectically materialist conception of the production of space and time. By the time that we reach Cosmopolis, this

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trajectory starts to feel like it has reached an end point of a sort. It starts to feel as if we have reached the point at which technology has become selfreferring and self-reproducing, at which technology has freed itself from the embarrassment of hard currency. If Lauren Hartke is a ‘body artist who tries to shake off the body’ (BA 104), then technology, in DeLillo’s late novels, is in the throes of sloughing its own skin. Eric says gravely to his currency analyst Michael Chin, early in Cosmopolis, that the ‘interaction between technology and capital’, their ‘inseparability’, is the ‘only thing in the world worth pursuing professionally and intellectually’ (C 23). It is this interaction between capital and technology, in the preparation of world markets for integration into a bodiless global economy, that drives world history, and that drives DeLillo’s prose. It is the cahoots between money and science that has brought us, finally, to the predicament imagined in Cosmopolis, a predicament in which it is ‘cyber-capital that creates the future’, in which ‘money makes time’, rather than the other way around (C 79). Where, in The Body Artist, Mr Tuttle finds that he is unable to ‘measure himself’ to ‘the Now’, in Cosmopolis it is the power of electronic money that empties the moment of its narrative quality, of its inhabitability as the ici maintenant. ‘The present’, the theoretician Vija Kinski suggests, is ‘hard to find. It is being sucked out of the world to make way for the future of uncontrolled markets and huge investment potential’ (C 79). In the evacuated now of Cosmopolis and of The Body Artist the present disappears continually into the past or into the future, so that to experience time is always somehow to miss it. One can only approach the present through its echo or reflection in a past or a future that lies on the very surface, as time itself, uncorrupted by tenses or by ‘arbitrary’ distinctions, is made available to the cyber market, eminently present, overwhelmingly there, but also somehow ungraspable, stripped of the ‘clinging breath of presence’ (BA 96). Time, like money, is everywhere. It is supremely available, but, by virtue of such availability, it is untouchable and undiscoverable, a kind of ghost of itself. It is this haunted quality of time in these novels that condemns them to a perpetual sense of déjà vu, déjà vu both as the experience of an unrecoverable but nevertheless recovered past, and as the premonitory encounter with an as yet unlived future – as the reverse déjà vu, the remembering forward, that is one of the characteristic features of DeLillian temporality. In the extended, stretched time of cybercapital the past is somehow present to us, in the way that the experience of déjà vu makes an original moment curiously present. As Wunderlick finds the history of New York exposed on the urban surface, at the end of Great Jones Street, so in Cosmopolis the layers of geological time are somehow revealed, lying simultaneous with each other, with the present and the future. Where Wunderlick finds ‘sixteenth century London’ preserved in 1970s New York (GJS 248), so Eric senses the ‘Lower East Side of the 1920s and the diamond centers of Europe before the second war’ preserved in the ‘grain’ of the twenty-first century street (C 64–65). And with this coming to the temporal surface of the city’s geopolitical history, the novel

The body of history 225 excavates a history of DeLillo’s oeuvre, held in gesture and attitude, experienced as déjà vu. Both Cosmopolis and The Body Artist resuscitate primal moments in DeLillo’s oeuvre, or catch at their shapes in a fleeting dumb show. The oedipal obsession that stretches through the prose is played out here in pale mime. In The Body Artist, Lauren’s maternally sexual embracing of the boy man Mr Tuttle calls to the original encounter between David and his mother in Americana. As Lauren stands in the kitchen, with her ‘hands on [Mr Tuttle’s] shoulders looking into his eyes’ (BA 85), this stylised gesture returns directly to the primal moment of oedipal desire in David Bell’s kitchen. It recovers not only the moment when David’s mother was ‘before me now, looking up, her hands on my shoulders’ (A 196), but also that same moment as David reshapes it in film, the moment when ‘through the viewfinder I saw them, motionless, supremely patient, steadfast, her long fingers knuckle to tip visible over his shoulders, her left eye looking past his ear and into the eye of the camera’ (A 317–318). And in Cosmopolis, the oedipal scene returns in the form of yet another lost shoe (C 31), along with a whole series of other composed images which bring the layered time of DeLillo’s writing to the surface. As Eric witnesses the spectacle of a burning man ‘trembling in a length of braided flame’ on a New York street (C 97), it is as if this man – redolent as he is of a history of suicidal protest reaching back to the selfimmolation of Quang Duc – has been transported here from Players, or from the empty time of White Noise (see Figure 1).10 And when Eric stumbles into a film set, in which the city street has been taken over by naked bodies posed in the attitudes of mass death, the scene reaches well beyond itself, finding echoes answering back from across the oeuvre. The scene itself – the ‘city of stunned flesh’ laid out in the bare brightness of studio lights (C 172) – has a curiously revealed quality, as if here the body has been returned to its ‘unprotected’ prelapsarian nudity (C 172), stripped, like Mr Tuttle, of epidermic layers. But if the mounds of naked bodies are suggestive of an exposed body politic, they also carry with them a set of associations that have been already seen, a kind of collective political memory that runs through DeLillo’s writing. They call up the littered corpses of the My Lai massacre, and the bundled bodies of holocaust victims, as they have found themselves shadowed forth in White Noise, in the ethically evacuated space of the simulated disaster, the simulated evacuation. It is as if the body of history itself, here, stripped and exfoliated by the abrasive work of the television lights, cannot but carry the marks of a violent past, even as it is cleansed of the narrative of lived time, as it is returned to a ‘body slate erased of every past resemblance’ (BA 84). And if the past is present to us here, in its bleached out absence, so too the future has already arrived, in the form of a presentiment which is also a memory, a kind of topsy-turvy déjà vu. In both novels, through the medium of Mr Tuttle in The Body Artist, or that of virtualised technology in Cosmopolis, the space and time of the future, the very fluid of the time to come, flows continually into the emptying present. Where, in earlier novels

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such as White Noise and Mao II, the integrity of the narrative frame is threatened by the pressure of a future which has ‘become insistent’, which is impatient to arrive, in The Body Artist and Cosmopolis the future so contaminates the present and past that there is no narrative frame to defend or to exceed, no temporal borders available with which to carve time up. Mr Tuttle mutters a phrase to Lauren, in her voice, a bland wayward phrase. ‘Don’t touch it. I’ll clean it up later’ (BA 81), he says, and days, pages later, Lauren feels herself edging into the phrase, as Mr Tuttle drops a glass of water, wheeling into the prepared space of her own future. ‘Don’t touch it,’ she says to Mr Tuttle, feeling doubled, spooked. ‘I’ll clean it up later’ (BA 93). This same phenomenon recurs throughout Cosmopolis, as Eric’s webcams, spycams and recording devices, that monitor the movements of world leaders and of world currencies, repeatedly leap ahead of the sluggish world that they purport to track. Eric sees a recording of himself ‘recoil in shock’ on one of his screens, as he sits in his limousine. He finds himself ‘suspended, waiting’, as the microseconds speed past, before the detonation comes, ‘loud and deep’ the detonation that causes him to recoil in shock (C 93–94). These warping effects, these queer temporal confusions, occur, Lauren thinks, because the future is ‘not under construction’, but is rather already here. The future that is conjured into being by cybercapital is laid out, ‘susceptible to entry’ (BA 98). ‘There has to be an imaginary point,’ Lauren reflects, ‘a nonplace where language intersects with our perceptions of time and space’, and it is this mournful non-place to which we have been delivered, in this unnamed decade, and in DeLillo’s late prose. We are ‘stranger[s] at this crossing, without words or bearings’ (BA 99), condemned to experience all realities at once in the ultrafungible spacetime of global capital. As Milton’s God ‘beholds’ ‘past present and future’ in its post-apocalyptic simultaneity, from his vantage point on high, so all time and space is laid out before us.11 But unlike God, or Milton, we have no ethical perspective on this simultaneous time, no means of gaining a purchase. The revelation that has been afforded by the globalisation of capital is also a kind of blindness, the fullness of time is also an emptiness. The end point that we seem to have reached is not one that allows us to sum things up, it is not the orgasmic death towards which all narrative plots tend. We cannot ‘draw the line’, or ‘make the tot’.12 Rather, we have been delivered to the stretched time of an ending that continues to go on, a distended time that was first intuited by Beckett in Endgame, a time which endures even though it is ‘finished’. That DeLillo’s latest novels should find themselves delivered so completely to this unoxygenated temporality might suggest that the possibilities of fiction, or at least of his mode of fiction, have finally been exhausted. If his writing has organised itself around latent time, around the undied death that is at work in history, the death that harbours the unspoken promise of something so far undreamt, then the arrival of the future in these novels suggests that the well spring of his fiction has dried up. Even in her bereaved state, Lauren finds herself bridling against the kind of completed time that she finds realised

