Staging DeLillo
Rebecca Rey B.A. (Hons), The University of Western Australia, 2006
10322929
This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The University of Western Australia
School of Social and Cultural Studies Discipline of English and Cultural Studies
2012
Abstract
This thesis examines the plays of Don DeLillo. Although DeLillo‘s novels have received much critical discussion, his theatre works, with a few exceptions, have been largely ignored in literary circles. This thesis focuses on DeLillo‘s plays to rectify, in part, the lack of scholarship on this topic. In what follows I will examine each of DeLillo‘s six playtexts in chronological order, devoting a chapter to each of his main plays. Common themes emerging across the oeuvre are the centrality of language, the human fear of death, the elusiveness of truth, and the deception of personal identity. In order to provide a comprehensive critical analysis of DeLillo‘s plays, I will draw on a wide range of sources, including DeLillo‘s novels, personal notes and correspondence, interviews with the writer, and theatre performance reviews, in order to reach a better critical understanding of DeLillo‘s plays. This unprecedented examination of DeLillo‘s plays contributes not only to a deeper understanding of his other fictional works, but is rewarding in itself, as the plays can stand alone as being worthy of critical attention. In Chapter 1, I present an analysis of DeLillo‘s ‗The Engineer of Moonlight‘ (1979)—his first published, but as yet unperformed, playtext. ‗The Engineer‘ bears striking similarities in theme with DeLillo‘s earlier novel Ratner’s Star (1976). In Ratner’s Star, the young protagonist, Billy Twillig, is involved in cracking a code from outer space using the methodology of pure mathematics and logic. In contrast, the protagonist of ‗The Engineer‘, Eric Lighter, turns these same methodologies inwards in an attempt to better understand himself and his madness, a madness that stems from his obsession with mathematics itself. For Eric, the nature of his self and madness ultimately proves to be elusive, and beyond the purview of his mathematical methodology. I examine the motifs of madness, mathematics, game- playing and their interconnections as they appear in ‗The Engineer‘. We then enter the realm of metatheatre in Chapter 2, with DeLillo‘s The Day Room (1986). This play involves a confusing and comedic circus of characters that leaves the audience guessing as to which characters are genuinely mad and which are merely acting. The theme of the deception of identity is explored through the complications introduced by shifting character roles reminiscent of the work of Pirandello, and through unreachable truths indicative of Beckettian concerns. I also
ii explore several wider facets present in the playtext: metatheatricality, paranoia, and the link between acting and death. Chapter 3 provides a brief intermission, involving a short, playful, look at DeLillo‘s two one-minute plays, ‗The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed Into Heaven‘ (1992) and ‗The Mystery at the Middle of Ordinary Life‘ (2000). These two playlets are almost directly opposed in presentation and mood, yet they contain a common interest in the deep layers of lives led. ‗The Rapture‘ portrays a victorious tennis star at the height of his extraordinary win, and ‗The Mystery‘ is a quiet meditation on married life; both are moving examinations of core human relationships, desires, and motivations. Chapter 4 focuses on Valparaiso (2003), DeLillo‘s most technological and technocentric work for the stage. When Michael Majeski boards a plane to the wrong city, he finds himself in the centre of the media spotlight, and enjoys it. I briefly examine the characteristics and role of technology in Valparaiso and DeLillo‘s wider oeuvre, and the centrality of technology in the creation and maintenance of contemporary celebrity. Finally, I combine my thoughts on technology and the celebrity process to evaluate DeLillo‘s portrayal of Michael‘s identity. The relationship between language and death is the focus of Chapter 5‘s analysis of Love-Lies-Bleeding (2005). This playtext portrays a family‘s struggle with the decision of whether or not to euthanise its patriarch, Alex Macklin. I view this work through the lens of the philosophy of death, exploring the ethics of euthanasia. This is followed by an analysis of the language of death and the methods of coping with death. Finally, I conclude by drawing together the common themes relating to language, death, truth, and personal identity examined in the above theatre works. The importance of this research lies in its original analysis of Don DeLillo‘s plays, proving their literary worth, and hence providing an essential contribution to the already comprehensive scholarship on his novels.
iii
CANDIDATE’S DECLARATION: This thesis does not contain work that I have published, nor work under review for publication.
iv Acknowledgments
This project was supported by the School of Social and Cultural Studies at The University of Western Australia. I am particularly grateful for the Completion Scholarship that bestowed extra time and freedom of thought, and would like to thank UWA Convocation and Graduate Women WA for scholarships that allowed me to travel for research and conferences. In my major research trip to Austin in the United States, I had the pleasure of meeting the helpful staff at the Harry Ransom Center who kindly guided me through the enormous Don DeLillo Collection.
The day-to-day life of this thesis was made sweeter by the companionship and camaraderie of my postgraduate colleagues and friends. My co-ordinating supervisor, Steve Chinna, has been a wonderful mentor throughout with his gentle kindness, attention to detail, and unwavering good nature. I am also indebted to Tony Hughes D‘Aeth and Ryan Cox for providing lucid feedback on final drafts.
Lastly, I thank my parents and my family. This has all been made possible because of their past personal sacrifices and courage, and their continuing unconditional support. I dedicate this work wholeheartedly to them.
v Table of Contents
Abstract ...... ii Declaration Page ...... iv Acknowledgments ...... v Table of Contents ...... vi List of Illustrations ...... vii
Introduction ...... 1
Chapter 1: ‘The Engineer of Moonlight’ (1979) and the Logical Life ...... 13 1.1. Two Methodologies of Logic in ‗The Engineer‘: Mathematics and Play 1.2. Methodologies of Logic in DeLillo‘s Novels 1.3. The Elusive Nature of Truth 1.4. Conclusion
Chapter 2: Playing with Metatheatre in The Day Room (1987) ...... 46 2.1. Metatheatre and its Effects 2.2. The Connection Between Death and Acting 2.3. Conclusion
Chapter 3: Intermezzo: One-Minute Plays ...... 77 3.1. ‗The Rapture‘ of the Extraordinary 3.2. ‗The Mystery‘ of the Ordinary
Chapter 4: Technology and the Celebrity Circus in Valparaiso (2004) ...... 86 4.1. The Relationship Between Technology and its Users 4.2. A Visible Celebrity with an Invisible Secret 4.3. Language: Speech and Silence 4.4. Conclusion
Chapter 5: Love-Lies-Bleeding (2005): Speaking of Life and Death ...... 127 5.1. The Philosophy of Death and the Ethics of Euthanasia 5.2. Specialised Terminology and Naming 5.3. Conclusion: A Silent End
Conclusion ...... 156
Bibliography ...... 158
vi List of Illustrations
Chapter 2: The Day Room Figure 1: Grass‘s metal stand, The Garage Theatre photograph ...... 59 Figure 2: Characters‘ uniforms, Northark Drama photograph ...... 60 Figure 3: Promotional photograph for Theatrix production ...... 60 Figure 4: The Garage Theatre photograph ...... 60
Chapter 4: Valparaiso Figure 1: Stage set-up paper representation...... 92
Chapter 5: Love-Lies-Bleeding Figure 1: Promotional photographs, Breitbart website ...... 130–131 Figure 2: Photograph of Alex in performance, Breitbart website ...... 131 Figure 3: ‗Saturday Cartoon‘, Birmingham Blues, August 25, 2007 ...... 139 Figure 4: Photograph of production, Steppenwolf Theatre Company ...... 145
vii Introduction
Although Don DeLillo is well known for his novels, such as the popular White Noise (1985) and Underworld (1997), he has rarely been acknowledged as a playwright. In an attempt to rectify, in part, the lack of scholarship on this topic, and bring some critical notice to these largely unstudied texts, this thesis focuses on DeLillo‘s plays. A study of DeLillo‘s plays will contribute not only to a deeper understanding of his other fictional work, but will be rewarding in itself as the plays can stand alone as pieces of art worthy of critique.
DeLillo was awarded the US National Book Award in 1985 and the Jerusalem Prize in 1999, as well as the American Academy of Arts and Letters‘ William Dean Howells Medal, for Underworld (1997). Amidst this critical acclaim for his novels, DeLillo has quietly published four major playtexts and two minor ones, and all but one have been performed around the world, often numerous times. As Klaus Benesch pointed out in 2003, despite the notice DeLillo‘s novels have received, his plays have been conspicuously absent from academic criticism of his work.1 Little has changed in this regard since then. At the time I began research into DeLillo‘s plays in 2008, there existed no monograph or book chapter that analysed his theatrical output in a comprehensive way. Only a handful of journal articles, performance reviews and interviews on the plays are freely available, and his personal notebooks housed at The University of Texas, Austin, are sought only by the most persistent scholar. Significant literary criticism, however, is relatively non-existent;2 this gap in the critical literature on DeLillo is what I intend to begin to fill. Of course, it must be acknowledged that this thesis does not claim to be an exhaustive text on DeLillo‘s plays, but it will be a start.3
1 Klaus Benesch, ―Myth, Media, and the Obsolescence of Postmodern Drama: Don DeLillo's Tragicomedy Valparaiso‖, Global Challenges and Regional Responses in Contemporary Drama in English, ed. Jochen Achilles, Ina Bergmann, and Birgit Däwes (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2003). Obtained via correspondence from the author as an unpaginated PDF file. 2 Adam Begley is one of the few interviewers who mentions the plays in ―Don DeLillo, The Art of Fiction‖, The Paris Review 135 (Fall 1993), 18 May 2008
1 The above literary fame has resulted in much comprehensive scholarship on Don DeLillo and his novels. I outline in what follows some scholarly milestones that have paved the way for further research. Adopting an historical view of the literature, Tom LeClair was the first to publish on the novels in 1987, taking a ‗systems theory‘ approach in his In The Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel.4 He singled out DeLillo as a systems novelist who writes novels of excess, peppered with nonchalant characters and taxonomies of people and environments. Such an information and communication technology-based approach arguably set the standard for later DeLillo criticism, as the influencing nature of technology on contemporary identity has since been investigated by Douglas Keesey, Joseph Tabbi, Jeremy Justus, and Klaus Benesch.5
Douglas Keesey followed LeClair in 1993 with Don DeLillo, a thorough analysis of all the novels from Americana to Mao II. He concludes that Libra was DeLillo‘s great masterpiece, and disagrees with reviewers contending that DeLillo‘s characters lack humanity due to the author‘s greater interest in ideas rather than people.6 Keesey attempts to assuage these early characterisation criticisms by showing how they have also been directed at postmodern writers like William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, and William S. Burroughs.7 Most importantly— regarding my thesis‘s aims—Keesey was one of the first to mention and very briefly describe the playtexts ‗The Engineer of Moonlight‘, The Day Room, and ‗The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed into Heaven‘ in his final ‗Coda‘ chapter.8 He likens ‗The Engineer‘ to Ratner’s Star, and The Day Room to Luigi Pirandello, Tom Stoppard and Samuel Beckett. Slightly preceding Keesey, Judith Laurence Pastore
4 Tom LeClair, In The Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987). 5 Douglas Keesey, Don DeLillo (New York: Twayne, 1993); Joseph Tabbi, Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Jeremy Justus, ―Surveillance, Paranoia, and Abjection: The Ideological Underpinnings of Waste Management in the EPA‘s Measuring Recycling Guidelines and Don DeLillo‘s Underworld”, Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-present) 5/1 (Spring 2006)
2 also delved into the links between Pirandello and DeLillo in an article published in Italian Culture;9 I survey these possible textual influences in chapters 1 and 2.
DeLillo‘s friend, Frank Lentricchia, edited a collection called New Essays on White Noise in 1991, giving critics the opportunity to reinterpret the novel.10 Eight years later, he published Introducing Don DeLillo, another edited collection, including Anthony DeCurtis‘s incisive interview, ‗―An Outsider in this Society‖‘, and essays on conspiracy, cinema, and further postmodern approaches. Peter Boxall, on the other hand, in Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction, takes a novel-by- novel methodology, from Americana to Cosmopolis.11 In it, he contends, in a somewhat politicised way, that DeLillo‘s characters struggle against the increasing lack of possibility in globalised post-war culture. Creativity and opposition to the status quo have been quashed by the new self-referring, dislocated culture. However, Boxall writes, not only does DeLillo portray the collapse of the possibility of fiction, but by writing it, he also continues the possibility of fiction.12 Stacey Olster‘s edited collection Don DeLillo: Mao II, Underworld, Falling Man, is also structured as a text-based novel-by-novel analysis in the style favoured by Keesey and Lentricchia.13 She situates these three novels‘ contexts as the end of the Cold War and the beginning of a globalised economy, all concerned with interrogating ideas of national identity.
Mark Osteen and David Cowart take a more cultural and linguistic approach, humanising DeLillo‘s novels more than previous critics. Mark Osteen‘s American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture analyses several novels with the individual and the human as the central interest.14 His highly relevant interpretations note how DeLillo‘s characters are threatened by the aggressiveness of media and technology, how they can use mathematics and patterns in language to attain some semblance of control, and how new levels of publicity have impacted on personal privacy. His publication appeared at the cusp of the new millennium,
9 Judith Laurence Pastore, ―Pirandello‘s Influence on American Writers: Don DeLillo‘s The Day Room‖, Italian Culture 8 (1990), pp. 431–47. 10 Frank Lentricchia, ed, New Essays on White Noise (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991). 11 Peter Boxall, Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2006). 12 Boxall, p. 9. 13 Stacey Olster, ed. Don DeLillo: Mao II, Underworld, Falling Man (London and New York: Continuum, 2011). 14 Mark Osteen, American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).
3 going further than LeClair, Keesey and Lentricchia with his more contemporary analysis of the integration of technology into modern life, rather than simply its disconnective and destructive powers. Osteen claims DeLillo engages with the dread of postmodern culture to transform it through the mystical, redemptive powers of art. This was followed by David Cowart, whose Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language brought DeLillo‘s linguistic techniques to the fore.15 Cowart positions language as an index that exemplifies culture, and provides a sensitive investigation of DeLillo‘s linguistic depth and luminosity. Both Osteen‘s and Cowart‘s contributions to the literature are milestones in analyses of the community aspects of culture and language. Whereas previous critics like Joseph Tabbi based their ideas on postmodern theory,16 the interests of Osteen and Cowart lie in American culture, and language as an indicator of that culture.
Baudrillardian perspectives on DeLillo‘s work abound, an example of which is Klaus Benesch‘s article published one year after Cowart‘s book on DeLillo‘s language. In ―Myth, Media, and the Obsolescence of Postmodern Drama‖, Benesch assumes a Baudrillardian stance on DeLillo‘s language, stating that DeLillo‘s narrative and theatre texts hinge on the substitution of the real.17 Leonard Wilcox similarly foregrounds Baudrillardian theory, suggesting that White Noise and Libra present postmodern life in America as very similar to the transformation of image to real that Baudrillard indicates in his work.18 Benjamin Bird, on the other hand, deviates from the Baudrillardian perspective by isolating a different problem that plagues DeLillo‘s characters: their lack of ability to accept the subjectivity of phenomena of consciousness. Their senses of selves hinge on their having confidence in their subjective mental experiences.19
15 David Cowart, Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2002). 16 Joseph Tabbi, Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). 17 Benesch, §3, n.p. 18 Leonard Wilcox, ―Baudrillard, DeLillo‘s ―White Noise‖, and the End of Heroic Narrative‖, Contemporary Literature 32/3 (Autumn 1991), pp. 346–65. For more Baudrillard-based interpretations, see Christian Moraru, ―Consuming Narratives: Don DeLillo and the ‗Lethal‘ Reading‖, The Journal of Narrative Technique 27/2 (Spring 1997), p. 194 and passim; Joe Moran, ―Don DeLillo and the Myth of the Author–Recluse‖, Journal of American Studies 24/1 (April 2000), p. 140 and passim. 19 Benjamin Bird, ―Don DeLillo‘s Americana: From Third- to First-Person Consciousness‖, Critique 47/2 (Winter 2006), pp. 185–200.
4 It may well be that it was the experimental and hyperbolic nature of Baudrillard theory that led to scholarship coming from broader approaches at the start of the twenty-first century. The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, edited by John N. Duvall, marks the significant moment when DeLillo‘s fiction gained greater attention.20 Duvall‘s collection is separated into parts investigating aesthetic and cultural influences, early fiction, major novels, and themes and issues. The essays deal with a diverse array of topics and texts, the main breakthrough being the collection itself, as a ‗companion‘ for readers. It portrays DeLillo as not only an important cultural commentator, but also a predictor, positioning the author as interested in how social and cultural trends have influenced and will influence the contemporary American sense of personal identity. Duvall, in his introduction— influenced to some degree, I would argue, by Osteen—highlights DeLillo‘s tendency to allow his characters the possibility to change their situations, often through the production of art.
Much of the branch of critical literature published in the first decade of the twenty-first century interprets DeLillo as working away from postmodern theory. These critics extend some of the claims made by Cowart, whereby DeLillo‘s characters are seen not as evacuated of identities, but autonomous and fallibly human. On this point, Joseph Dewey, Jesse Kavadlo and Amy Hungerford come from different critical directions, but aim for similar goals. Joseph Dewey, in Chapter 2 of his Beyond Grief and Nothing, takes a cursory look at ‗The Engineer of Moonlight‘ as a narrative of failed engagement. Furthermore, he evaluates Valparaiso and Love-Lies-Bleeding as parables of resurrection in Chapter 5, stressing in particular the ‗rebirth‘ of the characters.21 Kavadlo‘s Don DeLillo: Balance at the Edge of Belief delves into DeLillo‘s humanism, and his interest in human experience and ability of belief and selfhood to transcend contemporary issues.22 He argues that DeLillo‘s recent fiction (Mao II, White Noise, Libra, and Underworld) transcends the contemporary crisis of meaning and lack of faith by providing a cultural commentary that acts as a ―moral corrective‖ against such a worldview. Kavadlo notes a general critical trend towards postmodern approaches, and argues instead
20 John N. Duvall, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 21 Joseph Dewey, Beyond Grief and Nothing: A Reading of Don DeLillo (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006). 22 Jesse Kavadlo, Don DeLillo: Balance at the Edge of Belief (New York: Peter Lang, 2004).
5 for a return to noticing human themes like fear, love and evil. Hungerford‘s Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion Since 1960 opens by stating its interest in belief in meaninglessness. She dedicates a chapter to investigating DeLillo‘s use of language as a religious ritual based on tradition rather than doctrine.23 Continuing Cowart‘s analysis of language, but coming from the direction of religion, Hungerford shows how belief in DeLillo‘s work is not a belief in content (McLuhan‘s ‗message‘), but rather a belief in the medium, human speech. Alexander Dunst‘s unpublished 2010 thesis focuses on madness, and includes DeLillo criticism in his fourth chapter.24 This research indicates a returned focus on the human, with interest again in human fears, desires, and limits, interpreting DeLillo through a lens similar to those of Osteen and Cowart.
Ethics and moral discourse feature in two scholarly works by Peter Schneck and Philipp Schweighauser, and Paul Giaimo.25 Schneck and Schweighauser‘s 2010 Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction: Transatlantic Perspectives on Don DeLillo, as the title suggests, is comprised of commissioned articles to begin an exchange between American and European DeLillo criticism. It rests on the need for an investigation of the ethical implications of terrorism, media, and literature. Such a European point of view centres DeLillo‘s cultural critique on American consumerism, the mass media, and language. Indeed, it also strays from the immediately negative implications in postmodern theory, for example, Wilcox‘s postmodern interest in trauma, and aligns itself with a more open, and even potentially positive, perspective on subjectivity like others have given.26 I synthesise a similar ethical interest with literary analysis in my chapter 5 to show the cultural results of such contemporary issues, euthanasia in particular. Similar to Schneck and Schweighauser, Giaimo‘s Appreciating Don DeLillo: The Moral Force of a Writer’s
23 Amy Hungerford, Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion Since 1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 24 Alexander Dunst, ―Politics of Madness: Crisis as Psychosis in the United States, 1950–2010‖ (diss., University of Nottingham, 2010). 25 Peter Schneck and Philipp Schweighauser. ed. Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction: Translatlantic Perspectives on Don DeLillo (New York and London, 2010); Paul Giaimo, Appreciating Don DeLillo (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2011). 26 Leonard Wilcox, ‗Baudrillard, DeLillo‘s ―White Noise‖, and the End of Heroic Narrative‘, Contemporary Literature 32/3 (Autumn 1991), pp. 346–65. Curtis A. Yehnert shows how DeLillo‘s characters exhibit personal responsibility for self-creation and media use in ―Like Some Endless Sky Waking Inside‘: Subjectivity in Don DeLillo‖, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 42/4 (2001): 357–66. Jason S. Polley similarly points out characters‘ autonomy in taking risks and self-correcting their limits: ‗Acts of Justice: Risk and Representation in Contemporary American Fiction‘, diss., McGill University, 2007. I am indebted to Polley for sharing his dissertation with me.
6 Work continues the ethical trend by bringing DeLillo‘s Catholic influence to the fore, taking on an investigation into the morality within his novels. He contends that DeLillo‘s immoral characters are almost always punished in some way, indicating DeLillo‘s tendency to provide hidden morals within his stories.
Journalistic interviews have also furthered DeLillo scholarship. Some of the most illuminating interviews with DeLillo have been by Mimi Kramer, Vince Passaro, Maria Nadotti, Jody McAuliffe, C. W. E. Bigsby, Gerald Howard, and others.27 These conversations provide valuable insights into DeLillo‘s writing habits, his textual influences, biographical background, thoughts on American life, and thoughts on novelists and novel writing. I have integrated some of his responses into this thesis in order to inform my own analyses.
This thesis is structurally divided into five chapters: four of these analyse the four main playtexts and the remaining chapter deals with DeLillo‘s two one-minute plays. I have given each main text a full chapter‘s worth of attention with the intention that each chapter forms a scholarly entity in itself, and contributes to an overall analysis of DeLillo‘s stage works. There exists one conscious limitation: it should be noted that DeLillo‘s most recent play, ‗The Word for Snow‘ (2007), has been omitted, due to the playtext‘s unavailability.28
In the ‗first act‘ of this thesis, which comprises chapters 1 and 2, I examine DeLillo‘s plays from the 1970s and 1980s, ‗The Engineer of Moonlight‘ (1979) and The Day Room (1986). Chapter 1 gives insight into a world of numbers and patterns
27 Mimi Kramer, ―Who‘s the Boss?‖ The New Yorker 65/47 (11 Jan. 1988), pp. 74–5; Vince Passaro, ―Dangerous Don DeLillo.‖ New York Times (19 May 1991), p. SM35; Maria Nadotti, ―An Interview with Don DeLillo.‖ Salmagundi 100 (Fall 1993), pp. 83–97; Jody McAuliffe, ―Interview with Don DeLillo.‖ South Atlantic Quarterly 99 2/3 (Spring/Summer 2000), pp. 609–15; C. W. E. Bigsby, ―In Conversation with Don DeLillo.‖ Writers in Conversation (Norwich: The Arthur Miller Centre for American Studies, 2000 and 2001), pp. 109–30; Gerald Howard, ―The American Strangeness: An Interview with Don DeLillo‖, Hungry Mind Review 29 Jan. 1999, 2 April 2008,
7 in ‗The Engineer of Moonlight‘ (1979).29 Centred around mathematician Eric Lighter‘s recent mental breakdown, ‗The Engineer of Moonlight‘ remains DeLillo‘s only unperformed play to date. In §1.1 I draw out two methodologies of logic— mathematics and play—which are examples of self-referential and self-contained frameworks. In §1.2 I compare ‗The Engineer‘ with some of DeLillo‘s other novels, especially his highly scientific and dense Ratner’s Star, which may have prompted his writing of ‗The Engineer‘. Despite frameworks that aim to explain the external world when applied externally, in §1.3 I show how Eric‘s truths still remain elusive. Their personal and inner nature ensure their inability to be deduced or explained via logic, hence, by the close of the playtext, Eric has not reached any new conclusions regarding his madness.
In chapter 2, I explore identity confusion in the Pirandello-esque The Day Room (1986).30 The first act sees a mix-and-match of hospital patients and insane ward patients negotiating their roles, each unsure of the sanity of the others. The second act moves to a motel room, where the roles of actors and spectators are questioned, as spectators wait to watch a secret play, but may indeed be acting in it themselves. Here DeLillo experiments with metatheatrical elements like self- referring characters and dialogue that exposes the artificiality of the play. After explaining metatheatre and its dismantling of spectator expectations, I show how spectators‘ distrust of truths leads to paranoia (§2.1). The failure to meet general spectators‘ expectations of realism is evident through production reviews. In §2.2 I explore the connection between death and acting, showing how DeLillo in The Day Room presents acting as a metaphorical way of evading death by inhabiting other roles. Death, however, is as unavoidable as the human fear of it. I conclude in §2.3 that although acting may be pursued for its feelings of deathlessness, death nonetheless cannot be escaped.
The above chapters are followed by a short intermission, comprised of chapter 3, which focuses on two of DeLillo‘s shorter works from the 1990s and 2000s, the tiny but potent one-minute playlets ‗The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed
29 Don DeLillo, ‗The Engineer of Moonlight‘, Cornell Review 5 (Winter 1979), pp. 21–42. 30 Don DeLillo, The Day Room (New York: Penguin, 1989). First published in American Theatre in 1986, then by Alfred A. Knopf Inc. in 1987.
8 Into Heaven‘ (1992)31 and ‗The Mystery at the Middle of Ordinary Life‘ (2000).32 The former portrays a victorious athlete at the height of his win, while the latter follows a conversation between a couple wondering about the lives of their neighbours. In some ways binary opposed, these plays respectively exposing the ‗extraordinary‘ and ‗ordinary‘ side of life show DeLillo to be a master of the depth of the moment. They also prefigure the investigation of celebrity and marriage in Valparaiso (2003).
Chapters 4 and 5 make up the ‗second act‘ of the thesis, devoted to DeLillo‘s most recent plays. Chapter 4 delves into celebrity and the technological aspects of Valparaiso (2003).33 When Michael Majeski takes a business trip and finds himself on the wrong plane, his previously mundane life takes a turn towards fame. I analyse technology in §4.1 by considering whether it has a ‗will‘ of its own, how it is presented within Valparaiso and DeLillo‘s novels, what happens when there is a discord between human and machine, and how it can induce paranoia in the contemporary person. I then tie this to the dissemination and representation of fame in celebrity culture (§4.2), and how communication technologies affect the public/private divide. In §4.3 I analyse Valparaiso‘s language in terms of stylised dialogue and pauses, drawing connections to DeLillo‘s possible influences by Pinter and Beckett. I conclude by emphasising that the ‗will‘ in technology is metaphoric only. In Valparaiso and other of DeLillo‘s works, his characters remain largely in control, directing communication technologies to represent their desires and meet their required ends.
Finally, Chapter 5 brings to the light the ethics involved in euthanasia in Love-Lies-Bleeding (2005).34 Alex Macklin‘s second stroke has left him severely disabled in a ‗persistent vegetative state‘. His ex-wife and son have come to visit, and try to convince his current wife to give her consent for euthanizing Alex. The play approaches death in ethical terms, and I highlight its similarities to the 2005 Terri Schiavo euthanasia case (§5.1). When analysing the language in §5.2, it is clear that medical and botanical terminology, names and naming, and language
31 Don DeLillo, ‗The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed into Heaven‘, South Atlantic Quarterly 91/2 (Spring 1992), pp. 241–2. First published in The Quarterly 15 (1990). 32 Don DeLillo, ‗The Mystery at the Middle of Ordinary Life‘, South Atlantic Quarterly, 99: 2/3 (Spring/Summer 2000), pp. 600–3. 33 Don DeLillo, Valparaiso (London: Picador, 2004). 34 Don DeLillo, Love-Lies-Bleeding (London: Picador, 2006).
9 failure all indicate the power of language over fact and existence. I conclude by assessing the anti-climax of Alex‘s death, a vital moment missed by the other characters and indicative of DeLillo‘s fondness for unresolved endings and the withholding of expected narrative solutions.
Common Themes Among the Plays and Novels Over the course of my delving into DeLillo‘s plays, four key themes will emerge. First, DeLillo privileges language—particularly dialogue—overall. Second, the human fear of death impels DeLillo‘s characters to avoid and forestall it, for example, through acting. Third, the truth remains elusive for the characters, and fourth, personal identity is a deceptive idea. I synthesise an analysis of the plays with a look also at the novels, illustrating how there is a cross-fertilization of themes explored across two distinct genres.
The Centrality of Language DeLillo‘s plays, like his novels, are heavily concerned with language. The linguistic registers, vocabulary, and style of each of his theatrical works vary greatly: there are the ravings of a mad genius in ‗The Engineer of Moonlight‘; comedic dialogue volleys between characters in The Day Room; densely intimate details narrated or hinted at in his one-minute plays; the sound bites of celebrity and media in Valparaiso, and medical and botanical terminology in Love-Lies-Bleeding. Every one of DeLillo‘s works for the stage relies unequivocally on its presentation of action primarily through language rather than staging. Language, for these texts, exposes all, including characters‘ identities and identity volte faces, their relationships with each other, their mental states and their relationships with the societies in which they live.
The Human Fear of Death DeLillo‘s characters, both in his plays and novels, fear death, and death invades the narratives wholesale to create strong lines of tension. In the novels, for instance, Jack Gladney acquires toxic poisoning in White Noise, Benno Levin shoots Eric Packer in Cosmopolis, the memory of Rey Robles haunts Lauren Hartke in The Body Artist, Bill Gray is hit by a car in Mao II, and so forth.
10 In the plays, death reigns as the supreme human fear. Characters‘ mortalities are given immediacy through the memento mori situations in which they find themselves. In Chapter 2, the hospital setting of The Day Room creates a context of illness. This, coupled with the slow picking off of characters back to the Arno Klein Ward for the mad, highlights particularly the mental death of insanity. In Chapter 4, Michael Majeski‘s suicide attempt is the catalyst for his catching the wrong plane in Valparaiso, with his inevitable mortality exposed in his death in the end. In Chapter 5 I explore Alex‘s persistent vegetative state in Love-Lies-Bleeding, and his family‘s discussion about what constitutes the right to die. It is their eventual deaths that characters attempt to avoid, escape, or forget, whether through acting it (The Day Room), rationally investigating it (‗The Engineer of Moonlight‘), or ultimately controlling it (Love-Lies-Bleeding and Valparaiso).
The Elusiveness of Truth Although all of DeLillo‘s characters exhibit a hunger to discover truths, none ultimately succeed in his novels. The search for truth forms Eric Packer‘s existential quest in Cosmopolis for things that matter, as well as Billy Twillig‘s new project in Ratner’s Star, James Axton‘s desire to understand the mysterious murdering clan in The Names, and the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory presented in Libra.
In Chapter 1, we will see that James records Eric Lighter‘s ravings in ‗The Engineer of Moonlight‘, but no key to his madness is forthcoming. Furthermore, in Chapter 2‘s analysis of The Day Room I note that the metatheatrical techniques and Pirandello-esque characters serve only to destabilise spectators‘ pre-existing expectations of realism, replacing them instead with a string of volte faces and plot twists. In Valparaiso, too, in Chapter 4, although Michael‘s suicide attempt is uncovered, the truth ―hiding in his heart‖ is not.35
The Slipperiness of Personal Identity Personal identity is connected to the aforementioned importance of death and truth, as DeLillo‘s characters often re-evaluate themselves during or after a crisis. For example, in the novel The Body Artist, Lauren Hartke sloughs herself into a
35 DeLillo, Valparaiso, p. 89.
11 blank slate after her husband‘s death, and Babette and Jack Gladney in White Noise constantly grapple with their fear of death.
Personal identity, Michael‘s metaphoric ―soul in a silver thimble‖ that Delfina in Valparaiso longs to have,36 is presented in DeLillo‘s plays as a complex, nebulous, and deceptive quality. The Day Room is the most prominent example of identity as self-deceptive and deceptive to others: one wonders whether Arno Klein‘s patients indeed know they are mad, or whether the Arno Klein group are aware of their roles as actors or spectators. Love-Lies-Bleeding meets the theme head on, when Alex Macklin‘s personal identity comes into question by his family. The criteria by which the family members measure continuous identity—consciousness, personality, brain activity—vary significantly, and together they decide whether Alex ―isn‘t Alex‖ any longer.37
In the following chapters I draw on previous scholarship and research on DeLillo‘s novels and combine a human-centred approach, an interest in the construction of language and its dissemination of meaning, and a suspicion of jargon and a postmodern evacuation of identity, to carry out thorough analyses of Don DeLillo‘s plays and evaluate the four themes described above. I aim, in this process, to provide evidence that the plays have been unfairly neglected, to the detriment of DeLillo scholarship, and hence merit more than just an intermittent, and often cursory glance.
36 DeLillo, Valparaiso, p. 90. 37 DeLillo, Love-Lies-Bleeding, p. 15.
12 CHAPTER 1
‘The Engineer of Moonlight’ (1979) and the Logical Life
‗The Engineer of Moonlight‘ (1979) is Don DeLillo‘s first playtext, published between the novels Players (1977) and The Names (1983).38 The first act is centred on crazed mathematician Eric Lighter; the second, around a board game. In §1.1 of this chapter, I explore two methodologies of logic in ‗The Engineer‘—pure mathematics and game-playing. These represent self-contained realms of rules and logic employed by characters in the playtext. Accordingly, in §1.2 I explore methodologies of logic present in DeLillo‘s novels, particularly Ratner’s Star. In §1.3 I show how the ultimate truths Eric Lighter seeks remain elusive, and in §1.4 I conclude by showing how the application of methodologies of logic fails to reach a single truth when examining the inner self.
To the best of my knowledge ‗The Engineer‘ has remained unstaged since its 1979 publication in the Cornell Review. This playtext, it seems, has faded from view, and DeLillo‘s active disownment of this play is no secret. He omits mention of ‗The Engineer‘ in his letter to Ioanna Kleftoyianni in 2002, laying claim to only the stage-performed The Day Room (1987) and Valparaiso (2004): ―I haven‘t written for movies but I‘ve written two stage plays, and one of them—called Valparaiso—was produced recently in Paris and New York.‖39 However, in 2006, the Artistic Director of Steppenwolf Theatre, Martha Lavey, persistently questioned him on the number of plays he had written. DeLillo did eventually admit that there are ―four, and the first one was something I published in a small literary journal and forgot about, because I didn‘t think it was stage-worthy‖ owing to its being ―strictly a private experiment‖.40 Jason S. Polley, one of the few scholars who has explored DeLillo‘s theatre works, makes the following observations about further omissions of the playtext:
38 Don DeLillo, ‗The Engineer of Moonlight‘, Cornell Review 5 (Winter 1979), pp. 21–42. All further quotations taken from this source will be paginated in-text within parentheses. I will henceforth call ‗The Engineer of Moonlight‘ simply ‗The Engineer‘. 39 DeLillo, letter to Ioanna Kleftoyianni, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. 40 Martha Lavey, ―Set on Stage‖, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, 2005–2006, 19 Sept. 2009
13 Indicatively… the book-jackets of his three subsequent plays omit any mention of The Engineer of Moonlight. Nor does this first play tend to be included in the numerous catalogues of DeLillo‘s fictions. Widely understood as his first dramatic work, The Day Room supplants The Engineer of Moonlight‘s claim to primacy.41
In an interview with Jody McAuliffe, DeLillo describes the impetus to write ‗The Engineer‘ as imagining the characters in physical space: ―I‘m not quite sure how to explain what brought it about. I think I saw people on a stage, actually, and began to follow them and to listen to them.‖42 Knowing ‗The Engineer‘ was ―something that was probably not stageworthy, in a way‖, ―awfully conversational‖ and ―needs a greater thrust than it has, a kind of forward motion‖,43 he then wrote The Day Room in 1986 and believed it to be better suited for production. Should he return to work on ‗The Engineer‘, the author admits that ―it might turn out to be more rewarding than the other two [The Day Room and Valparaiso]. But I don‘t know if I‘d ever do that‖.44 This playtext‘s critical neglect and wholly textual life has opened a free space in which I present some interpretations of the large themes at work.
In summary, ‗The Engineer‘ is a play of two acts, four characters and one home, a precursor in many ways to Love-Lies-Bleeding (2005). Mathematician Eric Lighter, his assistant James Case, and his first and fourth wives, Diana Vail and Maya, spend the first act sunbathing, ducking in and out of the house, and discussing Eric‘s mental decline which culminated in a mental breakdown. Diana has come to visit Eric to ensure his well-being. The second act then consists of their playing a mysterious board game together. Although Maya, Diana and James alternate between sunbathing, chatting, and playing, the central character of the play remains the enigmatic Eric Lighter and his downward spiral into madness. Simply structured and limited in stage directions, ‗The Engineer‘ relies heavily on dialogue-driven action and the symbolic and connotative ideas exchanged between the characters. Although comments by DeLillo on the play are rare, I quote below one of the few instances where he has spoken about it at length, in an interview with Tom LeClair and Larry McCaffery. It involves ―people in rooms‖, DeLillo explains:
The play is just that. People talking, people silent, people motionless, people juxtaposed with objects. There are four characters. What connects them is the awesome power of their
41 Polley, p. 169. 42 McAuliffe, p. 609. 43 McAuliffe, pp. 609, 609, 610. 44 McAuliffe, p. 615.
14 loving. The main character is Eric Lighter, a once-great mathematician who is now a pathetic but compelling ruin. If the play has a line of development at all, it hinges on whether Eric‘s former wife will abandon a recent marriage and successful career to help the others transcribe and type Eric‘s half-insane memoirs, along with the other day-to-day chores and obligations. The idea is absurd on the face of it. Diana ridicules the notion. Toward the end of the play she leaves the stage still denying that she‘ll stay. But we know she still feels a powerful love for Eric, for the aura of greatness that clings to him, and we feel uncertain about taking her at her word. The suggestion that she may stay is contained in a strange board game she‘d played with the others earlier in Act Two. A game involving words and logic used in unfamiliar ways. If we take this game as a play within the play, what we see is that Diana, who has never played before, gradually comes to understand the strange and complex nature of the game—an understanding the audience doesn‘t share. Toward the end she is elated; she is saying it all begins to fit, the colors, the shapes, the names. She wants to play.45
DeLillo cites the rewarding aspect of the play as its being ―deeply rooted in real people and real things‖, although theatre, for him, is ―not about the force of reality so much as the mysteries of identity and existence‖.46 Toby Silverman Zinman notes the lack of action in the play, despite its dense dialogue and symbolic overtones:
The trouble is, nothing happens. They talk, they put on suntan lotion, they stand up and sit down, but mainly there is no plot, no definable point of view, no action. The play seems to be realistic but is so tonally confusing that it is hard whether we are supposed to like these people or laugh at their nostalgia, their mystical pretensions, and their arch one-liners.47
Regarding DeLillo‘s possible influences, one can perceive a link between Zinman‘s summary of ‗The Engineer‘ and Beckett‘s Waiting for Godot: in the latter, Estragon poignantly expresses his ennui, saying ―[n]othing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it‘s awful!‖48 As Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman note, ―[t]his line spoken by one of the characters in the play provides its best summary‖.49 Zinman seems disappointed at the lack of narrative movement, though one may wonder whether creating a Godot-like ennui may be DeLillo‘s goal.
1.1 Two Methodologies of Logic in ‘The Engineer’ ‗The Engineer‘ contains within it two examples of what I call methodologies of logic—pure mathematics and play—each of which I will explore in turn. These are
45 Tom LeClair and Larry McCaffery, Anything Can Happen (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), pp. 89–90. 46 McAuliffe, p. 615. 47 Zinman, pp. 77–8. 48 Beckett, Waiting for Godot, p. 41. 49 Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman, Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegen Paul, 1979), p. 92.
