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The Work of Irony in the Late Novels of Don Delillo

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The Work of Irony in the Late Novels of Don Delillo 1 Tendering the Impossible: The Work of Irony in the Late Novels of Don DeLillo. _________________________________________ A Thesis Submitted in Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University of Canterbury by Nicholas Wright. _________________________________________ University of Canterbury 2006 2 Contents Illustrations 4 Abstract 5 Acknowledgements 6 Introduction 7 (i) Language (ii) Irony and Allegory (iii) Otherness (iv) Tenderness (v) DeLillo’s deconstruction (vi) The Chapters Chapter One: Tendering Allegory. The Ironist’s Melancholy Science 30 (i) Turning (ii) Irony in the Work of deconstruction (iii) The Economy of Tenderness (iv) The Irony of Invention (v) The Tenderness of Mourning Chapter Two: The Body Artist 61 (i) The Fallen Wonder of the World (ii) Time Seems to Pass (iii) Time and the Other: “How much myth do we build into our experience of time?” (iv) The Work of Art Chapter Three: Underworld 89 Part One: The Triumph of Death Part Two: “Organising Loneliness”. American Allegorists and Mourning 98 (i) We are the Astonishment (ii) A Complex Sensation (iii) Responsible Living (iv) Inoculation and Collection (v) The Corrections (vi) Todo y Nada 3 Part Three: The Underworld of Irony 118 (i) Irony: The movie version (ii) Irony, Wasted (iii) Shoot and Repeat Part Four: Impossible Work and the Art of Irony 132 (i) Klara’s Art (ii) Reproducibility (iii) Unterwelt Part Five: Tenderness and the Impossibility of Irony 148 (i) Undiminishable Loss (ii) Everything Connects (iii) The Tenderness of Mourning: Between the Straight-up and the Slanted Chapter Four: Cosmopolis 162 Part One: Pain (i) Introduction (ii) The Street (iii) Bodies (iv) Masochism and False Mourning (v) Temporality and Allegory Part Two: Language and Mourning 182 (i) Packer and the Mirror of Language (ii) Levin. “Where do I stand in this light?” Part Three: Tenderness of Tenderness 193 (i) Introduction (ii) On Film (iii) Untranslatable, Untransferable Pain Conclusion: What is Left That’s Worth the Telling? 208 Works Consulted 214 4 Illustrations: Figure 1. Pieter Bruegel. The Triumph of Death c. 1562. Panel 117 x 162 cm. The Prado, Madrid. 92 5 Abstract The following thesis represents an attempt to account for the novelist Don DeLillo’s last three novels (Underworld (1999), The Body Artist (2001), and Cosmopolis (2003)) through the examination of what I conceive as DeLillo’s philosophy of language. It is my assertion that the crucial and articulating aspect of DeLillo’s philosophy of language is his investment in, and investigation of, irony. As I argue, DeLillo’s novels presume a certain conjugation of what I refer to as the work of irony (the seemingly impossible work of tendering both the allegorical imperative of naming and the ironic imperative of Otherness) with the work of art. In other words, DeLillo’s theory of language reveals his theory of art and, thus, his own theory of writing. This aesthetic philosophy becomes the critical tool with which DeLillo evaluates the various symbolic economies of a culture and its individuals caught within late capitalism. The impossibility of defining irony becomes, for DeLillo, a metaphor by which to understand language itself as what I refer to as a fallen and tender economy, constituted by an Otherness, which language can only tender. In his novels, DeLillo, I argue, suggests that language and subjectivity ought to be conceived of as forms of a faith in an Otherness, impossible to represent as such, to which all speech, violence, art, commodity and reproduction are indebted, and which we may mourn and represent – as we must – more or less faithfully, more or less blindly, and, by virtue of irony, more or less tenderly. The possibilities of faith and the ethical in art and representation, thus, for DeLillo, arise through an attention to an Otherness that can only be tendered through the very tenderness (fallenness, profanity, weakness) of allegory and language. To understand this is to understand the role of irony in DeLillo’s philosophy, and also to understand DeLillo’s profound commitment to language, his renovation of allegory through its mortification by irony and, thus, its remembering and mourning of Otherness. In this regard, DeLillo shares much with the melancholia of deconstruction as evinced within the language philosophies of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, in particular, Derrida’s economic consideration, différance, and his notion of the work of mourning, both of which, I argue, offer the reader of DeLillo’s texts ways of tendering the work of irony. 