The body of history 227 in the figure of Mr Tuttle. ‘She wanted to create her own future’, she thinks, ‘not enter a state already shaped to her outline’ (BA 98). But in these novels, it feels as if the future is no longer uncreated, that one’s ‘life and death are set in place, just waiting for you to keep the appointments’ (BA 98). If, for Walter Benjamin, a revolutionary politics relies upon a capacity to ‘blast open the continuum of history’;13 if, for Marx, the drawing up of a ‘programme for the future’ is necessarily the work of the ‘reactionary’, if for Derrida, the ‘future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger’,14 then these novels might speak of the petering out of a revolutionary politics, and of a critical fiction. They might perform or exemplify Eric’s perception that ‘there’s no more danger in the new’ (C 8). Mr Tuttle might personify a ‘walking talking continuum’ (BA 91) which cannot be ‘blasted open’. The strange, abbreviated quality of the writing might testify to this exhaustion. Both novels feel as if they can hardly happen, as if they can hardly live in their own space, or in their own time, as if they are running on an energy that they themselves have to conjure out of nowhere. After the great, recuperative work of Underworld, the encyclopaedic fashioning of genre and style and history, these novels feel lost, without bearings, unable to speak in a ‘voice faithful to the genre’ (U 104). Even here, however, in the fleeting space of DeLillo’s later prose, something struggles on. As Lauren insists to herself, in defiance of Mr Tuttle’s revealed future, ‘something is happening’ (BA 98); something is happening, even now and even here, that has not already happened, that has not already been seen. The world continues to crumble at its edge, to fall into a time that has not yet been prepared, into a future that can be anticipated only in the form of an absolute danger. There is a death that is still at work in the texture of the moment, a death that has not found itself revealed or redeemed, a death that holds within it the possibility of an as yet unwritten fiction. A phrase that surfaces in The Body Artist, which reaches through the body of DeLillo’s writing, suggests the spectral persistence of this deathly possibility, even as it speaks of its exhaustion. Lauren thinks, late in the novel, that she sees a bird ‘rise past the window, eerie and birdlike, but maybe not a bird’ (BA 91). She tries to catch at the fleeting moment, at the strangely surreal and weightless sight of a bird rising, vertically, at the window, but she cannot quite register it. She has to rethink it, to remake it, in order to know if the bird happened, if the bird really rose at the window, generating effortless lift; she ‘had to re-create the ghostly moment, write it like a line in a piece of fiction’ (BA 91). The moment that she creates, here, is a fiction that cannot know itself, can never find itself proven, or endorsed. How would she ever know, she thinks, that it happened, that the bird rose at the window, that the fiction matches with an event in the world; ‘how would she ever know for sure unless it happened again, and even then, she thought, and even then again’ (BA 91). This reflection evokes an extraordinary sense of déjà lu, for a reader of DeLillo’s prose. It takes us back, through White Noise, to The Names, and to Axton’s own reflection on the curiously unknowable

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quality of flight. The time of air travel, Axton thinks, ‘is time totally lost to us’: We don’t remember it. We take no sense impressions with us, no voices, none of the windy blast of aircraft on the tarmac, or the white noise of flight, or the hours waiting. Nothing sticks to us but smoke in our hair and clothes. It is dead time. It never happens until it happens again. Then it never happened. (N 7) This echoing relation between The Body Artist and The Names, a relation which crosses two decades and a million words of prose, suggests a kind of still time, a stalled time in which the future is already made, in which not only White Noise but also The Body Artist is already held, in reverse déjà vu, in the non-time of Axton’s flight. But whilst it speaks of such a temporal continuity, such an unbroken continuum stretching from 1979 to 2000, this resonance also carries a kind of death, a kind of unincorporable absence which has inhabited DeLillo’s prose, and which lies within it even now. The bird’s vertical line of flight, the flight that Lauren almost sees, that can belong only in a line of fiction, takes virtual place in the dead time that lies dormant in the fibres of DeLillo’s prose, the staticky emptiness that is unconscriptable to any programme, that is not part of Mr Tuttle’s revealed future. This unmadeness, this unbodied, undreamt time, has grown very scarce in DeLillo’s late prose, and in the age of cybercapital. Time has become so present, has become so ‘like itself ’ (BA 92), that it seems as if there are no gaps, no breaches in the continuum. Hypertext seems to have revealed Hegel’s ‘concatenation of the world’, with a kind of weightless immediacy. But the very historical and technological processes that have delivered us to a future of cybercapital have preserved also a dead time, a dead time that is still at work, that might still hold the seeds of a new future and of an unwritten fiction. The forms of technology that so fascinate Lauren – the streaming video feed from Kotka, the electronic voice on a telephone answering machine – may bring Mr Tuttle’s bodily time into her living room, may produce a kind of temporal continuum that is uninterruptible, unsusceptible of critique. But at the same time cybertechnology produces a kind of warp in the continuum, a kind of bottomless gap. The internet feed that joins the USA with Finland, Lauren thinks, produces a kind of ‘dead time’, a time that doesn’t happen until it happens again, and then still doesn’t happen, a dead time which remains beyond the measurable or the manipulative power of the fastest computer. And the answering machine that speaks with an electronic voice, that implores us with an absolute absence of effect to ‘Please / leave / a mess/age’ (BA 67) performs not so much the infinite reproducibility of speech, as the gulf of dead time that the electronic voice crosses, that it seeks to eliminate. As Bill’s answering machine message to Brita in Mao II is inhabited by the rowelling spirit of his unpublished book, so Lauren’s message is made of generated words that

The body of history 229 are inhabited by a deathliness, words that are ‘separated by brief but deep dimensions’ (BA 67). The message, in all its uninflected, electronic blandness, in all its cybernetic denial of what Bill thinks of as the ‘poetry of nobody home’, carries in the cycles of its simulated speech such unmeasured depths, such ‘strange discontinuity’, that it feels as if the movement from one word to the next, from one syllable to the next, is a ‘quantum hop’ (BA 67). The technology that delivers us to a blank flatness, to the kind of tautological finishedness carried in Mr Tuttle’s gnomic claim that ‘the word for moonlight is moonlight’ (BA 82), produces also a kind of discontinuity, a kind of asymmetry in which is held the ‘riddling little twist, subatomic, that made creation happen’ (C 52). The internet feed, the electronic message, carry in their digital cycles the little misalignment that, like the flaw in Klara Sax’s ‘twisty smile’ (U 749), prises open the ground, holds the poles of the tautology apart, allows for a kind subatomic shift that might become tectonic, that might move the very foundations of the earth. In the unnamed decade in which I am writing, this possibility that there might be something unforeseen contained within the texture of the present – something small and subatomic, or something massive and earth shattering – has taken on a particular significance. Vija Kinski says to Eric that time itself, in April 2000, is pregnant with this possibility. With the ‘slightly twisted’ (C 79) smile that she inherits from Klara Sax and from Lee Harvey Oswald, Kinski tells Eric that ‘something will happen soon, maybe today’, that will ‘correct the acceleration of time’ (C 79). It is difficult to read this line, in a novel published in 2003, without aligning Kinski’s ‘something’ with the terrorist attacks that occurred in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. DeLillo’s earlier fiction has prepared us for this suggestion that it is terrorism rather than fiction that might allow for ‘creation to happen’. The terrorist Abu Rashid insists in Mao II, for example, that it is ‘terrorism’, rather than democratic politics, or avant-garde art, that ‘makes the new future possible’ (M 235). If Cosmopolis and The Body Artist are organised around the smallest warps and discontinuities in the continuum, the subatomic little twist that allows for a new future to happen, then the terrorist atrocity that hangs in the air in Eric Packer’s New York might seem to be of a different order of magnitude altogether. It might be that it is the brutal fury of the 9/11 attacks, rather than any kind of twisty fictional possibility that lies latent in the culture, that will correct the acceleration of time, or usher in a new era in world history. To pit the massiveness of a terrorist event, in this way, against the possibilities of an aesthetic critique of the culture, however, might be to misunderstand the relation between terrorism and fiction as it is conceived by DeLillo. For all its brutality, it may be that terrorist atrocity is not a more effective way of making a dent in the global hegemony than the work of the artist, at least not in any straightforward way. It is striking that the possibility that Kinski posits – the possibility that something devastating and unforeseen might happen, maybe today – is still as moot to the post-9/11 reader as it would have been

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in April 2000. The suspenseful intuition that something may be around the corner, that something transformative ghosts a culture which has reached a self-referring completion, is still a defining characteristic of cultural life in the west, as I write in 2006. The 9/11 attacks, in this respect, and for all their pervasive influence on the global balance of power, have not yet become the ‘something’ that Kinski intuits in Cosmopolis. Far from representing a selfevident, material assault on the world’s centres of economic and military might, an assault that makes a new future possible, the attacks have become increasingly difficult to locate or to understand as a singular and definitive historical event. This difficulty has emerged partly from an uncertainty about the nature of cause and effect in contemporary political culture. 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, partly because it is hard to trace a clear narrative line from the former to the latter. It is hard to know whether the doctrine of pre-emptive war that ‘legitimises’ the first conflicts of the twenty-first century has emerged as a consequence of 9/11, or whether the recent, more aggressive phase in US foreign policy has its roots elsewhere, in an older political nexus that gave rise to the attacks, rather than following on from them. This uncertainty about the meaning and historical location of the attacks, about whether they represent transformation or continuity, emerges again and again. The period of world history into which we are entering in the wake of 9/11 looks like it might be one in which global power relations are entirely redrawn, in which a new global front is opened that is as wide and dangerous as that between the USA and the USSR during the cold war. But it seems equally possible that the global unrest we are now witnessing is the playing out of a very familiar relation between global capital and dwindling mineral resources that has its roots in the immediate post-war. The response to the attacks on September 11 is suspended in the space of this uncertain juncture, this transition between one historical era and the next that does not even know whether it is a transition. The disappearance of the World Trade Center towers might signal the irruption of a new, uncreated future into the prepared space of global cybercapital. But in disappearing, the towers may simply be realising an absent quality that they have always had, revealing that they have never really been here, that they have always been ‘no less transient for all their bulk than some routine distortion of the light’ (P 19). The disappearance of the towers may not signal a break in the historical continuum, but might rather turn out to be a part of it; an endorsement of the Virilian acceleration of time, rather than a correction of it.15 This uncertainty, this sense that we are living in a time that is at once finished and unfinished, is what DeLillo’s prose leaves us with. The burning man who sits rigidly on a street corner in Cosmopolis marks the space of this uncertainty, of this finishedness which is also in process. The man’s selfimmolation speaks eloquently of the power of suicidal death, when it is