15 self-contained and non-referential frameworks; they use logic and rules within their systems, but are not applicable to the outside world, and hence provide no practical knowledge. The first and most prominent methodology of logic in ‗The Engineer‘ is mathematics, the purity of which ensures its irrelevance to the external world. The second logical methodology is play itself, in the form of games, which is not only a pastime in which the characters indulge in the second act, but it also employs a set of rules and logic of its own in its own world, similar to mathematics. Mathematics and game-playing are not, however, all-encompassing logical methodologies. This is evident because despite Eric‘s aim at an explanation or interpretation of the world through the grand narratives of maths and games, he ultimately fails to reach a comprehensive model of truth for the inner world. Hence, DeLillo is reacting against modernist systems of imposed meaning and structure, by portraying Eric Lighter as a highly intelligent person who never reaches the truth for which he searches. The effect of including these frameworks in ‗The Engineer‘ is to exemplify how Eric tries to reach truth by applying rational methodology to the inner workings of the mind, but ultimately fails to discover enlightenment or answers. His attempt to use such logical frameworks to explain himself or the world may well indeed be absurd: could DeLillo in fact be setting Eric up as a comedic old fool?
The World of Pure Mathematics The central principle of the Enlightenment is that the methodological application of rationality, experiment and analysis can eventually lead to a clearer and superior knowledge of the natural and human world. DeLillo destabilises this notion in ‗The Engineer‘ by promoting the idea that Eric‘s obsessive recording of this body-data uncovers no new information about his breakdown. A logical framework applied to the inner world of the mind results in no such answers. Breakdown, however, can be restorative: in this section I will explore the characteristics of Eric‘s madness, and show how DeLillo further subverts traditional scientific methodology by playing with the idea that madness for some is not a backwards step, but instead an in-between cognitive state whereby an individual‘s non-rational thought may allow for his or her reaching ideas in other ways.
Before examining how Eric‘s mental breakdown occurred due to his obsession with mathematics, we must reach a definition of what it is to be ‗mad‘.
16 Insanity and its definition varies across the fields of psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, and law. Legally, it is founded on a perception of irrationality: for instance, Michael S. Moore defines the ―mentally ill‖ person as one where ―we find his past behaviour unintelligible in some fundamental way‖.50 Ever the logician, Eric Lighter was previously convinced that mathematics can reveal the truth behind the mysteries of the world, as if there is a Platonic form-like realm of understanding beyond everyday knowledge, and accessible only through the mathematical language of logic. Before his breakdown, he used numbers and the language of mathematics to interpret the world. James assisted him, and therefore knows the profound implications of Lighter‘s genius:
James: I work with Eric. I assist Eric Lighter. As always. Eric Lighter‘s work was a revelation, we mustn‘t forget. He did unexpected things. His work is full of surprise. And yet profoundly connected. Deep strata. There‘s a preconscious quality. He showed us what we‘d always known was there, at some untapped level. But that was long, long ago. It‘s a young fella‘s game, as he‘ll tell you himself, when pressed. (32)
The mysterious and all-enveloping nature of Eric‘s obsession with numbers could have led to his breakdown. Eric notes the connections when he explains that ―[t]his is what happens to broken-down mathematicians. We become visionaries‖ (29), implying that mathematicians require mental breakdown in order to ‗see‘ more clearly. This view stands in opposition to the presentation of obsession in Libra, where David Ferrie notes, ―[w]hatever you set your mind to, your personal total obsession, this is what kills you‖.51 Ferrie‘s view of mental breakdown is fatalistic, whereas, according to Eric, breakdown directly causes, or results in, lucidity beyond normal capabilities. Eric‘s methodological study of his personal, inner cognitive chaos brings him closer to understanding himself better, but no final conclusive truths are reached.
Eric‘s mental instability has a command over his family: it is the reason for Diana‘s visiting him. David Cowart calls Eric Lighter a ―mental case‖, despite his being a ―strange mix of the rational… and the dreamy or mad‖ (243).52 I think Cowart goes too far here, though, failing to discriminate between complete insanity
50 M. S. Moore, Law and Psychiatry: Rethinking the Relationship (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 196–7. 51 Don DeLillo, Libra, p. 46. 52 Cowart, Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language, p. 243.
17 and mental instability. Eric‘s breakdown—temporally limited, not continuous—is described when James enlightens Diana about the difficult period in Eric‘s life:
James: …He was in seven weeks. I don‘t know what to call it, technically. Overwhelming depression. Sense of deepest futility. He‘d sit and moan. Ramble on sometimes in some funny little animal language. … And he‘d sit there all sort of beaten down by some enormous inner force. All folded over. I don‘t know what he was seeing out of those eyes. His eyes were in some tunnel. (27–8)
James and Eric attribute Eric‘s breakdown to different sources. Significantly, James attributes the hiatus to ―some enormous inner force‖, placing Eric‘s locus of control as internal rather than external. It was his own mind driving its breakdown, acting as a catalyst to psychosis, rather than outside pressures. This observation is significant because it points to a source—Eric himself—suggesting that something within his own personality or role is at the root of the problem. Moreover, it is implied that his work as a mathematician and the ―[d]eep strata‖ (32) of his intellect were the causes of his mental incapacitation, and continue to affect him. The breakdown made Eric regress into a non-linguistic, base state, rambling in ―some funny little animal language‖ (27); James, then, views Eric‘s depression as regressive and an impediment to his vital mathematical work.
According to Eric, however, his psychotic episode was nothing but positive, a wake-up call that marked his inevitable progression to the next natural role of being a visionary. After his hospitalisation, Eric‘s pursuit of mathematical endeavours irrevocably shifted to a deep interest in madness, progressing his role from mathematician to visionary and his project from decoding equations to decoding his ‗visions‘. One of Eric‘s new realisations is the mixing of and overlap between sanity and insanity. He has this exchange with James on the existence of the insane among the allegedly normal:
James: Little by little, the argument goes, the insane are being returned to the streets. This is because we‘re so preoccupied with violence we no longer see the insane. […] Eric: […] We don‘t see mental illness. Lunatics no longer threaten. Every day hospitals release them by the thousands. […] James: Compulsives. Eric: Hysterics. James: And he‘s one of them. Eric: And I‘m one of them. Diana: This is so stupid. […] Eric: […] The mad are everywhere. So many, you‘ll have to learn their language. (29)
18 DeLillo concerns himself with the intersection of the mad and sane by portraying his protagonist as a mix of the two. Madness and mathematics are therefore connected through Eric, but still possess different qualities. At least one crucial general difference between mathematics and madness is that mathematics is external, following universal laws, while madness is internal, following personal inclinations, habits, propensities, and other subjectivities. Eric inhabits the space between mathematics and madness in ‗The Engineer‘; similar to the way in which ‗playing‘ requires both logic and chance, so too does Eric‘s role now encompass both mathematical genius and meandering madman. His logic requires his madness, and his madness employs components of logic, thus he is a living dichotomy of both sound and unsound mind, and stable and unstable emotion. He has sleep disturbances, but counts aloud carefully; he rants and raves, but carefully records and analyses it; and he is conversationally tangential, but boasts striking memory and insight.
The combination of sane and mad is most palpable when Eric speaks rationally about madness, exhibiting a symbiotic relationship: he uses logic to analyse his madness and records his madness to find a higher plane of knowledge. Co-existence and combination is key because neither is accessible without the other. His mental acuity extends so far that he notes how and why madness comes forth from internal sources. Post-breakdown, he has discovered the world of the inner, now understanding madness and explaining it to James and Diana:
[The mad] like to talk. They talk out to people. This is their way. They talk from inside out. They don‘t use what‘s around them. They don‘t gather data. It‘s what‘s inside. They use themselves. That‘s why the language is so hard to understand. There‘s as many dialects as people who speak. (30)
For Eric, then, the universality and selflessness of numbers is co-existent with the individuality and egocentrism of madness: he is a concurrently logical and mad being. Although Eric‘s works are no longer ―papers in mathematics‖, but ―notes on madness‖ that centre on ―Eric‘s state of mind‖ as he ―attempts to describe and examine what‘s happening to him‖ (33), he is still drawing upon his analytical skills to observe and evaluate his state of mind. The mathematician has become an obsessive recorder of everything, including the ―[s]mallest change in body temperature‖ (33), because he considers everything to influence ―[h]is condition. His state of mind‖ (34). We can see him, then, as a mathematical genius whose
19 final proof is himself. His life has progressed to this point, whereby his last and most important project is discerning the extent of his condition and using madness as a new axiom through which he may arrive at his pièce de résistance, a final metaphysical answer.
The World of Play In Act 2, Eric announces: ―Let‘s play. Time to play. Game time‖ (37). Play, as an action, is a second example of a logical methodology that is present within this playtext. Games and playing use formulae in a loosely mathematical way to bring about certain consequences and arrive at a final result. Act 2 of ‗The Engineer‘ bears similarities to chapters six to eight of Ratner’s Star, where as ―mathematics becomes increasingly imaginative, DeLillo associates it with games‖.53 The second act of ‗The Engineer‘ represents the application of pure mathematics to the real world through a board game. Games are, for DeLillo, evidence of the human need to order the chaos of the world, to impose rules and measured moves that each player must follow. Thomas LeClair, asking DeLillo whether games were an early interest, received the following response:
The games I‘ve written about have more to do with rules and boundaries than with the freewheeling street games I played when I was growing up. People whose lives are not clearly shaped or marked off may feel a deep need for rules of some kind. People leading lives of almost total freedom and possibility may secretly crave rules and boundaries, some kind of control in their lives. Most games are carefully constructed. They satisfy a sense or order and they even have an element of dignity about them. […] Games provide a frame in which we can try to be perfect.54
Metatheatrically similar to the play-within-a-play in The Day Room, in Act 2 the characters Eric, James, Maya and Diana begin to play an unnamed board game. This is the part of the playtext when the symbolic and representative nature of mathematical language is used to dictate moves in the game. ‗Play‘—in the form of logical board games rather than games of chance—is a primary way in which mathematical principles are applied to the common world.
Richard Schechner has explained the ritual of ‗play‘ in The Future of Ritual, where he devotes one chapter to the act of ‗playing‘.55 He contends that play is a
53 LeClair, In The Loop, p. 129. For a tabled map of the chapters of Ratner’s Star and the time periods, mathematicians, references, and concepts in each, see LeClair‘s p. 125. 54 LeClair, ―An Interview with Don DeLillo‖, Conversations with Don DeLillo, p. 5. 55 Richard Schechner, The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993).
20 universal phenomenon which manifests itself in the imaginative realm of childhood and carries through to adulthood in socially acceptable forms like sport and leisure games. He presents six templates against which we can measure ‗play acts‘: structure, process, experience, function, ideology, and frame.56 These characteristics are demonstrated in the second Act of ‗The Engineer‘: play takes place as a structured board game, where players throw dice and move their pieces about in order to test their skill and enjoy themselves. The game seems to be dominated by a desire to test trivia, with the goal being a gaining and proof of knowledge. It is framed by the board, since when the conclusion is reached, the playing ends, and according to the stage directions, ―Maya folds up the game board and takes it with the box into the bedroom‖ (41). Abiding by rules—often cross-culturally similar across related games—exhibits the privileging of order and rationale in the act of play. Logic, then, informs the game, so in this instance, play is a combination of logic and chance.
J. Huizinga‘s comprehensive and seminal Homo Ludens also explores at length how ‗play‘ occurs within culture. He defines play as,
a voluntary activity or occupation executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy and the consciousness that it is ―different‖ from ―ordinary life‖.57
He ascribes various characteristics required for play: freedom, extraordinariness, being outside of everyday life, ability to order, and lack of connection to materialism or money. Play is also cultural, not biological.58 It has a ―significant function‖, and yet has ―no moral function‖, as the ―valuations of vice and virtue do not apply here‖.59 This amorality is evident in ‗The Engineer‘, as goodness does not feature during the characters‘ playing, except in the form of game rules. Important particularly in relation to logic in ‗The Engineer‘, Huizinga notes that play ―demands order absolute and supreme‖, and is ―invested with the noblest qualities we are capable of perceiving in things: rhythm and harmony‖.60 Finally, the characteristic that endows play with its exceptionality is ―the fact that it loves to
56 Schechner, p. 25. 57 J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949), p. 28. 58 Huizinga, foreword. 59 Huizinga, pp. 1, 6, 6. 60 Huizinga, p. 10.
21 surround itself with an air of secrecy‖.61 Such secrecy is evident in the game Eric and the others play, with Diana asking for clarification, ―Is this part of the game?‖ and James secretively replying with, ―Play the game‖ (38). Intellectual intertextuality including Heisenberg, Voltaire, Whitehead, and Russell, indicates the game‘s goal: a progression towards a synthesis between the movements on the board and the improvement of the mind.
The motif of play also appears in Maya‘s name, with Eastern connotations. Maya is Eric‘s current wife, and Schechner also writes about maya, the Sanskrit word for ‗illusion‘, and which O‘Flaherty says is best translated as ―transformation‖.62 Schechner describes maya as being ―the multiplicity which the world is: creative, slippery, and ongoing‖.63 He writes that ―[m]aya–lila is fundamentally a performative–creative act of continuous playing where ultimate positivist distinctions between ―true‖ and ―false,‖ ―real‖ and ―unreal‖ cannot be made‖.64 This Indian tradition of maya–lila ―rejects Western systems of rigid, impermeable frames, unambiguous metacommunications, and rules inscribing hierarchical arrangements of reality‖.65 Alternatively, the Western positivist view of play, Schechner writes, is framed off from the real, and is seen as non-serious and temporary.66 According to Schechner, ―[i]n the West, play is a rotten category, an activity tainted by unreality, inauthenticity, duplicity, make believe, looseness, fooling around, and inconsequentiality‖.67
The mysterious unnamed game that Eric, James, Maya and Diana play seems to have similarities both to Hermann Hesse‘s intellectually elite glass bead game and a similarly cerebral ancient game, Go.68 Go is an intellectually-based and spiritually-infused territorial game; the Nihon Ki-in, in the preface to their introductory book on how to play, say that ―the game may appear profound and mysterious to outsiders, but every problem connected with the process and outcome
61 Huizinga, p. 12. 62 Wendy Doniger O‘Flaherty, Dreams, Illusions, and Other Realities (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984), p. 117–19. Quoted in Schechner, The Future of Ritual, p. 29. 63 Schechner, p. 31. 64 Schechner, p. 29. 65 Schechner, p. 34. 66 Schechner, p. 35. 67 Schechner, p. 27. 68 Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (London: Picador, 2002 [1943]).
22 can be explained and solved in logical terms‖.69 They situate the game‘s origin as between four and five thousand years ago in China, ―primarily connected with the art of divination‖.70 Based on the ―Chinese philosophy of the dual cosmic forces‖,71 the board, populated with black and white stones, indicates the struggle between positive and negative forces. Shukaku Takagawa also notes that the ―Black and White stones were considered to symbolise the ‗negative‘ and ‗positive‘ elements of the universe‖.72 Such intertextual influences as the glass bead game and Go lend an intellectually centred and historically based flavour to DeLillo‘s game.
The above East/West, play/reality modernist opposites present within the playtext have the potential to cause readers of the text to make reductive judgments about binaries that exists within ‗The Engineer‘: on the one hand, Eric is a mathematician at ease with highly specialised axioms to interpret the world through numbers, and on the other, he is losing touch with simple everyday life, instead retreating inwards to record obsessively his body‘s shifts and his mind‘s ramblings from a self-reflexive and intimate point of view. The apparent binaries above, however, are actually symbiotic, because they co-exist within the play. Hence, the characters in ‗The Engineer‘, while playing the game, find themselves negotiating the space between binaries: mathematician Eric is adept at concise formulae yet indulges in tangential monologues; Sanskrit-speaking wife Maya balances Eastern mysticism with a Western grasp of the game‘s logic; James plays the two simultaneous roles of devout assistant and employee, and a concerned son- like figure; Diana can no longer tell between logic and chaos, as she repeatedly ―consults the rules‖ and wonders if Eric‘s rambling anecdotes are ―part of the game‖ (38). Hence, all characters possess elements of both logic and chaos: Eric is intelligent yet mad, Maya is spiritual yet stoic, James is dedicated yet curious, and Diana is sensitive yet realistic. These characters are three-dimensional because of these inner conflicts, but what is most effectively realised in ‗The Engineer‘ is the way in which contraries are mutually necessary and symbiotic. And it is Eric—the character who embodies both mental rationality and chaos with equal awareness—
69 The Nihon Ki-in, Go: The World’s Most Fascinating Game. Vol 1: Introduction, trans. Ryuichi Kajiki and Takashi Konami (Tokyo: The Nihon Ki-in, 1973), p. 4. 70 The Nihon Ki-in, p. 6. 71 The Nihon Ki-in, p. 6. 72 Shukaku Takagawa, How To Play Go (Tokyo: The Nihon Ki-in, 1956), p. 2.
23 who in turn believes he is reaching some higher plane of understanding through using internal logic to interpret his madness.
Toby Silverman Zinman interprets the game as ―a comment on theatre itself‖, but ―although it is intriguing in an abstruse sort of way, it is, after all, just a board game, so the audience is left looking at four people looking at something the audience cannot see, playing a game they cannot follow‖.73 Zinman assumes ‗The Engineer‘ would be produced in a naturalistic and text-literal fashion, but an alternative production could involve an overhead video projection of the board game for the audience to see the moves on the board as the second act evolves. Zinman also observes a feeling of déjà entendu from reading this playtext after having read all of DeLillo‘s other novels: he remarks that—despite the active play in the second act—since characters simply talk to each other ―there is no reason to watch them talking to each other; it is essentially a novel‘s dialogue read aloud by different and embodied voices rather than the more intimate reading to oneself‖.74 The problem with ‗The Engineer‘, Zinman explains, is that the ‗genre [of theatre] has been betrayed‘ because it is ―really prose dialogue, requiring the condition of [reading to oneself], but presented as [performance]‖.75 This criticism has been reiterated by DeLillo himself, admitting he didn‘t think ‗The Engineer‘ to be ―stage- worthy‖.76 Nonetheless, with a video projection of the game board, spectators would be more involved in the second act and the act of ‗playing‘ the game would be a performance in itself.
Despite the child-like nature of play, DeLillo has nevertheless centred half of his first play on a board game. His inclusion of the game as a performance piece indicates his support for play, despite the ‗serious‘ complications of contemporary adult life. Huizinga notes—in 1944, no less—the disappearance or reduction of play as life becomes more complex:
As a civilization becomes more complex, more variegated and more overladen, and as the technique of production and social life itself become more finely organized, the old cultural soil is greatly smothered under a rank layer of ideas, systems of thought and knowledge, doctrines, rules and regulations, moralities and conventions which have all lost touch with
73 Zinman, pp. 78, 79. 74 Zinman, p. 79. 75 Zinman, p. 79. 76 Lavey, n.p.
24 play. Civilization, we then say, has grown more serious; it assigns only a secondary place to playing.77
The game in ‗The Engineer‘ is seemingly a combination of an intellectually and scientifically driven Trivial Pursuit and a move-based race game like Parcheesi. Trivial Pursuit rewards players for their intellectual memory and knowledge, hence reinforcing the hierarchy of logic as superior to chance. Parcheesi, on the other hand, privileges luck and strategy, and exemplifies the Eastern themes of the play since its origins lie in sixth-century India. It has since spread to Europe and the rest of the world in various forms similar to the original pachisi. While Trivial Pursuit privileges skill owing to previous knowledge, Parcheesi is a game of luck based on the throw of the dice; this is another example of a system of logic—play—that contains within it a mind/spirit alliance.
1.2 Methodologies of Logic in DeLillo’s Novels It should be noted that the motif of the consuming nature of logical methodologies like mathematics is by no means limited to ‗The Engineer‘ and Eric Lighter. In fact, frameworks of logic occur within many of DeLillo‘s novels: characters obsessed with order and observation are present also in Ratner’s Star (1976), The Names (1983), Americana (1990), and Cosmopolis (2003). David Bell in Americana records the minutiae of life, compulsively observes patterns in his surroundings, and memorises statistics; Billy Twillig in Ratner’s Star finds comfort in the organizational nature of patterns; Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra is convinced about fatalistic coincidences, with the novel supporting conspiracy theories surrounding strange events; and Cosmopolis‘s Eric Packer centres his energies around economic and corporeal glitches that fall outside patterns of usual financial and body movements. While these texts exemplify DeLillo‘s fascination with the effects of logical systems on human consciousness, the difference between these and ‗The Engineer‘ remains that the minor obsessions exemplified in DeLillo‘s novels do not serve to explore explicitly the logical methodologies. Instead, the characters in the novels work towards answers in a sane—though often obsessed—way. Whereas Eric Lighter in ‗The Engineer‘ is portrayed as being in the midst of a mad progression towards deeper enlightenment about himself, DeLillo‘s other obsessive
77 Huizinga, p. 75.
25 characters are using their various universal codes of statistics, language, coincidence, and so forth, to attempt to access higher levels of knowledge about the world.
‘The Engineer’ and Ratner’s Star Ratner’s Star remains the novel with the most similar concerns to those of ‗The Engineer‘. DeLillo has explained that writing Ratner’s Star required entering the world of mathematics as ―a novice, a jokesmith, with a certain sly deference‖. Yet, all the while, he was ―writing a shadow book in another part of my mind—same story, same main character, but a small book … less structure, less weight—four characters instead of eighty-four or a hundred and four‖.78 I contend that this idea eventualised as the playtext ‗The Engineer‘, which does indeed contain four characters, is much shorter and simpler, and was published only three years after Ratner’s Star. One may take this even further to suggest that ‗The Engineer‘ contains in it a more mature version of Billy Twillig: Eric Lighter. Ratner’s Star follows Billy Twillig, a young mathematical genius in his new post at a code-breaking facility. Similar to Eric‘s breakdown, Billy fears that his mathematical side ―might overwhelm the other, leaving him behind, a name and shape‖.79
U. F. O. Schwarz in Ratner’s Star says ―there is no reality more independent of our perception and more true to itself than mathematical reality‖.80 DeLillo admits to have found beauty within the exacting nature of mathematics in preparation, one assumes, for his mathematical and scientifically-inclined novel Ratner’s Star, and so one may say this new interest in the field then continued on to inspire ‗The Engineer‘:
Things started happening to this simple idea. Connections led to other connections. I began to find things I didn‘t know I was looking for. Mathematics led to science fiction. Logic led to babbling. Language led to games. Games led to mathematics. When I discovered uncanny links to Alice and her world, I decided I had to follow. Down the rabbit hole.81
Both Frank Lentricchia and Mark Osteen have called Ratner’s Star a ―Mennipean satire‖, foregrounding DeLillo‘s commentary on characters‘ mental attitudes. Lentricchia compares it to Lewis Carroll‘s Alice books, while Osteen notes its
78 Adam Begley, ―The Art of Fiction CXXXV: Don DeLillo‖, Conversations with Don DeLillo, p. 95. 79 DeLillo, Ratner’s Star, p. 129. 80 DeLillo, Ratner’s Star, p. 48. 81 LeClair and McCaffery, p. 86.
26 ―Joycean complexity‖.82 In 1997 DeLillo wrote the following to David Foster Wallace regarding his newfound fascination with the beauty of mathematical language:
Once, probably, I used to think that vagueness was a loftier kind of poetry, truer to the depths of consciousness, and maybe when I started to read mathematics and science back in the mid-70s I found an unexpected lyricism in the necessarily precise language that scientists tend to use. My instinct, my superstition is that the closer I see a thing and the more accurately I describe it, the better my chances of arriving at a certain sensuality of expression.83
To Thomas LeClair he has noted the beauty of specialised languages, ―[m]ysterious and precise at the same time‖.84 He highlights mathematics and astronomy as being ―full of beautiful nomenclature‖, with science as ―a source of new names, new connections between people and the world‖.85 There exists in this excerpt a privileging of the systematic observation that occurs within the fields of science, and this favouring of scientific methodology is also reflected in ‗The Engineer‘. Osteen, however, argues that Ratner’s Star relies on the idea that the nature of logic inevitably leads to uncertainty:
Here [in Ratner’s Star] he blends an imaginative history of mathematics with a symbiotic rewriting of Lewis Carroll‘s Alice books to produce a disturbing parable of the hazards of scientific arrogance. Through his intertextual dialogue with Carroll, DeLillo depicts the faith in mathematics as a dream that ineluctably leads to the looking-glass world of uncertain and self-reflexivity that is twentieth-century hard science. Responding fearfully to this uncertainty, DeLillo‘s scientists resort to magic, seeking the age-old chimera of a purified scientific language.86
Uncertainty forms the backbone of ‗The Engineer‘ too, with Eric‘s mental state under scrutiny by his family. The extent of his mental instability remains unknown, glimpses of it evident only through his dictations to James.
Both Ratner’s Star and ‗The Engineer‘ are bisected into two very different halves. Ratner’s Star, Osteen explains, has opposed halves: ―There‘s a strong demarcation between the parts. They are opposites. Adventures, reflections. Positive, negative. Discrete, continuous. Day, night. Left brain, right brain.‖87 In addition to their similar structures, both texts repeat the theme of the human fear of
82 Osteen, American Magic and Dread, p. 4. Lentricchia, introduction, New Essays on White Noise, p. 8. 83 Don DeLillo, letter to David Foster Wallace, 5 Feb. 1997, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. 84 LeClair, ―An Interview with Don DeLillo‖, Anything Can Happen, p. 9. 85 LeClair, ―An Interview with Don DeLillo‖, Anything Can Happen, p. 9. 86 Osteen, p. 4. 87 LeClair and McCaffery, pp. 86–7.
27 death, and mathematics‘ therapeutic ability. Ratner’s Star presents the idea that the deep fear of death held by so many of DeLillo‘s characters can be temporarily quelled by science and mathematics. Eric in ‗The Engineer‘ has his ideas obsessively recorded, presumably for fear of losing them to madness or death. Osteen expands on the anodyne quality of logical pursuits, in this case, science:
By dramatizing how human enterprises inevitably reflect human failings and limitations, Ratner’s Star attains a deeper thematic coherence with DeLillo‘s other works: it exposes science as a form of magic designed to quell our terror of mortality. Mathematics, DeLillo suggests, is a makeshift bridge built over a pool of dread.88
The mental ordering of the characters‘ known worlds into rational paradigms provides relief for Billy in Ratner’s Star, for instance, when he uses patterns to explain the frightful experience of riding a shaking elevator: ―[he] sought to convince himself there was a pattern to the vibrations and changes of speed, a hidden consistency‖,89 not dissimilar to Eric‘s reassuring counting in his sleep.
In an interview with Anthony Curtis, DeLillo notes the following metanarrative technique where the theme becomes the structure:
It seems to me that Ratner's Star is a book which is almost all structure. The structure of the book is the book. The characters are intentionally flattened and cartoonlike. I was trying to build a novel which was not only about mathematics to some extent but which itself would become a piece of mathematics. It would be a book which embodied pattern and order and harmony, which is one of the traditional goals of pure mathematics.90
DeLillo has also revealed that Lewis Carroll‘s work influenced the structure of the book, and also the tugging between logic and spirit:
There‘s a structural model, the Alice books of Lewis Carroll. The headings of the two parts—‗Adventures‘ and ‗Reflections‘—refer to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.... There is also a kind of guiding spirit. This is Pythagoras. The mathematician-mystic. The whole book is informed by this link or opposition, however you see it, and the characters keep bouncing between science and superstition.91
The inherently logical structure of Ratner’s Star bears a very similar resemblance to the second act of ‗The Engineer‘, where the mysterious game played by all the characters becomes the structure of the playtext. In both, mathematical logic becomes the formula of the text, so the genius characters flourish within the
88 Osteen, p. 63. 89 DeLillo, Ratner’s Star, p. 283. 90 DeCurtis, pp. 67–8. 91 LeClair and McCaffery, p. 86.
28 rational paradigms, and in ‗The Engineer‘ the characters are empowered by ‗playing‘.
Although rationality and logic in the form of science and mathematics do not lead to any new answers for Billy or Eric, the importance of these fields remains in their synthesis, their use, and their working towards answers. Billy Twillig eventually comes to terms with ―the irrationality of the universe‖, and must accept ―his dialectical role in synthesizing opposites‖.92 Eric Lighter also realises his role of being a recorder of his thoughts as well as his formal ideas, synthesising the personal with the mathematical. This portrayal of the liminal space between scientific method and spiritual growth is exhibited in ‗The Engineer‘, where it seems as if Eric Lighter‘s mathematics contains for him a sense of transcendence and mystery, and his personal journey through madness holds scientific interest.
‘The Engineer’ and Other Novels Obsession, personified by Eric Lighter, is also a common theme in DeLillo‘s novels. Osteen outlines the prevalence of the motif in the early novels, noting that the ―middle section of The Names becomes a quest story, extending the shrewd analysis of the obsessive mentality begun in End Zone, Great Jones Street, and Running Dog‖.93 In The Names especially, Owen Brademas notices that the names cult‘s executions ―mock our need to structure and classify, to build a system against the terror in our souls. They make the system equal to the terror. The means to contend with death has become death… They intended nothing, they meant nothing. They only matched the letters‖.94 The cult‘s obsessive use of patterns in The Names, then, is a parody of the human need to categorise and classify, and this need is epitomised by Eric Lighter. DeLillo‘s commentary on human obsession is evident in the above novels, and furthermore in Americana.
Both Eric Lighter and Americana‘s David Bell are obsessive recorders of data. One can compare Eric‘s compulsive need to record the potentially loaded everyday details of his body to David Bell‘s ‗small-town America‘ film in Americana
92 Osteen, p. 80. 93 Osteen, p. 126. 94 DeLillo, The Names, p. 308.
29 where he records everything around him. In ‗The Engineer‘, as James informs Diana, Eric
attempts to describe and examine what‘s happening to him. Now, this moment. And what‘s happening in the past. […] Impressions, outpourings. […] Everything‘s on paper. That‘s the point. Smallest change in body temperature. This is recorded. Detailed analysis of some conversation he overheard on a bus ten years ago. (33–4)
David Bell similarly wants to record the ‗raw‘ minutiae of everyday small-town American life:
What I‘m shooting now is just a small segment of what will eventually include more general matter—funerals, traffic jams, furniture, real events, women, doors, windows. Auto-fiction. Actors, people playing themselves, lines of poetry. When I‘m done I‘d like to put the whole thing in a freezer and then run it uncut thirty years from now.95
Eric, too, comments on the inescapable significance of simple suburbia, where there‘s ―nothing quite so final as small town life in America. You‘re never free of it. As you get older, you see how much it‘s meant to your terrible self-awareness. […] Ordinary days and nights. But a sense, a density, that‘s extreme‖ (35). Both David and Eric see a magnitude in banal details, and both increasingly become obsessed with the ―everydayness of things‖ (35). David‘s film is an anthropological collection of everyday moments that comprise suburban days. Eric‘s recording is just as random and uncensored but the subject is himself, his inner cognitive and corporeal movements.
Furthermore, David is also fixated on simple patterns, and is paranoid that there are codes and answers of which he is unaware. He attempts to control his unpredictable world of finance and business by finding patterns in sofas and doors, phones, numbers and statistics. He takes obsessive notice of the differing colours of his colleagues‘ doors and sofas, as if there were formulae that he could discover if he employed rigorous observation techniques:
At least a dozen times I had… tried to correlate a man‘s standing with the color of his door and sofa. There had to be a key. If only I could find it. What I would do when and if I found it was a question that did not disturb me. I would do something. I would change something. I would have protection. I would know the riddle.96
A short while later, while speaking on the phone to his old friend Wendy, he notices the pattern created by the holes in the mouthpiece:
95 Don DeLillo, Americana (London: Penguin, 1990) p. 289. 96 DeLillo, Americana, p. 89.
30
There were thirty-six small holes in the mouthpiece of my telephone. They were arranged in three circles of six, twelve, and eighteen holes each. There were only six holes in the earpiece. This disparity seemed significant but I didn‘t know exactly why.97
He also memorises numbers: ―‗I have a head for numbers,‘ I said. ‗Numbers fascinate me. Numbers have power. … Everybody is a number.‘‖98 Accordingly, speaking about his youth, he describes the American fascination with statistics:
America, then as later, was a sanitarium for every kind of statistic. We took care of them. We tried to understand them. … Numbers were important because whatever fears we might have had concerning the shattering of our minds were largely dispelled by the satisfaction of knowing precisely how much we were being driven mad… Numbers rendered the present day endurable… I recall how important it was for me, personally, to define a situation, or a period of time, with as many numbers as I could assemble.99
David Bell‘s numbers and patterns, like Billy Twillig‘s, work to soothe his fears of the unknown by providing concrete statistics. Similarly, for Eric in ‗The Engineer‘, counting numbers is ―a recitation, a sacred formula… You see how reassuring‖ (22). The stability and unchanging nature of the numerical world provides an anodyne quality as compared to the fluctuating and often chaotic character of the human world. Both David and Eric revel in their belief that the ordered nature of numbers is a code that, if cracked, would reveal the underlying logical truths of the human world in flux.
The difference between Eric and David, however, is in their attitudes towards numbers. While counting may be reassuring for them both, David uses it to relieve social pressure and weight around him, whereas Eric revels in its potential ability to explain the chaos ‗inside‘. ―David Bell,‖ DeLillo wrote in a letter to Gerald Cloud, ―is a student and a product of the culture around him.‖100 David internalises the patterns that surround him because they contribute to his ontological makeup; he notices his environs and attempts to distil them into patterns and statistics. Eric, however, begins from within his cognitive logic, and employs mathematics to interpret the world. Hence, David‘s locus of control is external, collecting and noticing patterns to calm himself internally. Eric‘s locus of control is internal, using his deep knowledge to try to understand the external
97 DeLillo, Americana, p. 96. 98 DeLillo, Americana, p. 121. 99 DeLillo, Americana, p. 159. 100 Don DeLillo, letter to Gerald Cloud from the University of Delaware, 26 April, 2003, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
31 world. This external locus of control is identified by DeLillo when he says the following to Tom LeClair:
People whose lives are not clearly shaped or marked off may feel a deep need for rules of some kind. People leading lives of almost total freedom and possibility may secretly crave rules and boundaries, some kind of control in their lives.101
Logic is maintained as an insightful tool that can be therapeutic, but these two characters apply it in different ways to similar ends.
Fatalism and conspiracy are methodologies of logic explored in Libra. The idea of a deterministic ‗fatalism‘ concerns the intuitive feeling that events are pre- ordained, whether by a divine being or simply the movements of the world. Engaging with fatalism and conspiracy is another way, like David Bell‘s patterns, to impose control. Shortly after meeting Lee Oswald, David Ferrie tells him that he has ―studied the patterns of coincidence‖.102 Later, David introduces premature thoughts of presidential assassination into Lee‘s mind, turning to patterns as a way of convincing Lee of his being an important cog in the wheel of the future: ―There‘s a pattern in things. Something in us has an effect on independent events. We make things happen.‖103 This active influence by the individual implies a personal control of destiny, however despite this knowledge, David convinces the naïve Lee otherwise. After discovering that Kennedy‘s car will take a convenient route past Lee‘s workplace, David continues the convincing encouragement:
You see what this means. How it shows what you‘ve got to do. We didn‘t arrange your job in that building or set up the motorcade route. We don‘t have that kind of reach or power. There‘s something else that‘s generating this event. A pattern outside experience. Something that jerks you out of the spin of history.104
This implies a lack of determinism in history. In the historiographic metafictional novel Libra, DeLillo presents the possibility that Lee Harvey Oswald was set up by the CIA, thereby reducing Lee‘s responsibility in Kennedy‘s assassination and positioning him to some extent as a bullied victim. It plays on the conspiracy theory that there is more to the story than the findings of the Warren Report—a popular
101 LeClair and McCaffery, p. 81. 102 Don DeLillo, Libra (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 44. 103 DeLillo, Libra, p. 330. 104 DeLillo, Libra, p. 384.
32 suspicion among the majority of the American public since the event itself.105 DeLillo does not condone fatalism and conspiracy, but rather exposes their falsity through David Ferrie‘s cunning plots. David acts as Lee‘s puppeteer, effectively showing the novel‘s ‗fatalism‘ to simply be one man‘s strong encouragement of another‘s actions. The framework of pre-destined actions, then, falls flat.
With conspiracy as an example of logically creating patterns out of chaos, DeLillo said to William Goldstein in 1988, ―[s]ome people prefer to believe in conspiracy because they are made anxious by random acts… [c]onspiracy offers coherence.‖106 Conspiracy theories—such as those surrounding Kennedy‘s assassination—offer persuasive potential patterns in events, which, like pure mathematics for Eric Lighter, act to furnish the chaos of the world with logical interpretations. Conspiracy exploits the ‗underground rules‘ of deceit, motive, agenda and risk to attempt to convince the public that the randomness of certain events is in fact easily explained. The claimed ‗obvious‘ nature of conspiracies is a consequence of paranoid undercurrents, so the conspiracy explanations are conveniently founded upon, and therefore prove, paranoid tendencies of the public towards powerful institutions, governmental or otherwise. Paranoia here stems from the ‗hidden story‘ behind such events, creating an interpretive framework through which any event may be explained. In the case of Libra, pattern functions as an example of fatalism, where the patterns of events and the final outcomes are ‗destined‘ simply because they were minutely planned by outside forces.
In effect, conspiracy theories attempt to explain complex events through logic in a similar way that mathematics, numbers and language interpret characters‘ worlds in DeLillo‘s novels and plays. There is, however, a large difference between fatalism and mathematics: while mathematics uses formulae to produce answers through variables, fatalism does no such thing. The lesson in Libra is the fictional nature of fatalism, as it leaves no room for the individual‘s free will, and so renders
105 Although the Warren Report found Oswald solely guilty of the crime, a 2004 FOXNews poll on the 40th anniversary of the event found the following: ―66 percent of the public today think the assassination was ‗part of a larger conspiracy‘ while only 25 percent think it was the ‗act of one individual‘. These new poll results are similar to previous surveys conducted by Louis Harris and Associates in 1967, 1975 and 1981, when about two-thirds also felt the shooting was part of a larger conspiracy.‖ Dana Blanton, ―Poll: Most Believe ‗Cover-Up‘ of JFK Assassination Facts‖, FOXNews.com, 18 June 2004, 3 October 2010
33 the human passive. The assassination of JFK is the ideal example of an individual acting on his own—if influenced—accord. Decoding patterns and trying to reach truth is therapeutic for the mathematicians and physicians in DeLillo‘s works, and is representative of a greater human need to retain control. Despite the failure of methodologies of logic to reach truth after all, DeLillo‘s inclusion of patterns in his works may be a commentary on human nature and the fear of disorder, or, ultimately, death.
Characters‘ applications of logical methodologies exhibit their fears and agendas. Frameworks like mathematics and language can evaluate events, places and people through their paradigms of knowledge. Three characters fascinated especially by numbers are David Bell in Americana, Eric Packer in Cosmopolis, and Eric Lighter in ‗The Engineer‘. Each has diverse motivations that lead to varying consequences: the first looks outward, while the latter two are inward-looking. Though both David Bell and Eric Packer use logic, the difference between these characters is their inner motivations. As noted earlier, David studies and reproduces his surrounding culture, interested in recording what happens around him and to other people:
―I have a head for numbers,‖ I said. ―Numbers fascinate me. Numbers have power. The whole country runs on numbers. I love to count things. I love to add and subtract. Everybody has numbers. Everybody is a number. Is that so terrible? Maybe it is. I frankly don‘t know.‖107
David‘s concern with numbers is aimed at the external world, while according to DeLillo, Eric Packer ―is driven by inner need. He is not influenced by American culture‖, but is concerned with ―time and money… the physical world, the systems and relationships in physics and related disciplines‖.108 DeLillo has also clearly stated in his personal notes Cosmopolis‘s concern with patterns: ―nature structures itself, and grows, according to the golden ratio and the Fibonacci sequence.‖109
Eric Packer in Cosmopolis, however, displays similarities to Eric Lighter in ‗The Engineer‘, in that both characters are inward-looking-outward, exhibiting obsession in their various ways, by analysing and recording their sets of data. Eric
107 DeLillo, Americana, p. 121. 108 Don DeLillo, letter to Gerald Cloud from the University of Delaware, 26 April, 2003, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. 109 Don DeLillo, Box 9, Folder 7: Cosmopolis—Notes, in notebook, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
34 Packer is the protagonist in a ―novel of self-consciousness‖.110 His and Eric Lighter‘s contexts are also similar in terms of self-contained atmosphere, since Eric Packer‘s limousine effectively separates himself from the outside streets and world—even though he occasionally and temporarily leaves it—and Eric Lighter‘s house on the beach is physically isolated; despite James‘ offstage mingling with women on the beach, onstage action is still confined to the deck and the house. Both texts, then, employ a constricted physical context and, in turn, retain a claustrophobic mood that permeates the action. These obsessions with patterns that DeLillo bestows upon Eric Packer and Eric Lighter are examples of logic being applied to data to interpret meanings from them. Both characters also have trouble sleeping: ―Sleep‖, for Eric Packer, ―failed him more often now, not once or twice a week but four times, five‖;111 Eric Lighter ―counts through much of the night‖ (22). Eric Lighter‘s obsession leads to madness while Eric Packer‘s results in his death, and, no longer being driven by an inner need, ―at the end he becomes a crowd, entering the cyber/pixel world of the future‖.112 Both obsessive characters experience great loss owing to their interests in numbers, indicating that DeLillo is positing that obsession may be the first step to madness.