6 Acknowledgements As, I imagine, is the case with most endeavours such as this, I too, as author of this text, owe a debt to privilege that I, with this document, am unable to articulate or discharge. This is not the place to elaborate specifically on the various aspects of such privilege, except, however, to make mention of all those who have, throughout the years, shown interest, given encouragement, or, merely been patient with me: first among these others are Cheryl and Peter, my parents, and then, Patrick, of course, as well as Aaron, Allan, Andrew, Brendan, Catherine, Christian, Christina, Creon, Dan, Howard, Jason, Jennifer, Jed, Kate, Kelly, Kev, Margaret, Mark, Matt, Mike, Phil, Räili, Ray, and Rusty. Thank you all. I offer my gratitude also to friends and colleagues, past and present, in the English Programme, and to those within the Programme responsible for enabling for me the years of teaching I have enjoyed. I am indebted also to the University of Canterbury for the awarding of a Doctoral Scholarship. 7 Introduction (i) Language Sitting in her empty house, meditating on time itself, Lauren, the artist of DeLillo’s The Body Artist1 discovers her lover, a recent suicide, announced to her again and again throughout memory, and in the figure of Tuttle, a spectral figure she discovers in her home, through whom she is bared to announcements of Otherness. Thinking of Tuttle Lauren considers the following: There has to be an imaginary point, a nonplace where language intersects with our perceptions of time and space, and he [Tuttle] is a stranger at this crossing, without words or bearings […] He violates the limits of the human. (TBA, 99) Lauren achieves the work of the artist and the ironist in this text precisely because she faces up to the impossible and ironic demand posed by DeLillo as the essential experience of full human consciousness: firstly, an imagining of the “nonplace” of irony, the ‘intersection’ of language with “time and space”, but secondly, an imagining of an Otherness in violation of this intersection, an Otherness that, for the artist, reveals the tenderness of the “human” in revealing the limitations of one’s language. Imagining the tenderness of one’s allegories, the contingent nature of one’s words where they intersect with the world is, essentially, a prerequisite for all DeLillo’s artist figures. I should add too, that such an awareness is necessary also to the sort of constellation of concerns and writers I make in this thesis under the rubric of what I see as DeLillo’s investigation of aesthetics, his theory of language and the work of art. The emphasis on tender limitation brings with it a certain Kantian currency, particularly that reflex to the sublime where one’s cognition of the limits of representation is seen as proof of the possibility of imagining something Other, something beyond the known, beyond one’s imagining. The ghosting of religious awe is appropriate here, as in all DeLillo’s novels that investigate language for the possibility of the revelation – keyed to irony – of what one of DeLillo’s characters calls “the fallen wonder of the world”.2 Chief among such “wonders” for DeLillo is, 1Don DeLillo, The Body Artist. New York: Scribner, 2001. 2 Don DeLillo, The Names. London: Picador, 1999. p.339. 8 of course, language – what I refer to as allegory.3 In effect DeLillo’s texts perform a re-evaluation of language, a cherishing of the tenderness of allegory, and, with this, the fallenness of human subjectivity. DeLillo’s texts take as their focus that which lies, like some underworld, in excess of language and subjectivity, a sacred Otherness, often contextualised as memory, that can be thought of as the impossible condition, beyond representation, from which the human possibilities of representation come. My argument is that through investigation of the limitations of subjectivity, conducted via a philosophy of language, an aesthetic philosophy, DeLillo, in a way that suggests much in common with the likes of Derrida, de Man, and Benjamin, articulates ethical and faith-oriented concerns through what I call the work of art. It is my argument that central to this project, and therefore central to DeLillo’s work, is irony, conceived of as the articulation of an impossible but all-pervasive Otherness that reveals, by virtue of its articulating force, the tenderness of being human, the tenderness of language and art, suggesting in the process how acts of cultural production might continue in integrity and good faith in a world dominated by the modes of reproduction definitive of late capitalism. The Body Artist, as the critic Philip Nel writes, “offers a lyrical meditation on language, memory, and the modernist (and romantic) project of bridging the gap between word and world”.4 What this “gap” or aporia means, how it is interpreted, or whether we interpret this division more as a question of delay or difference, reveals, I argue, how irony is interpreted and applied, as much by DeLillo’s critics and commentators as by writers on irony and deconstruction. What I think needs to be pointed out is that Nel’s suggestion, that DeLillo attempts to “bridge the gap” in The Body Artist, is inaccurate, and that this inaccuracy reveals not only a particular failing in the criticism of DeLillo’s novels, but also, and perhaps as a consequence of this, a particular failure to recognise the vital and thoroughgoing importance of irony in DeLillo’s texts.
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