The body of history 231 employed as a weapon against the state, to open a seam in the continuum. Where the anti-globalisation protests that take place across the city through the day manage only to ‘attest again’ to the market culture’s ability to ‘absorb everything around it’, Eric thinks that the man’s suicide lives out the possibility that the ‘Market was not total’. For Eric, the global market ‘could not claim this man or assimilate his act’. The suicide is a ‘thing outside its reach’, the one form of protest that does not immediately become complicit with that which it protests against (C 99–100). But even this man’s protest, as Kinski points out like a peevish art critic, is ‘not original’. It is, she insists, ‘an appropriation’, calling to mind ‘all those Vietnamese monks, one after another, in their lotus positions’ (C 100). Even death itself, here, seems familiar, already seen. The spectacle of violent death might reveal a limit to the reach of the market culture, but it is also already a part of it. Like the transition from clarity to murk that Lauren tries to notice in The Body Artist, suicidal death here marks a transition, a boundary between one state and another. But, like the suicide attacks on September 11, it marks a transition that does not yet know itself as such. The suicide attacks, like any act of murderous violence, can only remain ethically bankrupt. For protest to articulate itself, to become an ethically valuable act of dissent which makes way for a new future, it is necessary to clear a space to rethink and to reinvent the culture, a space in which death is still at work as possibility, as provisionality, as the absolute danger of an unknown future. Otherwise violent death is simply an appropriation, perhaps one of the least original gestures imaginable. Eric’s own death, which closes and fails to close Cosmopolis, straddles a similar boundary between inside and outside, between assimilation and resistance to the global market. His death occupies a curious absence in the novel, an outside which is also incorporated. It marks the space of an asymmetrical discontinuity, a ‘riddling little twist’, what Deleuze calls an ‘immanent limit’, or an ‘inclusive disjunction’.16 His death, of course, is one of those things that comes to him as a form of reverse déjà vu, a kind of future anterior. As he approaches the instant of his death, he sees its aftermath, already captured on the screen, already tracked and traced and incorporated by the technology that allows him to follow the micro-movements of global capital. Like Oswald in Libra, he sees his death on television (L 439). He sees, in the screen fitted to his wristwatch (time to retire that word), streaming video footage of his ‘prone’ body, his own corpse, heading in an (obsolete) ambulance to the (obsolete) morgue (C 206). This capturing of his death, like the pre-emptive screening of his orgasm earlier in the novel, suggests the extent to which death fails to leave a mark on the surface, or to redirect the flow of information in the global marketplace. As death becomes unimaginable, for Jack Gladney, at a ‘certain income level’, a mere matter of ‘documents changing hands’ (WN 6), here, death has already been incorporated. It is no longer the custodian of danger, of possibility, of the future. But even as the novel closes with this intimation of an uninterrupted, self-referring global marketplace, it suggests a kind of deferral that is still at work, a kind of

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asymmetry between death as information, and death as possibility. The novel closes in the space of a lag, in the yawning interval in which time, in this empty decade, seeks to catch up with itself, in which the body struggles to keep up with the future that is being made by cybercapital. It closes in the staticky, deathly absence of a quantum hop. As Eric waits for his body to catch up with the death that he has witnessed in the data stream, all he knows is that, even at the very moment of ending, ‘this is not the end. He is dead inside the crystal of his watch but still alive in original space, waiting for the shot to sound’ (C 209). He occupies a transitional space that does not know yet whether it is a transition. He occupies a place of pure potential, a space of possibility, that holds itself open for the briefest of periods, waiting for the shot to sound. This is what DeLillo leaves us with, for now; a death which insinuates itself into the very midst of life, but which cannot yet know itself, or find itself perfected. He leaves us with a death in process, an ending which nevertheless forces or allows us to recognise that this – this here and this now – this is not the end.

Notes

Introduction 1 Samuel Beckett, Endgame, in Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), p. 107. 2 Don DeLillo, The Body Artist (London: Picador, 2001), p. 98. 3 Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno, ‘Something’s Missing’, in Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), p. 7. 4 Bloch, ‘Something’s Missing’, p. 7. 5 Bloch, ‘Something’s Missing’, p. 6. 6 For two rather different accounts of the ways in which globalisation has influenced the possibility of radical politics, and changed the ways in which we conceive of left and right, see Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics (Cambridge: Polity, 1994), and Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004). 7 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. xxi. 8 Fukuyama, The End of History, p. xxi. 9 For a range of responses to globalisation and the end of history see, for example, Fukuyama, The End of History, Giddens, Beyond Left and Right, and Barry Cooper, The End of History: An Essay on Modern Hegelianism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984). For a reading of the influence of Kojève on postmodern theory and politics, see Shadia B. Drury, Alexandre Kojève: The Roots of Postmodern Politics (London: Macmillan, 1994). 10 For Hegel’s theorisation of the struggle for recognition, see G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), trans. A.V. Miller. See particularly pp. 111–119. 11 Bloch, ‘Something’s Missing’, p. 12. 12 Francis Fukuyama, ‘The West has Won’, Guardian, October 11, 2001, p. 21. 13 Fukuyama, ‘The West has Won’, p. 21. 14 See George W. Bush, ‘Speech to the Republican Convention’, September 3, 2004, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,,1296654,00.html: ‘The terrorists are fighting freedom with all their cunning and cruelty because freedom is their greatest fear and they should be afraid, because freedom is on the march’. 15 Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Exhausted’, in Essays Critical and Clinical (London: Verso, 1998), trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, p. 152, emphasis in

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17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Notes

original. For to End Yet Again is the title of a 1975 short story by Samuel Beckett (also known as Fizzle 8). See Samuel Beckett, The Complete Short Prose 1929– 1989 (New York: Grove Press, 1995). Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, in Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (London: Calder, 1994), p. 418. For an extended discussion of the figure of the aporia in contemporary thought, see Jacques Derrida, Aporias: Dying: Awaiting (One Another) at the Limits of Truth (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), trans. Thomas Dutoit. Beckett, The Unnamable, p. 293. See Gary Adelman, ‘Beckett’s Readers: A Commentary and Symposium’, in Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 54, no. 1, Winter 2004, p. 54. Deleuze, ‘The Exhausted’, p. 152. Samuel Beckett, Molloy, in Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, pp. 39, 40. See Samuel Beckett, Stirrings Still, in Beckett, Complete Short Prose, pp. 259–265. Beckett, Molloy, p. 40. For a compelling collection which addresses the significance of the apocalyptic as a means of conceiving the end, see Malcolm Bull (ed.) Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). See Edward Said, ‘Adorno as Lateness Itself’, in Bull (ed.) Apocalypse Theory, pp. 264–281. For a discussion of the politics of lying, and of the right to lie, see Jacques Derrida, ‘History of the Lie’, in Richard Rand (ed.) Futures: Of Jacques Derrida (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 65–98, trans. Peggy Kamuf. Beckett, Molloy, p. 32. For Pynchon’s history of military technology see, for example, Gravity’s Rainbow (London: Vintage, 2000). Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (London: Picador, 1979) can be read as an analysis of the ways in which military technology enters into civilian life. See Kynaston McShine (ed.) Andy Warhol: A Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989), p. 280. For a history of email and the internet, and its relationship with the military, see John Naughton, A Brief History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet (London: Phoenix, 2000), and Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). Abbate comments that the internet ‘evolved through an unusual (and sometimes uneasy) alliance between military and civilian interests’. Using the internet to ‘chat with my friends’, Abbate suggests, feels ‘rather like taking a tank for a joyride’ (p. 2). Beckett, Endgame, p. 93. Beckett, Endgame, p. 97. Beckett, Endgame, p. 122. Beckett, Endgame, p. 127. Beckett, Endgame, pp. 98, 107. Deleuze, ‘The Exhausted’, p. 158. Deleuze, ‘The Exhausted’, p. 158. Samuel Beckett, Disjecta (London: Calder, 1983), p. 171. Deleuze, ‘The Exhausted’, p. 158. Maurice Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays (New York: Station Hill, 1981), trans. Lydia Davis, p. 55.