In addition to events and numbers, language as a methodology of logic is a motif identified in DeLillo‘s novels that is also tied to madness and murder. The premise of the novel The Names rests precisely on linguistic patterns, where a group murder victims according to matching their initials to the initials of towns‘ names in which they live. The simple relationship between letters, places and people is magnified as the scientific methodology of linguistics takes precedence over morality. Similar to Ratner’s Star, in The Names patterns are judged as ideal and indicative of deeper meanings: even before archaeologist Owen Brademas becomes interested in the murderous group of linguists, protagonist and risk analyst James Axton says Owen ―saw patterns there, movements in the flow‖, and that he used to say ―even random things take ideal shapes‖.113 Interpreted through a pattern—in this case linguistic—coincidental matchings of initials and place-names are inserted into a predetermined formula, thus creating a pattern to aid in the reaching of truth.
110 Don DeLillo, Box 9, Folder 8: Cosmopolis—Notes, in notebook‘, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. 111 DeLillo, Cosmopolis, p. 5. 112 Don DeLillo, Box 9, Folder 9: Cosmopolis—Notes, in notebook, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. 113 DeLillo, The Names, p. 18.
35 Like in Libra, where coincidences are given greater weight through determinism and conspiracy, and Ratner’s Star, where the code must be broken through pure mathematics, in The Names, the murders are coded through language. Despite James‘s deciphering of the link between names and places, Owen admits they ―barely consider the victims except as elements in the pattern‖,114 indicating a disregard for the moral implications while privileging the logic of language itself. Pattern overwhelms each of the murderers, who require it to dehumanise their victims. They are obsessed with language as a framework for existence, using it to determine who lives and who dies, exposing obsession as deeply dangerous owing to its overwhelming and absolute nature. The Names, like Cosmopolis and ‗The Engineer‘, contains characters that exemplify the profound link between the cognitive absolute of obsession, its consequential madness in ‗The Engineer‘, and murder in Cosmopolis and The Names.
If methodological frameworks are employed by DeLillo‘s characters to explain events and the mysteries of nature, it can be argued that this need to try to understand deeper meanings behind the chaotic large amounts of unorganised data pervading contemporary life is caused by a compulsion to try to know the mysteries of the world and reveal the ultimate truths at the centre, whatever that may be.115 These truths inevitably remain hidden and unobtainable, though, since large frameworks inevitably miss small details and micronarratives. As DeLillo writes in Running Dog, no truths are reached because of human fallibility:
At the bottom of most long and obsessive searches… was some vital deficiency on the part of the individual in pursuit, a meagreness of spirit… Whether people searched for an object of some kind, or inner occasion, or answer or state of being, it was almost always disappointing. People came up against themselves in the end. Nothing but themselves. Of course there were those who believed the search itself was… the reward.116
Characters in DeLillo‘s novels and playtexts exhibit the drive to uncover the truth and reach intellectual enlightenment in varying ways. To take an overarching view, I summarise them here: Eric Lighter in ‗The Engineer‘ begins as a mathematician understanding the world through axioms, and later believes that his own measurable body elements potentially contain a code. For Billy Twillig in Ratner’s
114 DeLillo, The Names. p. 171. 115 This is especially true of Michael Majeski‘s use of technology in Valparaiso, through which he seeks to recover a sense of identity. I discuss this further in §4. 116 Don DeLillo, Running Dog (London: Vintage, 1989 [1978]), p. 224.
36 Star, it is the code emanating from space that needs to be understood. For David Bell in Americana, the unpredictability of the television industry‘s power plays and his own personal relationships cause him to turn to patterns for answers. Lee Oswald in Libra begins to believe in his central place in the deterministic pattern of events leading to his role in Kennedy‘s assassination, and Owen Brademas‘ obsession with ideal shapes and movements in The Names leads to his joining the murderous linguistic cult. In their quests for some higher plane of knowledge, however, none of these protagonists reach it. Eric Lighter does not reach any new profound understanding about his madness, nor does Billy Twillig solve the code given to him, or Lee Oswald realise his actions are not pre-determined. The methods of inquiry utilised by DeLillo‘s characters are helpful in the gaining of some new knowledge, but ultimate conclusions are never reached because truth is elusive. Hence, noticing patterns—whether in numbers, letters, events or objects— and applying them to interpret the world is not simply a guilty pleasure in which DeLillo‘s intelligent, and sometimes genius, characters indulge. Frameworks of logic and their applications help in gaining some limited new knowledge, but, taken too far, inevitably lead to a spiral of obsession and compulsion.
Regardless of whether the patterns of events, numbers, or other things provide answers through their methodologies of logic, it is their being aware of or constructing these methodologies that DeLillo is promoting as significant. David Bell does not finish his uncut tape of small-town America, and although Billy Twillig breaks the code to which he was assigned, its originating from Earth leads to his needing to ―learn that mathematics cannot explain every secret‖.117 Eric Packer doesn‘t master the predicting of global currency patterns, but instead loses everything, and Eric Lighter never discovers where the key to his madness lies. DeLillo‘s interest in the failed ‗results‘ of his characters‘ observational endeavours is testament to his interest in the human. If, indeed, the key to enlightenment is a mastering of scientific systems, his characters would reach a level of extraordinary awareness, but they do not. They do not find the answers they seek, but along the way they come to realise more about themselves, their lives, and the way in which their worlds work. DeLillo‘s characters never reach the truth they aim for because, essentially, truth remains beyond their grasp.
117 Osteen, p. 80.
37
1.3 The Elusive Nature of Truth Thus far I have argued that mathematics in ‗The Engineer‘ is one of many kinds of codes; others on which DeLillo has written are physical (colour, shape) patterns, coincidences and fate, language, and so forth. The significance is not the existence of these codes, but that DeLillo‘s characters believe that if they notice and put them to use, they can decode the chaos of the world and find the real truth within, despite the futility of this goal. In ‗The Engineer‘ especially, Eric Lighter‘s mathematical vocation sets him on the path of obsession, which brings about an episode of madness, and leads him to focus on himself. He then sets out to record his personal journey through madness, applying his scientific abilities as a methodology by which to study himself as the ultimate subject. Eric Lighter is a mad mathematician, a character that exemplifies both sides of logic and chaos, plays between them, and requires both to reach the enlightenment he is working towards. By using logic, intellectual rigour, confidence and patience, and combining these with emotion, nostalgia, and spirituality, Billy Twillig, Owen Brademas, David Bell, Eric Packer and Eric Lighter expect to be successful in their various activities.
In DeLillo‘s personal notes written in preparation for ‗The Engineer‘, he states that, ―Madness [is] the truth‖,118 so rationality in fact does not hold the key to perfect knowledge. In ‗The Engineer‘, it is not sanity that will lead closer to truth, but its twisted twin—madness. The world of numbers in ‗The Engineer‘ is presented as a path towards the ideal, a tool through which, when combined with the freedom of madness, one may approach a pure, enlightened state that privileges insight over blind ignorance. ‗The Engineer‘, however, deviates from the rationale of logic because DeLillo clearly states in his preparatory notes that truth is located by the insane, not the rational:
Sanity an illusion. Madness the brute release
Sanity a veneer. Madness the truth.119
118 Don DeLillo, Box 22, Folder 2: The Engineer of Moonlight—drafts ―Act 1‖, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. 119 Don DeLillo, Box 22, Folder 2: The Engineer of Moonlight—drafts ―Act 1‖, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
38
This is a far departure from Enlightenment principles in historical epistemology, which align the gaining of knowledge with a sound mind. There, intellect is furthered through rigorous assessment of information using rationality, logic and scientific method. In ‗The Engineer‘, Eric Lighter‘s training in logic, combined with his new cognitive ‗freedom‘ from logic, allows for an opening of a more cognitively creative space.
DeLillo draws links between Eric‘s obsession and the positive qualities of purity and integrity:
Obsession is interesting to writers because it involves a centering and a narrowing down, an intense convergence. An obsessed person is an automatic piece of fiction. He has a purity of movement, an integrity. There is a kind of sheen about him. To a writer, an obsessed person is right there. He is already on the page.120
Obsession and madness in literature connotes a losing of oneself, of one‘s mind and one‘s abilities. More specifically within the realm of theatre, Eric Lighter‘s mad brilliance is also a stark contrast to the privileging of rational truth in theatrical realism, whereby characters with the propensity towards logic and strength of character, and a genuine awareness of their surroundings, are those who may find real truth. Eric Lighter‘s characteristics are directly opposed to the expectations of dramatic realism, where playwrights aim to recreate real life on the stage with the greatest fidelity, and characters have either fundamentally good or bad characteristics, representing good or evil. DeLillo instead gives Eric Lighter both the role of madman and mastermind, and shows that Eric‘s newfound clear- mindedness regarding the ―everydayness of things‖ (35) was incited not by his sanity, but by his brush with madness. It is madness that has set him on his new self-centred project on ―notes on madness‖ (33), so one can assume if he had not been so involved in his field, obsession would not have resulted and madness would not have given him the cognitive freedom to study himself as a subject. Eric‘s madness is categorised and analysed, with James describing how he and Maya ―organize his formulations‖ and ―transcribe his rantings and ravings‖ (37). The mathematician‘s intellectual interest in his own condition permeates the playtext; according to James, Eric uses the word ‗madness‘ ―all the time‖: he ―loves the word‖ as it is ―probably his favorite word‖ (37). This is despite Diana‘s belief that it
120 LeClair and McCaffery, p. 88.
39 is ―medieval, it‘s resonant‖ (37), indicating an inclination towards the realism of contemporary facts rather than emotive connotations.
Eric‘s logical training, coupled with his new interest in his personal thoughts, leads him to gain a higher, big-picture awareness of the more personal aspects of his life. Although he displays strange behaviour like counting aloud at night, and making tangential comments, these oddities are almost always directly linked to his brilliant intellect and mathematical insight. He is not out of touch with his family, since he is able to describe the other characters as ―a family in most of the ways that matter‖, and notice the way ―familiar things deepen our time among them‖, how ―[s]ilence becomes the key to being‖ (40). Diana suggests to James that Eric ―feels obsession cures or cleanses‖, throwing off ―disguise and ambiguity‖ (43), thus Eric believes madness to be an eye-opening and consciousness-raising condition. His illness is a medium by which he may come closer to accessing truth, leaving behind commonplace rationales of thought, and approaching the higher levels of truth and being that he has dedicated his life towards.
In this play, DeLillo subverts the notion that the mad are the furthest from real knowledge, and instead aligns truth with madness, as if sanity were a veil that separates those that can tap into true knowledge. In the final pages of the playtext, Eric exhibits his new understanding through his mad perspective. Eric notices the ―external view‖, where ―[o]bjects have a dense aura‖, where ―[m]atter is consciousness‖ and products sit in ―boxes, cans, bottles, tins‖ (47). He poignantly remembers the ―look and feel of that oilcloth… the long wide bars of Ivory soap… flypaper hanging in the back room‖ (47). Eric, through his brilliant mind, with madness, now sees. As in my previous examples, this theme continues through DeLillo‘s works: the mad, in his novels and plays, are able to transcend the average and the everyday, and progress towards higher planes of epistemology, in some instances even experiencing something close to ideal levels of being. Young Wilder‘s lengthy crying in White Noise, for example, exhibits non-linguistic loss of rational cognition in which a child without language leaves the rational world and instead retreats to an emotional state that is pure feeling. Jack Gladney feels that Wilder entered a spiritual realm:
It was as though he‘d just returned from a period of wandering in some remote and holy place, in sand barrens or snowy ranges—a place where things are said, sights are seen,
40 distances reached which we in our ordinary toil can only regard with the mingled reverence and wonder we hold in reserve for feats of the most sublime and difficult dimensions.121
While Wilder could have been simply described as a crying child, DeLillo takes it further—in parody, it seems—by endowing the toddler with metaphysical qualities, infusing the entirely everyday situation with transcendence into another state of mind. Wilder seems as if he had embarked on a divine journey, and returned different in some way, with an inner sense of peace that calmed his marathon crying, indicating that his journey through an emotionally chaotic inner space has led to his emerging with newfound knowledge.
Moreover, in ‗The Engineer‘, Eric feels his mental breakdown has opened another world to him, in which his body and its collected data contains within it elemental secrets that will later become clear. He has emerged from a journey of self-discovery and exploration with a progressive set of life insights, which James shares particularly overtly at the end of the play when he reads aloud Eric‘s notes. James‘s recordings of his ravings show the way in which Eric has emerged from behind the ―veneer‖ and is approaching an enlightened mind space:
Notes on memory. How we step outside the action. External views. […] Notes on objects. […] The external view. (47)
Eric speaks like a guru, a teacher who possesses greater knowledge of the ―external view‖, as opposed to the general public who are ―not prepared to see this‖ (47). He exhibits the macrocosmic characteristics of inclusivity and universality. One could consider this to be the speech of a mastermind who has emerged from the depths of mental darkness and into an omniscient state of being, becoming aware now of the universal links between people, memory, objects and consciousness. This reading would fail to note one important thing, though: Eric seems unaware of smaller details—the strangeness of his actions, for instance. Despite reaching new grand ideas concerning objects and memory, Eric still cannot operate day-to-day without help, so his new insights lack the holism necessary for true enlightenment which takes into consideration both small, everyday life actions, and large metaphysical notions. Eric‘s new awareness is not complete, and we must remember that DeLillo concludes the play before Eric produces any omniscient truth, as the final scene ends with James waiting for Eric to speak.
121 DeLillo, White Noise, p. 79.
41
While at the start of the playtext the reader‘s first encounter with Eric was Diana and James‘s descriptions of Eric‘s counting through the night, ―[s]eventy- one, seventy-two, seventy-three. Very slowly‖ (22), the final closing pages depict Eric‘s depth of awareness of material ontology and consciousness. Though little temporal time has passed, the difference between the beginning and end of the playtext is symbolic of a genius mind passing through mental chaos in order to emerge with a developing sense of enlightenment regarding the world and his place in it. Rather than being obsessed with the language of pure mathematics, Eric has now widened his sights to his surrounding environment, interpreting the external world as loaded with consciousness:
James: Notes on memory as a form of madness. All longing is pathological. Notes on insanity in things. The rooms stand empty. It‘s late afternoon. We‘re in the mind. I want to say limits dissolve. That‘s what no one understands. Matter is consciousness. They‘re not prepared to see this. How it can be everywhere. In the photographs in the hall. In the closets in the rooms upstairs. In the suits and dresses. In the pockets. Inside the shoes. In the dust in the air. Under the sheets. Between the knees. Along the thighs. In the openings and closings. Boundaries become part of the things they divided. Boundaries become part of the things they divided. (47)
This starts to bring the play to a close on one of Eric‘s personal discoveries: the connection between matter and consciousness, and the infusion of memory in material objects. His acknowledgment of its being something that ―no one understands‖ indicates his new position outside the everyday scope of knowledge, as a mad ―visionary‖. Eric‘s madness is the catalyst for this new insight, which would not have occurred if he had not experienced a mental breakdown and subsequent ‗opening‘ of his mind. Owing to his madness, he has been able to ‗play‘ with inner thoughts previously gone unprivileged. These recordings of his ideas on madness are evidence of the epistemological successes that stemmed from his mental illness.
Only the mad may have access, behind the ―veneer‖ and ―illusion‖, to the ―brute release‖ of truth.122 Eric possesses the ability to examine himself, because like all madmen, he ―keeps going in‖ (43). According to DeLillo‘s notes, the big- picture truth is reached from the inside, from within and through insanity:
122 Don DeLillo, Box 22, Folder 2: The Engineer of Moonlight—drafts ―Act 1‖‘, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
42
self-awareness is a disease/dilemma leads to madness impossible to step out of oneself he is obsessed by his own madness obsession cures123
The key to understanding this playtext are these draft notes, where the writer exposes the underlying motivations, catalysts and outcomes of his protagonist‘s madness. Obsession, we can see, does not lead to paralytic madness in this text. Eric‘s obsession with his mind does not show its deterioration; it continues despite his mental illness. By compulsively recording the ramblings of his mind, he is able to work through it and emerge with a deeper awareness than previously held. In effect, he acts as a student of himself, his own scientific observer, and graduates to a master of macro-philosophical concepts.
We may, however, interpret Eric differently. Rather than his being an enlightened visionary, it may seem just as likely that DeLillo‘s protagonist is raving mad, a lunatic with illusions of grandiosity, paranoia, and sleep disorders. Under this interpretation, Eric‘s obsession with numbers really does cause mental chaos, and has resulted in his disconnection with reality. Scientific method, when applied comprehensively, accurately, and with the appropriate boundaries, does lead to new discoveries and understandings, but Eric‘s hyperbolic fixation with pure mathematics has led to his demise rather than his success. The man is, simply put, a broken genius incapable of clear-headedness, let alone philosophical insight. Nevertheless, this reading does not account for Eric‘s wise comments, and is simply not DeLillo‘s intention, as his personal notes demonstrate. DeLillo, in his claim that ―[s]anity a veneer. Madness the truth‖,124 indicates sympathy—parodic or otherwise—towards the idea of the mad sage. He is categorically denying the one- sided, epistemically rational framework within which sanity is the criterion for truth, and instead opening up the binaries of sanity/madness and illusion/truth to allow for ambiguity, and to promote illusion within sanity and truth through madness. Since this playtext has never been performed, nor has DeLillo spoken widely about its themes, it is owing only to his notes and drafts that we are able to clearly distinguish where DeLillo‘s considerations lie. In ‗The Engineer‘, a playtext
123 Don DeLillo, Box 22, Folder 2: The Engineer of Moonlight —drafts ―Act 1‖, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. 124 Don DeLillo, Box 22, Folder 2: The Engineer of Moonlight —drafts ―Act 1‖, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
43 so loaded with a multitude of binaries and spaces between, the traditional good/bad judgments on sanity/madness and logic/chaos are consciously imploded through the representation of a brilliant mathematician who makes greater philosophical discoveries about himself through his mad notes than his carefully applied axioms.
1.4 Conclusion The ending of ‗The Engineer‘ is a folding back into Eric‘s journey of self-discovery. James resumes his note-taking and recording of Eric‘s monologues, and the play feels as if it begins again. DeLillo employs this circular narrative structure in many other of his works. LeClair contends that a structural ‗doubling-back‘ can make the reader self-conscious, and more likely to see through his/her previous assumptions:
DeLillo consistently creates polarized structures—of genre, situation, character, language, tone—that double the novel back upon itself, questioning its generic codes, its beginnings and development, its creator‘s position toward it, his relation with the reader, who becomes self-conscious, reflective about both his reading and himself, a möbius-stripping away of assumptions about the forms that DeLillo uses, the charged subjects he encircles with his reversals, and the act of reading from beginning to end.125
The ending of Ratner’s Star also folds over to the beginning, as DeLillo describes in an interview with Tom LeClair: ―Discrete [versus] continuous. Day, night. Left brain, right brain. But they also link together. The second part bends back to the first.‖126 Osteen likens Ratner’s Star to a self-reflective mirror: ―Itself structured as a mirror or boomerang, the novel depicts a looking-glass world that humans constantly mistake for a window‖.127 Osteen may be indicating that by making an entire revolution through a narrative, the reader and spectator is armed with the information that will allow a more thorough and reflective review of the entire work. By the end, of ‗The Engineer‘, though, it can seem as though Eric Lighter has made no progress in understanding himself further, and indeed, he hasn‘t. As Dewey notes, the play ―argues, ultimately, the unworkability of systems that aim to create order amid the chaotic wonder of a grief-world that stubbornly refuses to concede itself to tidiness‖.128 Despite Eric‘s rigorous applications of logic through pure mathematics and play, as well as his meticulous recording of his thoughts,
125 LeClair, In The Loop, p. x. 126 LeClair, ―An Interview with Don DeLillo‖, Conversations with Don DeLillo, p. 12. 127 Osteen, pp. 62–3. 128 Dewey, p. 66.
44 body temperature, and so forth, the inner workings of his mind continue to be a deep mystery.
45 CHAPTER 2 Playing with Metatheatre in The Day Room (1987)
Don DeLillo‘s second play, The Day Room, was first performed in 1986 and published as a playtext in 1987.129 This chapter will explore how identity and death are presented in the play, particularly on metatheatricality, in direct contrast to theatrical realism. Structurally, this chapter will be divided in two: in §2.1 I will explore the genre of metatheatre, its techniques, and examples of it in the work of Aristophanes and Pirandello. I will examine the dismantling of the ‗fourth wall‘ in Aristophanes, and role-playing in Pirandello‘s Six Characters in Search of an Author.130 These findings will then inform my analysis of the ways in which DeLillo uses similar techniques as these playwrights in The Day Room. I follow this in §2.2 by evaluating the human fear of death, the connection between death and acting, and the way acting can seem to be a temporary evasion of mortality.
To locate this text within the tradition of metatheatre, we must first analyse DeLillo‘s motivations, and then the techniques by which he arrives at his goals. DeLillo‘s impetus to write The Day Room can be gauged from an interview with Dominic Maxwell, where the writer considers the seed of the idea for the play:
‗I‘m not sure how it all began,‘ he says in a gentle New York cadence, ‗except that it was roughly 20 years ago when I had an idea that seemed to demand a limited space. This was a play called The Day Room. What I saw was characters in an artificial setting, a hospital that is not necessarily a hospital: it wasn‘t the kind of reality a novelist imagined. And I knew at once that this could not be anything but a play. And of course it‘s happened only several times in my life as a writer. But in each case there seemed to be no doubt that I was headed toward the stage rather than toward the printed page.‘131
Despite the earlier publication of ‗The Engineer of Moonlight‘, New Yorker reviewer Mimi Kramer incorrectly noted The Day Room as the ―first play by the novelist Don DeLillo‖, setting it up as DeLillo‘s theatrical debut.132 The performance history is peppered with interesting events. In 1987 it was rejected from performance at The
129 First published in American Theatre in 1986, then by Alfred A. Knopf Inc. in 1987. 130 Of course, the concept of the ‗fourth wall‘ was not part of ancient Greek theatre and only became dominant during realism and naturalism from the late-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. However, it is still the dominant convention in mainstream theatre and film. 131 Dominic Maxwell, ―Novelist Don DeLillo Stumbled Into Writing for the Stage.‖ The Times 24 April 2006, 2 May 2008
46 Lamb‘s Theatre on West 44th St., owned by the Manhattan Church of the Nazarene. Reverend Orville Jenkins objected to the inclusion of an anatomical word, ‗nipple‘:
The latest rejection by the Reverend Jenkins is a new play called The Day Room by the splendid novelist Don (White Noise) DeLillo. The Day Room could not be produced at the Lamb‘s, according to co-producer Jim Freydberg, because a male character, daydreaming aloud about a woman he covets, says the word nipple.
―The Lamb‘s not on the liberal wing,‖ explains Carolyn Ross Copeland, who runs the Lamb‘s Theater Company for the church. ―I don‘t want to be a censor,‖ Copeland says, ―but people like to come and see Snoopy.‖133
Moving from the risqué to the accident-prone, Susan Nussbaum, performing from a wheelchair in 1986, fell off the stage and broke a leg during a Sunday preview.134 An April 1986 performance in Boston was similarly cursed: reviewer Carolyn Clay described it as ―a performance the end of which a smoke alarm went off repeatedly, dovetailing so perfectly with the panic and cacophony conjured by DeLillo that no one knew whether the noise was planned or a spontaneous warning of imminent combustion‖.135
The action of the play is complicated by characters‘ identity confusion. Although the twists and turns somewhat prevent a well-formed outline, this is a direct consequence of the play‘s unsettling quality and its very attempt to disrupt the linearity of realism. In Act 1, hospital patients Budge, Wyatt and Grass are cared for by Nurse Walker, Nurse Baker, Dr Phelps, Dr Bazelon and the orderlies, except they are each picked off in turn and returned to the upstairs Arno Klein Wing, a day room for the mentally ill. Grass is first escorted out by Dr Phelps (16), then Dr Bazelon is escorted out by Nurse Baker (41), followed by Wyatt‘s being escorted out by an orderly (47), and Nurse Baker‘s escorting out by the orderlies (53). In Act 2, set in the Arno Klein Wing, the mystery deepens, as the desk clerk and maid metatheatrically contemplate their roles (―I‘m the desk clerk, you‘re the maid‖ (62)), but then there is a sudden shift to a motel room. According to the stage directions, the actor cast as Wyatt in Act One functions as the TV set, wearing a
133 ―Theater of the Absurdly Prudish‖, Spy (May 1987), p. 14, in Box 18, Folder 7: The Day Room— Manhattan Theatre Club, Winter 1987, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. 134 Box 18, Folder 8: The Day Room—Remains Theatre, Chicago, May 1993, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. 135 Carolyn Clay, ―White Noises Off: All DeLillo‘s World‘s a Stage‖, The Boston Phoenix (Section 3, 22 April 1986), pp. 11–13, in Box 19, Folder 4: The Day Room—Reviews‘, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
47 straitjacket, and sitting in a ―wheeled swivel chair‖ (58–9). A group of people are sitting around—apparently a keen theatre audience waiting to see a spontaneous performance by the Arno Klein theatre group—in the Arno Klein Wing of the hospital in Act 1. Characters click the remote control towards the TV and the personified television begins to speak commercials and programmes. The desk clerk and maid appear again, Arno Klein wanders in with a suitcase, seemingly settling down in his own hospital wing for the night, and the play ends. No conclusive end is given, no satisfactory answers are provided.
The Day Room is not a code-breaking exercise, but a play about play, a theatrical piece encouraging an investigation on the adoptions of roles, the fear and inevitability of death, the assumptions of truth, and the relinquishing of rules regarding identity. Regarding characters‘ identities, the rules of the ‗reality game‘ have been overturned. Mimi Kramer brings some questions to attention in her review:
[A]s characters in the second half wander into the motel room babbling about the elusive theatrical troupe it becomes less and less clear who the real audience is. Are these actors or madmen, we wonder. Are they performing for us? For each other? For themselves?136
The spectators may begin asking themselves, ‗Who is mad, who is sane, and who possesses power in the hospital?‘ Even the seemingly lucid and sage Nurse Baker is dragged out by the orderlies. Nothing in this play is as it seems. Douglas Keesey locates the play ―in the metatheatrical tradition of Luigi Pirandello (Six Characters in Search of an Author), Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead), and, especially, Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot)‖, indicating possible influences on the writer.137 Kramer also notes its similarities to Stoppard‘s play, though as a source of disappointment:
Long stretches of it sound as though they were written by a precious high-school student who had recently read ―Rosencrantz and Guilderstern Are Dead‖ for the first time—a play that ―The Day Room resembles in many ways.138
According to Kramer, DeLillo does not ―seem to be aware of the whole history of absurdist drama‖.139 By opening the stage and its characters for scrutiny through
136 Kramer, p. 74. 137 Keesey, p. 11. 138 Kramer, p. 74. 139 Kramer, p. 74.
48 self-reflexive metatheatre, DeLillo exposes the artificiality of acting and the relativity of truth in very similar ways to Pirandello‘s Six Characters in Search of an Author. The first section of this chapter will specifically look at the characteristics of metatheatre in Six Characters and a variety of other plays. I will then compare these to DeLillo‘s metatheatrical techniques in order to fulfil his goal, which, according to his personal notes, is to achieve transparency, to ―look through one play into the other‖,140 and to expose acting as ―espionage‖, where actors ―disguise, cover, steal lives—blend in‖.141 Transparency, however, does not necessarily provide answers as to actors‘ identities, since this play muddles expectations: when asked who he is, the character Freddie answers, ―Just Freddie, I guess, for now‖ (70), exhibiting the mutable, transient quality of identity. Transparency, rather than aiming for complete answers, instead gives the audience the opportunity for consideration and thought regarding role-playing. It places the onus on them to undertake a journey of discovery regarding the characters and, subsequently, themselves.
2.1. Metatheatre and its Effects The metatheatrical framework of The Day Room has various effects, three of which I will explore here. First, the antirealist disruption of spectators‘ expectations supports the phenomenological idea that one cannot trust one‘s senses when trying to arrive at truth. Second, this scepticism, coupled with the destabilising and reassigning of different roles to the actors and characters through non-traditional anti-realist action potentially results in a postmodern paranoia. And third, the consequence of the destabilising of truth and instilling of paranoia then gives DeLillo the freedom to explore acting as a metaphorical defiance of death.
DeLillo’s Place in the Metatheatrical Tradition The Day Room espouses the tenets of anti-realism through metatheatrical techniques. The metatheatrical tradition lends itself to the themes of identity, role- playing and truth in The Day Room, as it is an inherently destabilising genre that exposes the paradoxical ‗false truth‘ of acting on the stage. Theatrical realism supports the phenomenological privileging of the senses as a means to
140 Box 15, Folder 1: The Day Room—Handwritten notes in spiral notebook, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. 141 Box 15, Folder 3: The Day Room—Handwritten notes in notebook, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
49 understanding the world. In realism, what the audience is shown and told is indicative of what is true. Antirealism, however, disrupts the seemingly natural order of sense and truth, as what we hear the characters say may be lies, and what they do upon the stage may not be possible in or representative of reality. The Day Room opens in what seems to be a hospital room surreptitiously occupied by mad imposters. Toby Silverman Zinman brings to light the stage as metatheatrical in itself:
The theatre as day room is an idea echoed in the physical fact of stage as transformable room, an arena which has perimeter but no parameter; this is an idea which is essentially theatrical rather than novelistic: on stage, everything happens somewhere.142
By setting the play in a hyperfamiliar space as a hospital room, DeLillo has the opportunity to subvert the knowledge regarding patients and hospital staff that spectators take for granted. However, Kramer explains that the spatial context of the hospital and motel rooms is not where the play‘s main sense of place is located:
Its spiritual setting is neither the hospital room where the first act takes place nor the motel room where we find ourselves in Act II but another place entirely—a mental ward that may or may not exist somewhere offstage—and its spiritual hub is Arno Klein, a character we may or may not ever see.143
Despite what may seem like DeLillo‘s disruption of the realist tradition—what Jason S. Polley describes as a ―dismantling of dramatic convention‖144—I argue that dramatic antirealism is a convention in itself, for purposes we shall see later in this chapter. Rather than dismantling conventions, it is more accurate to say he is dismantling spectators‘ expectations by exercising contrary conventions.
Metatheatre, though seemingly contemporary because of its dislocating and deconstructive postmodern concerns, is not a new mode of theatre. It dates at least as far back as the work of the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes and continues through to Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello and Irish playwright Samuel Beckett. Theatrical realism, exemplified by naturalism from the late-nineteenth century onwards, bounds plays within the realms of possible truths and situations with verisimilitude. Audience interpretation is key, so ―the actor merely needs to learn the lines, understand the given circumstances… and respond‖, and it is ―the
142 Zinman, p. 81. 143 Kramer, p. 74. 144 Polley, p. 181.
50 audience, not the actor, who will then construct notions of who the character is, based on what they observe and how they understand it‖.145 According to theatre theorist Nick Moseley, the realist tradition therefore gives us ―an impression of the individual as a coherent and independent whole, whose existence transcends the social environment in which he finds himself‖.146 David Mamet also highlights the ―illusion of a character upon a stage‖,147 opening up theatre to the antirealism possibility of metatheatre, whereby the theatricality of the stage is acknowledged, and the aim to replicate real life becomes null as the play‘s fictional world is exposed so the definite status of truth is questioned. The consequences of suspicion and distrust are perfectly suited to DeLillo‘s interests in the themes of identity and truth, and so antirealist metatheatre founds the action in The Day Room.
Metatheatricality—and, in particular, actors directly addressing the audience—is evident within the work of Aristophanes, as far back as the fourth century BCE. His satirical play The Wasps, produced at the Lenaia festival in 422 BCE, is a comedy based on the ‗waspish‘ elderly jurors in the law courts. Near the beginning, two slaves called Xanthius and Sosias directly address the spectators, daring them to guess the ailment from which their master is suffering. As a theatrical technique, acknowledging the spectators‘ existence immediately reminds them of the fictional nature of the play, eliminating any possibility of realism in the world of the stage. Though the fourth wall is left intact in The Day Room, metatheatricality occurs through other techniques such as the characters‘ self- reflexivity. For example, the artificiality of the play is directly acknowledged, where, at times, the characters satirise the conventions of the realist play by pre- empting physical movements, as if to cue others‘ actions. The patient Grass, here, cues Nurse Walker‘s entrance:
Wyatt: Then what? Grass: The nurse walks in the door. Nurse Walker enters. (13)
Later, Nurse Baker cues her own forcible removal from the scene:
Grass: I believe we‘ve reached the limit. Nurse Baker: We‘re taking you down now.
145 Nick Moseley, Acting and Reacting (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 7. 146 Moseley, p. 9. 147 David Mamet, True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), p. 9.
51 The two masked orderlies enter, slip in behind Nurse Baker, seize her arms. She struggles briefly, then goes limp. The orderlies drag her out. (53)
The characters‘ self-reflexive special knowledge reminds the spectators that they are watching a constructed play. They comically engage with the audience‘s intrinsic knowledge that the play is a false representation of reality. These verbal cues indicate conscious contempt towards the traditional tenets of realism, sending up the very notion of verisimilitude by exposing the falsity of theatre. DeLillo‘s employment of metatheatricality thus purposely disrupts the expectation of realism that still dominates mainstream theatre.
Role-playing is a motif that motivates this play‘s concerns with personal identity: Luigi Pirandello‘s Six Characters in Search of an Author is probably one of the most well-known examples of metatheatricality. In Judith Laurence Pastore‘s engaging article ‗Pirandello‘s Influence on American Writers: Don DeLillo‘s The Day Room‘, she recognises the connection between this play and Pirandello‘s. She flags the
similarity of its themes to the philosophical issues which preoccupy Pirandello: the existential nature of modern existence; the tenuousness of personal identity; the deceptions of role-playing; the illusory nature of time, space, and memory; and the open-endedness of what we perceive as reality and our ongoing desire for closure.148
In preparation for writing her article, Pastore wrote a letter to Robert Brustein, a Pirandello expert and the director of the American Repertory Theatre. He replied with the following insight:
You are quite right in detecting a similarity between Pirandello and DeLillo‘s THE DAY ROOM. I don‘t know if he had SIX CHARACTERS in mind when he wrote that play, but he certainly was writing under the influence of Pirandello, particularly in the way the characters move in and out of their identities and roles. When I asked him about this myself, he did confess that Pirandello was his theatrical guide—but not limited to Pirandello. So, in brief, you are quite right in your conjecture and a thematic relationship does exist between Pirandello and DeLillo.149
Consequently, I assume that, in the writing of The Day Room, DeLillo was in fact influenced by Pirandello‘s concerns with roles and identities. Despite Brustein‘s elucidations, DeLillo has officially named few, if any, theatrical influences,
148 Pastore, p. 431. 149 Don DeLillo, letter dated February 9, 1989, Box 15, Folder 3: The Day Room: Handwritten notes in notebook, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Capitals in original.
52 although he mentions theatre‘s presence in his childhood: ―Being a New Yorker, I always, even as a kid, was aware of theatre, but I never really became fervent about theatre the way I did about movies. And that, in fact, is still true.‖150
Pirandello‘s confession as to why he was inclined to write Six Characters is a moving description of the personal relationship between the playwright and his characters:
These creatures of my brain were not living my life any longer: they were already living a life of their own, and it was now beyond my power to deny them a life which was no longer in my control. […] And, lo, those six characters who had of their own initiative stepped up on the stage, suddenly find in themselves that sense of universal significance which I had at first sought in vain […] Every creature born of the imagination, every being art creates, must have his own play, that is to say, a play of which he is the hero and for which he is the dominating character.151
The characters‘ requiring a masterful author to tell their story confirms his anti- realist tendencies. The falsehood of theatre itself is exposed by privileging the characters‘ knowledge of themselves as characters. For Pirandello, ―[i]t is not the drama that makes the characters, but the characters who make the drama‖,152 so rather than the author carrying his characters through a story, the characters seemingly weave their own stories according to their own desires and motivations. DeLillo‘s characters—Nurse Walker, for instance—who question their places within the play and indirectly rebel against the roles assigned to them, are a nod towards the Pirandellian foregrounding of characters‘ wills, and the power they have with respect to narrative construction and story verisimilitude. In essence, both The Day Room and Six Characters not only necessarily rely on their characters for plot and action, but they express their awareness of this reliance, and this is what most distinguishes them from the realm of theatrical realism. Both authors have consciously made it seem as if they have handed over control to their characters, to do with it what they will, and consequently their characters seem to assert their freedom to question the truth of their identities and of the story.
The characters in Six Characters In Search of an Author enter the stage during the actors‘ rehearsals because they feel compelled to present a different play that
150 McAuliffe, p. 610. 151 Luigi Pirandello, ―Pirandello Confesses…‖, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 1925, 18 Feb. 2010 < http://www.vqronline.org/articles/1925/spring/pirandello-confesses/>. 152 ―L‘azione parlata‖, Marzocco (7 May 1899), Spsv 1016. Quoted in Ann Hallamore Caesar, Characters and Authors in Luigi Pirandello (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 13.
53 they argue must be performed. The play is so metatheatrical, in fact, that it is difficult to describe it without tying oneself up in knots. It involves a troupe of actors practicing a play, only to be interrupted by a family of ‗characters‘ wanting the actors to act out their story. The constructed nature of theatre is exposed in the face of the expectation of realism: Pirandello presents actors playing actors, as well as actors playing characters, and later characters playing actors. Not only does Pirandello send up the falsity of theatre for the audience, but in the process—and perhaps because of it—he gives all of his characters a deep sense of self-reflexivity. After the characters wander on stage during the actors‘ rehearsal, the Father pleads to be represented in the play: ―The drama is in us, and we are the drama. We are impatient to play it. Our inner passion drives us on to this.‖153
This self-reflexivity can be compared to The Day Room, where, in the second act, two characters pointedly remind themselves of their roles as characters in the play:
Maid: Do we have names in this? Desk clerk: No. Maid: What are we? Desk clerk: I‘m the desk clerk, you‘re the maid. (61–2)
It is the characters‘ and actors‘ self-awareness of their roles, and their discussion of them, that aligns DeLillo so acutely with Pirandello. And in turn, this is what differentiates this particular play from others by DeLillo. In The Day Room, the characters‘ knowledge of their roles as characters is evident, whereas it is nowhere else present in other writing by DeLillo, fictional or theatrical.
Staging a metatheatrical play was a risky exercise for Pirandello in 1920s Italy. The unorthodox nature of the play on its opening night in Rome was met with violent hostility, showing the audience‘s disdain for anti-realism, and the playwright was forced to quickly escape the bourgeois audience‘s taunts and jeers by fleeing the theatre.154 Interestingly, in direct contrast, Ann Hallamore Caesar writes that in December 1927 when ―peasants‖ attended a performance of Sei personaggi, they
153 Eric Bentley, ed., Naked Masks: Five Plays by Luigi Pirandello (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1952), pp. 128–9. 154 Caesar, p. 36.