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40 Blanchot, Gaze of Orpheus, p. 56. 41 Beckett, Endgame, p. 98. 42 See Bloch, ‘Something’s Missing’, p. 9, where Bloch speaks of Voltaire’s shipwrecked swimmer, who finds that ‘this ocean in which he finds himself does not have a shore but that death is completely in the now in which the shipwrecked man finds himself’. 43 See Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1997), trans. John Cumming; Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge, 1973), trans. E.B. Ashton; Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (London: Routledge, 1991), ed. J.M. Bernstein. 44 Jacques Derrida, ‘Passions: “An Oblique Offering”’, in David Wood (ed.) Derrida: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 6. 45 Derrida, ‘Passions’, p. 6. 46 See Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (Sydney: Power, 1995), trans. Paul Patton, and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990). 47 Frederic Jameson, ‘The Antinomies of Postmodernism’, in Frederic Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 18. 48 Frederic Jameson, ‘Marxism and Postmodernism’, in Frederic Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (London: Verso, 1998), p. 33. 49 Frank Lentricchia, ‘Libra as Postmodern Critique’, in Frank Lentricchia (ed.) Introducing Don DeLillo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 197. 50 David Cowart, Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2002), p. 210. 51 Mark Osteen, American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), p. 7. 52 Osteen, American Magic, p. 7. 53 Cowart, Don DeLillo, p. 209. 54 Cowart, Don DeLillo, p. 11. 55 Cowart, Don DeLillo, p. 209. 56 Cowart, Don DeLillo, pp. 209–210. 57 Cowart, Don DeLillo, p. 12. 58 See Jean-Luc Nancy and Phillipe Lacou-Labarthe, Retreating the Political (London: Routledge, 1997), trans. Simon Sparks. 59 See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (London: Routledge, 1994), trans. Peggy Kamuf. 1 Americana 1 John F. Kennedy, ‘Commencement Address at American University in Washington’, in John F. Kennedy, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, 3 vols (Washington, DC: Office of the Federal Register National Archives and Records Service, 1964), vol. 3, p. 460. 2 Don DeLillo, End Zone (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 232. 3 Neil D. Isaacs, ‘Out of the End Zone: Sports in the Rest of Don DeLillo’, in Arete, vol. 3, no. 1, 1985, p. 91. See Douglas Keesey, Don DeLillo (New York: Twayne, 1993), p. 13. 4 Walter Benjamin, One Way Street (London: Verso, 1979), trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, p. 76.

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5 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), trans. Albert Hofstadter, p. 41. 6 Cowart, Don DeLillo, p. 141. 7 Oliver Cromwell, ‘Letter to William Valentine, 5th July 1644’, in S.C. Lomas (ed.) The Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, 2 vols (London: Methuen, 1904), vol. 1, p. 176. 8 For an account of the migration from England to New England in the seventeenth century, see David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 9 See Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, 3 vols (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, vol. 1, p. 38: But I implored her again: ‘come and say good night to me,’ terrified as I saw the light from my father’s candle already creeping up the wall, but also making use of his approach as a means of blackmail, in the hope that my mother, not wishing him to find me there, as find me he must if she continued to refuse me, would give in and say: ‘Go back to your room. I will come.’ Too late: my father was upon us. Instinctively I murmured, though no one heard me, ‘I’m done for!’. 10 James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London: Paladin, 1988), p. 173. 11 See W.B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’, in Yeats, Collected Poems (1933; London: Picador, 1990), pp. 210 –211. 12 See James Joyce, Ulysses (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992). The moment at which Bell and Sullivan finally consummate their relationship has Joycean overtones that were even more marked in an earlier draft of Americana. DeLillo excised some of these references in redrafting. For the excised passage, see Keesey, Don DeLillo, pp. 28–29. 13 See Revelations 8: 7–10. 14 Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’, p. 211. 15 Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London: Pimlico, 1999), ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zorn, p. 247. 16 Don DeLillo, The Body Artist (London: Picador, 2001), p. 82. 17 See Marinetti’s ‘Manifesto of Futurism’, in Umbro Apollonio (ed.) Futurist Manifestos (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), pp. 21–22. 18 Samuel Beckett, ‘Three Dialogues’, in Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues (London: Calder 1965), p. 125. 19 Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho, in Beckett, Nohow On (1989; London: Calder, 1992), p. 101. 20 For a reading of loops in Great Jones Street, and throughout DeLillo’s oeuvre up to White Noise, see Thomas LeClair, In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1987). 21 See Samuel Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (London: Calder, 1993), p. 123. 22 Samuel Beckett, Eleutheria (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 82.

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23 Beckett, Eleutheria, p. 170. See also Anton Chekhov, The Seagull, in Chekhov, Selected Works, 2 vols (Moscow: Progress), trans. Kathleen Cook, vol. 2. The Seagull is partly the model for Eleutheria, and for Great Jones Street. Kostya, the play’s playwright, seeks to put on a play within the play that will ‘show us [ . . . ] nothing’ (p. 47). 24 Although even this regression to an infantile speechlessness has an echo in Beckett. The narrator of Beckett’s novel The Unnamable, trying to imagine a form of speech that would be unencumbered by meaning, asks himself ‘would it not be better if I were simply to keep on saying babababa, for example’. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, in Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnamable (1959; London: Calder, 1994), p. 310. 25 For a reading of the homoerotics at work in End Zone, see Michael Hardin, ‘What is the Word at Logos College? Homosocial Ritual or Homosexual Denial in Don DeLillo’s End Zone’, Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 40, no. 1, 2000, pp. 31–50. 26 T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, in Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), p. 191. The still point invoked in Great Jones Street is mirrored in the image of a record, ‘revolving at thirty-three and a third’ (GJS 166). 27 See Saint Teresa of Avila, Way of Perfection (London: Sheed and Ward, 1946), trans. Edgar Allison Peers. 28 See, for example, ‘Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming Imperceptible’, in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Continuum, 1988), trans. Brian Massumi, pp. 232–309. 29 Samuel Beckett, Imagination Dead Imagine, in Beckett, Complete Short Prose, p. 182. 30 Several critics have commented that Harkness paraphrases Wittgenstein’s comments on the Tractatus in a letter to Ludwig Von Ficker, where he says that ‘my work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one’. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Briefwechsel mit B. Russell, G.E. Moore, J.M. Keynes, F.P. Ramsay, W. Eccles, P. Engelmann und L. von Ficker (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980), ed. B.F. McGuinness and G.H. von Wright, pp. 96–97. This English translation is from Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Vintage, 1991), p. 178. See also Stuart Johnson, ‘Extraphilosophical Instigations in Don DeLillo’s Running Dog’, in Contemporary Literature, vol. 26, no. 1, 1985, p. 74. 31 See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge, 2001), trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness. The Tractatus closes with the gnomic assertion that ‘what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence’ (p. 89). 32 Wittgenstein, Tractatus, p. 42. 33 Wittgenstein, Tractatus, p. 41. 34 Jeremy Green, ‘Disaster Footage: Spectacles of Violence in DeLillo’s Fiction’, in Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 45, no. 3, Autumn 1999, p. 596. 35 Green, ‘Disaster Footage’, p. 577. 36 Mark Osteen, American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), p. 30. 37 Osteen, Magic and Dread, p. 45. 38 Osteen, Magic and Dread, p. 60. 39 See George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), pp. 45–46, for a description of the party’s mechanical provision for the citizens of Oceania of ‘newspapers, films, textbooks, tele-screen programmes, plays, novels’.

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2 The historical counterfunction 1 Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism (London: Arthur L. Humphreys, 1912), p. 10. 2 Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), p. 6. 3 Beckett, The Unnamable, p. 353. 4 For a theory of an aesthetics of disappearance, see Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), trans. P. Beitchman. 5 See, for example, Mao’s ‘order to the Chinese People’s Volunteers’, on October 8, 1950, in which Mao orders the Chinese people to ‘support the Korean people’s war of liberation and to resist the attacks of US imperialism and its running dogs’. Mao Tse-Tung, Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, 5 vols (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1977), vol. 5, p. 43. 6 See Don DeLillo, ‘Baader-Meinhof’, New Yorker, April 1, 2002, pp. 78–82. 7 Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism, p. 258. 8 Milton, Paradise Lost, Book III, lines 116 –117. 9 Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I, lines 6 and 1. 10 See Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, in Art and Literature, The Pelican Freud Library, 15 vols (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973–1986), trans. James Strachey, vol. 14, p. 341, where Freud comments that ‘we ourselves speak a language that is foreign’. See also Marcel Proust, Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), trans. John Sturrock, p. 93, where Proust comments that ‘beautiful books are written in a sort of foreign language’. 11 Beckett, Molloy, p. 64. 12 1012 = 10,201, 1013 = 1,030,301, 1014 = 104,060,401. 13 See Mark 13:35–37. 14 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1997), trans. John Cumming, p. 27. 15 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 27. 16 Don DeLillo, Americana (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 175. 17 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Athlone, 1997), trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, p. 1. 18 See Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2000), ed. Richard Kelly, pp. 55 and 57, where Alice’s hallucinatory trips are prompted by narcotics which carry the injunctions, recalling the sacrament, ‘DRINK ME’ and ‘EAT ME’. 19 See Carroll, Alice, pp. 51 and 154. 20 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 168. 21 Gottlob Frege, Conceptual Notation and Related Articles (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), trans. Terrell Ward Bynum. 22 See RS 57, and Johannes Kepler, The Dream, in John Lear (ed.) Kepler’s Dream (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1965), trans. Patricia Frueh Kirkwood, pp. 103–104. 23 See Lewis Carroll, Euclid and his Modern Rivals (New York: Dover, 1973). Softly suggests a date of 1979 for the novel, claiming that Conceptual Notation was published ‘exactly one hundred years ago’ (RS 273). 24 The story of Descartes’s three dreams, on November 10, 1619, comes from Adrien Baillet, La Vie de Monsieur Descartes, 2 vols (Paris, 1961; facsimile repr. Geneva, 1970), vol. 1, pp. 80–86. See Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), pp. 106 –111.