54 stayed put in their seats, silent and still, at the end of the performance and when eventually the actors returned to the stage as ‗themselves‘ to tell the audience that it was all over and they could go home, this too was taken to be part of the performance and nobody stirred. It was only very, very gradually, when they realized that nothing further was going to happen, that silently and cautiously they left the theatre.155
Caesar follows this description by saying that the event was an illustration of how the defiance of convention is only successful when the spectators have understood and agreed to the rules in the first place, something of which the peasants were unaware. The peasants‘ unfamiliarity with the conventions of theatre, or the ways in which conventions may be subverted, led to actual—as opposed to intellectual— confusion as to what was real and what was not. While Caesar‘s point is valid, it is also complicated by a very similar and more recent event that happened in Western Australia, during a performance of Six Characters as part of the 2010 Perth International Arts Festival. The evening‘s 600-strong audience—composed mainly of middle- and upper-class adults and school-children—took their seats and awaited the show, only to be told the night‘s performance was cancelled due to technical problems. The reactions were surprising:
―Everyone was stunned,‖ an audience member told PerthNow. ―Until then, we were pretty unsure about what was going on. There was a TV set and a computer and the cast members were standing round on stage and the lighting was dim, but until the production person came out and made the announcement we thought it was all part of the show.‖156
Hence, it seems likely that not only does knowing the rules of realism allow for effective anti-realism, but knowing the rules of anti-realism also may encourage an expectation of it. No doubt the contemporary bourgeois audience expected a metatheatrical play, and their expectations led them to continue to believe that the apparent ‗technical difficulty‘ was part of the performance. To some extent, modern anti-realism folds back on itself, so contemporary audiences familiar with Pirandello will expect a ‗realistic anti-realistic‘ play where they are along for the ride of trickery and confusion, but still the play-versus-reality distinction exists.
Both Pirandello‘s and DeLillo‘s characters express bewilderment at their loosening grasp on their surroundings and themselves. Pirandello‘s six characters are baffled by the actors‘ remarking at their lack of fixed character; they believe
155 Caesar, p. 183. 156 Lisa Quartermain and Maria Noakes, ―Festival 10 theatre-goers turned away as problems plague headline show‖, PerthNow, 9 February 2010, 12 February 2010
55 themselves to be as real as the Actors who share the stage, and show confusion at their apparent lack of a coherent identity. Similarly in The Day Room, Budge seems to have a grasp on the goings-on in the hospital, but Wyatt grows more and more confused:
Budge: I don‘t know anything you don‘t know. Wyatt: If everything has been set up, all my life, and if it‘s been running smoothly until today, when a defect suddenly appeared, then who are you, Mr. Budge, and what are you doing here? Budge: All I‘m doing is raising possibilities. Admittedly not very logical ones. But we‘re talking, we‘re interacting. I‘m surprised and delighted by our progress. Wyatt: Progress toward what? Budge: Undisguised talk. Transparency. The language of friends. Wyatt: I‘m hungry. (45)
DeLillo‘s characters, though, only question the details and logic of their ambiguous situations to a certain point, and then the struggle is abandoned and they are content to move on, or they go limp and are dragged off. Their noncommittal attitudes indicate a non-interest in explanation, and a willingness to allow themselves to be carried through the twists and turns of the plot. Whereas characters in realistic plots invariably go on to active searches for reasons and motivations, DeLillo‘s hospital patients feel no such compulsion, but rather occupy themselves with banter as they await their fate.
Beckett‘s Waiting for Godot has similarities to The Day Room, whereby Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot like Gary and Lynette wait for the Arno Klein theatre group. Lois Gordon interprets the waiting as the purpose in life:
Godot, then, is that someone or something that would obviate the need for the games that tentatively provide a purpose in life. Waiting is the human condition in which one constructs games or a lifestyle that mask the unknowable.157
The following exchange between Vladimir and Estragon can be compared to the exchange that opens The Day Room between Budge and Wyatt:
Vladimir: Charming evening we‘re having. Estragon: Unforgettable. Vladimir: And it‘s not over. Estragon: Apparently not. Vladimir: It‘s only beginning. Estragon: It‘s awful. Vladimir: Worse than the pantomime. Estragon: The circus. Vladimir: The music-hall.
157 Lois Gordon, Reading Godot (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 60.
56 Estragon: The circus.158
Budge: In other words you‘re not a talker. Wyatt: I don‘t have the knack. It‘s a gift. Some people have it. Budge: But aren‘t we here, in a sense, to talk? […] Wyatt: I‘m here for tests. Budge: But in the meantime […] (5–6)
Beckett‘s characters make self-reflexive comments on the antics with which they amuse themselves while they wait for Godot, while DeLillo‘s characters pass the time chatting about the need to talk. As Rónán McDonald writes, Vladimir and Estragon‘s exchange ―brings the performance on stage, with its inherent pretence, into alignment with… the world off-stage‖.159 Beckett does not use the stage to reproduce reality via naturalism, but instead highlights the ―performative, theatrical and repetitive aspects of what we call reality‖.160 We can further note the similarity of these metatheatrical moments in The Day Room when Dr Phelps and Nurse Walker exchange short lines, and Budge interrupts with the pointed, ―The interplay is delightful‖ (22).
Spectators’ Distrust of ‘Truth’ Identity and its concealment is brought to the fore through metatheatrical techniques, as spectators are presented with characters—perhaps patients, perhaps actors—in a hospital setting, then other characters—perhaps tenants, perhaps actors—in a motel room. The task given to the spectators initially seems like a disentangling of identities, whereby characters‘ confusing role-reversals requires taking up the challenge of exposing the imposters, and subsequently discovering the ‗real story‘ behind the façade of roles. As I show in this chapter, however, it is a quest for closure that is doomed to fail, since the elusiveness of personal identity is such that conclusive truth is impossible. Such a call to intellectual duty is purposeful: DeLillo‘s handwritten notes in preparation for the writing of The Day Room show his interest for the topics of concealment and identity, and the questions they prompt:
secret levels, deeper levels -of language -of perception
158 Beckett, Waiting for Godot, pp. 34–5. 159 Rónán McDonald, The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Beckett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 35. 160 McDonald, p. 35.
57 -of identity
How far down can we go? How many people are we? How well can we hide?161
Through his notes, we are able to gather the concerns of ―performance + concealment‖ that DeLillo had when sketching out the main ideas for his play.162 The questions asked in his preliminary notes could be the ones he aims for his spectators to ponder. Whether the characters Budge, Wyatt, Grass, Nurse Walker, Dr Bazelon, and so forth, are in fact hospital patients and staff, or actors in an acting troupe, is not the main point of the play; the puzzle lies not in who is who in the play, but in knowing the truth of personal identity itself, and whether it is achievable.
Self-deception and concealment are two ways in which the search for truth is hindered. DeLillo‘s concern with ―How well can we hide?‖ comes across in his assigning his characters to specific social roles, which give rise to opportunities for concealment and deceit. It is founded in a fear of self-deception, originating in the classic split personality in Robert Louis Stevenson‘s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Dr Jekyll realises the multiplicity of the human character:
…when I reached years of reflection, and began to look round me and take stock of my progress and position in the world, I stood already committed to a profound duplicity of me. … man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point… I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens.163
DeLillo takes this classic humanist idea further by pursuing a special interest in roles which grant an ‗ownership‘ of facts. In particular, he privileges uniformed medical personnel like nurses and doctors who are empowered by the highly specialised medical knowledge they possess and their revered social status. Stage props like stethoscopes and intravenous drips have been used in productions of The Day Room to give a medical tone of authority. In the first act, Grass and Wyatt share this exchange regarding blood:
161 Box 16, Folder 5: The Day Room—Handwritten notes in spiral notebook, ―Sundance, July 83‖, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. 162 Box 16, Folder 5: The Day Room—Handwritten notes in spiral notebook, ―Sundance, July 83‖, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. 163 Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Stories (Köln: Könemann, 1995 [1886]), p. 61.
58 Grass (to Wyatt): What color is your blood? Wyatt: Red. Grass: Red. Me too. Acrylic or polyester? Wyatt: It‘s mine, it‘s human. Grass: I‘ve invested heavily in blood futures. I have a direct line to the trading floor for polyester blood. (13)
The photograph in Figure 1 below shows the stark colours, red (on the left) and blue (on the right), in the prop drips from a Garage Theatre production:
Figure 1: Grass‘s ―metal stand with a crosspiece on which are arrayed a number of bottles and pouches containing fluids of various colors‖ (13). Photographed as part of The Garage Theatre 2011 production, Long Beach, CA.164
In addition to the drips, uniforms are also immediate visual signs of roles worn by those in their parts. When the orderlies arrive to take Wyatt away, the stage directions state that they enter ―wearing surgical masks‖ (47). In the 2008 University of Nebraska-Lincoln production, the 2010 Northark production in Harrison, and the 2011 Garage Theatre production at Long Beach, Nurse Walker, Dr Phelps and Dr Bazelon wear uniforms (see Figures 2–4), as visual markers of their roles as medical professionals. They are then picked off, one by one, as seemingly ―mad‖ impersonators of medical professionals (or, alternatively, as we may interpret from the second act, they may be actors playing mad people).
164 ―The Day Room by Don DeLillo‖ photographs, The Garage Theatre, n.d., 9 Oct. 2010
59
Figure 2: Photographs of the production of The Day Room by Northark Drama.165
Figure 3: Promotional photograph for the 2008 Theatrix production.166
Figure 4: Photograph of the 2011 production by The Garage Theatre.167
165 Photographs by Jamie Stevens, dSavannahCREATIVE [sic], and Eric J. Stefanski, ‗Northark Drama: 2010 Productions‘, Ozark Arts Council, 2010, 20 March 2011
60
DeLillo‘s focus on characters‘ occupations, combined with the above production costume choices to dress these characters in the conventional uniforms of stethoscopes, lab coats and scrubs, is a direct example of his interest in the connection between the roles that the characters play, the clothes they wear, and the perceived level of truths they know. The unsettling of spectators‘ previously held expectations—for instance, that doctors should be trusted—occurs, for DeLillo, precisely due to the authority of the validating uniforms worn by those we trust with our health. The following entry in DeLillo‘s notebook reveals his interest in the professional ownership of facts:
Only the uniformed person can distinguish between shades of meaning, between levels, identities, perceptions.168
Interestingly, there is a strong lack of stage directions regarding costumes; DeLillo could have chosen his characters‘ roles and context with the assumption of costumes. The depth of personal roles people play is examined when Nurse Walker and Dr Phelps exchange ideas about roles and their limits:
Nurse Walker: What I wonder about is the narrow scope of the roles we have to play. Can‘t we stop being doctor and nurse for just a minute? Can‘t we give you a glimpse of the people behind the uniforms? People with their own doubts, fears— Dr. Phelps: Sicknesses. Nurse Walker: We get sick. Dr. Phelps: We cry out. Nurse Walker: People with their own secrets, their intimate systems of protection. Dr. Phelps: What lies beneath? Nurse Walker: One level. Dr. Phelps: Two levels. (21–2)
After more comedic exchange, Wyatt begins to wonder whether ―these people belong here‖ (23), and Budge admits he has never seen them before. DeLillo could here be encouraging the spectators to recognise the split identity of actors, being both persons and characters simultaneously. In the world-at-large, actors are human beings (albeit also performing roles), and on stage they are both human beings and characters; these two roles overlap and so create a simultaneous real and unreal, the ―two levels‖ that Dr. Phelps identifies. On a metacognitive level, when the play is performed, the people adopting the characters of Budge, Nurse Baker,
61 and so on, are primarily people—actors—and secondarily characters. Nurse Walker‘s suggestion to ―stop being doctor and nurse for just a minute‖ exposes falsity on two levels: in character, as a nurse, she craves to be recognised as a person, and as an actor, the person playing Nurse Walker will drop the nurse role and resume being a person offstage outside of the play. The deeper ―levels‖ that lie ―beneath‖ draw links to celebrity culture in Valparaiso and the personal questions that Delfina directs at Michael in order to uncover some deep truth or motivation of which he was previously unaware. This continual seeking of the hidden truth, secret desire, or unknown motivation, is a theme through which DeLillo reminds his readers and spectators that surface identity does not reveal the depth of human complexity. In The Day Room, the levels of identity are presented through roles, whereas in Valparaiso, stable identity is complicated through celebrity and self- delusion.
Further to Pirandello‘s Six Characters, Beckett‘s What Where explores personal identity, this time with the intention to dig for a truth that is inevitably unreachable:
Bam: You gave him the works? Bim: Yes. Bam: And he didn‘t say where? Bim: No. Bam: He wept? Bim: Yes. Bam: Screamed? Bim: Yes. […] Bam: Take him away and give him the works until he confesses. Bem: What must he confess? Bam: That he said where to him. Bem: Is that all? Bam: Yes. V: Not good. I start again.169
In this short and mysterious playtext, Beckett‘s characters do not arrive closer to the information they are seeking by the conclusion of the piece; they are left ignorant. The mysterious first-mentioned ―he‖ is never revealed, nor are ―the works‖ explained, or the importance of the ―where‖ explored. The Day Room employs a similar tone as it explores identity through role-playing, with characters‘ similar confusions, indicating a Beckettian impossibility of knowing the full truth of their
169 Samuel Beckett, Collected Shorter Plays (London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 1984 [2006]), pp. 314–15.
62 fellow characters‘ identities. Both Keesey and Kramer have likened The Day Room to Beckett‘s work,170 exposing how both share similar concerns with the impossibility of knowing truth, especially personal truth. Beckett has said that it is ―not even possible to talk about truth. That‘s part of the anguish‖.171 In his Waiting for Godot, both protagonists exhibit deep uncertainty about Godot and their own memories:
Estragon: We came here yesterday. Vladimir: Ah no, there you‘re mistaken. Estragon: What did we do yesterday? Vladimir: What did we do yesterday? Estragon: Yes. Vladimir: Why… (Angrily) Nothing is certain when you‘re about.172
As Beckett told Tom Driver, ―The key word in my plays is ‗perhaps‘‖.173 Both Beckett and DeLillo‘s failing to provide hard answers to any of the questions raised by their characters results in the final consequence of a questioning of the possibility of truth. Their characters‘ screwball comedy confusion is a double-edged sword: their confusion is both funny and tragic as their known worlds tumble around them. In the end, though, neither they nor the spectators can trust what they would usually take to be true within the confines of the stage.
As Jacqueline Zubeck argued regarding Valparaiso, and it is equally true of The Day Room, DeLillo ―shows us tragedy by making us laugh at his comedy‖.174 The screwball comedy of characters bumbling about, unsure of who or where they are, hides a tragic depth regarding the crisis of truth. The tragedy lies in the ungraspable nature of what is true, who we are, and who we consider each other to be. As DeLillo elucidated in his private notes: ―No one is what he appears to be... [it is a p]rogression of imposters, actors, madmen that take us farther and farther from the truth.‖175 Using antirealism as the basis for this play, and paranoia as the driving force of some of his confused characters, DeLillo is less concerned with
170 Keesey, p. 11. Kramer, p. 74. 171 Charles Juliet, ―Meeting Beckett‖, trans. and ed. Suzanne Chamier, TriQuarterly 77 (Winter 1989–90), p. 17. 172 Beckett, Waiting for Godot, p. 14. 173 Tom Driver, ―Beckett by the Madeleine‖, Columbia University Forum 4 (Summer 1961). in Graver and Federman, Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, p. 220. 174 Jacqueline Zubeck, ―‘Exalted Time: DeLillo and His Drama‖, presented at a panel session on DeLillo‘s drama at the 2010 The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900, 19 Feb. 2010. Obtained via correspondence. 175 Box 15, Folder 1: The Day Room—Handwritten notes in spiral notebook, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
63 providing a dénouement than he is with taking us along for the ride. He has acknowledged his tendency to make things difficult for the reader of his novels, which
is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and the facile knowledge-market. The writer is driven by this conviction that some truths aren‘t arrived at so easily, that life is still full of mystery, that it might be better for you, Dear Reader, if you went back to the Living section of your newspaper because this is the dying section and you don‘t really want to be here.176
While here he refers specifically to his works of fiction, the same inclination to unsteady the playtext reader or spectator is evident through his stage works in the form of dramatic antirealism, which highlights the ―mystery‖ of which life is full. An unsettling of order and privileging of ambiguity exposes the indistinct nature of truth, and the very different perspectives from the different characters are indicative of how personal, and ungraspable, truth can be.
Language features as a primary conductor of meaning while also manipulated to subvert truth. For instance, the correct use of specialist terminology—medical language—gives a special power to the speaker and an ‗ownership‘ of facts in The Day Room. She who knows the terms knows the facts and holds the power. In his preparatory notebook for The Day Room, DeLillo outlines some thoughts on the matter of naming:
Why are you saying these things! Because we have to say something. Because language expands as distances proliferate. We have to name these things. We have to keep up with the runaway world. Devise words for the new ways we find to die.177
In the published version of the playtext, these powerful lines made their way to the dialogue of characters in medical roles, the doctor and nurse, who exhibit their authority through their knowledge of the right ‗terms‘. I quote below a lengthy exchange between patients and hospital staff regarding the power of language:
Wyatt: In other words a straitjacket. Dr. Phelps: They don‘t call that anymore. Nurse Walker: That word became too blunt, too crude. Dr. Phelps: Too restrictive. So they called it a camisole. […]
176 LeClair, ―An Interview with Don DeLillo‖, Conversations with Don DeLillo, pp. 12–13. 177 Box 16, Folder 5: The Day Room—Handwritten notes in spiral notebook, ―Sundance, July 83‖, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
64 Nurse Walker: Just so you know the jargon. […] Wyatt: What is the illness? Nurse Walker: Knowing that you‘re going to die. Wyatt (to Budge): Why are they saying these things? Dr. Phelps: Because we have to say something. Because language itself would be enormously impoverished if we didn‘t have disease to talk about. Nurse Walker: Haven‘t you ever heard a patient flaunt the terminology of his disease? Dr. Phelps: They become experts overnight. Nurse Walker: They feel at home in the language of their disease. Dr. Phelps: It‘s their disease after all. Nurse Walker: They love to explain the terms to visitors. Dr. Phelps: We have to name these conditions as they appear and proliferate. We have to design a body of words as vivid and horrifying as the conditions they attempt to describe. Nurse Walker: If the gravity of the disease is not reflected in the terminology, the patient feels cheated. Dr. Phelps: We have to stretch the language to its breaking point as people find new ways to die, abrupt and mysterious symptomatologies. Nurse Walker: Sarcomas. Dr. Phelps: Blastomas. (18–20)
Medical terminology, for DeLillo, is an ownership of knowledge, and a consequential metaphorical power over the illness. This focus on the use of the ―right term‖ is similar to the exchange between Toinette and Sean about desert plant names in Love-Lies-Bleeding, where the memory of Alex‘s beloved desert plants gives emotional relief from the turmoil that faces them as they decide to euthanise him.178
In medicine, knowing the correct medical terminology of diseases can aid in a sense of control and power over the body. The linguistic facts or names, however, do not constitute the real truth of the disease; nominative language lacks explanation, so the relief felt by the patient is misguided. It is this misguided comfort that DeLillo so swiftly taps into through the exchange above. Speaking disease names only speaks around the disease—like speaking around the ‗he‘ in Beckett‘s What Where—so knowledge and understanding is not furthered. Professionals know the correct terms, so the role-playing of doctors, nurses, and patients, is a partaking of ‗in-group‘ language. Nurse Walker and Dr Phelps‘ self- reflexive use of the correct jargon—and Wyatt‘s believing them—can lull the audience into a false sense of confidence in their roles as medical professionals. Douglas Keesey notes the ‗playing of parts‘ in his brief final chapter on DeLillo‘s plays:
178 I explore this further in Chapter 5.
65 DeLillo stresses the fact that anyone in a uniform is merely acting a part, pretending to be secure in his control over death, by having each ―doctor‖ revealed as an imposter and taken back to the hospital‘s psychiatric wing.179
Consequently, when they are exposed as imposters, an air of paranoia can emerge, as it seems that even the most linguistically adept professionals can no longer be trusted to be sane. It is the ordinariness of this paranoia—the small confusions, deceptions and volte-faces—that most shakes our expectations and belief systems to the core, because if we cannot trust those that are most like us, as Nurse Baker asks, ―[i]s there anyone you can believe in?‖ (52).
The Abstraction of Truth as Leading to Paranoia The self-reflexivity of The Day Room is a postmodern characteristic because it can lead to the disorientation and suspicion present in paranoia: only by complicating and disrupting the usual order of characters and actors can DeLillo more effectively bring to the light larger issues of truth, roles, and identity. As a consequence of the antirealist technique of metatheatre, we have seen that the spectators‘ preconceived notions of truth are disrupted. The second and causally related effect is the spectators‘ high potential to feel paranoia regarding the characters and action. The metatheatrical devices like characters‘ self-awareness and their exposing the play as a play can very likely lead to the ultimate paranoid mood of the spectators.
Contemporary paranoia can take many forms, but is generally linked with identity and its fluctuating, elusive nature. Patrick O‘Donnell in Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary U.S. Narrative writes that contemporary people are paranoid because ―paranoia is the last refuge of identity so aware of itself as a construct and as constructed by desires assembled for it that it becomes a parody of itself‖.180 O‘Donnell defines paranoia as a ―refuge of identity‖, a description that is indeed manifested in The Day Room. Rather than writing a play with characters whose roles are clear-cut and apparent, DeLillo‘s role-reversals, dead-end dialogue volleys and self-aware characters challenge the audience‘s expectations of identity, resulting in a paranoia that works to attempt to reorganise the new information in a rational method. After each role-reversal, from hospital patient to mad person, or actor to mad person, the characters, and potentially the spectators, are moved first
179 Keesey, p. 204 180 Patrick O‘Donnell, Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary U.S. Narrative (Durham and London: Duke University, 2000), p. 9.
66 towards suspicion, and then towards paranoia, as they try to second-guess the twists and turns.
The paranoia that the individual spectators of The Day Room may experience is not an accidental consequence of its philosophical concerns, but a deliberate result of metatheatrical dialogue spoken within the play. There are two levels of The Day Room: the first is what is contained within it, and the second is what is contained outside of it. In each of these levels, there are both ‗people‘ and ‗people playing roles‘, and the two begin to overlap when characters broach the topics of what and who is real, leading to the Pirandellian ambiguity of people, characters, roles, truth and falsity. In one instance, Nurse Baker indicates a self-awareness regarding her own role as an imposter when she talks with Grass about the paranoia that arises from falsehood:
You want desperately to believe in appearances. You want the simplest assurances. I understand completely. So many cruel deceptions. Is there anyone you can believe in? Are you talking to the person you think you‘re talking to? Is the person saying what you think she‘s saying? (52)
This monologue seems the final, published version of DeLillo‘s jotted notes asking, ―How far down can we go? How many people are we? How well can we hide?‖181 He directly addresses his spectators through Nurse Baker, exposing the expectation of realism and the paranoia that follows the deceptions in the play. Previously held assumptions regarding reliable characters and imposters are destabilised. Jason S. Polley calls this effect of metatheatricality ―spatial slippage and personal disorientation‖,182 a suspicion in what is claimed to be true. Nurse Baker‘s instilling of paranoid ideas into Grass‘s mind highlights The Day Room‘s antirealism, which undermines Western theatre, where the playwright conventionally creates predictable characters, the characters are consistent and persistent in who and what they are, and the audience can assume the events upon the stage are realistic portrayals of the outside world.
The play‘s antirealistic nature can imbue the spectators with a suspicion in the conscious phenomenological experience. They soon realise that what they see is
181 Don DeLillo, Box 16, Folder 5: The Day Room—Handwritten notes in spiral notebook, ―Sundance, July 83‖, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. 182 Polley, p. 177.
67 not necessarily what is true. Despite reviewers‘ disappointments in the play‘s failure to ―make any discoveries about the nature of theatre or of existence‖, since it is ―too far removed from realistic, consequential action to be anything but mute about the human condition‖,183 The Day Room achieves its metatheatrical goal to confuse and make ambiguous the expected realism that is staged. Acting and theatre, after all, is a lie; as Howard Barker asserts, ―[t]o tell the truth sincerely is the pitiful pretension of the theatre. To lie sincerely is the euphoria of the art of theatre‖.184 Barker also resists the sociological urge to explain his theatre, inviting spectators instead to think. The conscious lies foregrounded and exposed in The Day Room are those we all know well: that actors are actors, that the stage is not necessarily representative of life, and that we should well learn not to trust what we see. The spectators watch characters—who they are led to believe are patients and nurses— be replaced by madmen and actors, and as a result of one volte-face after another, may find themselves becoming paranoid regarding the identity of each character in turn. It seems, then, that the intention to write a metatheatrical play does not begin with the need to discover what truth is, but, rather, it is to show what our need to know the truth does to us, and that effect is often paranoia.
This paranoia is cerebral: the spectators potentially feel intellectually unsettled. Alexander Dunst calls this specific type ―‗ordinary paranoia‘, a paranoia at once ubiquitous and almost invisible, not antagonistic but deeply wedded to irony and world-weary cynicism, a pragmatic and local barrier against an excess of jouissance‖.185 The irony occurs, for example, when the maid asks the desk clerk to remind her that she is the maid (61–2), and the ―world-weary‖ cynicism is evident in the subversion of the expectation of dramatic realism. Combined with the impossible figuring out of the identities of imposters and professionals is the notion of the breakdown of ‗the system‘ and the paranoia that can follow. Normality and the expected is replaced with absurdity and confusion. Wyatt and Budge simply cannot understand what is going on in the hospital, usually a familiar space of ritual:
Wyatt: It‘s incredible. It‘s an outrage. Budge: We‘re hospital patients. Vulnerable.
183 Kramer, p. 75. 184 Howard Barker, Death, The One and the Art of Theatre (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 4. 185 Dunst, p. 179.
68 Wyatt: Susceptible to every kind of abuse. Budge: We‘re dependent on these people. Wyatt: Like an airliner roaring off a runway— Budge: —into a steep climb Wyatt: We depend on the crew. It‘s the same thing exactly. And we still haven‘t been fed. No one‘s fed us. (27)
They foreground their vulnerability and reliance on the hospital staff as well as each other, despite the unsure status of the identities of either. The exchange above broaches the same topic of the hierarchy of knowledge and subsequent reliance upon those ‗in the know‘ as Michael‘s accidental flight in Valparaiso. There, the ‗systems‘ and the people working for them have the authority, while Michael keeps his confusion to himself:
Michael: Yes. It was strange. The aircraft seemed too big, too wide-bodied for an intrastate flight. Delfina: But you said nothing. The attendant came around with pillows and blankets. Michael: And I said nothing. (86)186
In both instances we are presented with characters who take part in the usually mundane events of a hospital check-in and a plane flight—which are overturned by major or minor but significant complications—fake doctors, an incorrect itinerary—and are then left to wonder about their internal mental states and external existence of the world. By subverting seemingly normal occurrences, DeLillo places his characters in crises of knowledge in order to most effectively exhibit the fickle nature of our perceptions and beliefs.
2.2. Death In addition to the potential emergence of paranoia, a second overall effect of metatheatricality in The Day Room—and in particular, its self-reflexive characters— is the actors‘ defiance of death. Death and the human fear of its finality are pervasive motifs in DeLillo‘s fiction and theatre works. He is concerned with the ―presence of death‖, noted by Wyatt (7), and how ―[d]ying is what [actors are] all about‖ (90), noted by Jolene. This interest in the fear of death and ways to escape mortality comes through starkly in his fiction and in his other plays: in White Noise, the central trope is ―Who will die first?‖,187 while the action in Love-Lies-Bleeding is comprised of the method and timing of familial euthanasia. In Valparaiso, too, the
186 For more on Valparaiso, see Chapter 4. 187 DeLillo, White Noise, p. 15.
69 secret that Michael Majeski‘s celebrity process uncovers is his death wish and suicide attempt, and in Cosmopolis, Eric Packer‘s fear of mortality causes his obsessive physical check-ups in the privacy of his limousine.
According to Jolene, an actor in Arno Klein‘s acting troupe, the fear of death drives actors to act. She says, ―We develop techniques to shield us from the facts‖ because ―[w]e cannot meet death on its own terms‖ (90). Actors, then use their roles to seemingly ‗avoid‘ death. According to R. E. Ewin, the fear of death is so commonplace that in his book Reasons and the Fear of Death he tries ―to show that fear of death is in a very important sense pre-rational, comparable in that respect to something such as sexual desire‖.188 It follows that the desire or compulsion to evade death is instinctual, however, for Geoffrey Scarre, the ―simplest tactic for achieving tranquillity in the face of death is to avoid thinking about it altogether‖.189 Since this is difficult, Scarre goes on to describe how we ‗bracket off‘ thoughts of our mortality from our daily lives:
Unless we are unfortunate enough to be of unusually neurotic temperament, we ought to be able temporarily to bracket off thoughts of death while we focus on the business of living. Such bracketing is not the same as thrusting those thoughts completely out of sight or self- deceptively attempting to mould them into some comelier shape, and it should enable us to retain an authentic attitude towards our mortality without succumbing to an enervating anxiety.190
Nowhere does DeLillo ‗do death‘ and death-fear‘s connection to everyday life better than in White Noise, with lines like ―Doesn‘t our knowledge of death make life more precious? What good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It‘s an anxious quivering thing‖.191 Babette, in White Noise, in particular acknowledges the absurdity of living with the knowledge of one‘s inevitable death, describing Scarre‘s ‗bracketing off‘ in action: ―We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. … Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent?‖192
188 R. E. Ewin, Reasons and the Fear of Death (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002), p. 4. 189 Geoffrey Scarre, Death (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen‘s University Press, 2007), p. 66. 190 Scarre, p. 67. 191 DeLillo, White Noise, p. 284. 192 DeLillo, White Noise, p. 198.
70 DeLillo‘s stepping away from the genre of fiction in order to write for the stage led to his noticing theatre‘s reliance on live actors, deeply linking acting and the fear of death. He expands on these ideas in an interview with Mervyn Rothstein, where he says:
I think theatre is really mysterious and alluring for someone who has written a novel… I began to sense a connection, almost a metaphysical connection, between the craft of acting and the fear we all have of dying. It seemed to me that actors are a kind of model for the ways in which we hide from the knowledge we inevitably possess of our final extinction… . There‘s something about the necessary shift in identity which actors make in the ordinary course of their work that seems almost a guide to concealing what we know about ourselves.193
An actor‘s vocation relies on his ability to adopt multiple personas, moving between various fictional lives. Not only is this an adoption of a new fictional persona, but DeLillo has drawn out its connection to the death-evasion that occurs offstage in roles we undertake to offset our fear of dying. Toby Silverman Zinman has noted the pervasive issue of death in DeLillo‘s work, ―not the physical act of dying, nor the metaphysical implications of Death, but the fear of dying as the crucial definition of our humanness‖.194 Given DeLillo‘s personal notes on the subject, and Jolene‘s speech that Zinman quotes in his article and I quote below, it is unfortunate that Zinman does not go further in analysing how and why the connection between acting and death is so prevalent in The Day Room. To compensate for this limitation, I will utilise DeLillo‘s personal notes and the playtext itself to explore how death is seemingly ‗delayed‘ through acting, and especially through the self-reflexivity of the characters.
DeLillo‘s personal notes are strong evidence for his philosophical considerations regarding role-playing and death. He experiments with the connection between acting and death in his handwritten notebooks in preparation for writing The Day Room. There, he suggests that an actor‘s actual death confirms his role as an actor, rather than as a person, due to the actor‘s vocation as an impersonator:
When an actor dies, young or old, it‘s not quite the same. Dying confirms his actorhood. We know he‘s been clinging to life, precariously, role by role, and when he dies, we may
193 Mervyn Rothstein, ―A Novelist Faces his Themes on New Ground‖, The New York Times, 20 December 1987, p. H19. 194 Zinman, p. 74.
71 weep and moan but we‘re not really surprised. We know at some level he became an actor in the first place because he feared dying and sought an escape.195
For DeLillo, actors are separated from human mortality, owing to their special relationship with death. Acting is a classic death-evasion role-playing activity, an example of Scarre‘s ―bracketing‖ out of our inevitable mortality. The role-playing explored in The Day Room is one instance where a vocation like acting allows the actor to feel as if he is evading death by adopting a character‘s personality, thus metaphorically ‗pausing‘ his own mortal decline and interrupting the persistence of his existence. From the excerpt above, we can argue that actors‘ movements between characters and their stepping on and off the special timeless frame of the stage is an ability DeLillo seems to interpret as representative of the human evasion of death. The wish to prolong life—and more importantly, postpone death—is granted to actors, who, if only symbolically, have the potential to live forever through their characters on screen. On stage, however, this symbolic deathlessness occurs only for the length of the performance, as DeLillo writes above, ―role by role‖. DeLillo‘s claim that an actor‘s dying ―confirms his actorhood‖ exposes the incongruity between the stark natural inescapability of death and the synthetic evasion techniques that acting as role-playing metaphorically allows a person upon a stage.
As I explained earlier in this chapter, self-reflexivity through an acknowledgment of the artificiality of the stage world in which they find themselves is a key technique of metatheatre. One recurring topic of this self-reflexivity, however, is death and its avoidance. In the second act, Jolene arrives at the motel room full of people waiting to see a play, and she tells them the play does not start until Arno Klein arrives. She then gives a key lengthy and lucid monologue on actors and acting:
Jolene: I hate speeches. Look. Let me put in this way. When an athlete dies young, it‘s a terrible twist of nature. […] How different for the actor. Young, old, ancient, budding, decrepit. Dying is what we‘re all about. […] We show you how to hide from what you know. There‘s no innocence here. Just secrets, terrors, deceptions. […] We develop techniques to shield us from the facts. But they become the facts. The fear is so deep we find it waiting in the smallest role. We can‘t meet death on our own terms. We have no terms. […] But the parts we play in order to live make us tremble in our own skin. We‘re transparent. This is our mystery, our beauty, our genius, our sickness. (90)
195 Don DeLillo, Box 15, Folder 2: The Day Room—Handwritten notes in spiral notebook, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
72
Here she describes the actor‘s ambivalent relationship with death, and specifically notes that actors play parts ―in order to live‖. Jolene‘s speech can be further deconstructed using DeLillo‘s own rough preliminary notes for The Day Room, the central tenets of which remain in the final version of the playtext, and in Jolene‘s speech in particular:
Actors immune to death as long as they are someone else.196
(1) What do actors do? We play parts to keep from dying. That‘s what you‘re all doing here. You‘re sinking deeper and deeper into your roles. [illegible] The more you fear dying, the greater your passion to act. Nobody understands this better than I do.
(2) Actors are transparent The actor is always close to submission, and submission is death. He yearns to submit to a stronger will Everything comes from some vastness beyond. The ancient playwright, the Greek world, the galaxy, the myth, heavens.197
Acting allows a person to live through someone else—a character—and remain deathless as that character upon the stage, if only temporarily. DeLillo‘s rough notes and the published playtext are evidence of his idea that the actor‘s main compulsion to act is a result of his deep human fear of death and consequent desire for immortality. The metatheatrical self-reflexivity of Jolene‘s speech is DeLillo‘s centrepiece for his representation of life and death on the stage.
Of course, despite this attempt at death-evasion, the actor inevitably remains mortal, and it is this incongruence that DeLillo seems to be highlighting, particularly in The Day Room‘s second act. Moving from role to role, through characters, the actor feels as if he ‗pauses‘ his own death, delaying his own end as he lives through fictional others in fictional worlds. In reality, however, the mortal actor continues to move towards death while he is on stage, so acting becomes a false belief in temporary immortality. Jolene‘s speech highlights the fact that the stage is one place where a person may feel ―immune to death‖, despite this being only a feeling and the opposite being true: actors on stage are aging, or ‗dying‘ in front of their audiences. On stage, fully in the ‗now‘, the actor can feel as if he is shedding time and his inevitable death; Herbert Blau, however, would disagree, arguing that despite pretences, the actor is dying upon the stage:
196 Box 15, Folder 1: The Day Room—Handwritten notes in spiral notebook, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. 197 Box 15, Folder 2: The Day Room—Handwritten notes in spiral notebook, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
73
Someone is dying in front of your eyes. That is another universal of performance. There are, to be sure, a myriad of ways in which the history of performance has been able to disguise or displace that elemental fact. You can joke about it, you can laugh it off, you can perform great feats of physical skill, but the image of it is before your eyes all the more because you are looking, even if the space is empty. You can‘t escape that look even if you close your eyes.198
An actor‘s deathward movement is inescapable according to Blau—it is the human consequence of his role as both a person and an actor—and although actors seem deathless ‗in the present‘ of their character, they are still mortal as people. Howard Barker also comments on the connection between the ambiguity of theatre and its relationship to the ambiguity of death:
To ask for truth in theatre is contradictory, a repudiation of its essence. Consequently, death, a subject for which true statements are, a priori, inadmissible, is the subject most perfectly suited to the form of theatre.199
As the great unknown, death as a metaphysical theme is best suited to the stage, where truth cannot exist in the form of realism because of the paradox of its being staged. True realism cannot occur on stage precisely because of its staged nature, so we must be content with the contradictory nature of ‗false realism‘—a claim to truth that is staged. In Act 1 of The Day Room, medical language is empowering, but in Act 2, it is acting that feels as if it temporarily releases people from their mortality. Both, however, are false hopes, as medical language does not encompass all truth and acting does not provide an escape from death.
The ‗nowness‘ of acting—its immediacy, its embodied nature and its ephemeral lack of past or present—is the characteristic that allows for a somewhat deceptive sense of atemporality on stage, and a feeling of evasion of death as a result. If the fictional world of the stage is atemporal, then actors could be interpreted as being the most metaphorically timeless of beings because only they are able to live in another character‘s ‗present‘, combining both a new life-force with a new temporality. The timelessness of actors on stage can be, in some sense, compared to the imperishable goods within the supermarket in White Noise, where ―[t]here were six kinds of apples, there were exotic melons in several pastels.
198 Herbert Blau, The Eye of Prey (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 181. 199 Barker, p. 4.
74 Everything seemed to be in season, sprayed, burnished, bright‖.200 The natural seasons and the continuation of time feel as if they have been paused, rendering the usually perishable fruits imperishable, no longer suffering from inanimate mortality but instead eternally fresh and new. Murray Jay Siskind‘s metaphysical descriptions of the supermarket‘s products are also infused with a kind of deathlessness, or at least a sense of death-evasion through the burnishing and waxing of the corruptible fruits to evade their perishability. Shopping with Jack Gladney and Jack‘s family, Murray notices that the ―place is sealed off, self-contained. It is timeless‖.201 It ―recharges us spiritually, it prepares us, it‘s a gateway or pathway‖.202 The supermarket, like the stage, is a place where mortality feels as if it is ‗bracketed off‘ from everyday life and is one of the few instances where, at least momentarily, the inevitable movement towards death at least seems paused. Taken further, the supermarket can be a timeless stage where one performs the act of shopping, the supermarket and its goods somewhat shed time and the mortality that follows it. This is the paradox of theatre, the both-and: what happens on the stage is both real and not-real, here and not here, both now and not now.
2.3 Conclusion In this playtext, DeLillo approaches his fond theme of the human fear of death through the lens of metatheatre, giving his characters the ability to directly comment upon their adoption of roles. There are two levels of role-playing involved: first, there are actors playing characters, and second, there are characters playing patients, hospital staff and actors. The Day Room is a play in which escaped psychiatric patients seem to be acting as hospital patients and staff, and actors seem to be acting as an audience waiting to see a play; in both cases, characters are acting and adopting roles other than their own. Within the ‗frame‘ of the stage, an actor may well, in theory alone, live forever, because mortality is not one of the behavioural or social rules that exist within that frame, at least not intrinsically. It can be said that an actor‘s adoption of a character or a role leads to the adoption of another ‗framed life‘, a fictional one with a life-force attached. Hence, the actor‘s own mortality is placed on hold when he is in character, as he has adopted another
200 DeLillo, White Noise, p. 36. 201 DeLillo, White Noise, p. 38. 202 DeLillo, White Noise, p. 37.
75 ‗life‘ on stage. Metatheatre highlights the inner and outer ‗frames‘, giving rise to the acknowledgment of the differing rules within each.