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25 See Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, in The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 13, pp. 43–158. 26 See Wittgenstein, Tractatus, p. 89: My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognises them as nonsensical, when he has used them – as steps – to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it). 27 See Tom LeClair, ‘An Interview with Don DeLillo’, in Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1983), eds. Tom LeClair and Larry McCaffery, p. 85. 28 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, p. 435. 29 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 126. For a detailed investigation of the relation between early and late Wittgenstein, see Norman Malcolm, Nothing is Hidden: Wittgenstein’s Criticism of his Early Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). 30 Brian McGuinness (ed.) Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), trans. Joachim Schulte and Brian McGuinness, p. 183. 31 Monk, Wittgenstein, p. 178. 32 Wittgenstein, Tractatus, p. 89, emphasis in the original. 33 Beckett, Proust, p. 101. 34 Theodor Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), trans. Shierry W. Nicholson, p. 101. 35 Theodor Adorno, Against Epistemology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), trans. Willis Domingo, p. 42. 36 Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, p. 246. 37 See Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), p. 90. 38 Sigmund Freud, ‘Character and Anal Erotism’, in The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 7, p. 210. 39 See Freud, in The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 7, pp. 103–104: ‘By producing [his faeces, the child] can express his active compliance with his environment and, by withholding them, his disobedience’. 40 See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), trans. Leon S. Roudiez. 41 See Freud, ‘Anal Erotism’, pp. 213–215. 42 Jean Baudrillard, America (London: Verso, 1988), trans. Chris Turner, p. 80. 43 Dorothy Richardson, ‘Slow Motion’, in Close Up 1927–1933: Cinema and Modernism (London: Cassell, 1998), ed. James Donald et al., pp. 182–183. 3 Writing and apostasy 1 George Herbert, ‘The Windows’, in The Works of George Herbert (Oxford: Clarendon, 1945), ed. F. E. Hutchinson, pp. 67–68. 2 Don DeLillo, Mao II (London: Vintage, 1992), p. 38. 3 Don DeLillo, The Names (London: Picador, 1999), p. 216. 4 Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)’, in Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (London: NLB, 1971), trans. Ben Brewster, p. 166.

240

Notes

5 See Frank Lentricchia, (ed.) Introducing Don DeLillo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 65. 6 Douglas Keesey, Don DeLillo (New York: Twayne, 1993), p. 116. 7 For an analysis of the impact of the Anglo-American monetarism that was developed during the 1980s under Thatcher and Reagan, see, for example, John N. Smithin, Macroeconomics after Thatcher and Reagan: The Conservative Policy Revolution in Retrospect (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1990). 8 For Heidegger’s philosophical development of the notion of dasein, see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), trans. Joan Stambaugh. 9 T.E. Lawrence published the ‘Twenty-seven Articles’ in the Arab Bulletin on August 20, 1917. They are reprinted in T.E. Lawrence, The Essential T.E. Lawrence (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956), ed. David Garnett, pp. 138–144. 10 Joyce, Ulysses, p. 65. 11 See Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986), trans. Mark Polizzotti. 12 Gisela M.A. Richter, Kouroi: Archaic Greek Youths: A Study of the Development of the Kouros Type in Greek Sculpture (London: Phaidon Press, 1960), p. 1. 13 See Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), p. 97. 14 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), trans. Gayatri Spivak, p. 68. 15 This sense that the novel is engaged with theological problems is borne out by the number of papers which situate The Names within a Christian problematic. See, for example, Clement Valetta, ‘A “Christian Dispersion” in Don DeLillo’s The Names’, Christianity and Literature, vol. 47, no. 4, 1998, and Daniel Born, ‘Sacred Noise in Don DeLillo’s Fiction’, Literature and Theology: An International Journal of Theory, Criticism and Culture, vol. 13, no. 3, 1999. 16 For a reading of the obsessive, and of questing in DeLillo, see Osteen, American Magic, pp. 99 –141. 17 Herbert, ‘The Windows’, pp. 67– 68. 18 For a striking reading of glossolalia in The Names, see Cowart, Don DeLillo, pp. 171–175. 19 See Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication (New York: Semiotext(e), 1988), trans. Bernard Schutze and Caroline Schutze. 20 See, for example, Maurice Blanchot, The Instant of my Death, and Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. 21 Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Writing (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), trans. Ann Smock, p. 105. 22 Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, e.g. p. 61. Septimus Warren Smith insists throughout the novel that ‘there is no crime’. 23 Blanchot, The Space of Writing, p. 205. 24 For Wittgenstein’s development of an ethics grounded in silence, see the Tractatus. Wittgenstein comments in a letter to Ludwig von Ficker, in relation to the Tractatus, that the Ethical is delimited from within, as it were, by my book; and I’m convinced that strictly speaking it can ONLY be delimited in this way. In brief,

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I think: All of what many are babbling today, I have defined in my book by remaining silent about it. See Monk, Wittgenstein, p. 178. 25 Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, pp. 21–22. 4 Death and the avant-garde 1 See Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (New York: Peter Smith, 1941), trans. T.E. Hulme, p. 150, where Sorel quotes this phrase in a letter from Marx to Beesly. There is a somewhat anecdotal character to this, as the letter itself has not been published. Marx has made similar comments in letters that are available, however. See, for example, Marx’s letter to Ruge of September 1843, where Marx says that ‘everyone will have to admit to himself that he has no exact idea what the future ought to be’, suggesting that ‘constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair’ (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, 11 vols (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), trans. Jack Cohen et al., vol. 3, p. 142. 2 Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, p. 254. 3 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 11, p. 311. 4 See Sigmund Freud, ‘Determinism, Belief in Chance and Superstition – Some Points of View’, in The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 5, p. 328, where Freud insists that ‘our efforts never succeed in clearly remembering the previous occasion that announces itself’ in the experience of déjà vu. For a reading of Freud’s treatment of déjà vu, which includes a reflection on White Noise, see Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 172–186 and pp. 315–316. 5 See T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland, lines 215–218, in Eliot, Collected Poems, p. 71. 6 Marion Muirhead, ‘Deft Acceleration: The Occult Geometry of Time in White Noise’, in Critique, vol. 42, no. 4, Summer 2001, p. 413. 7 Virilio, Speed and Politics, p. 151. 8 For a range of responses to White Noise, which read the novel in relation to Baudrillard, see for example Bradley Butterfield, ‘Baudrillard’s Primitivism and White Noise: “The only avant-garde we’ve got”’, Undercurrents, vol. 7, Spring 1999; John N. Duvall, ‘The (Super)Marketplace of Images: Television as Unmediated Mediation in DeLillo’s White Noise’, Arizona Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 3, Autumn 1994; Haidar Eid, ‘Beyond Baudrillard’s Simulacral Postmodern World: White Noise’, Undercurrents, vol. 7, Spring 1999; and Leonard Wilcox, ‘Baudrillard, DeLillo’s White Noise, and the End of Heroic Narrative’, Contemporary Literature, vol. 32, 1991. 9 Frank Lentricchia, ‘Tales of the Electronic Tribe’, in Frank Lentricchia, (ed.) New Essays on White Noise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 87. 10 Lentricchia, ‘Tales of the Electronic Tribe’, p. 88. 11 Lentricchia, ‘Tales of the Electronic Tribe’, p. 112. 12 For a history of the development of the supermarket, see Andrew Seth and Geoffrey Randall, The Grocers: The Rise and Rise of the Supermarket Chains, second edition (London: Kogan Page Ltd, 2001), and Rachel Bowlby, Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping (London: Faber and Faber, 2000).

242

Notes

13 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage, 2000), p. 15. See also Roland Barthes, ‘The Rustle of Language’, in Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), trans. Richard Howard, pp. 76 –79. 14 Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, p. 249. 15 Jonathan Dollimore, Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. xiii. 16 See, for example, Larry H. Addington, America’s War in Vietnam: A Short Narrative History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000), p. 113. 17 See Joseph Goldstein et al., The My Lai Massacre and its Cover-up: Beyond the Reach of the Law: The Peers Commission Report with a Supplement and Introductory Essay on the Limits of the Law (New York: The Free Press, 1976). 18 See Susan Moeller’s Shooting War for a harrowing example of the ways in which certain iconic images of death re-emerge, from the Spanish-American war in Cuba, to the Korean and Vietnam wars. 19 See Bill Readings, ‘The Time of Study: 1968’, in Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 135–149. 20 See Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), trans. Ann Smock, p. 1. 21 Brian McHale, ‘Lost in the Mall: Beckett, Federman, Space’, in Henry Sussman and Christopher Devenney (eds) Engagement and Indifference: Beckett and the Political (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001), p. 122. 22 Paul Mann, The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 9. 23 Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, in Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works, p. 57. 24 Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, p. 247. 25 See Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (London: Phoenix, 1995), trans. Richard and Clara Wilson, p. 97. 26 Speer, Inside the Third Reich, p. 97. 27 Mann, The Theory Death of the Avant-Garde, p. 3. 28 Derrida, ‘Passions’, p. 6. 5 Becoming historical 1 Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, p. 150. 2 Chief Justice Earl Warren et al., The Warren Report: Report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1963), p. 22. 3 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Literature and Life’, in Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 1. 4 Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, p. 255. 5 Deleuze, ‘Literature and Life’, p. 1. 6 Deleuze, ‘Literature and Life’, p. 1. 7 Chief Justice Earl Warren et al., Warren Commission Hearings and Exhibits, 26 vols (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1964) vol. 5, p. 186. 8 Antony DeCurtis, ‘Interview with Don DeLillo’, in Lentricchia, (ed.) Introducing Don DeLillo, p. 47. 9 See James Reston, ‘Why America Weeps’, New York Times, November 23, 1963, p. 1. See also William Shakespeare, The Life and Death of King John, 3.1.256.

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10 For an elegant reading of the mechanics of this convergence, see David Cowart, ‘Convergence of the Twain’, in Cowart, The Physics of Language, pp. 91–110. 11 Joyce, Portrait, p. 251. 12 Deleuze, ‘Literature and Life’, p. 1. 13 Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, p. 9. 14 Warren Report, p. 691. 15 Warren Commission Hearings and Exhibits, vol. 11, p. 116. 16 Warren Commission Hearings and Exhibits, vol. 8, p. 320. 17 Warren Report, p. 725. 18 Warren Commission Hearings and Exhibits, vol. 1, p. 194. Marguerite says ‘I am trying to analyze a whole condensed program of things that are not correct’. 19 Deleuze, ‘Literature and Life’, p. 5. 20 Warren Report, p. 722. 21 Warren Report, p. 687. 22 Warren Commission Hearings and Exhibits, vol. 3, p. 317. 23 Deleuze, ‘Literature and Life’, p. 1. 24 ‘The Historic Diary’, Warren Commission Hearings and Exhibits, vol. 16, pp. 94–95. 25 See ‘The Historic Diary’, p. 95. Freud remarks to Jones and Jung, after a fainting fit, how ‘sweet it would be to die’. See Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, 3 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1957), vol. 1, p. 348. 26 Ernst Bloch et al., ‘Something’s Missing’, p. 17. 27 Warren Commission Hearings and Exhibits, vol. 6, p. 294. 28 Deleuze, ‘Literature and Life’, p. 5. 29 John F. Kennedy, ‘Commencement Address’, p. 460. 6 Terrorism and globalisation 1 George W. Bush made this comment on several different occasions, and in different contexts. See, for example, Guardian, June 26, 2002, p. 4, where Bush is reported to have made the comment in his Middle East policy statement, made on June 24, 2002. 2 Don DeLillo, Libra (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), p. 13. 3 Don DeLillo, Mao II (London: Vintage, 1992), p. 235. 4 Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth Century Fiction (London: Routledge, 1983), p. 181. 5 S.T. Coleridge, ‘Kubla Khan’, in Coleridge, The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), p. 251. See also Ignatius Frederick Clarke, Voices Prophesying War, 1763–1984 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966). 6 Thomas Pynchon, ‘Introduction’, in George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), p. xiv. 7 Pynchon, ‘Introduction’, p. xiv. 8 Don DeLillo, ‘Ruins of the Future’, Guardian, December 22, 2001. The article is online, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/saturday_review/story/ 0,3605,623666,00.html 9 Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers (London: Verso, 2002), trans. Chris Turner, p. 11. 10 George W. Bush used the word ‘crusade’ on September 18, 2001. See, for example, John Sutherland, ‘Crazy Talk’, Guardian, September 19, 2001. 11 Baudrillard, Spirit of Terrorism, p. 9.

244 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Notes

Baudrillard, Spirit of Terrorism, p. 10. Baudrillard, Spirit of Terrorism, p. 10. See DeLillo, ‘Ruins of the Future’. Baudrillard, Spirit of Terrorism, p. 11. Baudrillard, Spirit of Terrorism, p. 15. See DeLillo, ‘Ruins of the Future’. Osteen, American Magic, p. 213. For a penetrating reading of the resonance of the phrase ‘here but also there’ in Mao II, see Laura Barrett, ‘“Here, But Also There”: Subjectivity and Postmodern Space in Mao II’, Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 45, no. 3, 1999. McShine, Andy Warhol, p. 457. Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), trans. Michael Shaw, p. 61. Beckett, Endgame, p. 127. Beckett, Endgame, p. 93. Beckett, The Unnamable, p. 418. Samuel Beckett, Ohio Impromptu, in Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works, p. 448. Beckett, Ohio Impromptu, p. 446. Adelman, ‘Beckett’s Readers’, p. 54. Malcolm Bull, Seeing Things Hidden: Apocalypse, Vision and Totality (London: Verso, 2000), p. 33. Baudrillard, Spirit of Terrorism, p. 15. Baudrillard, Spirit of Terrorism, p. 17.

7 The work of death 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 68. Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays, p. 56. Don DeLillo, Underworld (London: Picador, 1999), p. 140. Robert Frost, ‘The Death of a Hired Man’, in Complete Poems of Robert Frost (London: Jonathan Cape, 1951), p. 58. See M. Seidel and R.H. Marijnissen, Bruegel (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971), pp. 111–135. See Matthew 24:36. See Seidel and Marijnissen, Bruegel, pp. 43, 106 –109. See Don DeLillo, ‘Interview’, in LeClair and McCaffery (eds) Anything Can Happen, where DeLillo suggests that somebody ought to make a list of books that seem to bend back on themselves. I think Malcolm Lowry saw Under the Volcano as a wheel-like structure. And in Finnegans Wake we are meant to go from the last page to the first. In different ways I’ve done this myself.

9 Karl Kraus, Worte in Versen, quoted in Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, p. 253. 10 See Ludwig Münz, Rembrandt (London: Thames and Hudson, 1955), pp. 108–109. 11 See Shakespeare, Hamlet, 5.1.180 –190.

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12 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, in The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1962), vol. 1, p. 142. 13 Milton, Paradise Lost, 12, 54, 55. See Cowart, Don DeLillo, p. 174 and p. 229, n. 15. 14 See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 66–92. 15 Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, p. 347. 16 Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, p. 348. 17 L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953), p. 9. 18 Deleuze, ‘Literature and Life’, p. 5. 19 Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 68. 20 See Theodor Adorno, ‘Reconciliation under Duress’, in Ernst Bloch (ed.) Aesthetics and Politics (London: New Left Books, 1977), trans. Ronald Taylor, pp. 151– 176. 21 G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), trans. T.M. Knox, p. 593. 22 Kennedy, ‘Commencement Address’, p. 460. 23 Adorno, ‘Reconciliation under Duress’, p. 176. 24 Kennedy, ‘Commencement Address’, p. 460. 25 See The Cloud of Unknowing (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), trans. Clifton Wolters, pp. 96–99, where the author of the Cloud instructs us to develop a ‘prayer of one syllable’, which might ‘penetrate heaven’. See also Cowart, Don DeLillo, p. 186, for a somewhat different reading of this moment. 26 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 6. 27 Don DeLillo, The Names (London: Picador, 1999), p. 284. 28 See Genesis 1, 2. 29 Whilst the majority of commentators on the novel address the relation between recycling of waste and the phenomenon of connectedness, different critics follow this relation in different ways. Mark Osteen discovers in recycling the possibility of a kind of artistic redemption – the construction within the artwork of a ‘healthy community in which “everything is connected”’ (Osteen, American Magic and Dread, p. 245) – whereas Peter Knight reads the novel’s excremental connectedness in terms of political conspiracy (see Peter Knight, ‘Everything is Connected: Underworld’s secret history of paranoia’, Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 45, no. 3, 1999, pp. 811– 836). For a range of approaches to this problem, see for example Jesse Kavadlo, ‘Recycling Authority: Don DeLillo’s Waste Management’, Critique, vol. 42, no. 4, 2001, pp. 384 – 401; Ruth Heyler, ‘ “Refuse Heaped Many Stories High”: DeLillo, Dirt and Disorder’, Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 45, no. 4, 1999, pp. 987–1005; and Paul Gleason, ‘Don DeLillo, T.S. Eliot, and the Redemption of America’s Atomic Waste Land’, in Joseph Dewey, Steven G. Kellman and Irving Malin (eds) Underwords: Perspectives on Don DeLillo’s Underworld (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2002). 30 Knight, ‘Everything is Connected’, p. 827. 31 See Cowart, Don DeLillo, pp. 197–202. 32 Heinrich von Kleist, ‘Feelings before Freidrich’s Seascape’, Berliner Abendblätter, October 13, 1810. For an English translation of Kleist’s article, together with a reproduction of Friedrich’s painting, see Philip B. Miller, ‘Anxiety and Abstraction: Kleist and Brentano on Caspar David Friedrich’, Art Journal, vol. 33, no. 3, 1974, pp. 205–210.