The remarkable effect of this play is the wholesale unsettling of previously held notions of truth. By baring the resemblances between acting and madness, DeLillo highlights the ways in which both veil personal identity by disrupting the continuity of ‗personhood‘ usually held to be a prerequisite for a stable personality. The metatheatricality of the characters‘ dialogue is repeatedly evident, from explicitly stating their roles in the play, to being aware of their terminology, and even further, to drawing overt attention to the deception required of actors. DeLillo never goes so far as to give full explanations or conclusions as to who is acting and who is mad; he has a more non-traditional, anti-realist stance than Pirandello, whose characters and actors‘ roles are relatively clear-cut. The Day Room may also incite paranoia in the spectators at the close of the play, giving little fulfilment for those requiring a hard conclusion. Daniel Aaron in his chapter ‗How To Read Don DeLillo‘ gives an observant description of the writer‘s ambivalent technique:
He promises but holds back. The signs, sounds, signals his characters think they see or hear or feel defy reason and intuition. These unexplained phenomena, whether presented in the language of scientists or cranks, seem to hint of a religious disposition or at least a hankering for transcendent answers, but DeLillo never takes the reader into his confidence, leaves few if any clues to point to his philosophy, social views, habits, and tastes. He is a withholder, a mystifier, a man without a handle and like the trickster mushroom of Emily Dickinson‘s poem—surreptitious, circumspect, and supple—he keeps popping up in unexpected places.203
Despite DeLillo‘s interest in non-traditional open endings, this explanation is particularly pertinent to this playtext, the premise of which is founded on the slipperiness of identity: who we believe whom to be, and what we believe what to be. John Frow has noted that White Noise ―is obsessed with one of the classical aims of the realist novel: the construction of typicality‖;204 the same may be argued for theatrical anti-realist works like The Day Room. Where what seems at first glance to be a simple hospital ward, and a motel room, soon evolves into perplexity with bewildered characters, deceptive dialogue and tangled plot twists.
203 Daniel Aaron, ―How to Read Don DeLillo‖, Introducing Don DeLillo, Frank Lentricchia, ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 68. 204 John Frow, ―Notes on White Noise‖, Introducing Don DeLillo, p. 177.
76 CHAPTER 3 Intermezzo: One-Minute Plays
This chapter will provide a metaphorical curtain drop—an intermission of sorts—to take a brief look at DeLillo‘s one-minute plays. Thus far we have journeyed through DeLillo‘s theatre works of the 1970s in Chapter 1, traversing the logical terrain of mathematics and games in ‗The Engineer‘. Subsequently, we moved into the 1980s in Chapter 2, with the volte-face identity crises of The Day Room. We turn now to the very short ‗The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed into Heaven‘ (1990) and ‗The Mystery at the Middle of Ordinary Life‘ (2000). Following this, the curtain rises again in the mid-2000s in Chapter 4 with Valparaiso and late-2000s in Chapter 5 with Love-Lies-Bleeding.
DeLillo‘s first playlet, ‗The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed into Heaven‘ (1990)205—henceforth called ‗The Rapture‘—depicts a victorious athlete and the lead-up to his victory. The athlete poses god-like, bathed in light, and the interviewer narrates his biography, the events that led to his win. It was commissioned and performed in 1990 as part of a one-minute play festival at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, MA. His second playlet, which was commissioned by ART a decade later, ‗The Mystery at the Middle of Ordinary Life‘206—henceforth called ‗The Mystery‘—does the reverse by presenting the everyday: a couple sit in their kitchen, describing the banality of married life. Where ‗The Rapture‘ is a focussed study of the conditions for extraordinariness, ‗The Mystery‘ is a penetrating example of human ordinariness. These two pieces of theatre are linked by the ‗mystery‘ of each of their poles: what is it that makes a life extraordinary, and what makes a life ordinary?
Don DeLillo‘s one-minute plays are both potent examinations of human motivation. While ‗The Rapture‘ portrays a victorious tennis star at the height of his extraordinary win, and ‗The Mystery‘ is a quiet meditation on married life, both are moving inquiries into the human core of relationships, desires, and motivations.
205 Don DeLillo, ‗The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed into Heaven‘, South Atlantic Quarterly 91/2 (Spring 1992), pp. 241–2. First published in The Quarterly 15 (1990). All quotations in this section are taken from these pages. 206 Don DeLillo, ‗The Mystery at the Middle of Ordinary Life‘, South Atlantic Quarterly, 99: 2/3 (Spring/Summer 2000), pp. 600–603.
77 Their staging, pace and atmosphere are significantly different, yet they contain a common interest in the deep layers of lives led.
3.1 ‘The Rapture’ of the Extraordinary ‗The Rapture‘ was first performed by the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in April 1990, winning the ―Most Likely to be Produced‖ award,207 and going on to be adapted into a short film.208 It depicts a young tennis player ―at the moment of triumph‖, interviewed just after his win.209 The playlet is composed of the interviewer‘s monologue, an assumptive summary of the player‘s life, his journey to this moment. All the while, the player is frozen in victorious pose, ―head thrown back, eyes closed, arms raised, one fist clenched, the racket in the other hand… glowing in strong light, with darkness all around‖ (241).
There are religious overtones that permeate ‗The Rapture‘. In the only known critical article mentioning this play, Amy Hungerford takes a religious interpretation when she notes that this is the ―bodily position he held at the moment he was assumed into heaven‖.210 Hungerford analyses the word ‗rapture‘ and its repeated use by DeLillo in interviews, linking it with the religious overtones she argues are present in this writer‘s wider oeuvre.211 She writes that the play ―centers rapture on the stage and remains committed to its possibility, its unknowable quality (the raptured athlete is inaccessible to us except as spectacle)‖.212 While the athlete may indeed appear as spectacle, Hungerford takes her argument further when she compares the athlete‘s rapture to DeLillo‘s rapture as a writer:
207 ―Playwrights make time for ART‖, Boston Globe, 25 April 1990, pp. 38 and 40, in Box 16, Folder 6: One Minute Plays. I: The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed Into Heaven. II: The Mystery at the Middle of Ordinary Life‘, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. 208 ‗The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed Into Heaven‘, IMDB, n.d. 29 Jan. 2012
78 The interior privacy of the athlete in this moment, and the way the world talks greedily on, allows us to see in the raptured athlete a figure for DeLillo, the raptured author, made into spectacle by his own rapturous work.213
Hungerford fails to highlight that the primary difference between a writer‘s rapture and that of an athlete lies in the athlete‘s celebrity status, which is the very driving force of the play. The characteristics of celebrity are the foundation of action in this playlet: the bright spotlight centred on the tennis star, the commentator‘s vocal narration, and the detailed outline of the newsworthy items of the player‘s life indicate a person deemed worthy of fame. The interviewer hastens a response from the tennis player, saying ―now we‘re all enfolded in your arms, you are the culture that contains us‖ (242), setting up the player as a general representative of American culture, or, more accurately, a symbol of the American Dream come good. Indeed, the celebrity presented here may well pre-empt DeLillo‘s concern with the celebrity process in his longer play Valparaiso, analysed in Chapter 4 of this thesis.
DeLillo‘s personal notes reveal his preliminary ideas regarding ‗The Rapture‘, and expose his thematic interests in composing the piece. For instance, he lists some of the alternative titles he was testing at the time: Tennis Whites; The Perfection of the Body; The Tennis Player Leaves This Earth Forever; The Cult of the Body; The Victory That Will Keep You Going Even as You Die.214 Rather than privileging the corporeal mortality of the athlete, DeLillo imbues his titles with quasi-religious awe. As Hungerford notes, the moment captured in the play portrays the ―interior privacy of the athlete‖,215 however it is an assumed interiority, not an actual one. The interviewer does not speak for the athlete, but about him, and it is this separation that best represents the cult of celebrity. The interview repeats the estimating phrases ―it must feel‖ and ―tell us quickly how it feels‖ (241, 242), setting up the vast chasm between the athlete and spectators who also act as his sporting audience. The interviewer‘s monologue is comprised of what could be the ‗public‘s‘ romanticised notion of the successful athlete‘s life up until now, where hardships have finally led to his victory in this game, and his rise into heaven.
213 Hungerford, ―Don DeLillo‘s Latin Mass‖, pp. 351–2. 214 Don DeLillo, Box 86, Folder 6: One Minute Plays. I: The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed Into Heaven. II: The Mystery at the Middle of Ordinary Life‘, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. 215 Hungerford, ―Don DeLillo‘s Latin Mass‖, p. 351.
79 Alternative phrases indicate the specific words chosen for the task. The published nouns in ―it must feel like a culmination… it must feel like a vindication… it must feel like a permutation,‖ (242) were chosen over the alternatives ‗appropriation‘, ‗ratification‘, ‗unification‘, ‗emulsification‘, ‗transmogrification‘. Also, the line that was eventually published as ―growing up without a role model, without a high school on a hill‖ was the final chosen alternative to ―a telephone in the kitchen‖ or a ―flagpole on the lawn‖.216 A ―high school on a hill‖ connotes a quiet suburban youth, and the ‗h‘ alliteration could have appealed to the phonetically sensitive DeLillo. Furthermore, it may be that the four-syllable chosen nouns ‗culmination‘, ‗vindication‘, and ‗permutation‘ ensured rhythmic consistency in the monologue. The meticulous care DeLillo takes in choosing his words becomes clearer when consulting his drafts, as a sense of phonetic pattern emerges in his final published lines.
DeLillo has previously refused any adaptation of the content, keeping the play faithful to its text. In April 1995, Bruce Sheridan, who had previously directed The Day Room, asked DeLillo permission to stage an adaptation of ‗The Rapture‘. Sheridan proposed to shift the focus to rugby instead of tennis to suit New Zealand audiences. DeLillo responded unequivocally:
…I have to declare strong reservations concerning The Rapture of the Athlete. I don‘t believe that adapting the piece to local conditions is a good idea. This may work at times (or fail to work) in the case of material that has reached an advanced stage of recognition, a play that needs to be reinvigorated or rediscovered. But I think that new work ought to be done as written. Making a piece more relevant or recognizable only guarantees that narrow outlooks remain narrow. I understand your reasons for wanting to alter the piece but I‘m afraid I have to say no.217
The athlete‘s rapture, then, has remained wholly American. DeLillo‘s desire to retain its original context has meant that, as far as is evident, it has only been performed once.
A number of Beckett‘s short plays bear similarities to ‗The Rapture‘, particularly in terms of lighting. For instance, ‗Catastrophe‘, first performed in
216 Don DeLillo, Box 86, Folder 6: One Minute Plays. I: The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed Into Heaven. II: The Mystery at the Middle of Ordinary Life‘, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. 217 Don DeLillo, letter to Bruce Sheridan, April 1995, Box 86, Folder 6: One Minute Plays. I: The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed Into Heaven. II: The Mystery at the Middle of Ordinary Life, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
80 1984, has a director (D) and female assistant (A), contemplating the protagonist (P), raised high according to the stage directions:
P midstage standing on a black block 18 inches high. Black wide-brimmed hat. Black dressing-gown to ankles. Barefoot. Head bowed. Hands in pockets. Age and physique unimportant.218
The protagonists in ‗Catastrophe‘ and ‗The Rapture‘ have been physically raised; the former, however, assumes an apologetic stance, whereas the latter claims success in his triumphant pose. In the end of ‗Catastrophe‘, A and D ask Luke (L), in charge of the lighting, to light up P:
A: [To L.] Once more and he‘s off. [Fade-up of light on P‘s body. Pause. Fade-up of general light.] D: Stop! [Pause.] Now . . . let ‗em have it. [Fade-out of general light. Pause. Fade-out of light on body. Light on head alone. Long pause.] Terrific! He‘ll have them on their feet. I can hear it from here. [Pause. Distant storm of applause. P raises his head, fixes the audience. The applause falters, dies. Long pause. Fade-out of light on face.]219
The director‘s and assistant‘s manipulation of the protagonist‘s portrayal is bared. In ‗The Rapture‘ also, the interviewer has authority over the tennis player with the narration of his biography, circling the player, ―moving in the opposite direction, stopping occasionally, making as many revolutions as the monologue allows‖ (241). In both short pieces, one character takes centre stage, while the others fawn around him.
3.2 ‘The Mystery’ of the Ordinary A decade after the tennis player and interviewer took the stage in ‗The Rapture‘, ‗The Mystery‘ was performed at the same venue in 2000. Also with a two-character cast, it involves a ―man and a woman in a room‖ (602), musing about co- habitation. The woman contemplates how couples are able to live together, repeating the same phrases, hinting at the mysterious boredom that surrounds domesticity. A shift in topic then follows, with a brief, banal discussion about cold medication, and finally they agree on it having been a long day.
218 Beckett, ‗Catastrophe‘, Collected Shorter Plays, p. 297. 219 Beckett, ‗Catastrophe‘, Collected Shorter Plays, pp. 300–1.
81 This is a play broaching the topic of the banal, mundane everyday, as its title indicates. The current title was chosen over two other possibilities: ‗The Mystery Locked in the Middle of Ordinary Domestic Life‘, and ‗The Mystery at the Heart of Ordinary Life‘. As Hungerford has noted, ―mystery‖ joins ―rapture‖ as one of DeLillo‘s favourite words to use when speaking about writing.220 This claim is supported by DeLillo in his interview with Anthony DeCurtis:
I think my work has always been informed by mystery; the final answer, if there is one at all, is outside the book. My books are open-ended. I would say that mystery in general rather than the occult is something that weaves in and out of my work. I can‘t tell you where it came from or what it leads to. Possibly it is the natural product of a Catholic upbringing.221
DeLillo‘s Catholic upbringing may indeed have influenced his symbolism and metaphors, particularly in ‗The Rapture‘. The Christian ‗rapture‘ alludes to the final divine separation of good and evil at the end of days, setting the play up, in a sense, as a metaphor for the judgment of the human (the athlete) by the divine (the interviewer). In this way, the athlete‘s life is relayed, and his professional success, coupled with his personal goodness, ensures his assumption into heaven. This spiritually-infused reading of ‗The Rapture‘ can be contrasted to the humanistic ‗The Mystery‘, where human weakness and fallibility override any considerations of the divine. It may be that DeLillo‘s second one-minute play depicts ‗human mystery‘ to balance the divine concerns of his first.
While the action in ‗The Rapture‘ carries through with consistent energy and pace until the end, ‗The Mystery‘ contains in it a break in the pace of the dialogue and the topic. In the preface to the published playtext in the South Atlantic Quarterly, DeLillo admits that it is ―really 2 acts in 2 minutes‖, since the ―2nd part— the one-line exchanges—ought to be done without reference to the first part‖, as if the characters had failed to recall the first part.222 The second part somewhat provides an answer to the woman‘s questions in the first part, indicating that banal conversation forms a vital and unavoidable part of co-habitation.
220 Hungerford, ―Don DeLillo‘s Latin Mass‖, p. 351. 221 DeCurtis, ―‗An Outsider in This Society‘: An Interview with Don DeLillo‖, Conversations with Don DeLillo, p. 63. 222 DeLillo, ‗The Mystery at the Middle of Ordinary Life‘, p. 601. All subsequent references to this playtext will be provided in parentheses.
82 First Part The editing DeLillo made to the playlet is evident in his notes, with some lines showing that it is quite possible that DeLillo had been working on ‗The Mystery‘ and Valparaiso concurrently. For instance, the first pensive dialogue by the woman in ‗The Mystery‘ includes the following:
Sharing ten thousand meals. Talking to each other face to face, open face, like hot sandwiches. All the words that fill the house. What do people say over a lifetime? Trapped in each other‘s syntax. (602)
An early draft of Valparaiso also contains a line similar to the above: ―In each other‘s faces for ten thousand days. Half sentences, muddled syntax.‖223 It may well be that DeLillo‘s delving into Michael and Livia‘s relationship and domestic life in Valparaiso prompted his interest in writing an ―exfoliation of the state we call marriage‖ (601) when approached by ART.
The development of the playlet can be tracked from preliminary notes to published and produced play, with DeLillo‘s keeping or deleting of phrases exhibiting thematic matters. For instance, take the following preliminary original lines:
Woman: …I‘ll tell you something. There‘s a profound mystery hidden in the middle of ordinary domestic life. Man: What do people say to each other?
DeLillo removed the woman‘s line, which instead formed the title of the piece, and simplified it into the following published version:
Woman: I‘ll tell you something. Man: You‘ll tell me something. Woman: There‘s a mystery here.
This edit and final omission is vitally important because it ensures the play maintains an understated tone. DeLillo‘s explicit title tells the theme of the play, while allowing the dialogue itself to explore it implicitly.
As with ‗The Rapture‘, DeLillo experiments with word choice in his early drafts. His deep interest in language and phonetic patterns is evident in the following edit. The longer original version is this:
223 Don DeLillo, Box 78, Folder 4: Valparaiso—drafts, notes on, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
83
The sentences that trail away. The pauses. The clauses. The mannerisms. The idiosyncrasies. The pauses. The clauses.
These lines were pared down to the following:
Woman: …Words that trail away. The pauses. The clauses.
Keeping the phrases ―[t]he mannerisms… the idiosyncracies‖ again ensures an implicit discussion of these features of human interaction. The words ―pauses… clauses‖ privileges the sound of the woman‘s lines as they would be spoken on stage, catching the spectators‘ attention with its unexpected rhyme.
Second Part The second part of ‗The Mystery‘ may have had its roots much earlier than its production date, in Mao II (1991), as one of the lines has been taken directly from the novel. In ‗The Mystery‘, the exchange between the man and woman has sleepy undertones:
Woman: Long day. Man: A good night‘s sleep. Woman: Long slow day. Lights slowly down.
In Mao II, Karen and Scott have a strikingly similar conversation:
―Long day,‖ she said. ―Let me tell you.‖ ―All that driving, you must be really.‖224
Both open with the same weary line, and subsequent agreement from the other person. The sentences in the play are cut short, bearing a strong resemblance with the dialogue in The Players (1977):
[S]poken by urban men and women who live together, who know each other‘s speech patterns and thought patterns and finish each other‘s sentences or don‘t even bother because it isn‘t necessary225
224 DeLillo, Mao II, p. 32. 225 Begley, p. 92.
84 Regarding the theme of everyday domestic life, such familiar language exposes the banality all the more. There is, too, a sense of exhaustion present in both excerpts, a weariness towards life and the difficulties one must overcome.
This intermission chapter has allowed us a chance to take a brief look at DeLillo‘s shortest of plays, ‗The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed Into Heaven‘, and ‗The Mystery at the Middle of Ordinary Life‘, both being only about a minute or two long in performance. If we were to estimate the significance of these texts in his oeuvre, it would be in terms of their relationship to his other works: ‗The Rapture‘, with its potent and religious depiction of a celebrity‘s intimate, personal life details, prefigures Michael Majeski‘s initiation into fame in Valparaiso, first performed seven years later in 1999. ‗The Mystery‘, on the other hand, continues DeLillo‘s interest in the language of familiarity, first seen upon the stage in the dialogue of ‗The Engineer of Moonlight‘, and in the novel Mao II, while developing even further in the conversations on marriage in Valparaiso. We can see from drafts and notes pertaining to the one-minute plays that DeLillo used them as exercises in potency, paring down and concisely communicating to his spectators the essence of the poles of human ordinariness and extraordinariness.
85 CHAPTER 4
Technology and the Celebrity Circus in Valparaiso (2004)
Don DeLillo once remarked, ―We‘re all one beat away from becoming elevator music‖,226 giving voice to the fear that we all might one day be absorbed into the mechanics of background technology, reducing the richness of the human psyche to a second-rate polyphonic whine. The theme of pervasive technology and its effects on mediated human experience is one for which DeLillo is well known. The majority of his works depict worlds in which experience is mediated in some way, whether through television, film, advertising, computers or reflected images in glass buildings and car windows. The clustered motifs of media, technology and data are most noticeably present in the novels Americana (1971), White Noise (1985), Mao II (1991) and Cosmopolis (2003), as well as in the plays ‗The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed Into Heaven‘ (1990) and Valparaiso (2004). This chapter explores the themes of technology‘s effect on mediated experience and its influence on the celebrity process in Valparaiso (2004).
In its widest sense, the term ‗technology‘ refers to any product of the practical application of scientific or technological knowledge.227 However, in what follows I will focus particularly on communicative technology in its most sophisticated and developed sense, since these are the forms with which DeLillo is concerned. Such technology includes electronic devices, electronic media technology, and mediating projections and representations. As a writer based in New York, it is no surprise that he foregrounds these technologies. In an interview with Gerald Howard, DeLillo explains how the technology of film, and the image, has become such a large component of contemporary life:
I suppose film gives us a deeply self-conscious sense, but beyond that it‘s simply such a prevalent fact of contemporary life that I don‘t think any attempt to understand the way we live and the way we think and the way we feel about ourselves can proceed without a deep consideration of the power of the image.228
226 Begley, ―The Art of Fiction CXXXV: Don DeLillo‖, Conversations with Don DeLillo, p. 97. 227 I loosely follow one of the Oxford English Dictionary definitions of ‗technology‘: ―The branch of knowledge dealing with the mechanical arts and applied sciences; the study of this‖, as well as the ―application of such knowledge for practical purposes‖. 228 Gerald Howard, ‗The American Strangeness: An Interview With Don DeLillo‘, n.d., 19 Nov. 2009,
86
The critical worth effect of Valparaiso lies in its investigation of the image and the interview to promote fame. As talk show host Delfina advises celebrity protagonist Michael Majeski, ―Do not disappear off camera… Off-camera lives are unverifiable‖.229
DeLillo has spoken widely about his interest in technologically-mediated contemporary life, and there has been much scholarly analysis of its representation in his novels. For instance, Adam Begley‘s reading of Underworld sees technology as coming ―freighted with personal threat‖.230 He writes that ―[d]igital communications, a new wave of powerful and sophisticated technology, seem tailor-made for the promotion of paranoia‖.231 In Mao II, Scott claims that Bill believes our desperation for meaning ―has led us toward some thing larger and darker… the news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe‖.232 David Cowart‘s reading of Americana highlights a Baudrillardian real/image divide: ―What the author presents is a set of simulacra: manuscript and film and book mirroring a life and each other, words and images that pretend to mask a person named David Bell‖.233 These are only a few examples of techno-centric readings of DeLillo‘s work; one must not be reductive of his technological concerns, however. DeLillo does not simply note the existence of technology and its pervasiveness in contemporary life, but delineates an intersection between technology, death and language. DeLillo‘s works are interested in the totality of technology, the ―total exposure, total revelation, total absorption of the subject‖,234 and also its negation when it fails to work.
DeLillo‘s Valparaiso (2004) was published as a playtext in 2003 and first performed in January 1999 at the American Repertory Theatre, directed by David Wheeler. In an interview with Jody McAuliffe, DeLillo outlines the vision that was the seed for Valparaiso. For a number of years he‘d had the idea of ―a man getting on a plane and going to the wrong city, a city that had the same name as his
229 Don DeLillo, Valparaiso (London: Picador, 2004), p. 83. All subsequent quotations sourced from this text will be provided within in-text parentheses. 230 Begley, n.p. 231 Begley, n.p. 232 DeLillo, Mao II, p. 72. 233 Cowart, ―For Whom Bell Tolls: Don DeLillo's Americana‖, p. 604. 234 Don DeLillo, red notebook 2, labelled A.R.T., Box 78, Folder 4: Valparaiso—drafts, notes on, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
87 destination but turns out to be a totally different place‖.235 He began working on the first act of Valparaiso, then disappointedly abandoned it and wrote Underworld, only to return more clearly to it afterwards. The play portrays the social pressures faced by a couple when one spouse‘s ordinary life is made sensational through a chance mistake. The married lead characters, Michael and Livia Majeski, contend with their sudden thrust into international media spotlight as a result of system analyst Michael‘s extraordinary travel experience. Intending to fly to Valparaiso, Indiana, he accidentally finds himself in Valparaiso, Florida. He then boards another plane and finds himself in Valparaíso, Chile. Despite its strangeness, this premise has its roots in reality. A 2002 newspaper article in DeLillo‘s collections reveals that a real- life British couple intending to fly to a summery Sydney, Australia, found themselves in the tiny town of Sydney, Canada, thoroughly unprepared for the harsh Canadian winter.236 Valparaiso focuses upon the aftermath of a fictional event and the questions that interviewers of the famous—or their audiences—may want to ask but do no more than imply: What constitutes a celebrity? Are celebrities required to ‗deserve‘ their fame? And if so, what is expected of them?
The spectators of this play are given a first impression of potential secrecy, hopelessness, and a mystery with a story waiting to be uncovered. This should be separated from what the TV audience in Act Two knows, since it is only the play‘s audience in Act 1 who is let in on Michael‘s secret. The two audiences are physically the same, but for the purposes of the plot, they are separately informed of various plot information. The audience of Valparaiso‘s performance becomes the talk-show audience within Act 2. Furthermore, the boundaries between the play‘s spectators and the talk show‘s audience are collapsed, though the stage/auditorium divide remains. Anything that any member of the audience says or does in Act 2 becomes part of the play, as each of them is a character within it. Similar to The Day Room, questions of roles and role-playing arise; however, while The Day Room is concerned with who is mad and who is acting, in Valparaiso DeLillo investigates
235 McAuliffe, p. 612. 236 A copy of ―Holiday Mix-Up in Tale of Two Sydneys‖, CNN.com, 5 Aug. 2002, can be found in Box 78, Folder 5: Valparaiso—General notes, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Though that article no longer exists online, the BBC also reported the news: ―Britons Fly to ‗Wrong‘ Sydney‖, BBC, 5 Aug. 2002
88 how the private becomes public, and, in a sense, how the public (that is, the play spectators in a theatre) becomes private (that is, a small talk-show audience in a pseudo-living-room setting). This role-changing technique is effective in parodying the nature of media, as the spectators, by being both play spectators and TV audience, soon discover that talk-show hosts Teddy and Delfina are comically self- absorbed, outrageous characters.
This chapter identifies three main interrelated themes of the play Valparaiso: the centrality of technology in the creation and maintenance of contemporary celebrity, and its affect on personal identity. The structure of this chapter is as follows: first, in §4.1, I evaluate whether there exists agency within technology, and will specifically examine the idea of there being a Will within technology, or within the people who make use of it, and examine how technology is represented in Valparaiso. Second, and tied to agency and technology, is the theme of celebrity. In §4.2 I will expose the reliance that the creation and promotion of the celebrity world has on technological visual mediums, and what is expected of celebrities by media personnel. The play‘s language is analysed in §4.3, in particular the influences of Pinter and Beckett on DeLillo‘s stylised dialogue and pauses. In §4.4 I will use my analyses of technology and celebrity within Valparaiso to offer some concluding thoughts on DeLillo‘s portrayal of identity within the play.
First, a word on its performance history. Valparaiso appeared at the American Repertory Theatre in 1999, and was then produced in 2000 by Chicago‘s Steppenwolf Theater and the Íomhá Ildánach Theatre Company in Dublin (2000). The reviews paint a negative picture of the play. It is described as a ―black comedy‖ with ―Pinter-like dialogue‖ by Arthur Lazere, a ―dire, intellectual comedy‖ by Bruce Weber, simply a ―story‖ by Dominic Maxwell, and a two-act play that ―evokes certain conventions of Greek theater‖ and ―capitalism is the master trope‖ by John N. Duvall.237 Portland reviewer Eric Bartels also admits that some theatre
237 Arthur Lazere, ―Valparaiso‖, Culturevulture.net, 12 Aug. 2000, 7 May 2008
89 is easy, but Valparaiso is ―no such animal‖.238 The language in his short review (―withering examination‖, ―crushed‖, ―powerful‖, ―body blow‖ and ―brutally effective‖) gives a sense of the play as a very tiring, emotional ride where ―between the playwright‘s sharp, often provocative dialogue and a fast-paced production framed by jarring soundscapes, it is no picnic‖.239 Jeinsen Lam in London was just as exhausted by how the ―characters converse in an overtly un-naturalistic manner‖;240 likewise, in 2007, Janice Cane ―grew weary‖ of the unrealistic characters and repetitive interviewing.241 The more recent 2010 production by University Theatre in Madison was reviewed by Jennifer A. Smith as having ―strong visual and technical elements‖, however, ―the play just doesn‘t hold together‖ because the ―[s]tilted, self-conscious language seems to hold the cast back‖. Smith concludes poignantly: ―Contemporary culture, in all its banality and horror, has so superseded DeLillo‘s world that the play‘s impact is blunted.‖242 Director Jeremy Thomas Poulsen and the university cast of graduates and undergraduates ―focused on identity, i.e. what makes us human and why we desire more‖.243 The investigation of identity did come across to the spectators, and this chapter will further analyse how contemporary identity is presented in the playtext.244
Weber, in his review, introduces the playwright as primarily a novelist,245 and Bartels equally describes DeLillo as ―the author of more than a dozen novels and several plays‖,246 placing him more naturally in the genre of fiction than theatre. In Lam‘s terms, Valparaiso is ―a novelist‘s idea of a play‖, ―flawed and only mildly provocative‖.247 DeLillo‘s own reception of one of the performances was
238 Eric Bartels, ―New accidental celebrity gets a Chile reception‖, The Portland Tribune, 1 Sept. 2006, 22 Aug. 2008
90 ―mysterious‖, focussed largely on the spectators‘ reactions.248 He expressed pleasure at the spectators‘ being ―receptive, line by line‖, possessing a thoughtfulness that led DeLillo to gain a ―sense of the play‘s strangeness‖.249
Valparaiso‘s two acts have received different receptions.250 We can imagine a possible staging of the two acts through the photographs on the following page: Image 1 shows a paper replica of a stage from a performance of Valparaiso, with the top image portraying the talk show stage in Act Two, and the bottom the domestic setting in Act One:251
248 McAuliffe, p. 611. 249 McAuliffe, p. 612. 250 For two of these, see Carolyn Clay, ―Traveling Man: DeLillo Marches Into the Maw of the Media‖ Boston Phoenix, 11 February 1999, 3 April 2008
91
Figure 1: Production stage set-up paper representation.
4.1 The Relationship Between Technology and its Users Valparaiso is a play about a married man, Michael Majeski, who is cast into sudden celebrity. The narrative is driven by the subsequent interviews given by Michael,
92 and his appearance on a talk show, hence the action is underpinned by the technological constructs in which Michael and the other characters are situated. Husband and wife, Michael and Livia Majeski, use televisions and telephones; Delfina and Teddy, the hosts of the talk-show on which Michael appears, manipulate the televised image and recordings by addressing cameras and imagined home audiences. Technology—both individual and wider systems—is present in Valparaiso and others of DeLillo‘s works, with its pervasiveness often read in a negative light by critics and reviewers. Emmanuel S. Nelson, for instance, names the media culture in Valparaiso as ―one of the compulsive coping mechanisms modern people use to deny any consciousness of tragic, spiritual, and moral failure‖.252 He further claims that ―[n]o meaningful relationship exists for any characters except through electronic media‖.253 I deviate from this reading by showing that meaningful relationships do indeed still exist in DeLillo‘s works, since electronic media simply serve to do as we command, being simply an extension of our desires.
The ‘Will’ of Technology In one of his notebooks, DeLillo attributes the following provocative quote to his friend Frank Lentricchia: ―Technology has a natural will, and that will is always totalitarian.‖254 DeLillo extended this by stating that technology‘s ―secret drive is toward total exposure, total absorption, total revelation‖.255 According to him, ―cameras, audio devices and videotapes are not just the technological implements, … [they] have a will, a power that shapes our needs and desires, our entire reality‖.256 It is this ‗will‘, this movement towards total exposure, absorption, and revelation that DeLillo engages with and represents in his work.
However, as the quotation from Lentricchia suggests, the will of technology is directed towards a particular aim. The sense of ‗will‘ at stake here is more akin to the Nietzschean idea of ‗will‘: something‘s or someone‘s intentional progression towards greatness—than the sense of a ‗will‘ tied to having free will—a capacity to
252 Emmanuel S. Nelson, ―Don DeLillo‖, The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Multiethnic American Literature, vol. 2, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005, p. 571. 253 Nelson, p. 572. 254 Box 78, Folder 4: Valparaiso—drafts, notes on, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. 255 Don DeLillo, letter to Frank Galati, Box 78, Folder 4: Valparaiso—drafts, notes on, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. 256 DeLillo, letter to Frank Galati.
93 make decisions and act on them. Lentricchia indicates that technology‘s will is moving towards progress, becoming more powerful because it is compelled to drive onwards and upwards into domination. This ―digital imperative is the ambient noise of the planet‖.257 What are we to make of this claim that technology—and, in particular, communication technology—has a will towards progress, power, and domination? On the one hand, we might take DeLillo to be positing the existence of a kind of literal consciousness within inanimate technological objects. For example, a television in DeLillo‘s work may have a sense of impulsion towards representation and saturation, somehow ‗yearning‘ to show its images to its viewers. Then, as a Baudrillardian result, representation becomes primary, leading to what Klaus Benesch calls a ―break-down of the real as a category of human discourse altogether‖.258 Hence, he highlights this play‘s postmodern theme as being ―the loss of meaning in a social environment entirely constructed by electronic fictions‖.259
On the other hand, and I would argue much more likely, the claim that technology has a totalitarian will may be serving as a metaphor to give direct symbolic access to the personification of technological objects. Communication technologies are presented as personified and driven towards self-replication, dissemination and control, but these qualities are metaphoric rather than actual. In this way, DeLillo purposely gives technology an animate presence for the purpose of better representing the process of mediation. The impulsion that is given to technology is a non-literal personification ‗tool‘ to help us realise how the will is manifest within ourselves as users of the technology. Consequently, DeLillo‘s repetitive inclusion of screens and data is not motivated by his interest in the screens and data themselves, but in their human users.
It then follows that the will of technology is not entirely within devices, independent of human users. The will of technology is in fact actually the will of its users—in the case of Michael, as we shall see, his desire to better understand himself and construct an identity through his interaction with his technological surroundings. Thus, although technology seems to have a will of its own, and the
257 Box 9, Folder 8: Cosmopolis—Notes, in notebook, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. 258 Benesch, n.p. 259 Benesch, n.p.
94 metaphor of will is apt in this context, it is, ultimately, the will of the users of technology that lies behind this appearance. In what follows, I argue for a human- centred theory of technology‘s totalitarian will. The omnipotence associated with technology in DeLillo‘s work is within users; it is a logical error to attribute power to objects that need operators to operate them. This understanding allows us to make better sense of the dilemma DeLillo‘s characters face: they want (and have) their experiences increasingly mediated by technology, but at the same time endeavour to retain an aspect of their ‗real‘ selves. It is the tension between these two poles that gives rise to the quote with which I began this chapter: our fear that we are one beat away from becoming elevator music is perhaps comprised of our repeated grateful use of elevators, and our fear of being suppressed by them.
Although characters in DeLillo‘s works initially seem to be irrevocably dominated by the technology around them, it is evident in the overall narratives that technology is always combined with the organic—the human—in a relationship by which the organic takes precedence over technology. For instance, despite his unshakable goal of filming small-town life, David Bell in Americana still finds body-pleasure in sex and wonders if Sullivan thinks his body ―to be beautiful‖.260 Additionally, Eric Packer, in a passage near the end of Cosmopolis, realises that ―[t]he things that made him who he was could hardly be identified much less converted to data‖.261 Technology in Valparaiso is human-centred, despite the intermittent discord between man and machine, because this dissonance is precisely a catalyst for DeLillo‘s characters to search for a personal sense of self. Even though electronics are so pervasive—for instance, the play opens with an electronic sound like a ―synthesized roaring wind‖ (13)—they do not take a self- serving or self-organizing form, but instead foreground the characters‘ personal development around the equipment.
As DeLillo writes in his notes, Michael is searching for an identity ―through public means‖, and, equally, the ―media will shape him, guide him to self- realization‖.262 Hence, the Will that Lentricchia refers to and with which DeLillo is concerned with does not exist in the screen, but in we the viewers, who require a medium through which we become aware of our Will. Understanding this new
260 Don DeLillo, Americana, p. 332. 261 Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis, p. 207. 262 DeLillo, letter to Frank Galati.
95 juncture between the human and the machine allows for a much more human- centred analysis of DeLillo‘s works, and one which takes into consideration his personal intentions evident in his notes and correspondence.
The Centrality of Technology in Valparaiso and DeLillo’s Novels Each character in Valparaiso relies in some way on technology. DeLillo notes the importance of these technological props when he says:
It‘s very important to remember that in the series of interviews he does there are technological instruments involved. This, to a certain degree, is also a play about cameras, microphones, and audio recording equipment. This is the taken-for-granted presence of the force of technology in our lives—which I try not to take for granted.263
This importance is illustrated in the scenes where Michael makes his confessions, as the visual technological props take precedence. At various points when the interviews are recorded, the audio recorder emits a glow, as described in the following stage directions:
An elaborate audio-taping device sits on the table between the men. It glows throughout the interview.
The Interviewer finishes his adjustments and repositions the voice recorder in the middle of the table. Both men lean close. The instrument begins to glow.
The Crew members are yoked to each other by a series of wires and cables. […] Livia wears a Day-Glo clip-on mike.264
The audio-taping device‘s electrical and synthetic nature, foregrounded by the glow, is privileged as a quality with intrinsic power. The glow of the recorder attracts attention as a stage prop, commanding attention from the play‘s spectators. This can be compared to the supermarket in White Noise, where ―waves and radiation‖ take precendence over organicity.265 In the supermarket, the inorganicity of food is marked by spectacle—its shininess, its hypercolour and its seeming eternal nature—and similarly, the recorders in Valparaiso visually intrude on interviews, reminding the users of their existence and magnitude.
263 Mark Feeney, ―Unmistakably Don DeLillo‖, Conversations with Don DeLillo, p. 171. 264 DeLillo, Valparaiso, pp. 14, 27, 35. All subsequent page numbers from this source in this chapter will be provided in-text within parentheses. 265 Don DeLillo, White Noise, p. 326.
96 In the beginning of Act 2, Teddy and Delfina play upon the audience‘s desires to watch themselves on screen.266 The truth is not yet a priority: entertainment is the aim and spectacle is the means. DeLillo‘s characters are often ready to accept that film and television can be a tolerable substitute for fact, since, as Delfina claims, ―[o]ff-camera lives are unverifiable‖ (83). Beyond Valparaiso, this also occurs in his novels Americana, Ratner’s Star and Cosmopolis. In Ratner’s Star, when science-administrator Byron Dyne is approached by a Bible seller, he retorts with: ―We don‘t need Bibles. We have movies. Anytime we want, we can see Charlton Heston in chains.‖267 Similarly, David Bell in Americana privileges the screen over his surroundings when he admits:
There were times when I thought all of us at the network existed only on videotape... We seemed to be no more than electronic signals and we moved through time and space with the stutter and shadowed intensity of a TV commercial.268
Eric Packer in Cosmopolis is momentarily confused about the temporal difference between his screened image and his actual body, unsure where is the true and original:
Eric watched himself on the oval screen below the spycam, running his thumb along his chinline. The car stopped and moved and he realised queerly that he‘d just placed his thumb on his chinline, a second or two after he‘d seen it on-screen.269
Such examples of characters‘ negotiations with their screened realities pepper DeLillo‘s works and mark images as a vital motif in his work, indicating that screens have become inseparable influences on our identities.
Marshall McLuhan‘s account of technology in Understanding Media is founded on a negative influence: although it is an ―extension of our bodies designed to alleviate physical stress‖, he reminds us that it can ―bring on psychic stress that may be much worse‖.270 Alternatively, Benjamin Bird argues that DeLillo‘s characters and their identities have not been diminished by technology, but rather are moved to personal growth because of them. He writes that,
266 We should also remember that the hosts‘ TV audience is one and the same as DeLillo‘s play audience, creating a double layer of audience participation. 267 DeLillo, Ratner’s Star, p. 21. 268 DeLillo, Americana, pp. 23–4. 269 DeLillo, Cosmopolis, p. 22. 270 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (London: Routledge, 2001 [1964]), p. 73.
97 by suggesting that the human subject may have the potential to choose between competing epistemologies and their ontological correlatives, DeLillo hints at a model of mind capable of resisting technological or systematic restriction and of playing a significant role in the creation of its own perceptual framework.271
Although Bird‘s article analyses David Bell‘s identity-formation in Americana in particular, the same may be said for Michael Majeski in Valparaiso, who ―is a man searching for an identity through public means‖.272 Hence, Michael and David are both characters who engage in mediation to serve their own purposes of self- realisation.
In 1988 DeLillo explained the effect of Kennedy‘s death on his work: ―I think that‘s one of the things that informed my subsequent work, or all my work… The notion of a medium between an event and an audience, film and television in particular.‖273 DeLillo‘s novels and their comments on mediated experience are chronologically divided in two. Specifically, his early novels exist in the context of the Kennedy assassination and the Zapruder film that set the benchmark for film as evidence of events.274 His later novels occur in the digital age of computers and multinational business affairs. The novella Cosmopolis depicts the relationship between the human and the technological. His notebooks reveal that he constructed Eric as a highly perceptive, free-willed contemporary ambivalent being rather than an easily deceived automaton. DeLillo‘s scribbles are often contradictory, such as Eric‘s following ‗thoughts‘:
Nobody manipulates me or puts pressure on me.
I had a startling thing happen to me walking in the street one day. I realized everyone I saw was just as helpless as I was. Only they didn‘t know it.275
DeLillo‘s works reveal that screens and data are not infused with a consciousness: in no novel or play does a television turn itself on, or think on its own. It is this lack of creativity by communication technologies that prevents a paranoid reading of his
271 Bird, p. 188. 272 DeLillo, letter to Frank Galati. 273 William Goldstein. ―PW Interviews: Don DeLillo‖, Conversations with Don DeLillo, p. 50. 274 All rights to the twenty-six seconds of film captured by clothing manufacturer Abraham Zapruder were sold to Life magazine editor Richard Stolley two days after the assassination in 1963 for $150,000. Zapruder, however, placed the condition that frame 313 depicting the fatal shot and shocking head injuries would be withheld from public view, but this was released the year after. Several versions of the film are now available for public view on YouTube, the most viewed being ―The Zapruder Film‖, 20 May 2009
98 works. It is a human desire to spread power through mediation, and a human fear of the mediation failing, rendering us helpless, powerless and alone.
The pervading nature of technology is treated in similar ways in Valparaiso and Americana. Characters in both aim to capture the entirety of human experience—the variety and the vastness—in a taxonomic multitude through a lens. For instance, in Valparaiso the male Interviewer proposes to Livia his idea of filming Michael and capturing his celebrity status to excess:
Interviewer: A feature-length documentary film. A self-commenting super-vérité—okay— in which everything that goes into the making of the film is the film. Everything that leads up to the film and flows out of the film is the film. Including the film. A film that what? That consumes itself as the audience watches. (36)
This bears strong similarities to David Bell in Americana, road-tripping around small-town America, filming an uncategorised and disordered pastiche of people and things, with the idea of capturing a place in time through its unedited chaos:
What I‘m shooting now is just a small segment of what will eventually include more general matter—funerals, traffic jams, furniture, real events, women, doors, windows. Auto-fiction. Actors, people playing themselves, lines of poetry. When I‘m done I‘d like to put the whole thing in a freezer and then run it uncut thirty years from now.276
Both David in Americana and the male Interviewer in Valparaiso privilege the entirety, the wholeness of things, by way of pre- and post-production being the production. They seem to expose the artificiality of carefully edited film, an alternative to passive looking and the temporary suspension of disbelief. The audience and actors are given the active role of engaging with the making and reception of it, so the distinction between the image and the real is maintained. David and the Interviewer are on a quest to capture the entirety of reality, including mundane events like people sleeping and traffic jams, signifying their interest in the ‗whole story‘ of the everyday. Nonetheless, this goal is futile, as neither receives the entire story: David‘s ‗auto-fiction‘ is still fiction, and framed by the camera lens; the Interviewer too receives a story framed by the lens. So although such recordings aim for greater authenticity than professionally staged and cut cinematic productions, one can argue that the images can never reach an authentic state while they are still mediated through a lens.
276 DeLillo, Americana, pp. 288–9.
99
Film as a communicative technology repeatedly features in DeLillo‘s works. He has cited Fellini as an influence,277 and one can note the similarities between Fellini‘s La Dolce Vita (1960) and DeLillo‘s Valparaiso. The word ‗paparazzo‘ was first used in La Dolce Vita, where paparazzi fall over themselves trying to take the best photographs of movie stars and so forth, and even position their subjects to create the best photographs. Valparaiso could be read as a Fellinian example of contemporary celebrity, but there are significant differences: somewhere between Fellini‘s late-1950s and DeLillo‘s 1990s people began seeking fame rather than running from it, so Michael Majeski in Valparaiso exploits his newfound celebrity spotlight to seek his own personal identity. Whereas in La Dolce Vita, Sylvia runs from the paparazzi, as does Steiner‘s wife, Michael in Valparaiso laps up the attention. We could say that Fellini, in 1960, is satirizing the desperation of the media, while DeLillo, in 1999, is satirizing the desperation of the celebrity himself. According to part of David Bell‘s autobiographical film script in Americana, ―there is a universal third person [in America], the man we all want to be … invented by the consumer, the great armchair dreamer‖.278 This notion of the universal third person appears in Valparaiso, where the central character, Michael Majeski, says he begins to think ―that people need my story‖ (75) because he is an ‗everyman‘ representative of the universal third person. As a result of his experience, his website drew ―five thousand hits last week‖, he goes on ―motivational speaking tours‖ and does ―autograph shows on weekends‖ (73), exhibiting a belief in a mass desire for access to an anodyne celebrity. The ‗universal third person‘ in Americana and the general mass of ‗people‘ in Valparaiso are very similar, with the first being the definition, a result of the American Dream, and the second representing the actuality, the person who the consumers dream of being. The ‗universal third person‘ in Americana is created in part by advertising, and subsequently represented in Valparaiso as the celebrity consumed by his audiences.
277 DeCurtis, p. 67. 278 DeLillo, Americana, pp. 270, 271.
100 Discord Between the Human and Machine DeLillo does not provide us with the world we know; instead, he presents us with a world which is a step ahead, a world of more, of ―faster, better, more completely‖.279 In such a world the mediation of experience by technology is taken to its excess, and beyond—to the point of technology‘s breakdown. It is in these moments of breakdown that DeLillo‘s spectators or readers are most immediately confronted with the causal effects of technology upon its users—that is, they notice technology‘s effects through the implications of its failure. For example, in his notes on The Day Room, DeLillo records these two trains of thought:
Waite: Have you ever picked up a phone and heard absolutely nothing? Smalls: There‘s always something. What would it mean if you picked up the receiver and heard no sound at all. Nothing. Emptiness. No acoustical value. Phones do go dead. You still hear something. This is true. There‘s some kind of… life in there. There‘s an acoustical value. Something an acoustical engineer could recover and measure. It‘s not totally empty. A point well taken. 280
Telephone rings. That ominous pause. Then the computer voice comes in, the synthesized voice that says, Congratulations, Best Western, Missouri, Ramada, Colorado.281
Although in the first hypothetical the telephone ceases to work—its function of transmitting sound is void—Smalls maintains there remains something behind the silence. As this section will argue, despite the prevalence of technology in DeLillo‘s work, the indivisible remainder always continues to be the human. Perhaps what we hear in the silent receiver is ourselves.
Discord between people and machines is an indispensable feature of DeLillo‘s works. Jack Gladney in White Noise contemplates the underground nature of technology when withdrawing money from an automated teller machine:
Waves of relief and gratitude flowed over me. The system had blessed my life. I felt its support and approval. … I sensed that something of deep personal value, but not money, not that at all, had been authenticated and confirmed. … The system was invisible, which made it
279 Box 78, Folder 4: Valparaiso—drafts, notes on, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. The first name (Waite?) is illegible, so I have guessed. 280 Box 15, Folder 3: The Day Room—Handwritten notes in notebook, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. The first handwritten character‘s name is partly indecipherable, but I have estimated it to be ‗Waite‘. 281 Box 78, Folder 4: Valparaiso—drafts, notes on, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
101 all the more impressive, all the more disquieting to deal with. But we were in accord, at least for now. The networks, the circuits, the streams, the harmonies.282
Biman Basu notes that ―an undercurrent of uneasiness runs through the passage‖ above: while he is in ―accord‖ with the system, the contingent nature of the synchronicity is revealed by the ―at least for now‖ temporal restriction.283 The precariousness of the relationship between human and systems of technology exists in Valparaiso too: the technological interfaces that decide which plane Michael should board do not work in tandem with the human element of the person at the check-in counter and the traveller himself. Michael is obsessed by the ‗systems‘ of the aircraft and the entire booking process that overwhelmed him into passivity:
Michael: […] I was intimidated by the systems. The enormous sense of power all around me. Heaving and breathing. How could I impose myself against this force? Delfina: The electrical systems. Teddy: The revving engines. Michael: I felt submissive. I had to submit to the systems. They were all-powerful and all- knowing. (86)
Earlier, the Interviewer also refers to the similar technospheric underbelly of human existence, reminding Michael of the ―[s]ystems heaving and breathing all around you. Tell us. That sort of essence in the air. That sort of underbreath of powerful thrilling systems‖ (20). In White Noise, Jack is in accord with the ATM, but Michael experiences problems with the systems of travel in Valparaiso. The entire play‘s premise relies on being in ‗discord‘.
Michael exhibits this discordance in his media interviews by making repeated references to his helplessness in the face of technology. He admits to a power imbalance resulting in his not bringing the discrepancy between his itinerary and his ticket to the attention of the airline worker:
Michael: […] The ticket has more authority. It‘s computer processed. It‘s magnetically printed and coded. The itinerary is a simple piece of paper typed by an ordinary human being. But it doesn‘t seem gracious to reject Miami only seconds after she has called it up on her screen. She has her keyboard and her screen. She has found a seat for me. I don‘t want to disappoint her. (55)
Technology has significant sway over Michael, and has scared him into silence. DeLillo satirises technophobia to accentuate the person within the situation, as the
282 DeLillo, White Noise, p. 46. 283 Biman Basu, ‗Reading the Techno-Ethnic Other in Don DeLillo‘s White Noise‘, The Arizona Quarterly 61/2 (Summer 2005), p. 91.
102 itinerary and its human-processed nature seems to take precedence over Michael at the moment of check-in for the flight. Although the magnetised ticket has a great deal of import, it is the person behind the counter who Michael does not want to disappoint. Technology does not operate and exist in and of itself; it is not simply the ticket that humbles Michael, but the person operating the computers who has the final influence upon Michael‘s actions. Hence, a trouble-free check-in and flight requires both machine and person to work in accordance. Even on board the plane, which ―seemed too big, too wide-bodied for an intrastate flight‖, Michael admits to Delphina that he ―said nothing‖ (86), indicating that he failed to trust even his own intuitions. Bird reminds us that these kinds of moments have ―sometimes convinced critics that DeLillo takes a view of postmodern reality very similar to Jean Baudrillard‖. He continues, however, by contending that ―this Baudrillardian notion of contemporary reality as simulacra is not the difficulty that plagues characters like David Bell‖284—and Michael Majeski—but rather it is that he wishes to ―develop sufficient confidence in his subjective mental experience to enable him to create some sense of self, however wounded or attenuated‖.285 Like David Bell, Michael Majeski comes partway to achieving this. Michael, it seems, like David, seeks ―neither happiness nor the comfort of a substantial, stable self‖,286 but some sort of deeper understanding of his personal identity roles as a man, husband and father.
4.2 A Visible Celebrity with an Invisible Secret Technology constitutes an indispensable part of the creation and dissemination of celebrities and celebrity culture. As we will see, the process of celebrity relies on a relationship with communication technologies: it requires the presentation of a person, and her fame is augmented by her repeated re-presentation to an imagined audience or consumer. Celebrity—like technology, and through technology—is consumed, and owing to its ‗screening‘ of the ideal, it relies on a culture of the visual for its existence and proliferation.
284 Bird, p. 189. 285 Bird, p. 199. 286 Bird, p. 199.
103 Defining Celebrity The history of the construction of celebrity rests heavily on new modes of reproduction of the image. Whereas the Victorian period in Western Europe and North America founded fame through the mass production of postcards and photographs sporting pictures of popular people, the late twentieth- and early twenty-first century mode of fame rests vitally on television and video recordings, as well as the continued strong reliance on the still image in magazines and newspapers.
According to Graeme Turner in this book Understanding Celebrity, the contemporary celebrity will often possess the following three characteristics:
[they] will usually have emerged from the sports or entertainment industries; they will be highly visible through the media; and their private lives will attract greater public interest than their professional lives.287
As a new celebrity figure, Michael Majeski, in Valparaiso, displays two of these three conditions: he is highly visible through media and news, and his private life becomes of more interest than his ‗achievement‘ of comic dislocation. However, since he is initially presented as just an ordinary person (he is neither a sports star nor in the entertainment business) he does not meet all of Turner‘s conditions on contemporary celebrity. Indeed, his ordinariness has the effect of casting him as the perfect parodic celebrity. Michael‘s acquisition of fame is the ultimate postmodern event: performative, excessive and parodic. DeLillo himself plays down this parodic aspect in Valparasio. He says:
I don‘t consider this parody or satire… I consider this, really, the story of a man with a missing identity and the means by which he seeks to pursue this identity. It happens that he does it publicly.288
Despite this, humour from possibly unintentional comedic parody has come across in performances of Valparaiso.289 The humorous element of the play should therefore not be forgotten. For example, Livia‘s jokey line ―I forgave Michael on the Shopping Network‖ (75), spoken to talk-show hosts Delfina and Teddy, is interpreted by Emmanuel Nelson as seriously symptomatic of consumer culture. He
287 Graeme Turner, Understanding Celebrity (London: SAGE, 2004), p. 3. 288 Feeney, p. 171. 289 For example, the 2003 production at Sacred Fools Theatre in Hollywood. For more on this, see Willard Manus, ―DeLillo‘s Valparaiso at Sacred Fools‖, Lively Arts, 5 March 2003, 3 April 2008
104 writes that ―her comment exemplifies the reduction of human values to consumerism and the total absorption of human relationships by omnipresent, privacy-destroying media‖.290 A more charitable reading of Livia‘s comment, though, is a non-literal one based on dry humour. As Jacqueline Zubeck expressed, DeLillo ―shows us tragedy by making us laugh at his comedy‖. She notes that the ―gravity of the subject matter is made bearable by humor, and intimations of mortality become approachable through laughter‖.291
Postmodern events are present in DeLillo‘s novels too, and Valparaiso serves to continue this trend. In his novels, postmodern events are similarly situated within the technological realm of contemporary America. For instance, in White Noise, an ―airborne toxic event‖ occurs, in which a ―dark black breathing thing of smoke‖ threatens to poison nearby residents.292 In Mao II, crowds congregate to watch and experience great spectacles. Rodge, the father of a bride at a mass wedding, ponders new meanings reinvested in such events: ―They take a time- honored event and repeat it, repeat it, repeat it until something new enters the world.‖293 Michael‘s experience in Valparaiso is also a postmodern event, spectacular and excessive. The media must display and expose the full story to satiate the public‘s thirst for disaster and intrigue. Nick Kaye explains the way in which postmodern events represent breaks from previous forms of events:
‗Theatricality‘, in this sense, is not something, but is an effect, and an ephemeral one at that. It is in terms of this instability, of this excess produced by the figures in the play, that one might then speak of a moment which is both ‗theatrical‘ or ‗performative‘ and properly postmodern.294
An interest in such events can be found throughout DeLillo‘s fiction, for instance, in Underworld: ―There‘s a word in Italian. Dietrologia. It means the science of what is behind something. A suspicious event. The science of what is behind an event‖.295 And in The Names, dietrologia is practiced by Owen Brademas, who says: ―I‘ve always believed I could see things other people couldn‘t. Elements falling into
290 Nelson, p. 572. 291 Zubeck, n.p. 292 DeLillo, White Noise, p. 111. 293 DeLillo, Mao II, p. 4. 294 Nick Kaye, Postmodernism and Performance (New York: St Martin‘s Press, 1994), p. 23. 295 DeLillo, Underworld, p. 280.
105 place. A design. A shape in the chaos of things… I feel I‘m safe from myself as long as there‘s an accidental pattern to observe in the physical world.‖296
Celebrity is a self-referential representational process based on commodification, according to Turner. The ‗star‘ generally achieves something, is given air-time to represent the achievement, speak about it, and so forth, and eventually the private and public arenas are blurred by an increased interest in the star‘s private life. Intimate details of Michael Majeski‘s life are revealed through interviews on the talk-show hosts‘ couch (echoing, one might say, the psychoanalyst‘s couch), then presumably projected to millions of viewers around the globe, whose interest is further fed by the next interview. Turner writes that
the discursive regime of celebrity is defined by a number of elements. It crosses the boundary between the public and private worlds, preferring the personal, the private or ‗veridical‘ self (Rojek: 2001: 11), as the privileged object of revelation.297
The collapse of the public–private divide in celebrity culture is not a modern phenomenon, but it is particularly fame‘s rapid proliferation through modern representational means that is the vital enabler of postmodern fame. DeLillo has reinforced his interest in the invasion of privacy when he said that ―[t]his, to a certain degree, is also a play about cameras, microphones, and audio recording equipment‖,298 consciously demonstrating the importance of these stage props as enablers of celebrity processes.
Turner further claims that it is possible to map the precise moment when a public figure makes the transition to celebrity, occurring namely when ―media interest goes from their public role/achievement to investigating the details of their private lives‖.299 Applying this to Valparaiso, it is clear that near the beginning of the play, in Scene 2, Michael and the Interviewer do discuss Michael‘s reaction to realising he was aboard the wrong plane to the wrong destination. For a time it seems like a straightforward gathering of basic information surrounding the event; Scene 3, however, becomes more personally invasive, as Michael is pressed by the female Interviewer to describe intimate details concerning his wife, unrelated to the
296 DeLillo, The Names, p. 172. 297 Turner, p. 8. 298 Feeney, p. 171. 299 Turner, p. 8.
106 incident in question. She prompts him to consider what Livia wore on the morning when he left for his flight:
Interviewer: In pajamas perhaps? An old-fashioned nightie? We need to know. An extra- long T-shirt? What‘s printed on the shirt? Tell us precisely what you saw. Or nude in ravelled sheets, responding slowly to your touch. Tell us everything. Or restless and stirring. That sort of underbreath of stale sleep and bedsheets and body heat. Michael: She‘s warm and soft. Interviewer: And you‘re warm and hard. (22)
This sudden shift from an interest in the plane ride to the sexual nature of the previous morning is where I would identify the moment when Michael crosses the line from ‗interesting person‘ to ‗celebrity‘. To return to Turner‘s characteristics of celebrity, this is the point at which interest moves from the event to Michael‘s private life.
Ostensibly the subject is how his flight to Valparaiso, Indiana, actually turned out to be a flight to Valparaiso, Florida, but here the Female Interviewer stops focussing on this fact and begins to show a suspicious interest in the private minutiae of Michael and Livia‘s lives. Each interview, Benesch argues, takes the characters deeper into an ―encompassing mythological process‖ which ―adds a few minor details to what is already known without ever elucidating the shadowy identity of the protagonist‖.300 The interest in the minor details begins at the first flight itself and makes its way back in time by the Interviewer‘s incremental casting back even further in time away from the event: ―But first you left the terminal, you boarded the aircraft. Then what?‖ (19); ―But first let‘s take our viewers back to the beginning. Coffee‘s on the stove.‖ (20); ―But first you‘re at the breakfast table staring at your eggs.‖ (21); ―But first let‘s go back to the moment you opened your eyes.‖ (21); and finally:
Interviewer: But first let‘s go back to the night before. You‘re pouring a drink for yourself and thinking about the trip. Everything seems absolutely normal. Speak. Tell us, Michael. We deeply need to know. (24)
Suddenly with the use of ―we‖, an audience of magazine readers is implied, reminding the play‘s spectators that Michael‘s answers are not just between himself and the Interviewer, but are soon to be projected to a readership. The Interviewer suggests the public ―we‖ have a thirsty interest for this extra knowledge. DeLillo‘s
300 Benesch, n.p.
107 focus on the process of celebrity, rather than simply its products, emphasises Michael and his use of technology for identity-seeking means, despite the ―taken-for-granted presence of the force of technology in our lives‖.301
Celebrity and Visual Culture Visibility and visual technologies are vital to the contemporary promulgation of fame, as it becomes a question of who is seen, not what is seen. Graham MacPhee contends that visual technologies
permeate the main forms of mass-mediated popular culture, and have played a crucial role in the development of modern mass societies and the subsequent emergence of what might be described—however problematically—as a new global cultural space.302
Vision within modern European culture, he says, has been valued first in terms of epistemology, and second, in terms of aesthetics.303 The ‗aesthetics‘ MacPhee describes is, in some sense, the ‗style‘ or ‗mode‘ of presentation performed by the media. Whether in racy magazine photographs, languid on-air couch discussions, face-shielding paparazzi chases or reports of daily goings-on, the media control the style in which the knowledge is portrayed. Applied to celebrity, and particularly in the American context, I would suggest that the visibility of celebrities works first to allow us access to knowledge about the people, and second, to encourage judgment and evaluation of the knowledge gained. Fame relies absolutely on technologies of visibility, including radio, photography, and television, as ―[t]echnology exists to show [and] replay everything, and it creates a seeming need to do it again‖.304 Hence, not only does seeing famous people give the public a chance to know them and feel for them, but each time the celebrity is seen, their fame is visually justified.
It may seem a minor and self-evident point above—since one is, generally, famous by being in the spotlight—but the circular nature of celebrity, and the need to ‗recur‘ in the media, to be repeatedly re-presented, and to return to the screens again, is proof of a unique mode of being. One must not only become famous, but continue to be famous, hence there is a dependence on repeated visualisation after the first instance of exhibition. Celebrity, then, is as circular in nature as its
301 Feeney, p. 171. 302 Graham MacPhee, The Architecture of the Visible (London and New York: Continuum, 2002), p. 3. 303 MacPhee, p. 14. 304 Don DeLillo, notebook 2, A.R.T (red cover), Box 78, Folder 4: Valparaiso—drafts, notes on, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
108 medium, technology. Much as technological mediation relies on, first, its operator, second, its operator‘s representation, and third, its subject‘s seeing the representation and experiencing the ontological break between real and image, so too does celebrity first rely on the person, second, the person‘s mediated representation, and third, the person‘s consequential transference from being a member of the public to a celebrity in the spotlight. A celebrity, in most instances, is she who is seen, and seen again, and remembered,305 whereas a general person mediated by technology is she who is seen, and largely forgotten. Hence, it is no longer enough for the celebrity to become famous, but she must also continue to be famous.
Complicating the Public/Private Divide Contemporary media like film and television have significantly altered the relationship between public and private realms. Screens display the private publicly and bring public events into the private confines of a living room. As Osteen writes, ―DeLillo‘s characters, even on their islands, usually find true privacy to be fleeting or impossible‖.306 Osteen describes how DeLillo‘s characters contend with the new information age:
Threatened by waves and radiation, by the aggressive manipulations of media, institutions, and their discourses, DeLillo‘s characters seek safe islets of privacy and introspection. His work repeatedly explores the conflicts and boundaries between the public and the private, between collectivity and individuality, between concealment and revelation.307
In an interview with Mark Feeney, DeLillo notes the disappearing distinction between public and private:
Nothing is allowed to remain unseen and nothing is allowed to remain unsaid. There‘s a tendency of the characters to think of everything as potential footage. Things exist in order to be recorded in one manner or another.308
Although he is referring to the post-Cold War period, not his play Valparaiso, this quote remains pertinent when taken in reference to the period following the Kennedy assassination. He similarly said to Adam Begley, ‗―We‘ve reached the
305 There are, of course, counterexamples of celebrities‘ avoidance of media, which serves to strengthen their fame. J. D. Salinger is one such celebrity; DeLillo has noted the most famous photo of Salinger, regarding it as a ―startling picture of an elderly man—he looked frightened and angry‖. He further commented that ―[f]or the editor to send these two [journalists] to New Hampshire was a little like ordering an execution. And when you look at the face of the man being photographed, it‘s not a great leap of imagination to think he‘s just been shot‖ (William Leith, ―Terrorism and the Art of Fiction‖, Independent on Sunday (London), 18 Aug. 1991, features, p. 18). 306 Osteen, p. 142. 307 Osteen, p. 142. 308 Feeney, p. H1.
109 point where things exist so they can be filmed and played and replayed‖‘.309 The multiple replaying of the Zapruder assassination footage marks the beginning of an era of filming, then videotaping, as a serious and popular method of recording events for future repeated viewing. This is true especially in a political sense, regarding politicians as celebrities and footage as evidence of crimes.
Talk-show hosts Teddy and Delfina in Valparaiso are employed in actively blurring the public/private divide, and at the start of Act 2 Teddy explicitly brings the audience‘s attention to this very distinction. He exposes the mediated characteristic of television by re-embodying the talk-show audience and instructing them to notice the ―critical divide‖ between themselves and their images:
Teddy: […] Consider the central meaning of your role. Global millions watching at home but only a teentsy-weentsy studio audience. You are here and now and body-hot. The cameras will swing toward the audience in the course of the show. Not once but many times. Point to yourselves on the giant monitors. I understand the need for this. I encourage this. Wave to yourselves. See yourselves cross that critical divide into some plane of transcendence. (63–4)
The ―central meaning of [their] role‖ is to perform alongside the talk-show hosts, and to maintain their interest in their televised selves. Their televised natures are raised to the level of extraordinary, so they must act accordingly with surprise and glee when they view themselves on screen. Livia too notices the difference between being ‗live‘ and being ‗screened‘, when she watches Michael‘s new celebrity status on television:
Livia: I ride my bike and look at Michael. I see him as complete when he‘s on TV. It‘s the realized potential of the man. He‘s so really deeply there. The bones in his face seem to glow. He becomes an exceptional being. Delfina: He glows. Livia: He shines. (85)
Michael‘s ―exceptional‖ being marks precisely the difference between being live and being screened. The screen is still viewed as special, as extra, and as more, and Livia sees Michael as complete because he has been raised to the level of special on screen. It is not that he is more real, but that he is just simply more. Here we encounter another consequence of technology: technological mediation‘s increasing the power of one‘s existence by reproducing it in another form.
309 Adam Begley, ―The Art of Fiction CXXXV: Don DeLillo‖, Conversations with Don DeLillo, p. 103.
110 Getting to the Truth DeLillo—purposely or otherwise—parodies media interest in the personal through these Interviewers‘ leapfrogging past the actual event and concentrating instead on the unrelated lead-up. The Interviewers first collect the relevant information regarding how Michael felt on the plane, how and when he realised his mistake, and then proceed to deliberately drift into Michael and Livia‘s personal lives. There is a sense of pulling away from the spotlighted moment, and a magnifying of the irrelevant and highly private details surrounding it. This creates what Richard Schickel identifies as the ―illusion of intimacy‖,310 whereby the exposure of a celebrity‘s private moments causes the public to feel a fond closeness to him, familial or friendly in nature. Increasingly, this ―illusion of intimacy‖ is supported by the fact that twenty-first century celebrity is highly interested in the ‗newly‘ or ‗suddenly‘ famous. Turner coined the phrase ―the demotic turn‖ to describe, in particular, the abundance of ordinariness in the recent media:
That there is a demotic turn seems to me beyond dispute. The media discourses used to represent ‗ordinariness‘ edge closer every day to the lived experience of ‗the ordinary‘. Ordinary people have never been more visible in the media…311
There exists a new paradigm of ordinariness within celebrity, whereby ordinary people become famous for their ordinariness, and are interviewed to excess to reveal some hidden extraordinary characteristic. They are then ‗consumed‘ by other ordinary people hoping to be famous for their dormant extraordinariness. Contemporary fame can often constitute simply of mediation—those who are televised or recorded are famous—not for any talent or wealth or beauty, but simply for having been projected to millions of televisions, newspapers, radios, and magazines. This relies on the ordinary consumer of ‗ordinary fame‘, where members of the public hunger for the ‗illusion of intimacy‘ so they too may vicariously perceive themselves as special. If this mode of fame is simply televised or photographed ordinariness, it relies on the desire of the consumer for the truth behind the celebrity‘s everyday life, and in particular, on the consumer‘s desire for a hidden scandal.
310 Richard Schickel, Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1985), p. 4. 311 Turner, p. 83.
111 As the play progresses, it becomes clear that the scandal in Valparaiso is Michael‘s implied secrecy surrounding his ‗true‘ reason for boarding the wrong plane. According to Osteen, to ―discover true privacy, then, DeLillo‘s characters resort to a more active, even aggressive, form of protection and concealment: secrecy‖.312 Talk-show hosts Teddy and Delfina set themselves up as detectives whose mission is to uncover the ‗truth‘ about Michael and Livia. Delfina in particular has a predetermined belief that Michael has secrets that need to be exposed. When Livia suggests she had considered bringing her son Andy onto the show, Delfina and Teddy brush the suggestion away:
Delfina: We don‘t want him here. Teddy: We don‘t do that. Delfina: We‘re not interested in that. We‘re interested in the fundamental fact that an individual conceals from himself. Michael. What are you hiding in your heart? (75)
What Teddy and Delfina ―don‘t do‖ is portray the story of Michael and his family in its entirety, but instead focus on the potentially shocking personal details that are irrelevant to the event itself. In his notebook recording his ideas on Valparaiso, DeLillo reveals that there is: ―no difference between substantial + insubstantial‖ in news. Truth and falsehood becomes fodder for the ―drive toward identity‖,313 which in Valparaiso retains its primacy.
In the Director‘s Notes of the 2010 production at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Jeremy Thomas Poulsen encourages the spectators to interrogate the themes of identity, media and celebrity:
…how do you tell the difference between identity and desperation? How can any of us be expected to differentiate between who we are and who we are supposed to be?… Throughout our rehearsal process, we have focused on identity, i.e. what makes us human and why we desire more. We have looked at the new American dream, i.e. the desire to have wealth and fame, the need to possess everything around you… Maybe we believe it isn‘t real. It‘s just computers and images, flashes of light and smoke. Or is it?314
Similarly, in his notebooks, DeLillo summarises the truths that are finally exposed and prove relevant to Delfina and Teddy, and the Interviewers:
312 Osteen, p. 143. 313 Don DeLillo, notebook 2, A.R.T (red cover), Box 78, Folder 4: Valparaiso—drafts, notes on, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Emphasis in original. 314 ―Footlights.com: Your Guide to the Performing Arts‖, Valparaiso Director‘s Notes (Fall 2010), p. 3.
112
public + private Livia reveals infidelity MM reveals suicide attempt (Each shattering the other‘s domestic complacency)315
Since celebrity relies on consumers of this personal information, and consumers yearn for the hidden truth that is non-existent, celebrity is a process of revealing. As Teddy reminds the audience, ―We have to peel away the outer layers. Don‘t you think? One by one‖ (76). The talk-show hosts begin with the outer layer (the public details of the reason for the fame), and move closer and closer to the private, inner world of the individual in question. Michael becomes a ―hero of self-disclosure‖, a ―man with a missing identity‖, and interviews are ―the means by which he tries to pursue that identity‖.316 DeLillo in his notes marries this search for identity with the inseparable power of technology:
In part, the play is also about the cameras, microphone and recording devices used in these interviews technology -faster, better, more completely Total exposure, total reveleation, total absorption of the subject – the individual – consumption, instantaneous waste videotape – beginning + ending317
The revealing of Michael‘s truths and his search for his identity is tied inextricably to technology, as it is a publicised uncovering of public facts and private matters. Equally, the medium of technology requires the public‘s need for revelation of the ‗new‘ and unknown, since it is new information that is televised and recorded for consumers.
As mentioned earlier, DeLillo includes technological stage props and devices to exhibit the revealing of the central characters‘ innermost secrets. These props are not secondary and inferior, but vital to contemporary life and the process of fame. The stage directions in the prelude to the play use video props to display a preview of Michael‘s secret suicide attempt aboard the plane:
315 Don DeLillo, notebook 2, A.R.T (red cover), Box 78, Folder 4: Valparaiso—drafts, notes on, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. 316 Don DeLillo, notebook 2, A.R.T (red cover), Box 78, Folder 4: Valparaiso—drafts, notes on, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. 317 Don DeLillo, notebook 2, A.R.T (red cover), Box 78, Folder 4: Valparaiso—drafts, notes on, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
113 There is a deep pulse of image and sound. A videotape is projected on the back wall and adjacent furniture. It shows a single image, a high-angle shot of a man in a tightly confined space. There is a plastic bag on his head, fastened about the neck. He is seated, a forearm braced against the wall to either side of him. The plastic is thick and frosted, obscuring the man’s features. (13)
The videotape is further described as ―crude‖, ―marked with static‖, and displaying the hours, minutes, seconds, and tenths of seconds in a bottom corner. Although ―the projection lasts twenty seconds‖ (13), this is plenty of time to show Michael as a man unhappy with his life, and show Livia pedalling on an exercise bike, effectively going nowhere. We‘re then met with interview dialogue after the suicide attempt ‗preview‘ video. Michael and a male Interviewer are seated in Michael‘s office, as an ―elaborate audio-taping device sits on the table between the men‖ (14). The device glows; without it, Michael‘s exact words would not then be disseminated to its target audience, and would not continue his fame. Stage directions point to its necessity as a tool of the process, drawing in the Interviewer and the celebrity-to-be: ―The Interviewer finishes his adjustments and repositions the voice recorder in the middle of the table. Both men lean close. The instrument begins to glow‖ (27). All parties in the celebrity process know that they rely on verbatim answers to interview questions for irrevocable proof and sound bytes, and so the recording devices are indispensible. Interestingly, the voice recorder emits a glow rather than emitting, say, a low hum or beeping. By giving oral/aural devices a glow, DeLillo gives vision precedence; this glow, combined with the ―show-room-bright‖ TV talk- show living-room set, complete with ―pseudo-personal touches‖ (61) in Act 2, magnifies the visual nature of Michael‘s current situation and the visibility of fame.
Michael is seemingly ‗put on trial‘ for his notoriety: media personnel in the play act as cross-examiners, and the public—or spectators—is placed at the head of the court of fame, as judges. Michael participates in interview after interview, beginning with fact-driven questions about the event, and ending with an interrogation of intimate questions, leading to a symbolic death. The information he provides is skewed, and the talk-show hosts‘ bias towards suspicion emerges as Michael‘s facts fall by the wayside:
Delfina: He says one thing but hides another in his heart. Teddy: What is he hiding in his heart? Delfina: Who is he when he‘s not there? Teddy: What was he running away from? … Livia: How can you say these things without the slightest knowledge of the man? Delfina: Teddy.
114 Teddy: It‘s her show. She can say anything she wants. (88–9)
By asking rhetorical questions with implications of deceit and secrecy, Teddy and Delfina attribute a sense of potential guilt to Michael, as if he is guilty of not revealing all, and of keeping the most important information to himself. The dialogue then falls into a parody of an ordinary talk-show to exaggerate the remorseless hunger for the inside scoop, sending Delfina and Teddy into a vengeful spiral whereby they seek to bring Michael to a new self-aware state of revelation. The crime, here, it seems, is the gaining of celebrity status through the event‘s ‗ordinariness‘, whereas Michael‘s experiences were anything but ordinary. In essence, Michael is put on trial for gaining fame and then failing to reveal the ‗truth‘ behind his motivation to board the wrong plane. Guilt hangs on him as the hosts refuse his answers:
Delfina: I don‘t believe you. Michael: That‘s how I was thinking at the time. Delfina: Do you believe him? Teddy: I don‘t believe him. Delfina: I don‘t believe him either. (87)
No matter how Michael answers, the hosts are unsatisfied with his responses. They remain committed to the idea that he is hiding the truth, since, according to Delfina, he is ―a man so deep in self-estrangement he conceals his own actions from himself‖ (87). It is as if Michael has committed a crime against self-awareness, causing B-grade celebrity guilt: the guilt bestowed upon ordinary people by the media when judged undeserving of celebrity status. Becoming famous for simply flying to the wrong city results in the criminalization of Michael by the media— consisting of the Interviewers and Delfina and Teddy—and they hold judgment over what Michael‘s motivations were. Rather than a one-off news story, they want the ‗truth‘. Since Michael seems unable to expose his real actions until the end— and even then his suicide attempt is still veiled in mystery—in the meantime his lack of self-awareness leaves Teddy and Delfina unsatisfied.
Michael‘s crime is a loss of identity through space. It is a crime of dislocation and an anonymous, accidental losing of oneself that leads to self- estrangement. Michael, the ‗criminal‘, is guilty of being dragged onto the celebrity scene after an extraordinary event, but cannot justify his extraordinariness with an entirely truthful explanation. In the opening scenes, he describes feeling
115 ―[d]isplaced or misplaced‖ when he was on the wrong plane, but not ―in body only‖. He felt a tremendous separation from ―everything. Physically safe. Physically fine. But cut off from everything around me. And from myself as well‖ (15). Michael initially appears to be an ‗Everyman‘, a run-of-the-mill businessman who stood in as a substitute for an ill colleague on a work flight and found himself somewhere other than where he had planned to go. It is vital to the characterization of Michael that he must appear to be as everyday and unremarkable in every way except for his experience, so that his arrival on the celebrity scene hinges on the hidden extraordinariness he is required to reveal. The reason for the media interest is not his capacity to be and represent average Americans, but to signify the special people they too might be discovered to be. Michael‘s apparent ordinariness means he is usually limited to everyday events; however, when he incredibly ends up in one place and not the other, the onus is on him to prove his worthiness of fame. His ordinariness is obliquely referred to by the Interviewer: ―I got everything I need. Just tell me what‘s your name again‖ (18). Later, he admits it to himself:
Interviewer: What should I say? That my life is so unsingular I barely know myself in a mirror. Michael: This is how I used to feel. (44)
As Dewey writes, the ―misdirected flight becomes an irresistible metaphor for his directionless existence, whose insufficiency is suddenly strikingly apparent‖. As a result, he ―undergoes an unanticipated, uninvited moment of anxious self- assessment‖.318 DeLillo‘s notes reveal that he had been reading Carl Jung at the time of writing Valparaiso. Jung‘s thoughts on the pitfalls of self-knowledge are quoted in DeLillo‘s notes: ―The dread and resistance which every natural human being experiences when it comes to delving too deeply into himself is, at bottom, the fear of the journey into Hades. –Jung‖319 Jung‘s influence on DeLillo is best reflected by the unfortunate end met by Michael in the closing of the play:
Michael: This is how I wanted to live. Delfina: How do you want to die? Michael: By die you mean. Delfina: In the best possible sense. In the sense that nothing is left unsaid. Nothing is left unseen. What is your last living thought? Take us through it, Michael. Delfina assists Michael in winding the mike cord around his neck. (104)
318 Dewey, p. 129. 319 Box 18, Folder 5: Valparaiso—General notes, Don DeLillo Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
116 The link between Jung and Michael lies in his connection between his fear of knowing himself fully and his death-wish revealed in his suicide attempt. Michael indicates a fear of what he could find if he analyses himself and discovers what he was ―running away from‖ (89), and why he ―says one thing but hides another in his heart‖ (88).
4.3 Language: Speech and Silence Rather than executing the theatrical styles of realism and naturalism, this play continues the linguistic concerns of DeLillo‘s others by using meticulously styled language precisely to magnify rather than mirror reality. In his article on Valparaiso, Klaus Benesch contends that DeLillo‘s language constructs reality. DeLillo, Benesch writes,
conceives of language not just as a tool to reproduce or imitate reality as fiction but rather as generically involved in creating that very reality itself; put another way, DeLillo is convinced that language is a determining factor in the construction of subjectivity.320
In this section it will become clear that language does not create the characters‘ reality, but, rather, characters comprehend their environment through language, and seek to reveal the truths about their situations. It is through language—and in particular, interrogative dialogue—that the spectators come to realise Michael Majeski‘s secret motive for boarding the plane, and his struggle to understand himself. His subjectivity is deconstructed through language in an attempt towards self-knowledge via the celebrity process.