246

Notes

33 For an account of the student uprisings as they progressed from US campuses to the Barricades in Paris in May 1968, see David Caute, Sixty-Eight: The Year of the Barricades (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988), and Ronald Fraser et al., 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt (London: Chatto and Windus, 1988). 34 Cowart, Don DeLillo, p. 200. 35 Cowart, Don DeLillo, p. 183. 36 Osteen, American Magic and Dread, p. 245. 37 See Joyce, Ulysses, e.g. p. 25, and Eliot, Wasteland, lines 312–321. 38 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 1. 39 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 1. 40 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 6. 41 Sergei Eisenstein, ‘The Dramaturgy of Film Form’, in Eisenstein, Selected Works, vol. 1, Writings, 1922–34 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 161. See Osteen, American Magic, p. 253. 42 This process of unpainting has many echoes in the novel and beyond. Louise Nevelson, for example, says to Miles Lightman in Underworld that ‘the whole point’ of her work was to ‘return’ the canvas ‘to its virgin state’ (U 386). 43 See Denys Sutton, James McNeill Whistler: Paintings, Etching, Pastels & Watercolours (London: Phaidon Press, 1966), plate 53. 44 Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, p. 249. 45 Isaacs, ‘Out of the End Zone’, p. 13. 46 Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 68, emphasis in original. 47 Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 68, emphasis in original. 48 Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies, in Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, p. 190. 49 Beckett, Malone Dies, p. 190. 50 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 61. 8 The body of history 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9

Beckett, Endgame, p. 93. Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis (London: Picador, 2003), p. 209. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 5. See Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.5.196, where Hamlet decrees that ‘The time is out of joint’. See Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.2.68, where Gertrude implores ‘Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off’. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.2.70–71. See, for example, the third section in Part III of To The Lighthouse, where Lily Briscoe reflects on the capacity of art to capture a breaking wave, to command ‘Life’ to ‘stand still here’, to ‘make of the moment something permanent’. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (London: Grafton, 1977) pp. 146–151. For Woolf’s extended reflections on the quality of the moment, see also Moments of Being (London: Grafton, 1989) and her novel The Waves (London: Vintage, 1992). DeLillo, ‘The Ruins of the Future’. See, for example, Mao II, p. 187, when the towers occasion a kind of premonition for Karen: ‘The warning aura came when she was alone in the loft. A

Notes

10 11 12 13 14 15 16

247

mercury glow moved up the shanks of the towers out there. She came away from the window with a feeling in her arm that was like a current’. See Players, pp. 197–199, White Noise, p. 240. Milton, Paradise Lost, 3, 77–78. Beckett, Malone Dies, p. 182. See Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, p. 254. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 5. For Paul Virilio’s reading of the significance of 9/11 in contemporary culture, see Paul Virilio, Ground Zero (London: Verso, 2002). Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Exhausted’, in Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 156, 158.

Index

Abbate, Janet 234 n.29 Acropolis, the 98 Addington, Larry H. 242 n.16 Adelman, Gary 3 Adorno, Theodor 1, 2, 12, 14, 15, 60, 68, 69, 146, 194 –5 AIDS 119 Althusser, Louis 87 Americana 4, 5, 6, 19–35, 36, 45, 47, 48–9, 50, 51, 58, 60, 61, 68, 77, 78, 82, 90, 114, 123, 132, 142–3, 152, 165, 176 –7, 178–9, 184, 185, 201, 202, 210–11, 220–1, 223, 225 Antonioni, Michelangelo 31, 33 apocalypse x, 4, 6, 7, 8, 23, 82, 126, 142, 153, 176–95 passim, 196, 199, 203–4, 207, 210, 212, 226 Aristotle 185 Auschwitz 120 Avila, St. Teresa of 41; Way of Perfection 41 Baader-Meinhof 52, 75 Baillet, Adrien, La Vie de Monsieur Descartes 238 n.24 Barrett, Laura 244 n.19 Barthes, Roland 117, 242 n.13 Baudrillard, Jean 12, 13, 15, 76, 104, 107, 114–15, 159–60, 161, 165, 174, 241 n.8 Bay of Pigs 135, 142, 147 Beckett, Samuel 3, 4, 9, 11, 36–7, 38, 39–40, 41, 42, 67, 68, 124, 167–9, 171, 193, 234 n.16; Dream of Fair to Middling Women 38; Eleutheria 38, 237 n.23; Endgame 1, 4, 9, 11, 168,

215, 226; Imagination Dead Imagine 41, 125; The Lost Ones 125; Malone Dies 211–12, 226; Molloy 4, 5, 57; Ohio Impromptu 168–70, 174; Ping 41; Stirrings Still 4; The Unnamable 3, 4, 8, 50, 168, 237 n.24; Waiting for Godot 43, 125, 222; Worstward Ho 37 Beer, Gillian 157 Bellow, Saul, Humboldt’s Gift 50 Benjamin, Walter 12, 14, 15, 20, 35, 68, 109, 118, 126, 128, 129, 131, 157, 209, 227 Bergman, Ingmar 25, 33 Berlin Wall 1, 5, 161, 167–8 Bhabha, Homi 187 Bible, the 58, 63, 101, 113, 119, 122, 181, 189, 196; Revelations 10, 22, 34, 196 Blanchot, Maurice 3, 10, 105, 106, 122–3, 125, 176 Bloch, Ernst 1–2, 3, 11, 14, 146, 235 n.42 Body Artist, The 1, 9, 19, 35, 215–32 Born, Daniel 240 n.15 Bowlby, Rachel 241 n.12 Braun, Eva 80 Bruegel, Pieter 194, 200; Children’s Games 181– 4; The Triumph of Death 155, 163, 179–84, 199, 211 Bull, Malcolm 174, 234 n.23 Burger, Peter 167 Bush, G.W. 3, 157, 158, 159, 233 n.14, 243 n.1 Butler, Judith 12 Butterfield, Bradley 241 n.8

Index 249 Carroll, Lewis 51, 64, 208; Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 57, 61, 63, 64, 238 n.18; Euclid and his Modern Rivals 63 Castro, Fidel 3, 135, 136–7, 141, 142 Caute, David 246 n.33 Cézanne, Paul 33, 208 Chaplin, Charlie 77–8, 79, 80–1; Modern Times 77 Chekhov, Anton 38; The Seagull 237 n.23 Chomsky, Noam 233 n.6 Church Jr, George B. 140 Clarke, Ignatius Frederick 243 n.5 Cloud of Unknowing, The 195, 200 Cobain, Kurt 36 cold war 1, 2, 7, 8, 23, 26, 45–6, 90, 120, 142, 157, 160, 177, 178, 188, 199, 230 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 26, 157; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner 26 Confucius 63, 64 Conrad, Joseph 26; Heart of Darkness 26, 99, 173; The Shadow Line 26 Cooper, Barry 233 n.9 Cosmopolis 4, 6, 7, 76, 119, 215–32 Cowart, David 13, 24, 186, 196–7, 203, 204, 207, 240 n.18, 243 n.10, 245 n.25 Cressy, David 26, 236 n.8 Cromwell, Oliver 26 Cuban missile crisis 142 Curtis, Anthony de 132–3 Darwin, Charles 65 Day Room, The 5, 11 Dedekind, Richard 64 déjà vu 109, 111, 112–13, 114, 115, 119, 121, 122, 124, 126, 128, 129, 143, 150, 153, 157, 163, 174, 201, 202, 205, 224–5, 228, 231, 241 n.4 DeLeuze, Gilles 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 41, 68, 72, 131, 134, 136, 140, 149, 193, 231 DeLillo, Don see individual titles Derrida, Jacques 12, 14, 15, 16, 101, 104, 105, 127, 176, 194, 211, 215, 227, 234 n.25

Descartes, René 64 Dialectic of Enlightenment 58–9 Dickens, Charles, Great Expectations 20 Dirty Harry 77 Dodgson, Charles see Carroll, Lewis Dollimore, Jonathan 119 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 141 Dow Chemical 202 Drury, Shadia B. 233 n.9 Du Pont chemical company 202 Duvall, John N. 241 n.8 Eastwood, Clint 77, 79 ecstasy 92, 94, 102–3, 104, 105–6, 107, 176–95 passim Eid, Haidar 241 n.8 Einstein, Albert 63, 132 Eisenstein, Sergei 203, 207, 210; Battleship Potemkin 181 Eliot, George, Daniel Deronda 157 Eliot, T.S.: Four Quartets 40, 237 n.26; The Wasteland 112, 204 End Zone 4, 19, 22–3, 35– 49, 50, 57, 67, 106, 165, 237 n.25 epigraphy 8, 96, 100, 103 Faulkner, William, The Sound and the Fury 135 Ficker, Ludwig von 67 Fraser, Ronald 246 n.33 Frege, Gottlob 62; Conceptual Notation 63 Freud, Sigmund 12, 14, 15, 16, 56, 61, 62, 65, 70–2, 111, 113, 114, 146, 191, 198, 238 n.10, 241 n.4, 243 n.25 Friedrich, Caspar David, Monk at the Sea 199, 203 Frost, Robert 176 Fukuyama, Francis 2–3, 4, 16, 233 n.9 futurism 36 Gaukroger, Stephen, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography 238 n.24 Giddens, Anthony 2, 233 n.6 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, The Yellow Wallpaper 170 Gleason, Paul 245 n.29

250

Index

globalisation xi, 1–2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 16, 23, 47, 52, 59, 63, 70, 73, 81, 88, 90, 91, 95, 104, 107, 114 –15, 121, 127, 129, 130, 151–3, 157–75 passim, 183, 207, 216, 222, 226, 229–31 glossolalia 103–4, 107, 186–7, 189 Godard, Jean-Luc 33 Gonzalez, Speedy 183, 187–9 Great Jones Street 15, 22–3, 35– 49, 51, 65, 73, 79, 166, 197, 220, 224, 237 n.23 Green, Jeremy 45 Green Line, the 161, 172 Guevara, Che 3 Haeberle, Ronald 120 Hardin, Michael 237 n.25 Hargis, Bobby 147–8 Hartley, L.P., The Go Between 192 Hastings, Michael 137 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The Scarlet Letter 186–7 Hegel, G.W.F. 2, 11, 12, 14, 16, 36, 68, 194, 195, 200, 228, 233 n.10 Heidegger, Martin 14, 15, 22, 92 Heraclitus 64 Herbert, George: The Temple 103; ‘The Windows’ 87, 103 Hersch, Seymour 120 Heyler, Ruth 245 n.29 Hillsborough disaster 160, 162–3, 179–80 Hitler, Adolf 51, 59, 70, 72, 76, 77, 80–2, 119–20, 123, 126, 143, 151 Homer 184, 185, 191 Horkheimer, Max 12

Joyce, James 4, 20, 31, 33, 36, 138, 151–2, 181, 203, 215; Finnegans Wake 184, 244 n.8; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 32, 135–6, 151; Ulysses 34, 95, 204, 236 n.12 Kafka, Franz 64, 68; ‘The Burrow’ 57 Kant, Immanuel 11, 12, 14, 16 Kavadlo, Jesse 245 n.29 Keaton, Buster 77 Keesey, Douglas 90, 236 n.12 Kennedy, J.F. 10, 131–53 passim, 194 –5 Kepler, Johannes 64; Somnium 63 Kierkegaard, Soren 113 Klee, Paul, Angelus Novus 118, 209 Kleist, Heinrich von 199, 203 Knight, Peter 197, 245 n.29 Kojève, Alexandre 2, 12, 16 Korean war 26 Kouros 96–7, 103, 180 Kraus, Karl 184, 194 Kristeva, Julia 12, 14, 15, 71, 195, 204 –5 Kurosawa, Akira 33

Ibsen, Henrik 38 ‘In the Ruins of the Future’ 158–9, 160, 223 Iran-Iraq war 90, 91 Isaacs, Neil 20, 210

Lacan, Jacques 12, 14 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 14 Lawrence, T.E. 93 LeClair, Tom 128, 236 n.20 LeClair, Tom and McCaffery, Larry 244 n.8 Lentrichhia, Frank 13, 90, 115, 240 n.5 Libra 5, 6, 13, 52, 131–53, 157, 165, 166, 171, 173, 177, 192, 193, 201, 205, 229, 231 Life 136, 179 Looney Tunes 188 Lowry, Malcolm, Under the Volcano 244 n.8 Lukács, Georg 12

Jameson, Frederic 12 Japanese Noh 220 Johnson, Lyndon B. 120, 121 Johnson, Stuart 237 n.30 Jones, Ernest 243 n.25

McCarthyism 1 McHale, Brian 125 Malcolm, Norman 239 n.29 Man, Paul de 12 Mann, Paul 125, 126–7

Index 251 Mao II 3, 5, 11, 16, 37, 52, 87, 124, 128, 157–75, 177, 178, 179–80, 208, 211, 222, 226, 228–9, 246–7 n.9 Mao Tse Tung 51, 52, 63, 74, 238 n.5 Marion Lykes 140 Markham, Helen 144 –5, 202 Marston Moor, battle of 26 Marx, Karl xi, 3, 6, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 63, 109, 126, 131, 132, 136, 141, 142, 227, 241 n.1 Melville, Herman 25; Moby Dick 25 Militant, The 136, 141 millennium, the 4, 5, 21, 22, 23, 34–5, 48–9, 58, 90, 112, 152–3, 160, 161, 162, 168, 176, 177, 179, 181, 184, 186, 203, 210, 215, 216, 221, 222 Miller, Philip B. 245 n.32 Milton, John 68; Paradise Lost 53– 4, 75, 186–7, 226 modernism 3, 26, 33, 34, 35, 36, 41, 45, 50, 125, 129, 167, 203, 209 Moeller, Susan 242 n.18 Monk, Ray 237 n.30, 241 n.24 Moon, Sun Myung, Reverend 161–2 Muirhead, Marion 113 Murphy, Paul Edward 140 Mussolini, Benito 80 My Lai massacre 120, 121, 122–3, 225

Orwell, George 70; Nineteen Eighty-Four 47, 139, 158, 237 n.39 Osteen, Mark 13, 45, 163, 204, 240 n.16, 245 n.29 Oswald, Lee Harvey 85, 131–53 passim; Historic Diary 136, 137, 138–9, 145 pi 56–7 Players 4, 50–3, 59–60, 69, 72–83, 87–8, 90, 98, 107, 109, 116, 119, 122, 129, 161, 201, 223, 225, 230 Polanski, Roman, Repulsion 208 postmodernism 12–14, 15, 16, 45, 112, 114 –15, 119, 127, 129, 203 Presley, Elvis 120, 143 Proust, Marcel 29, 31, 33, 36, 56, 77, 102, 143, 191, 205; A la recherche du temps perdu 20, 29, 32, 236 n.9; Against Sainte-Beuve 238 n.10 Pynchon, Thomas 6, 158, 160; Gravity’s Rainbow 234 n.27; The Crying of Lot 49 69, 70, 234 n.27 Pythagoras 51, 56, 57, 63, 64 Quang Duc, Thich 17, 75–6, 122, 225, 231

Nabokov, Vladimir, Lolita 69, 128 Names, The 5, 6, 11, 65, 87–108, 109–11, 113, 114, 118, 128, 132, 140, 141–2, 146, 152, 160, 168, 173, 177, 180, 186–7, 189, 191, 192, 193, 211, 215–16, 220, 223, 227–8 Nancy, Jean-Luc 14 Nashe, Thomas 126 Naughton, John 234 n.29 Newton, Isaac 113 1968 cultural revolution 120–1, 123, 124, 126, 202–3

Ratner’s Star 50–72, 74, 76, 82, 89, 93, 101, 104, 114, 124, 143, 165, 170, 177, 185, 200, 201, 205 Readings, Bill 121 Reagan, Ronald 90, 160 Rembrandt 207; Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer 185–6, 207, 208 Reston, James 133– 4 Richardson, Dorothy 79 Riemann, Bernhard 64 Roeg, Nicholas, Don’t Look Now 145 Royle, Nicholas 241 n.4 Ruby, Jack 132 Ruge, Arnold 241 n.1 Running Dog 19, 50–3, 59–60, 69, 72–83, 88, 116, 119, 144, 151, 197, 222

Oedipal desire 28–35, 61, 62, 64, 143, 176–9, 184, 185, 192, 197, 201, 205–7, 211, 220, 225

Said, Edward 4 Saint Saëns, Camille 210 Schopenhauer, Arthur 38

252

Index

Seth, Andrew, and Geoffrey Randall 241 n.12 Shakespeare, William 182; Hamlet 173, 185, 216, 222; King John 133– 4, 145 Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein 127, 170 shoes 29, 32, 142–5, 197–202, 225 slow motion 73, 79, 128–9, 218, 221 Smithin, John M. 240 n.7 Sorel, Georges 241 n.1 Speer, Albert 126 Stalinism 1 Sterne, Laurence, Tristram Shandy 212 Sutherland, John 243 n.10 Swift, Jonathan 70 telephone answering machines x, xi, 11, 169–70, 228–9 terrorism xi, 52, 73– 4, 75, 77, 78, 79, 90, 106, 157–75 passim; 9/11 x, xi, 2, 3, 157–8, 159, 160, 213, 229–30, 247 n.15 Thales 64 Thatcher, Margaret 90, 160 Tiananmen Square massacre 160 Tippit, J.D. 144–5, 202 Trotsky, Leon 141, 142, 223 Underworld 5, 6, 7–8, 10, 15, 19, 21, 41, 161, 176–212, 215, 216, 222, 223, 227, 229 university, the 24 –5, 121, 123– 4, 202–3 Utopia 2, 58, 195 U2 spyplane 6, 147, 149, 150, 152 Valetta, Clement 240 n.15 Valparaiso 193, 204 Vico, Giambattista 184

Vietnam War 26, 120–3, 142, 202–3 Virilio, Paul 15, 95, 114, 230, 238 n.4, 247 n.15 Voltaire 11, 235 n.42 Walton, Valentine 26 Warhol, Andy 7, 125, 166, 167, 175, 208 Warren Report, The 131, 132, 138– 41, 142–5, 210 waste 13, 70–2, 187, 195–7, 203, 204 Wells, H.G. 141 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill, Arrangement in Gray and Black 208–9 White Noise 5, 19, 52, 109–30, 132, 135, 143, 147–8, 150, 152, 162, 174, 201, 202, 223, 225, 226, 227–8, 231, 241 n.4, 241 n.8 Wilcox, Leonard 241 n.8 Wilde, Oscar, The Soul of Man Under Socialism 50, 53, 54 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 15, 16, 42, 43, 57, 66, 68, 69, 106, 170–1, 237 n.30, 240–1 n.24; Philosophical Investigations 66; Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus 42, 44, 66–7, 68, 239 n.26 Woolf, Virginia 125, 217, 218; Moments of Being 246 n.7; Mrs Dalloway 106; The Waves 246 n.7; To the Lighthouse 246 n.7 World Trade Center 59, 159, 166, 223, 230, 246–7 n.9 World War II 6, 9, 15, 26, 59, 73, 80, 119–20, 161, 184 Yeats, W.B. 33, 34 –5, 36, 62, 65; A Vision 60 Zapruder, Abraham 10, 132, 133, 134, 135, 147, 148, 206, 210

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