Stylised Dialogue Michael sits with the interviewers to answer volleys of questions—many of them personal and ostensibly unnecessary—and is mentally confined to this new life of verbal repetition of his story. In his novels as well as his plays, the construction of linguistic rhythm and register is paramount to the exposition of characters within their mental and physical contexts. Dialogic repetition is also paramount in Valparaiso, an important structural element in this playtext: it returns the action to an event in the past, delivering the story repeatedly to spectators who benefit from narrative repetition. Narrative-based dialogue exists as language games played by
320 Benesch, n.p.
117 Michael and his interviewers, largely comprised of either encouraged repetition or forced interrogation. His plane experience is one exact story he is told to repeat several times, word for word; his convictions and memory are tested, but more importantly, the play‘s audience are fed plot points in piecemeal fashion. He is not encouraged to embellish and the interviewer does not ask him special or rare questions. It is overtly stated that his story has been repeated in past interviews and still he is encouraged to repeat it just as he has done before:
Interviewer: Good. I‘m going to ask you the same questions everyone else has asked you. Michael: But you want me to frame my replies somewhat differently. I understand that. Interviewer: No, you don‘t. Michael: You don‘t want the exact same words I‘ve used before. Interviewer: Yes, I do. Michael: You want me to respond exactly. (26–7)
Later in the play, on Delfina‘s television studio couch, Michael expresses his view in a lengthy monologue on the multiplicity of his story, exhibiting metatheatrical self-reflexive thoughts on theatre performance and actors following scripts:
…I‘ve answered every question. I‘ve answered some questions seventy, eighty, ninety times. I‘ve answered in the same words every time. I do the same thoughtful pauses in the exact same places. We‘re dealing with the important things here. Our faith, our health. Who we are and how we live. And I‘m beginning to think that people need my story. (75)
Michael accepts and welcomes the verbal captivity in which he has found himself. His answers indicate that he considers himself to be innocent of self-denial, despite the talk-show hosts‘ disbelief. He invokes a sense of community and collective desires, and his use of inclusive pronouns like ―our‖ and ―we‖ draws the TV audience into the narrative as empathetic characters. He accepts his role as an everyman representative of the public, and fills his role accordingly by performing the duty of accurate fact reporter, despite a lengthy delay until he reveals his suicide attempt. In these revealing interviews, Michael describes this desire as a ―need‖ for the story, and the ―symmetry of [his] mistake‖ is what ―shakes the heart‖ (75) of the public and moves them to wonder because it is postmodern events—whether they are absurd, sublime, apocalyptic or kitschy—that they seek to behold on screen. Though the interviews are intrusive, both Michael and Livia become increasingly able to disclose all.
DeLillo‘s employment of certain linguistic techniques was a conscious choice made to foreground language. He has revealed to Martha Lavey that, ―I do use repetition when I write for the stage—and a certain stylized kind of rhythm at
118 times‖, and specifically, he says, the rhythm ―seems to be natural‖ to him when writing the text.321 He also believes that ―if you record dialogue as people actually speak it, it will seem stylized to the reader‖.322 DeLillo‘s non-naturalistic, heavily stylised playtext dialogue in Valparaiso is textually effective in creating a sense of urgency in the media‘s coverage of Michael‘s story, and sets him up as a protagonist who deeply wants to be heard and validated. In performance, however, the result has been reviewed as less than impressive. For Peter Marks, reviewing the play in 1999, the staged dialogue limits verisimilitude because it sounds like ―authorial commentary rather than individual speech, and reinforces a heavy, didactic tone‖.323 Marks‘s expectation of natural speech indicates a preference for theatrical realism, but Valparaiso should not be mistaken for a play representing that mode. William Corbett, reviewing the 1999 performance at the American Repertory Theatre, draws attention to DeLillo‘s use of stylised language in this play:
In writing Valparaiso he sometimes added ―irrelevant detail to a piece of dialogue,‖ riffs he would not allow in his novels, and he constructed dialogue as narrative, every word moving the play forward. When he points out cuts he has made, he speaks of the abandoned words as having ―slowed the action down.‖ He hopes the audience ―will find pleasure in the language‖ but he knows that the language of Valparaiso is not, as it can be to stunning effect in his novels, ―naturalistic.‖ Instead it is language attuned ―to locate the metaphysics of a form,‖ the form being television.324
Jacqueline Zubeck says of the same performance that it was ―deadly: overproduced, blaring, [and] without a shred of humor‖,325 highlighting the overemphasised technical aspects of the production. Christopher Hickman‘s review, however, draws attention to the language: ―‗Some people say that the language in Valparaiso is not the way people speak,‘ says Austin Pendleton, who starred in the Steppenwolf
321 Lavey, n.p. 322 Connolly, p. 33. 323 Peter Marks, ―Airline Ticket Mix-Up Gives a Man 15 Minutes of Fame,‖ New York Times, 24 February 1999, 5 April 2008
119 production. ‗Well, that‘s right. It‘s very magical to me—very poetic, musical, disturbing, evocative.‘‖326 Arthur Lazere reviewed the Dublin performance in 2000, stating that the disappointments lay in the plot and stage effects. He considers DeLillo to be a ―virtuoso wordsmith‖, but the ―plotting becomes somewhat schematic, and the eventual outcomes a series of anticlimactic events of more intellectual interest than dramatic credibility‖.327 Again, ‗dramatic credibility‘ is a requirement of theatrical realism, and should not feature as a necessary technique in DeLillo‘s antirealist theatre.
Two years after Lazere, Bruce Weber reviewed the July 2002 Manhattan performance in a more critical light, focusing on DeLillo‘s dialogue. It was directed by Hal Brooks and performed by the Rude Mechanicals Theater Company at the Blue Heron Arts Center. Weber begins the review with a swift novelist/playwright comparison:
Don DeLillo, a first-rank novelist, isn‘t a natural playwright. He has a prediliction for brusque, lancing observations delivered like literate jabs, with a strident, declarative torque. But the writing isn‘t spare. In all his work Mr. DeLillo effuses; the momentum of his sentences carries past the periods and his paragraphs seem to roll downhill, throwing off blunt metaphors like sparks.328
He then accuses the language of being ―too carefully molded, too loaded, too calculatedly oblique to serve characters in conversation‖, and most importantly, ―better suited to narration than dialogue‖. Weber mentions his attendance at the Chicago production where the play baffled audiences with ―allusions‖ and ―speechifying‖. Though the first act was for him ―feverishly funny‖, by the middle of the review (and the play), Weber is admitting to a feeling of worn parody and tiredness following the intermission, summing up the production as simply ―intelligent‖.329
Ben Williams, reviewing the Rude Mechanicals‘ production, directed by Hal Brooks, acknowledges the consciously over-crafted nature of the language:
People don‘t really talk the way the characters do in Valparaiso—and yet they do. DeLillo makes a kind of absurdist poetry out of the bureaucratic, technologized, advertising-
326 Christopher Hickman, ―Don DeLillo‘s Chile Dish‖, The Village Voice, 9 July 2002, 5 April 2008
120 saturated jargon of our times. As Brooks acknowledges, there‘s a staccato, almost Mametesque rhythm to the dialogue: characters anticipate clichés by finishing each other‘s sentences, and certain phrases rear periodically. ―Part of my approach,‖ he says, ―has been trying to find those repetitious phrases and having each character look at them and say, What does that mean to you there? What does that mean to you here?‖330
For Hal Brooks, unlocking the meaning behind the overused, clichéd jargon was a driving force in his production. Understanding the metaphysics of the form of television, then, would provide deeper reasons for contemporary motivations behind actions. In the 2010 production by the Department of Theatre and Drama students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, language was once again a concern for the reviewer. Jennifer Smith, writing for The Daily Page, reviews the performance as follows:
Unfortunately, aside from strong visual and technical elements, the play just doesn‘t hang together. Stilted, self-conscious language seems to hold the cast back… despite the of-the- moment themes—all the more impressive since the play was written in 1999, before reality TV exploded—Valparaiso is ineffectual. Contemporary culture, in all its banality and horror, has so superseded DeLillo‘s world that the play‘s impact is blunted.331
The irony of the play‘s ‗defects‘ is that DeLillo‘s thematic impressiveness falls short due to reality‘s superseding ―banality and horror‖, thus deadening the blow of the work. The art that once imitated life now falls short of reality, and the extent to which celebrity and mediation pervades contemporary life. DeLillo stands once again as a visionary whose work proves itself correct in the years following the debut production and subsequent publication.
Pauses DeLillo carefully scatters pauses throughout the text, such as in the following instance where Michael‘s pause indicates what may be a momentary surprise at the repetitive aspect of the interview:
Interviewer: Frame the same replies. Pause. Michael: I can do that. I think that‘s completely doable. (26–7)
These repetitive interviews in Act 1 set the pace and create a gradual build-up in Act 2, where Michael is expected to bare all. Another pause occurs when the male interviewer tells Livia he wants to film Michael sleeping, describing the reflective
330 Ben Williams, ―Any Questions?‖ Time Out New York, 11–18 July 2002, p. 121. 331 Jennifer A. Smith, ―Wild Ride‖, The Daily Page, 29 October 2010, 10 April 2008
121 interviews he has done with famous felons. DeLillo parodies the power of fame, through a famous felon‘s development from criminal into pseudo-academic:
Interviewer: …then he spends the rest of his life in his book-lined study, doing guilt-ridden interviews with anyone who asks. Livia: But Michael hasn‘t committed a crime. Michael isn‘t guilty. Pause. Interviewer: Where‘s your son‘s room? (39)
This pause betrays a deliberate attempt on the part of the interviewer to direct the conversation on to another topic, due to either non-interest or disagreement. There is a preservation of power that the interviewer maintains in the pause after the mention of guilt. The interviewer singles Michael out as ―[t]his man in particular‖ who is ―footage waiting to be shot‖ (38). The event is ―a modern phenomenon‖, a blunder, and a ―tremendous‖ and ―legendary‖ thing (38). When he compares Michael to the reformed felon and pauses at Livia‘s suggestion that Michael is not guilty, a system of truth and lies is being founded, on which Act 2 rests. Subsequently, the interviews in Act 2 are interrogations where full disclosure is obsessively sought to find exactly where the break in the everyday lies, and what makes Michael special.
Influences of Pinter and Beckett DeLillo has been described as using ―Pinter-like dialogue‖ in Valparaiso,332 but it may well be only the quick interrogative exchanges and loaded pauses that liken his style to that of Harold Pinter. When asked what kind of theatre attracts him, DeLillo has named Beckett and Pinter as interests,333 who both use interrogative styles of dialogue like DeLillo to enforce an expectation of exposure and a goal of revelation. For example, Beckett‘s What Where, which was invoked in Chapter 2, is a short piece completely structured as a recurring interrogation between Bam, Bem, Bim, Bom and Voice of Bam. This is the first volley of questions:
Bom enters at N, halts at l head bowed. Bam: Well? Bom: (Head bowed throughout). Nothing. Bam: He didn‘t say anything? Bom: No. Bam: You gave him the works? Bom. Yes. Bam: And he didn‘t say anything?
332 Lazere, n.p. 333 McAuliffe, p. 610.
122 Bom: No.334
We can compare Beckett‘s interrogative style with the rhetorical questions posed by Teddy and Delfina in Valparaiso:
Teddy: What is he hiding in his heart? Delfina: Who is he when he‘s not here? Teddy: What was he running away from? (89)
For both Beckett‘s and DeLillo‘s characters, the quest for truth proves fruitless, since the interrogators may never know when they receive that truth. In Valparaiso, Teddy and Delfina will never truly know what motivated Michael to take the wrong plane, but they can continue the quest to find out.
Pinter similarly utilises the interrogative method; in this example from The Room the questions form an exchange between Mr and Mrs Sands and Rose:
Mrs Sands: Why don‘t you sit down, Mrs— Rose: —Hudd. No, thanks. Mr Sands: What did you say? Rose: When? Mr Sands: What did you say the name was? Rose: Hudd. Mr Sands: That‘s it. You‘re the wife of the bloke you mentioned then? Mrs Sands: No, she isn‘t. That was Mr Kidd. […] Mr Sands: Who? Rose: Mr Kidd. (Pause) Mr Sands: Is he? (Pause)335
The interrogative style used by Pinter, Beckett and DeLillo may imply that there is a deep truth to be discovered by questioning the subject in an invasive manner, however, that truth is never ultimately reached. Full disclosure is the main aim of the media in Valparaiso, but they do not discover what really is hiding in Michael‘s heart.
Michael‘s transition from an everyman to a celebrity causes Teddy and Delfina‘s expectation of his revealing his inner thoughts and motivations. The bewilderment Michael exhibits at their questions can be compared to Joseph K.‘s own confusion in Franz Kafka‘s novel The Trial. Plucked out of his everyday life,
334 Beckett, Collected Shorter Plays, p. 312. 335 Harold Pinter, The Room: A Play In One Act (London: Samuel French Ltd., 1960), p. 11.
123 Joseph K. is arrested and tried for a mysterious crime. His own personal hunt for the truth begins with self-directed rhetorical questions: ―Who could these men be? What were they talking about? What authority could they represent? … [W]ho dared seize him in his own dwelling?‖336 Later, he becomes aware of the gravity of the situation, and asks the Inspector, ―‗[T]he real question is, who accuses me? What authority is conducting these proceedings? Are you officers of the Law?‘‖337 He receives no definitive answers, however, but later acknowledges his innocence in a conversation with a painter:
“‘Are you innocent?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ said K. The answering of this question gave him a feeling of real happiness, particularly as he was addressing a private individual and therefore need fear no consequences. Nobody else had yet asked him such a frank question. To savour to the full his elation he added: ‘I am completely innocent.’338
Whereas in Valparaiso the interviewers interrogate Michael to reveal his motivation for climbing aboard the wrong plane, in The Trial Joseph K. is arrested and guilty of an undisclosed crime, but it is the character himself who analyses the situation with the goal of uncovering the hidden reason for his arrest, and ultimately fails. While Valparaiso‘s interviewers do the asking and carry Michael into fame, in The Trial Joseph K. questions those around him as he attempts to take control of his personal journey. Furthermore, in Beckett‘s What Where, the characters question one another with the aim of disclosure, and similarly in Pinter‘s The Room, the characters talk and question past each other with the intention to arrive at the truth. In all of these interrogative examples, an unknown ‗fundamental fact‘ seems to lurk, and, most importantly, it is ultimately unreachable and hence spectators and readers are left epistemologically unfulfilled.
4.4 Conclusion In §4.1 it was shown that technology in DeLillo‘s play Valparaiso has a consciousness in and of itself, only in a metaphoric sense. The technocratic ‗systems‘ are, in fact, operated by people: crucially, it was the airline representative at the airport counter who frightened Michael into complacent submission, not the computerised ticket itself or the screens displaying flight information. DeLillo‘s
336 Franz Kafka, The Trial (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 10. 337 Kafka, p. 18. 338 Kafka, p. 166.
124 modern technologised world remains human-centred, and this is most evident in the media coverage of fame. In §4.2 I drew links between mediated visual culture and Michael‘s process of becoming a celebrity, showing how fame generally relies on the repeated re-presentation of the famous person, through the practice of mediation. §4.3 analysed the play‘s language, including dialogue, pauses, and the linguistic influences of Beckett and Pinter. We now turn to a final question: what effect does mediation have on public and private identity?
Through play reviews and excerpts from DeLillo‘s notebooks, it is clear that DeLillo‘s main theme in this play is the slipperiness of personal identity, and the method by which he explores this is through the metaphoric power of technology. Technological mediation remains a prominent topic in DeLillo‘s work and is consistently noticed by critics, since reviews of performances of Valparaiso do indeed focus upon the effects of technology, media and celebrity on the identity of the individual. Peter Marks in his review of the performance of Valparaiso in Cambridge, Massachusetts, comments:
If ―Valparaiso‖ doesn‘t sour you on the spirit-crushing circus of public scrutiny, nothing will. It is meant to be a scathing exposé of the global obsession with celebrity and public confession, an examination of a media-saturated culture in the grips of, if you will, video ad absurdum.339
Marks indicates the parodic element of the play, so the playtext has the potential to be performed—and indeed, has been performed—as a send-up of the celebrity scene. Beginning with an absurd reason for becoming a celebrity, DeLillo places the onus of self-revelation on Michael, and takes the interviewing process to the limits of personal intrusion, then ends the play with a final extreme ‗murder‘ of the celebrity by a media person.340 If it had been an unparodic exposé, the content would have exhibited a much higher degree of verisimilitude and less of a comedic touch. William Corbett suggests that Michael Majeski is a hero ―in search of his missing identity‖, citing DeLillo as saying that ―[Michael] does it through the instruments of broadcast technology, microphone, cameras, videotape, and film— he does it publicly.‖341 Corbett makes the incisive point that ―DeLillo stages what we
339 Marks, n.p. Willard Manus too calls the Los Angeles performance a ―wicked little satire of our media- and celebrity-obsessed age‖ (Manus, n.p.). 340 Klaus Benesch mistakenly writes that Delfina ―kills Michael by forcing her hand microphone down his throat‖, but according to the playtext‘s stage directions he is strangled: ―Together, her hand on his, they pull the cord tight around Michael’s neck. He sinks down her body to his knees‖ (105). 341 Corbett, n.p.
125 are used to seeing on our living-room TVs. He holds a mirror up to nature but aslant‖,342 in the manner of parody and satire, even if the writer did not intend it so. While Valparaiso is a reflection of the effects of fame on a member of the public, it is magnified by excess, over-representation and caricature. Michael‘s experience culminates in his intensely performative and symbolic murder. While the play is stylised, it is not quite a contemporary exposé; DeLillo paints us a picture by magnifying the possible into intrusive indulgence. He expands the media cycle into great proportions, and in the process, satirises the course of fame and the notion of identity as stable and determinable.
There is a direct similarity between the impetus of technology and that of celebrity: technology relies on its users for its proliferation, just as the continuation of celebrity relies on media to proliferate images, and both technology and fame can influence the construction of personal identity. The celebrity also benefits from mediated representation in photographs, films and newsreels to continue fame. DeLillo, in the second act, throws the play‘s spectators into the role of live audience within the play, so all those present in the theatre become characters in the play. Swiftly, in Valparaiso, the boundaries between life and performance are collapsed, and the audience may well be left wondering whether, like Michael, they have found themselves somewhere other than they expected.
342 Corbett, n.p.
126 CHAPTER 5
Love-Lies-Bleeding (2005): Speaking of Life and Death
Love-Lies-Bleeding (2005) is DeLillo‘s fourth full-length play after ‗The Engineer of Moonlight‘ (1979), The Day Room (1986) and Valparaiso (2004).343 Love-Lies-Bleeding follows a family‘s struggle with the decision of whether or not to euthanise its patriarch. The play‘s protagonist is Alex Macklin, an artist who experiences a series of strokes and is now cognitively dead. The rest of the cast consists of Alex‘s fourth and current wife, Lia, his ex-wife, Toinette, and Alex and Toinette‘s son, Sean. Toinette has travelled from the city to visit Lia and Alex, and meet with Sean. Alex‘s future is up for debate: Sean has arrived thoroughly prepared with the tools and information for euthanizing his father, but can and should they do it? This chapter will show how this play is concerned primarily with language and death, and draw out the relationship between the two. DeLillo has stated that Love-Lies- Bleeding is
an attempt to explore the modern meaning of life‘s end. When does life end? When should it end? How should it end? What is the value of life and how do we measure it? The play isn‘t meant to answer these questions, but simply to float in the space between them.344
None of DeLillo‘s other characters consider mortality so directly and immediately, as in this play. In his other works—especially the novel White Noise—the theme of the inevitability of death pervades the narratives implicitly or as an aside, as an ultimate end or continuous fear, whereas Love-Lies-Bleeding places mortality front and centre as an issue that must be dealt with presently via euthanasia. This play is the portrayal of a helpless incognizant artist facing death, the resulting claustrophobic option of euthanasia and an examination of the artist‘s family members under emotional strain.
As far as is recorded, Love-Lies-Bleeding has been performed repeatedly: after its first performance in 2005 in Boise, Idaho, directed by DeLillo, it was staged in Chicago, Washington DC and Boise, Idaho, in 2006. In 2007 it appeared in
343 DeLillo, Love-Lies-Bleeding. All subsequent paginations of references to this text in this chapter will be provided in-text within parentheses. 344 Lavey, n.p.
127 Sydney, then in 2008 in Boston and Melbourne.345 I attended the Redstitch Theatre production in Melbourne, and sought out the director, Alice Bishop, to enquire about her use of props and stage walls:
RR: Was the paint on the walls and the chairs purposefully placed there? (The fact that the paint might resemble Alex’s artistic life, as well as his actual paintings hanging on the walls, only occurred to me halfway through the play.)
AB: I wanted the room to look like Alex‘s disused studio space. To have Alex‘s art on the walls would lead to judgement from an audience about how worthy he was as an artist— which is irrelevant to the story. Rather the set designer and I went for the concept that there was overspray from previously executed canvases on the walls. It could also be interpreted as canvases long since removed which have left their shadow.346
In performance, I found that Bishop‘s creative use of the stage walls infused the entire scene with Alex‘s presence. Though Alex‘s immobile body (in the scenes set in the present) allows for the spectators‘ visual understanding of him, the canvas outlines on the stage walls subtly extended his character back in time to when he was a healthy artist with canvases on the walls. This touch heavily personalised this production, and, combined with the physical body of the actor playing Alex, resulted in a much more ‗present‘ Alex character on stage than in the playtext.
Alex‘s cognitively-absent-but-physically-present centrality to the play is achieved by DeLillo‘s minimizing of surrounding props. The playtext specifies that Alex is ―seated in a wheelchair‖ with only a ―metal stand equipped with an intravenous feeding setup‖ as medical assistance (7, 3). DeLillo made a definitive decision to remove other technological controls from the playtext:
In this case, I wanted a minimum of systems […] I mean, there are feeding tubes, but I didn‘t want a hospital or a hospital bed. I wanted him sitting in a chair. That was very important to me.347
This simplified, technologically minimalist setting in Love-Lies-Bleeding is a direct contrast to Valparaiso‘s diverse examples of technologies which featured in the last chapter.348 Michael Majeski also describes their omnipresent, claustrophobic nature:
345 For more production details, see Curt Gardner‘s ―Productions of Love-Lies-Bleeding‖, 6 Feb 2008, 21 April 2008
128
Michael: […] I was intimidated by the systems. The enormous sense of power all around me. Heaving and breathing. How could I impose myself against this force? Delfina: The electrical systems. Teddy: The revving engines. Michael: I felt submissive. I had to submit to the systems. They were all-powerful and all- knowing.349
In Valparaiso, Michael finds himself in the midst of technological ―systems‖ as a result of his new fame on radio and television. Although both plays are human- centred in their core issues of fame and euthanasia, in Love-Lies-Bleeding the characters are the main objects on stage, allowing for a more direct exploration of the interrelationships of family members, and the in extremis father figure.
In DeLillo‘s other works, death is usually feared by the characters; here, however, it is presented as a potentially kind end that can be logically and actively brought about by planned human action. DeLillo has foregrounded the collaborative decision-making process, and the characters as active participators in Alex‘s death. His death, in this case, is humanly controlled by euthanasia, and is exposed through a four-part division of the main action of the play: first, consent must be given by all family members involved. This causes strain on familial relations as two characters are in favour of Alex being euthanised and the other is not. Eventually, consent is gained and the play moves on to the momentary dilemma regarding the method of death. It is evident that Sean had already planned the use of morphine, so they move on to the act itself. When the assisted suicide takes longer than the family planned for, and there is an unexpected awkward interval, the action slows down as the characters‘ patience is tested, and eventually there is the expected death. These elements of the euthanasia debate—consent, method, interval and death—are given a different pace, language, time-frame and weight.350 DeLillo‘s privileging of the causal effects on the characters‘ emotions and interrelationships is proof of his primary interest in the human. The emotional turmoil associated with the gaining of consent and the anxiety associated with Alex‘s slower-than-expected decline are dealt with more heavily than the already- chosen method and the sudden quiet death that passes them by.
348 These include the ―large TV set‖, ―elaborate audio-taping device‖, ―remote control unit‖, inferred camera, ―lapel mikes‖, and so forth (11, 14, 19, 20, 64). 349 DeLillo, Valparaiso, p. 86. 350 For an interesting and philosophically-informed insight into the euthanasia debate, see Thomas F. Tierney‘s ‗Death, Medicine and the Right to Die: An Engagement with Heidegger, Bauman and Baudrillard‘, Body Society 3/51 (1997), pp. 51–77.
129
Owing to the atemporal structure of Love-Lies-Bleeding, it would be prudent to take a step back and view the play in its entirety regarding structure, action and plot, and then situate the language used within its structure. The action of the play is divided into three parts according to time: before, during, and after the main action that occurs in the present. By situating the family‘s dealing with their decision as the ‗main action‘ (7), DeLillo not only shows Alex‘s current hopeless situation, but centres it at the very heart of the play. Rather than focussing on the time before the main action, he uses these flashbacks to contrast a healthy past Alex with the current incapacitated Alex, exposing his dramatic sudden decline and loss. Furthermore, the past, present and future are presented non-chronologically with the effect of drawing out the spectators‘ emotional response at key times. This non- chronological sequence is specifically set out as follows. Act 1 begins with the first scene set one year before the main action, followed by five scenes during the ‗present‘, then one scene set in the future at Alex‘s funeral, and six more set again in the present. The play continues in this oscillating way, with the overall temporal structure set up in an exacting swinging way, from past to present to future, present, past, present, future, present and past. This has the effect of furnishing a sympathetic coherence in Alex‘s life. The differences between healthy Alex and incapacitated Alex are evident in the production by Steppenwolf Theatre Company, as these photographs in Figure 1 show a healthy Alex interacting with second wife Toinette, ―six years before the main action of the play‖ (51):351
351 ―Photo Gallery‖ photographs, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, 27 April – 28 May 2006, 10 April 2008
130
Figure 1: Promotional photographs on Breitbart website, showing a healthy Alex.352
These photos seem to have been taken at different times during the second act, where Alex is in ―vigorous health‖ (51) and props include ―a tray with water glasses, wine goblets, bottles‖ (51). In comparison, the following photograph depicts a moment in the play further along in time where Alex is wheelchair-bound and embraced by Lia:
Figure 2: An incapacitated Alex in performance.353
This photograph (Figure 2) could be depicting scene 1 or scene 9, one year before the main action, when Alex is seated in a wheelchair after a stroke. He is able to speak, recounting his memory of seeing a dead man on the subway, and his wife Lia is beside him. By portraying Alex as he was, through non-linear structure and
352 Hillel Italie, ―DeLillo‘s Play Prepares for Chicago Run‖, Breitbart, 8 April 2006, 5 April 2008
131 flashbacks, the play‘s audience potentially develops an intimate relationship with his motivations, memories and milieu. However, although Love-Lies-Bleeding is a rounded story of a man who lived, loved and died, its main plot still lies with Alex‘s family rather than Alex himself, as the main character is mostly immobile on stage while the others physically move around him. Paul C. Castagno names the theatrical ―absent ‗other‘‖ as ―an offstage character addressed in monologue through indication, symbol or by substitution‖;354 Alex, then, is a ‗present ―other‖‘, present in body but not directly addressed, both within and without the action. As Dewey perceptively notes, he is an unnerving Beckettian figure, ―literally a lex, without words‖.355 From the point of realism, it may have been in the favour of the play‘s reception to present the scenes chronologically, so the audience may develop an attachment to the artist before his strokes and eventual death, but DeLillo deliberately subverts these expectations of linearity in favour of flashbacks and flashforwards that emotionally affect the present action. The effect of the flashbacks is a more comprehensive account of Alex the man, reminding the spectators of his vitality as he was. Non-linearity also delivers the spectators narrative information in piecemeal fashion, aiding in a build-up of suspense that leads towards Alex‘s ironically ‗missed‘ death.
5.1. The Philosophy of Death and the Ethics of Euthanasia The philosophical notion of death and its history in modern thought is outlined in Thomas F. Tierney‘s ‗Death, Medicine and the Right to Die‘. There he explains Martin Heidegger‘s theme of ―death concealment‖ and ―authentic mortality‖ in his theory of Dasein, where death is ―ontologically essential to the very possibility of being human‖.356 Hegel, on the other hand, ―placed death at the cornerstone of the historical edifice of human consciousness‖, and Hobbes believed the fear of death acted as a ―passionate impulse which moved people into and out of civil society‖.357 These philosophers crucially situate death not only at the end of life, as a terminus, but as an element that pervades life while it is lived. As Barker muses, we cannot
354 Paul C. Castagno, New Playwriting Strategies (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), p. 18. Castagno investigates the ―new playwrights‖ that privilege aesthetics over politics, and takes a language-based approach for the purpose of practicality for other playwrights. 355 Dewey, p. 149. This is notwithstanding that ‗lex‘ translates from the Latin as ‗law‘ rather than ‗word‘. 356 Tierney, p. 54. 357 Tierney, p. 54.
132 know death, since ―[n]othing said about death by the living can possibly relate to death as it will be experienced by the dying. Nothing known about death by the dead can be communicated to the living.‖358
Despite the popular view that life should be extended (and death avoided) as long as possible, some philosophers disagree with this intuitive position. Rather than support that an eternal life would be a positive possibility, Bernard Williams presents the idea that immortality would lead to meaninglessness. He does this by reflecting on ‗The Makropulos Case‘, a play by Karel Capek and opera adaptation by Leoš Janácek, in which the protagonist female lead ―EM‖ is given the elixir of life by her father at age 42, and 300 years later her ―unending life has come to a state of boredom, indifference, and coldness‖.359 Williams suggests that ―an endless life would be a meaningless one, and that we could have no reason for living eternally a human life. There is no desirable or significant property that life would have more of, or have more unqualifiedly, if we lasted forever‖.360 An immortal person would eventually experience all that she desires from life, leaving no reason to continue living. The prolonging of life beyond any chance of novelty is useless. Hence, for Williams, the key to life is its inevitable end. Another intuitive idea is that death is a naturally uncomfortable topic due to its negativity. Heidegger‘s writings on death in Being and Time reveal a concern with the inauthenticity of society‘s comfort with death. Death, in modern life, is ―treated as something which happens to everyone, but not to oneself in particular‖.361 Tierney suggests that the struggle between primitive and modern stances, combined with the progressive language of secularism and science, has resulted in the rational idea of a ―‗punctual death‘, according to which death is seen as the final event in the temporal course of a life, and marks the point beyond which life no longer exists‖.362
Steven Luper, in The Philosophy of Death, investigates the concept of death and its actuality through, among other means, euthanasia. He identifies several ways of understanding who we are as human beings, and argues that the criteria we use for this understanding also influences what, how and when we consider death
358 Barker, p. 1. 359 Bernard Williams, ―The Makropulos Case‖, reprinted in The Metaphysics of Death, ed. John Martin Fischer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 74. 360 Williams, p. 81. 361 Tierney, p. 55. 362 Tierney, p. 65.
133 to be.363 He separates criteria for personhood into three distinct types: ‗animal essentialism‘, in which we are essentially animals, ‗person essentialism‘, in which we are essentially self-aware beings, and ‗mind essentialism‘, where we are essentially minds. If death is the end point of our existence, for us to exist we need to persist until death, so the criterion of persistence is vital for understanding our ontology as human beings. Specifically within Luper‘s third category of ‗mind essentialism‘, he notes two varying but related accounts of persistence: the ‗mindist account‘, which requires our minds to remain intact for us to persist as humans; and the more specific ‗psychological account‘ of persistence, which considers our persistence over time (our life) to hinge on ―our psychological attributes and the relations among them‖.364 Luper writes the following regarding the ‗psychological account of persistence‘:
One view, which I will call the psychological account of persistence, is that my persistence over time is determined by my psychological features and the relations among them (Locke 1975, Parfit 1984). These features include experiences, acts of forming intentions, character traits, and decisions, for example. Two key relations may hold among these features: psychological connectedness and psychological continuity.365
Applying Luper to DeLillo, then, it is evident through DeLillo‘s combining of his theatrical works on death with themes of role-playing (The Day Room) and euthanasia (Love-Lies-Bleeding) that he privileges the psychology of the human—the psychological account of mind essentialism—over our animalness and self- awareness as a criteria for our being alive and being ‗ourselves‘. In Love-Lies- Bleeding, for example, in the midst of the family‘s considerations regarding the euthanising of Alex Macklin, Sean says, ―He is not Alex‖ (15). This separation between Alex ‗then‘ and Alex ‗now‘—as well as the more palpable temporal separation of the flashbacks in the play—is indicative of DeLillo‘s placing of importance on one‘s personality as a basis for one continuing to be a person. Alex‘s stroke and assumed temporary lack of oxygen to the brain has resulted in almost no cognitive ability, bar what Lia believes to be a recognition of the storm outside.366
363 Steven Luper, The Philosophy of Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 364 Luper, p. 5. 365 Luper, p. 25. 366 His body at least shows no sign of cognition. I hold the assumption that even blinking in code would be possible for a wheelchair-bound person in a vegetative state, should cognition be present, but this does not occur in the play. Alex, however, is in a ―persistent vegetative state‖ (27)— sometimes also called a ‗permanent vegetative state‘—a medical condition considered different from ‗brain death‘, and even more removed from actual ‗death‘. It is often thought that such mentally- handicapped people do not respond to external stimuli, but the ability to swallow or follow objects
134 Hence, according to Sean, as Alex‘s mind and personality no longer exist, therefore neither does his personhood.
Alex‘s potential lack of personhood is a primary component of Sean‘s arguing for Alex‘s euthanising. Luper explains the definitions of euthanasia, and differences between active and passive euthanasia:
First, theorists often abandon the assumption that euthanasia involves killing and distinguish between active euthanasia, or killing that benefits the individual who dies, and passive euthanasia, or benefiting an individual by allowing her to die. Second, it is standard to distinguish varieties of active and passive euthanasia in terms of the attitude of the individual who dies. Euthanasia, whether passive or active, is voluntary when it is competently consented to by the one who dies, involuntary when competently opposed, and non-voluntary when the one who dies is incompetent or cannot express an attitude about dying.367
More specifically regarding active euthanasia, Luper gives the conditions of,
the act A by which a person P actively euthanizes subject S would meet all of the following conditions […]:
(a) A brought about S‘s death, and S‘s death via A benefited S; (b) in doing A, P foresaw, at least roughly, how A would result in S‘s death, and that S‘s death via A would benefit S; (c) P intended to benefit S by bringing about S‘s death via A.368
The three family members each consent to Alex‘s on euthanasia along a scale of agreement: Sean is definitely in support of compassionately terminating Alex‘s life; Lia, while speaking to Toinette, declares with definite conviction that ―He‘s not ready yet‖ (24), and so Toinette is placed in the centre as mediator. Sean explains to Lia that euthanasia is a positive end for Alex, whereas Lia, for a time, remains unconvinced:
Sean: End his pain. We can live with this, can‘t we? Euthanasia. Good death. Lia: His death at your hands. This is what you‘ll live with. What‘s your method? Injection, asphyxiation. You think there‘s such a thing as a good death. So do I. It‘s where the living don‘t interfere according to their needs. Let him die in his time. (26– 7).
Lia‘s character, in particular, represents this notion of an ontological–temporal end, by maintaining that Alex is not ready to die:
Toinette: […]We‘re here to help him die. with their eyes can remain. Lia seems to have noticed one moment in the storm where Alex did respond to stimuli. 367 Luper, p. 178. 368 Luper, p. 178.
135 Lia: He‘s not ready yet. Go home and work on your speech. (23–4)
Here Lia is continuing her belief that Alex is simply not ready to die. Lia follows the absolute argument that Luper sets out:
1. Suicide and euthanasia sacrifice a person‘s subject value for the sake of her welfare. 2. It is directly wrong to sacrifice a person‘s subject value, which is absolute for the sake of some other sort of value, such as her welfare. 3. Hence, suicide and euthanasia are directly wrong.369
If we apply Luper‘s conditions for euthanasia in Love-Lies-Bleeding, the conditions are as follows:
(a) A morphine overdose brought about Alex‘s death, and Alex‘s death via morphine overdose benefitted Alex; (b) in giving a morphine overdose, Sean foresaw, at least roughly, how a morphine overdose would result in Alex‘s death, and that Alex‘s death via morphine overdose would benefit Alex; (c) Sean intended to benefit Alex by bringing about Alex‘s death via morphine overdose.
These conditions are fulfilled in Love-Lies-Bleeding: they show Sean‘s intentions as based on compassion and the reduction of pain for Alex. DeLillo‘s play follows this argument, as Sean and Toinette eventually convince Lia to allow Sean to administer the morphine. She says, ―I was with him through the night. I think we‘re ready‖ (70).
Dan W. Brock has written on euthanasia, particularly voluntary active euthanasia to delineate between euthanasia that has been performed voluntarily or involuntarily, and actively or inactively. While Alex‘s euthanasia is involuntary— since he has not expressed the desire to die—and active—since Sean administers morphine—Brock‘s article brings to light the philosophical ethics involved. Brock notes that his ―primary aim, however, is not to argue for euthanasia, but to identify confusions in some common arguments, and problematic assumptions and claims that need more defense or data in others‖.370 Voluntary active euthanasia can be argued for through the valuing of ―individual self-determination or autonomy and individual well-being‖.371 The involuntary active euthanasia Sean performs does not rely on individual self-determination, as Alex can no longer self-determine his fate. Hence, individual well-being takes precedence in the arguments presented by Sean
369 Luper, p. 184. 370 Dan W. Brock, ―Voluntary Active Euthanasia‖, The Hastings Center Report 22/2 (March–April 1992), p. 10. 371 Brock, p. 11.
136 and Toinette in the gaining of consent from Lia. As Sean argues, they must ―[e]nd his pain. We can live with this, can‘t we? Euthanasia. Good death‖ (26). Brock notes that a request for euthanasia requires the condition that ―continued life is seen by the patient as no longer a benefit, but now a burden‖.372 Ben Bradley also explains how the patient‘s death must be a compassionate way out of a dire situation:
The value of death is naturally relevant to the question of whether euthanasia is morally permissible. The general principle I defend … entails that death may be good for people in some circumstances, e.g. when continued life promises more pain than pleasure. I think that in such cases, suicide is entirely rational, and assisting a person to commit suicide may be morally permissible or even obligatory.373
According to Bradley, in the deprivation account, ―death is bad because it deprives us of a good life‖.374 DeLillo represents the deprivation account through Lia, who has expressed to Sean that Alex should ―die in his time‖ (27). Brock, however, writes that ―[w]hat is mistaken in [the deprivation account] is the assumption that all killings are unjustified causings of death. Instead, some killings are ethically justified, including many instances of stopping life support.‖375
Despite their best interests for Alex, in Love-Lies-Bleeding, Sean and Toinette adopt the pseudo roles of doctor and nurse in the ending of Alex‘s life, but they still exhibit the insecurities and doubts of laypeople unsure of the correct methods of euthanasia. Sean lacks the expertise to perform knowingly, and admits as much to Toinette:
The fact is this. Doctors do this all the time. They use a morphine drip. I don‘t know how to do this properly and I don‘t know how long it would take. But doctors everywhere do this. Trust me.‖ (73)
Later, when Alex does not die, Sean further admits he may have made an error in the dosage: ―Every-four-hours was probably a mistake. Every-four-hours is pain relief, not end-of-life‖ (84). Brock concludes his article by placing a vital condition on making euthanasia legally permissible: its being performed by a professional. He writes that ―[p]hysicians, whose training and professional norms give some assurance that they would perform euthanasia responsibly, are an appropriate
372 Brock, p. 11. 373 Ben Bradley, Well-Being and Death (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. xviii. 374 Bradley, p. xiv. 375 Brock, p. 13.
137 group of persons to whom the practice may be restricted‖.376 According to Brock, then, Sean is not the optimal person to bring Alex‘s life to an end.
The negotiation process between Sean, Lia and Toinette brings to the fore the requirement of consent from all family members. Sean explains to Toinette that ―[w]e have to get her explicit consent‖ (20). DeLillo may have been influenced by a real-life case of failed consent playing out on the news—the case of Terri Schiavo. At the time of the play‘s being written, 41-year-old Floridian Terri Schiavo had a place in worldwide headline news as a potential euthanasia patient. DeLillo spoke about the case in an interview with John Freeman, where he admits that ―the Terri Schiavo situation was in the news, yes. I didn‘t have her in mind particularly, but I did learn some things from that event‖.377 Schiavo developed potassium deficiency after suffering from bulimia, and collapsed from heart failure in 1990, resulting in a lack of oxygen and subsequent brain damage when she was revived. At Terri‘s husband‘s suggestion of euthanasia, Terri‘s parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, subsequently fought against the removal of her feeding tube, and, as CNN reports, the matter moved into the courts:
Pasco-Pinellas Circuit Judge George Greer in Clearwater, Florida, ordered the feeding tube removed March 18 at Michael Schiavo‘s request. He has said that his wife wouldn‘t have wanted to live in her condition —what Florida courts have deemed a ―persistent vegetative state.‖378
The influence of the 2005 Schiavo case is directly evident in the play, as the Florida court‘s description of her being in a ―persistent vegetative state‖ is replicated by DeLillo:
Sean: His condition has a name for a good reason. Lia: I don‘t want to hear that name. Toinette: What name? Sean: Persistent vegetative state. Lia: I don‘t want to hear that name. It‘s stupid and cruel. (27)
Terri died on the morning of March 31, 2005, at the hands of her husband and guardian Michael Schiavo, who prevented her parents from visiting in the last hours before her death. Her parents had fought for seven years for the continuation of her life, their lawyer David Gibbs writing to the Supreme Court that ―removing
376 Brock, p. 21. 377 Freeman, n.p. 378 Ninette Sosa, Bob Franken, Rich Phillips and Susan Candiotti, ―Terri Schiavo Has Died‖, CNN.com, 31 March 2005, 20 June 2010
138 the tube represented ‗an unconstitutional deprivation of Terri Schiavo‘s constitutional right to life‘‖.379 Though DeLillo‘s play is not a direct comment on the Schiavo case, Terri Schiavo‘s death was still undoubtedly an influence. Peter Marks reviewing the 2006 performance at the Kennedy Center also noticed the ethical debate in the play, remarking that ―the play seems at first to foster a straightforward debate, along the lines of ―Euthanasia: Right or Wrong?‖380 The power struggles in the Schiavo case regarding consent, guardianship and responsibility are present between family members Lia, Sean and Toinette. Terri‘s slow death lasting 13 days is also mirrored by the drawn-out wait for Alex‘s death, where Sean says ―[m]ight take him—I don‘t know. Ten days to die‖ (43). There appear strong parallels between the euthanised deaths of Terri Schiavo and Alex Macklin.
The struggle between Terri‘s parents and husband centred on their disagreement on the importance of Terri‘s having a future. A cartoon drawn at the time captures, through sarcasm, the futility of believing in a brain-dead person‘s future:381
Figure 3: ‗Saturday Cartoon‘, August 25, 2007.
379 Sosa, Franken, Phillips and Candiotti, n.p. 380 Peter Marks, ―‗Love-Lies-Bleeding‘: Dying to Make a Point‖, The Washington Post, 20 June 2006, 28 March 2009
139 The characters in this cartoon (Figure 3) indirectly observe the unproven confidence in Terri‘s future held by her parents, similar to the unproven confidence held by the US government in the ineffectual political leadership of the 2007 Iraqi government led by Jalal Talabani. Sean, in Love-Lies-Bleeding, like Michael Schiavo, also struggles against stubborn idealistic optimism: similar to Terri Schiavo‘s parents fight to continue Terri‘s life, Lia maintains Alex‘s right to live. Zygmunt Bauman writes about the ―deconstruction of mortality‖ evident in the family‘s discussion of the ‗how‘ rather than the ‗what‘ of the assisted suicide. Contemporary mortality is actively deconstructed to expose cause and effect, and so explanations regarding morphine are expected. Bauman notes that modern medicine reveals the causes of deaths, linking death with its reason:
All deaths have causes, each death has a cause, each particular death has its particular cause. Corpses are cut open, explored, scanned, tested, until the cause is found: a blood clot, a kidney failure, a haemorrhage, heart arrest, lung collapse. We do not hear of people dying of mortality. They die only of individual causes, they die because there was an individual cause.382
In Love-Lies-Bleeding, the cause of death has been pre-determined by Sean, who has come prepared with morphine. Bauman‘s ―deconstruction of mortality‖ occurs via language in this play, through characters‘ speech rather than action, and primarily through the use of medical language as the transmitter of the ‗facts‘ of death. Mortality is linguistically deconstructed using scientific terminology, with the goal being empowerment and control over the time and method of death.
5.2 Specialised Terminology and Naming DeLillo has said the following regarding language: ―language is where I begin and where I end‖,383 furthermore ―I began to suspect that language was a subject as well as an instrument in my work‖,384 and is ―the way I define myself‖.385 He defines himself as a writer concerned with phrase tempo, choice of words and all other aspects of constructing prose with its linguistic structure primarily in mind. In an interview with Sid Smith, DeLillo explains love-lies-bleeding, as both the play‘s title and a type of flower:
382 Zygmunt Bauman, Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies (Oxford, Blackwell, 1992), p. 138, quoted in Tierney, p. 59. 383 Bigsby, pp. 109–30. 384 LeClair, ―An Interview with Don DeLillo‖, p. 5. 385 Bigsby, pp. 124–5.
140
I think it was first named in the 16th or 17th Century as love lyeth bleeding… The name has built-in ambiguity and double entendre… I wouldn't make too much of the name or overinterpret the verb. Though others may be tempted to do so. It's hard to know how much an audience absorbs from hearing language spoken versus read on a page. I think in many cases speeches can be elusive, particularly if they're dense with meaning. I don't know if that happens here. It's relatively straightforward dialogue, even if not particularly colloquial. It's somewhat stylized, with elements of rhythm and repetition.386
Dewey notes too that the plant, within the field of alternative medicine, ―is widely held to contain healing power to relieve melancholia‖.387 It is clear through these extra-textual references that language is at the heart of DeLillo‘s methodology as a writer. Paul Maltby argues that, for DeLillo, language operates on two levels: a practical, denotative level, and a deeper, primal level.388 This section will explore these levels of language by comparing the language in Love-Lies-Bleeding with that of others of DeLillo‘s works, and specifically focussing on these linguistic topics: the use of medical terminology, names and naming, and language failure.
In performance, the language in Love-Lies-Bleeding is a crucial vehicle of the mood and action. Melbourne director of the 2008 Redstitch production Alice Bishop concedes this point:
RR: DeLillo has been said to be an architect of language, sometimes to the detriment of realistic conversation. Did you have any worries about the language being stilted? And did the actors have problems bringing DeLillo’s over-intellectual language to the realism of the stage, while still engaging the audience at a personal level?
AB: I think any great playwright by the very nature of his work must be an architect of language […] I didn‘t find the language stilted or indeed over-intellectual […] The actors loved this language […] With regard to the rhythms, DeLillo likes to work a bit with repetition for dramatic effect—and in the process of rehearsal this tended to reveal a lot about character and their need to reiterate; to be understood. Stylistically this play sits in naturalism—in the staging of it I pushed it as far as I could to a more representative style—by keeping the black box look of the theatre and stripping it bare as a euphemism for the cave (read vegetative state) into which Alex is trapped after the stroke and which is also representative of his artistic work. 389
The Melbourne actors‘ reactions to DeLillo‘s language appear significantly different from the 2006 production at the Kennedy Center, where reviewer Peter Marks noticed that ―the cast approaches DeLillo‘s language as if the phraseology is his
386 Sid Smith, ―Unraveling DeLillo‖, The Chicago Tribune, 30 Apr. 2006, 28 Dec. 2011 < http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2006-04-30/news/0604290278_1_novels-ideas-don-delillo>. 387 Dewey, p. 152. 388 See Paul Maltby, ―The Romantic Metaphysics of Don DeLillo‖, Contemporary Literature 37/2 (Summer 1996), pp. 264–5. 389 Bishop, n.p.
141 and not theirs‖.390 Similarly, and reviewing the same performance at the Terrace Theater in Washington DC, Paul Harris criticises the dialogue as ―pointed but not exactly riveting‖ because the ―cerebral discussion… limits the ability to empathize with any member of this opinionated crew‖.391 As she reveals above, Bishop consciously worked away from naturalism, into a more symbolic production that foregrounded performativity. She consciously fostered the actors‘ self-aware presence, since a sense of selfhood could more effectively ―facilitate critical engagement with ideas of subjectivity‖.392 For Bishop, it was vital to privilege DeLillo‘s language through simple, minimalist staging. Hence, in the Redstitch production of Love-Lies-Bleeding, the focus was more on what was heard, not seen, with dialogue carrying the action and the scene.
Since DeLillo is a minimalist with setting and stage directions, verbal language in the form of dialogue is the primary way to come to know the characters. I asked Bishop about the difficulties of working with such a lack of stage directions:
RR: The stage directions are minimal and give much room for interpretation. Did you encounter any setbacks in staging it?
AB: When I read a play for the first time, I read the stage directions to see if they affect the narrative then promptly cross them out if they don‘t. That‘s pretty much what I did here. […] I wanted to push away from a completely naturalistic setting […] I wanted to strip the setting down to bare essentials to throw greater focus on the text and raise the discomfiture of the characters and audience. The only real limitations struck were budget and resources. Redstitch is a small theatre. I particularly wanted a landscape diorama to exemplify the passage of time—this was difficult to execute entirely successfully with the budget we had.393
The minimalist setting causes a foregrounding of dialogue and a backgrounding of stage objects. Where the audience has minimal visual cues to interpret, the actors‘ words become the central focus, and in particular, the differences between modes of speech are all the more heightened.
390 Marks, n.p. 391 Paul Harris, ―Love-Lies-Bleeding‖, Variety, 20 June 2006, 5 Sept. 2008
142 DeLillo reveals his interest in recording a sort of ‗stylized naturalism‘ in his theatre dialogue when he says, ―I wouldn‘t use a lot of alliteration, but I do use repetition when I write for the stage—and a certain stylized kind of rhythm at times‖.394 He acknowledges the different style of writing between his novels and plays, and his penchant for formality on the stage:
In fiction, I tend to write fairly realistic dialogue—not always, and it tends to vary from book to book. […] In theater, I tend to write a slightly more formal dialogue. I‘m not sure why. It‘s almost as if I‘m writing narration in the form of dialogue. In certain plays that I‘ve done, I think this is true. I don‘t know the reason. I could conjecture that there‘s so much colloquial dialogue in American theater that I move in a somewhat different direction. But in this play there‘s a slight formality to it. Characters don‘t speak off-the-cuff or don‘t seem to be. It‘s not quite that spontaneous.395
In his article ‗DeLillo and Media Culture‘, Peter Boxall argues that DeLillo‘s writing ―does not reject, delete, eliminate but [is] one that absorbs, recycles, accommodates. […] It does not tend toward silence but toward speech; rather than failure of expression, this work tends toward a sublime articulacy‖.396 While this may be evident in the novel Underworld and even the play Valparaiso, ―sublime articulacy‖ occurs less in Love-Lies-Bleeding. Here, the metaphysics of life and death that abounds and rebounds in the emotion of familial loss remains implicit and unspoken. It is not the spoken words and their literal meanings, but the thought memories and connoted power structures that pervade the plot and are implied in the playtext through the language. When death is looming, language becomes less concerned with its denotations, favouring instead emotive connotations.
As Boxall claims above, DeLillo‘s language does indeed absorb, recycle and accommodate. I take this to be a ‗play‘ with language that is characteristic of this author. Derrida has written about playing with language with reference to deconstruction, where ‗play‘ is
not in the sense of gambling or playing games, but what in French we call jouer, which means that the structure of the machine, or the springs, are not so tight, so that you can just try to dislocate: that‘s what I mean by play.397
In this Derridean sense, it is a slight rebellion against the orthodox way, experimenting with alternatives. DeLillo‘s play with language reflects this, as many
394 Lavey, n.p. 395 Lavey, n.p. 396 Boxall, ―DeLillo and Media Culture‖, quoted in Duvall, p. 44. 397 Imre Salusinszky, ―Jacques Derrida‖ in Criticism in Society, ed. Imre Salusinszky (New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 20.
143 critics have commented that he constructs fictional worlds in which he is able to experiment with his characters‘ speech, rather than employ the linguistic conventions of realism. David Cowart suggests that
DeLillo‘s meditations on language tend to take place in a kind of parallel universe—a vantage from which the author can reframe, reconfigure, or subvert certain of the tendentious and reductionist elements in linguistics, psychology, and literary theory. Poetic and startling without ever lapsing into the merely fanciful, DeLillo‘s language games remind readers that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in the poststructuralist episteme.398
While DeLillo does not reject linguistic rules altogether—since this would result in incoherent grammarless babble—he does dislocate our conventional expectations of idea communication and linguistic description.
A further point to consider is the use of different languages or language groups in Love-Lies-Bleeding, when the characters speak about botany and medicine. Two such groups are ‗Classical‘ and ‗Modern‘ languages, both carrying varying connotations. For example, the English plant name ‗love-lies-bleeding‘ has emotional content that its Latin equivalent, ‗amaranthus caudatus‘ lacks, and Toinette recognises the difference during her botanic exchange with Sean: ―Larkspur. Where did the names come from? Not the scientific names—the common names‖ (34). In their Latinate and Greek forms, words can be emotionally empty—―cyanosis… bradycardia and hypotension‖ (78)—hence, Sean‘s use of their borrowed forms into English exhibits their anaesthetic and euphemistic benefits, steeped in logic and scientific fact. Non-technical Anglo-Saxon or Germanic names can contain an emotional or spiritual resonance simply because they are understood by the English-speaking characters and spectators. The words ‗love‘, ‗lies‘, and ‗bleeding‘ have deep connotative significance for Lia, who speaks nostalgically and metaphorically about the plant: ―So beautiful. Cuts like a knife‖ (38). Even the term ‗euthanasia‘, coming from the Greek and meaning ‗good death‘, scientifically softens emotion. The characters‘ adoption of Classical terminology transforms an emotionally confronting dilemma into an intellectual, rational one; alternatively, by using common words, they conjure up the memories and emotions connected to Alex.
Medical Terminology
398 Cowart, ―DeLillo and the Power of Language‖, p. 151.
144 Using medical language, and, in particular, the technical naming of diseases, is an effective way for Sean, Toinette and Lia to retain some semblance of control and distance in the face of a terminal illness. The family members concerned with the incapacitated Alex make repeated use of technical terms, seemingly to allay feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. Their owning of the situation is mirrored by their owning of its language.
By Act 3, the family has come to a decision to euthanise Alex. The line of tension shifts from the gaining of consent from all parties involved—that is, all except Alex—to the actual method of euthanasia. In the 2008 Redstitch performance, the action intensifies as the atmosphere is loaded with nervous energy and unsettling suspense. The 2006 Steppenwolf production also seems to have adopted a heavy, worrisome mood; as we can see by Figure 4 showing a controlled Sean and a worried Toinette:
Figure 4: Photograph from the Steppenwolf Theatre Company‘s 2006 performance of Love-Lies- Bleeding399
The shift in tension is equally reflected in the change of language: where the characters had previously exchanged passive reasoning in discussing consent, their language is significantly more active now that the deed needs to be done. They begin to plan the necessary actions to bring about Alex‘s death. Sean‘s speech in particular has become instructive as he takes the responsibility of administering the morphine. He has come assuredly prepared with tools to end Alex‘s life, his new
399 ―Photo Gallery‖ photographs, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, 27 April – 28 May 2006, 10 April 2008
145 authority displayed in his conviction: ―This is what will happen‖ (69). Lia, however, prefers ignorance: ―I don‘t want to be here when this is happening‖ (69). The family members speak in short digressive sentences so each may deal with the matter ahead, since action begins to take precedence over speech. Meanwhile, Lia goes walking to avoid the situation, leaving Sean and Toinette to perform the procedure. Medical language becomes an instructive tool when Sean quotes instructions from his printed notes and takes comfort in mimicking the methodology of doctors:
Sean: The fact is this. Doctors do this all the time. They use a morphine drip. I don‘t know how to do this properly and I don‘t know how long it would take. But doctors everywhere do this. Trust me. They increase morphine dosage in the name of pain reduction. In fact they are hastening the moment of death. It‘s called terminal sedation and it‘s an act of mercy. (73)
Where before their primary roles were son and ex-wife, for the purposes of the action Sean and Toinette have now become a pseudo doctor and nurse. This is an entirely new set of roles with new responsibilities, reflected in the shift in language. This is most evident in Act 3, Scene 2, where Sean and Toinette are newly concerned with specialist phrases such as ―[s]ublingual morphine‖ (72), ―tolerance development‖ (73), ―convulsive disorders‖ (73), questions about dosage and how to insert the plunger into Alex‘s mouth. The language of medicine gives assured poise to Sean in his new role of doctor, while his new role consequently transfers Toinette into the subordinate role of nurse.
If we take a Foucauldian reading of the scene above, Alex‘s vegetative state and his family‘s decision-making over his body exhibits Michel Foucault‘s ‗biopolitics‘. Biopolitics exposes the relation between the human body and institutions of power, particularly how ―the body is managed, organised and disciplined in institutions such as prisons, schools or hospitals‖.400 Subjectivity is tied to the way the body is shaped by institutionary practices; seen in this light, Alex‘s body is no longer a utilitarian productive resource. Its lack of utility, coupled with the family‘s humanistic tendencies, brings forth a ‗right to die‘ argument by Sean and subsequently agreed to by Toinette and Lia. This satisfies Luper‘s following condition for euthanasia: ―(c) P intended to benefit S by bringing about
400 Geoff Danaher, Tony Schirato and Jen Webb, Understanding Foucault (London: SAGE, 2000), p. 124.
146 S‘s death via A.‖401 If we apply Foucault‘s ‗biopolitics‘ here, the home has been transformed into a hospital institution: Sean has introduced morphine as a technology of the self, to regulate the death of Alex, and so demonstrates knowledge of scientific principles and normative judgements about pain and death. He tries to use his dominant position as ‗doctor‘ to win consent, and so the house that once was Alex and Lia‘s home has now been hegemonically altered by a shift in power. Where Alex once stood at the head of the family, his son now occupies the dominant and biopolitical role. Foucault‘s ‗biopolitics‘, like Love-Lies-Bleeding, highlight the connection between power and the body. While the above reading sidelines the vital small-scale emotional family trauma that surrounds the issue of euthanasia, it does foreground the power consequences of scientific knowledge. In this play, he who knows the language of body failure is king, and there is something undoubtedly vital in the deep cognitive connections between language and power, and power and death through euthanasia.
Medical terminology, along with botanical terminology, features as the primary example of formal language in Love-Lies-Bleeding. There are two registers of language used by the characters: informal and formal. The informal register is comprised of conversational language, while the formal register uses medical and botanical terms. Natural speech reflects the ease, comfort, encouragement and debate between family members. This informal register is most often used at the beginning of the play, when tension is at a minimum and the family members interact naturally, without stress. All three are understanding of each other, and each is comfortable in the presence of the others. It is a language of familiarity, affection and respect. Alternatively, the formal register is used when conviction and action enter the story, largely dominating the rest of Love-Lies-Bleeding that is set in the present. While there is sometimes intimate and familiar speech between mother and son, Sean and Toinette, an urgent sense of duty in the ‗present‘ senses influences the language toward direction and definitiveness. Once the decision to euthanise Alex has been made, the precise and sanitised language of medicine enters the exchanges as words become more specialised. Medical language allows Sean and Toinette professional compassion as they fall swiftly into the roles of doctor and nurse. Their familial relations to Alex are displaced in order to carry out their roles with slight detachment.
401 Luper, p. 178.
147
Names and Naming DeLillo‘s works are full of examples of naming people, objects, emotions and events. Zinman writes the following regarding DeLillo‘s affinity with naming: ―Don DeLillo deeply believes in the magic of the nominative act, and this idea is fundamental to his work; naming is the basis of language and language is the basis of life.‖402 The nominative act is indeed fundamental to DeLillo‘s descriptions of contemporary life. David Cowart notes the ―uncanny dynamics of names and naming‖, exposing the links between Alex‘s interest in naming in Love-Lies-Bleeding and characters‘ interests in naming in DeLillo‘s novels, like Lauren Hartke of The Body Artist or Klara Sax in Underworld.403 Names are carefully used by DeLillo to different effects; I focus here on his highlighting the connection through naming between language and death. Death and language are inseparable in DeLillo‘s works, both fiction and theatre, since what is named is fixed in a state of mortality, and what is unnameable is in flux within divinity.
Names and the importance of naming feature in most of his early novels; DeLillo consciously notes this in an 1988 interview with Kevin Connolly:
I think naming things helps us hold the world together, almost literally. Without naming I think it would all fall apart. Names are the sub-atomic glue of the human world… I think people [name things] as a way of keeping their grip on the world…‖404
Here DeLillo connects naming with ontology, as directly affecting a person‘s experience of the world. In the novels, that which is human is named, and more situated in experience and mortality. In Players, Lyle Wynant asks his lovers to call him Lyle and ‗―[u]se names‖‘ in conversations with him, encouraging the women to acknowledge him and make the experience tangibly specific.405 When Lyle‘s wife Pammy sees her friend‘s burnt body by the sea, her shock overwhelms her and she abandons nominative language: ―Nothing had a name. She‘d declared everything nameless. Everything was compressed into a block. She fought the tendency to supply properties to this block. That would lead to names.‖406 Her temporary denial
402 Zinman, p. 75. 403 David Cowart, ―DeLillo‘s Intertexts: Some Observations on Love-Lies-Bleeding‖, ANQ 22/1 (Winter 2009), p. 49. 404 Connolly, ―An Interview with Don DeLillo‖, Conversations With Don DeLillo, p. 37. 405 DeLillo, Players, pp. 193, 195. 406 DeLillo, Players, p. 199.
148 of the event is directly correlated with her denial of language, and, in particular, names. If names and objects are ontologically linked, denying the objects around her is manifested by denying them a place in language.
The running theme of ‗death by language‘ in his novels is also evident in Love-Lies-Bleeding. Preparing to euthanise his father, Sean reads from his notes, and the playtext reader is bombarded with terminology like ―overdose‖, ―respiratory depression‖, ―cyanosis‖, ―‗[e]xtreme somnolence, skeletal muscle flaccidity, cold and clammy skin, and sometimes bradycardia and hypotension‘‖ (78). He eventually admits, ―I love the language of body failure‖ (79). The medical language grounds Alex‘s body in mortality, and Sean quickly loses himself in the descriptive jargon. The importance of naming in medicine is underscored in Scene 8. On page 27 the word ―name‖ is repeated four times in close succession:
Sean: His condition has a name for a good reason. Lia: I don‘t want to hear that name. Toinette: What name? Sean: Persistent vegetative state. Lia: I don‘t want to hear that name. It‘s stupid and cruel.
Naming Alex‘s condition exhibits both Sean‘s acceptance and Lia‘s denial of it. As in much of his writing, DeLillo here highlights naming as an effective grounding technique. Through medical terminology, the situation is grounded in reality as an undeniable fact.407 Along with the portrayal of the everyday, such as in Valparaiso, language features as a tool of linguistic play, emotional exposition, power relations and familial comfort.
Further to medical terms, botanical terminology is a second example of naming in Love-Lies-Bleeding. Botany is directly associated with a healthy Alex: botanical terminology takes precedence when botanical names are volleyed back and forth in a game-like fashion when the characters are moved to nostalgia regarding Alex. His family remembers his passion for the formality of botany, in what Cowart calls a ―stichomythic exchange‖408 so the language becomes an exclusive binding mechanism for those who knew Alex when he was of able mind.
407 As a side point, reviewer Peter Marks draws a connection between the ―self-conscious‖ work named after the exotic native plant ‗love-lies-bleeding‘ and the ―vegetative‖ state Alex is in (Marks, n.p.) Alex‘s being in an ontological vegetative state similar to that of his beloved plants could be a rare example of DeLillo‘s black humour, perhaps. 408 Cowart, ―DeLillo‘s Intertexts‖, p. 49.
149 Here Sean and Toinette commence a language game, where the words they utter are directly related to connoted meanings only they fully understand. The Wittgensteinian ―language-game‖ takes meanings to be the ―functions they characteristically perform in the context of our current social practices‖.409 For the Macklin family, the language-game of desert plant names performs the function of nostalgic comfort. Meaning here is not abstract, but directly determined by the past function of the terms in the characters‘ pasts. Language has formal scientific registers to foreground facts, causes and symptoms, but it may also produce a metaphoric sense of immortality in the following two ways: first, informal familiar registers can be used to tap into a sense of memory and nostalgia, thus projecting the usually mortal body into a cognitive space of metaphorical deathlessness. And second, the ontological divide between mortal and divine is unable to be grasped through language.
In Love-Lies-Bleeding, naming also appears in the informal tone of the family and memory. Botany, here is connotative rather than literal. In Scenes 8 and 10, Toinette reveals how she used to talk to Alex about desert plants, and his love for their names. Incidentally, from page 34 to 35, the word ―names‖ repeats eight times in relation to plants, and the three characters start reciting desert plant names. Toinette remembers Alex‘s attitude towards botany: ―This is what he said. He said they didn‘t create the names of plants. They discovered them, like explorers‖ (39). For Toinette, language becomes the vehicle for nostalgia, and reveals the memories associated with her ex-husband. The connection between their existence and their names felt natural, and even vital, to Alex:
Toinette: Larkspur. Where did the names come from? Not the scientific names—the common names. He thought there was something inevitable in these names. They don‘t seem made up. Sean: Barrel cactus. Jumping cholla. Toinette: He was almost ready to believe that the landscape and the names happened together. (34)
Toinette here makes a point of separating the scientific and the common, underscoring the naturalness of common names. Then Lia describes the plant whose name forms the title of the play:
409 William G. Lycan, The Philosophy of Language (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 92.
150 Lia: Love-lies-bleeding. We went to India… and we saw a field of amaranthus, a type of amaranthus, and he told me the common name. Love-lies-bleeding. Slender red flowers. Spiky flowers. Sean: Who was the poet who thought of the name? Lia: So beautiful. Cuts like a knife. (37–8)
The repetition of desert plant names by Toinette and the other characters signifies the past connotations linked to Alex. The language in Love-Lies-Bleeding shifts from the formal scientific terminology of medicine to botanical names again near the end, signalling the move away from specialised mortality (of Alex) towards generalised mortality (of named objects). Toinette wistfully seeks the comfort of desert plant names again:
Sean: Where are you? Momentary silence. Toinette: Night-blooming cereus. That‘s one of them, isn‘t it? Sean: Yes, that‘s right. Toinette: What else? Sean: Larkspur. You remember larkspur. Toinette: My mind‘s so blank. Sean: Indian paintbrush. Toinette: What else? Sean: Joshua tree. Toinette: Do we know exactly what it is we‘re doing at this point? (80)
Her final question is ambiguously two-fold: she could be questioning either their actions with regard to Alex‘s euthanasia, or their volley of plant names. Nonetheless, Toinette has reverted back to plant naming, creating a past existence of Alex through the words she chants, and it begins to have a spell-like feel until she breaks it with her logical question. Names also feature in the aptly-titled novel The Names, where, according to Paul Maltby, ―DeLillo wants to remind us that names are often invested with a significance that exceeds their immediate, practical function. Names are enchanted; they enable insight and revelation‖.410 It is as if language carries more weight than being simply a means for communication: it is the very basis of existence as we experience it.
Fidelity to the original playtext of Love-Lies-Bleeding was essential for Melbourne director Alice Bishop. She believed it necessary to keep her Melbourne production in line with DeLillo‘s playtext:
RR: As far as I could tell, the play was kept extremely close to the original text. Was it important to keep it accurate word-for-word, or were the actors allowed to improvise?
410 Maltby, p. 262.
151 AB: This is only the second time we‘ve seen this play in Australia and because it‘s pretty new, I thought it was important to keep it close to the text. There was some improvisation during the rehearsal process but only used sparingly as a tool to gain access to emotionality.411
Since DeLillo‘s primary concern is language, the linguistics of his work is of utmost importance. For Bishop, keeping the play accurate to the playtext included fidelity of accents:
RR: Was it vital to keep the American accent?
AB: This is something which many people have asked me. I believe so. The rhythm of the language is so American and there are so many cultural references you would have to do a massive re-write and in that case why are you doing an American play if you don‘t want it to be American? We worked with an accent coach. Most Australian actors come to the standard American reasonably easily but crappy accents can let an otherwise strong production down.412
Had Bishop instructed her actors to keep their Australian accents, the play would have lost the American context and shifted the cadence of the words into a diphthonic Australian location.
Nominative language possesses immense power. Returning to The Names, when protagonist James Axton, a risk analyst for the Northeast Group, asks a cult member for the name of the cult, he receives the definitive answer of
No, impossible. Nameforms are an important element in our program, as you know. What do we have? Names, letters, sounds, derivations, transliterations. We approach nameforms warily. Such secret power. When the name is itself secret, the power and influence are magnified. A secret name is a way of escaping the world. It is an opening into the self.413
‗Nameforms‘ have existential power to the cult because of their connection to the existence of that which is named. If the nameform remains secret, the entity linguistically disappears and retreats into the private space of the nameless. Interestingly, the language–ontology connection is taken to the extreme in this novel: the nameless group note a person‘s matching of her name initials to her town‘s initials, and subsequently murder them. There is linguistic pattern involved, and a direct link between name and place, as if the matching of the letters should naturally lead to an ending of life. In Love-Lies-Bleeding, nameforms are tied to emotional escape: the characters temporarily escape their emotional predicament by speaking aloud the plant names vested with personal meanings, and linked to special memories of Alex. The characters are not simply repeating words, but they
411 Bishop, n.p. 412 Bishop, n.p. 413 DeLillo, The Names, p. 210.
152 relive the verbal exchanges in which the words were spoken in the past. Their nostalgia transports them to another time, when Alex was able-bodied: language, therefore, can cognitively affect imagination by triggering memories that lead the mind to another time and place. DeLillo is not only concerned with the gaps in language, and that which cannot be communicated, but the ‗excesses‘ of language as well, and the ability it has to provide extra spatio-temporal movement.
Language Failure Language is ―necessarily material, contextual, and intersubjective‖ according to Jacques Derrida.414 Though we have inner consciousnesses with subjective meanings, language must be externalised to communicate, and although communication is unreliable, this is the downfall of language. DeLillo explores communication by exposing the moments when language breaks down: for instance, the meaning of an emotional event may be so intense that language is unable to communicate it; or ideas may be so beyond the human that they are unable to be named. The namelessness of objects in DeLillo‘s work is often symbolic of holiness and divinity, as if there is a state beyond language that one may ideally reach as things in that ideal state are inexpressible. It happens in White Noise when Jack Gladney‘s daughter Steffie whispers ―Toyota Celica‖ in her sleep, and Jack muses on how ―the utterance struck me with the impact of a moment of splendid transcendence‖, feeling ―selfless and spiritually large‖,415 as if the spoken consumerist phrase was a revelation of spiritual importance. It occurs also in Ratner’s Star, where Billy Twillig considers the unnameable in various cultures:
…the names of deities, infernal beings, totemic animals and plants; the names of an individual‘s blood relatives of the opposite sex… An entire bureaucracy of curse, scourge and punishment is set up to discourage utterance of the unspeakable.416
In this taxonomy of existence, the upper levels of being are permeated with unutterability, as mortals are unable to fully fathom them and therefore cannot communicate about them. Still in Ratner’s Star, the mysterious and powerful aborigine is among the unnameable; furthermore, according to Ratner, the ultimate divine being is also unnameable:
414 Barry Stocker, ―Meaning as Soliloquy‖, Jacques Derrida: Basic Writings, ed. Barry Stocker (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), p. 86. 415 DeLillo, White Noise, p. 155. 416 DeLillo, Ratner’s Star, p. 38.
153 ―What is the true name of G-dash-d? How many levels of unspeakability must we penetrate before we arrive at the true name, the name of names? Once we arrive at the true name, how many pronunciations must we utter before we come to the secret, the hidden, the true pronunciation?‖417
The ‗G-dash-d‘ leaves the middle letter unspoken and unwritten, a reminder of the Hebrew Tetragrammaton YHWH, the pronunciation and writing of which is still a matter of disagreement among scholars.418 The Tetragrammaton is the ultimate symbol of divine unspeakability, denoting a being whose existence cannot be verbalised or written phonetically by human beings.
5.3 A Silent End At the height of anticipation built up by the action, the Macklin family significantly miss the moment of death. DeLillo infuses Alex‘s death with quiet simplicity. Those closest to Alex do not notice his passing, and Sean refuses to behold his dead father. The scene is understated and underrepresented by emotional dialogue; it is a sudden passing that is not dwelled upon, contributing to a soft ending. Though a compassionate end, it remains in line with DeLillo‘s trademark open endings, whereby, as in this case, the anticlimax of the sudden death may leave the audience slightly unsatisfied, a little confused and not quite placated. Peter Straus, former British editor-in-chief of Picador, defends DeLillo‘s characteristic (ir)resolutions:
It‘s not really fair to say he‘s bad at endings. He‘s not prescriptive as a writer, so therefore the end will sometimes be inconclusive. Everybody expects a resolution, just like everybody expects to be happy. He‘s pointing up the chimeras that contemporary society has highlighted. The penultimate sentence in [Cosmopolis] is ―this is not the end‖.419
Toby Silverman Zinman also suggests ―it is no accident that DeLillo leaves all [of White Noise‘s] plots and sub-plots unfinished… DeLillo, by withholding language and refusing to tidy up his plots, would forestall death‖.420 Osteen, too, notes that in the novels ―End Zone, Players, and The Names, DeLillo interrogates the value of plot, and scrutinises his and our participation in the games of novel reading and film
417 DeLillo, Ratner’s Star, p. 221. 418 Insight on the Scriptures says the following: ―Hebrew scholars generally favor ―Yahweh‖ as the most likely pronunciation… Still, there is by no means unanimity among scholars on the subject, some favouring yet other pronunciations, such as ―Yahuwa‖, ―Yahuah‖, or ―Yehuah‖.‖ (Insight, volume 2, page 7, quoted in Chapter 1 of the ―Tetragrammatron and the Christian Greek Scriptures‖, n.d., 14 Dec. 2011
154 watching. He does so by withholding satisfaction‖.421 Alex‘s moment of death is overshadowed by narrative flashbacks, for instance, his ruminating on life: ―I want to experience my own life. Everything‘s collapsing backwards. I can‘t feel what‘s here […] Everything‘s running backwards now. This is what consciousness is beginning to mean‖ (94). These flashbacks to his past may be a deliberate conceit by DeLillo—a comment on continuity in endings—reminding the audience of the vitality harnessed by the artist before his strokes. By the closing of the play, Alex, Lia, Sean and Toinette have moved through time via memory, adopted medical roles, negotiated language games, and struggled with the personal difficulty of euthanasia, all the while remaining a family.
421 Osteen, p. 117.
155 Conclusion
If I have achieved the aims I set out at the beginning, this thesis has shown that Don DeLillo‘s plays deserve critical attention. They present a diverse range of intellectual and social themes: the human fear of death and attempts to avoid it; the elusive nature of truth; and the deceptive elements of personal identity. Chapter 1 presented methodologies of logic in ‗The Engineer of Moonlight‘ (1979), showing that despite Eric Lighter‘s use of reasoning, he fails to reach the answers he seeks. Chapter 2 explored metatheatre and role confusion in The Day Room (1986), shedding light on the roles people play, and the complicated nature of identity. Chapter 3 was a short analysis of the extraordinary and the ordinary in DeLillo‘s one-minute playlets ‗The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed Into Heaven‘ (1992) and ‗The Mystery at the Middle of Ordinary Life‘ (2000). Chapter 4 investigated the connections between the celebrity process and technology in Valparaiso (2003), and demonstrated how the diffusion of technology breaks down the public/private divide and can incite paranoia. Finally, Chapter 5 gave an insight into the human desire to control the time and method of death, delving into the ethics of euthanasia in Love-Lies-Bleeding (2005).
The construction of language and its diffusion of meaning has been a prominent interest of DeLillo‘s throughout his career as a novelist and playwright. This linguistic inclination, combined with his exploration of the human fear of death, the elusiveness of truth, and the deceptive nature of human identity, has resulted in cerebral plays that are incisive, relevant, entertaining, and often humorous. There exist many similarities between his novels and plays, indicating that DeLillo‘s concerns continue into the genre of theatre, rather than his using theatre as a hard thematic break from his fiction. For example, ‗The Engineer of Moonlight‘ portrays a mathematician struggling with mental illness, drawing links between logic and mystery in a similar fashion as Ratner’s Star. Valparaiso is somewhat similar to the novella Cosmopolis, but takes the line of celebrity rather than wealth to give insight into fame‘s influence on the protagonist‘s personal identity. Love-Lies-Bleeding continues the death-centred dialogue in White Noise, but is a more active interrogation of the ethical implications of euthanasia. I have conclusively shown that his theatre works continue the exploration of themes
156 integral to his novels that make the plays worth critical study. Their critical neglect, then, has been to the detriment of DeLillo scholarship.
Naturally, there remains more to be done. DeLillo’s most recent play, ‘The Word for Snow’, was consciously omitted from this thesis due to lack of space and its unavailability in playtext form.422 Further attention could also be given particularly regarding DeLillo‘s writing in the genres of short stories and film. The film adaptation of Cosmopolis (2003) is due for release in 2012, allowing for a potentially exciting comparison between the film and the novel.423 Regarding DeLillo‘s work in the short story genre, a collection of several of his stories came into print in 2011: The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories.424 Despite only nine of his twenty stories appearing here, this published collection could form the basis of an investigation of DeLillo‘s short stories, as yet another example of cross-genre writing. Such a broadening of DeLillo criticism, in addition to the analyses provided in this thesis, would open the space for a more holistic study of his oeuvre, extending his reputation into the fields of short fiction, scriptwriting, and theatre.
422 According to Curt Gardner‘s immensely informative website, the play ―was commissioned by Steppenwolf Theater for the Chicago Humanities Festival (centering on a theme of climate change, tagged ‗The Climate of Concern‘, and premiered on October 27, 2007. The length is approximately 20 minutes‖ (Curt Gardner, ―Plays/Screenplays by Don DeLillo‖, DeLillo’s America, 4 Nov. 2007, 9 Dec. 2011,
157 Bibliography
Allain, Paul and Jen Harvie, The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.Amend, Christoph and Georg Diez, trans. by dumpendebat of dumpendebat.net, ―I Don‘t know America Anymore‖, 7 July 2011
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159 Cowart, David. ―DeLillo and the Power of Language‖, The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo. Ed. John N. Duvall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Cowart, David. ―DeLillo‘s Intertexts: Some Observations on Love-Lies-Bleeding‖, ANQ 22/1 (Winter 2009): 49–50. Cowart, David. Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2002. Cowart, David. ―For Whom Bell Tolls: Don DeLillo‘s Americana.‖ Contemporary Literature 37/4 (Winter 1996): 602–19. Danaher, Geoff, Tony Schirato and Jen Webb, Understanding Foucault, London: SAGE, 2000. ―The Day Room by Don DeLillo‖ photographs, The Garage Theatre, n.d., 9 Oct. 2010
160 Duvall, John N. ―Introduction: From Valparaiso to Jerusalem: DeLillo and the Moment of Canonization.‖ Modern Fiction Studies 45/3 (1999): 559–68. Ewin, R. E. Reasons and the Fear of Death, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002. Fischer, John Martin, ed. The Metaphysics of Death. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. ―Footlights.com: Your Guide to the Performing Arts‖, Valparaiso Director‘s Notes, Fall 2010. Freeman, John. ―Lurking Around Society‘s Edges‖, The Age 22 Feb. 2006, 5 Apr. 2008
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162 Lavey, Martha. ―Set on Stage.‖ Steppenwolf Theatre Company, 2005–2006, 19 Sept. 2009
163 Maxwell, Dominic. ―Novelist Don DeLillo Stumbled Into Writing for the Stage.‖ The Times (24 April 2006), 2 May 2008
164 Pirandello, Luigi. ―Pirandello Confesses…‖, n.d. 17 Aug. 2009
165 Smith, Sid. ―Unraveling DeLillo‖, The Chicago Tribune, 30 Apr. 2006, 28 Dec. 2011 < http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2006-04- 30/news/0604290278_1_novels-ideas-don-delillo>. Sosa, Ninette, Bob Franken, Rich Phillips and Susan Candiotti. ―Terri Schiavo Has Died.‖ CNN.com 31 Mar. 2005, 20 June 2010
166 Zubeck, Jacqueline. ―‘Exalted Time: DeLillo and His Drama‖, 2010 The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900, 19 Feb. 2010.
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