Ordinary Madness: Don Delillo's Subject from Underworld to Point Omega

Ordinary Madness: Don DeLillo’s Subject from Underworld to Point Omega Alexander Dunst ABSTRACT This article contends that Don DeLillo’s novels from Underworld to Point Omega are centrally concerned with changes in the structure of subjectivity under contemporary capitalism. The essay analyzes these developments from a late Lacanian perspective: as a shift from a dominant neurosis to what Jacques-Alain Miller has called “ordinary psychosis”. Over the years, a few of DeLillo’s critics have problematized a standard account of his characters as postmodern, sug- gesting that the author was in the process of crafting “a new kind of subjectivity”. However, none of these scholars have taken the prominence of psychotic protagonists in his novels as a starting point to analyze DeLillo’s fiction. Madness thus plays an important but overlooked role in the author’s oeuvre. After briefly considering DeLillo’s earlier writing, the discussion concentrates on three representative novels: Underworld, The Body Artist and Point Omega. Where Under- world focuses on paranoia, The Body Artist moves ordinary psychosis to the center of DeLillo’s imagination, a development whose social impact is explored further in the final novel. The article counters traditional conceptions of insanity as irrational and pathological with an emphasis on the structural role madness plays in DeLillo. This reassessment counters a critical tradition that often views insanity as a sign of deep-seated illness, or opposes pathology by naively romanticizing it. The conclusion situates the analysis in the broader framework of the medical humanities. Point Omega, Don DeLillo’s latest novel, is haunted by the breakdown of social relations.1 Framed by the evocation of Douglas Gordon’s video 24 Hour Psycho, the book follows Richard Elster, a retired intellectual hired to provide justification for the Iraq War (28). DeLillo’s protagonist seeks to escape from history and violence, guilt and consciousness. His avowed goal of non-relation, the abandonment of interaction for the desert landscape of the American southwest, has already been achieved by his daughter Jessie, and so it is she who is described as the bleak future of humanity: One day soon all our talk, his and mine, will be like hers, just talk, self-contained, unrefer- ring. We’ll be here the way flies and mice are here, localized, seeing and knowing nothing but whatever our scanted nature allows. A dim idyll in the summer flatlands. (72) Jessie Elster’s emotional withdrawal and isolation characterize her peculiar mental state as a form of psychosis. Yet her psychosis results neither in the picturesque madness of a murderous cult, as in The Names, nor in the paranoia depicted of Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra, nor, finally, in the split personality which the reference to Hitchcock’s thriller suggests. Jessie’s psychosis remains indistinct, even banal, an absence of social ties rather than a violent reaction against them. Thus, she 1 This essay functions as a sequel of sorts to my book Madness in Cold War America. 36 Alexander Dunst continues a distinguished line of atypically psychotic characters in DeLillo’s recent fiction, from Nick Shay in Underworld to Lauren Hartke in The Body Artist. Like most of their literary predecessors, these characters exhibit the incomplete internalization of social norms that for Jacques Lacan forms the decisive feature of insanity. What sets them apart and makes their madness initially surprising is the ordinary rather than extraordinary quality of their psychosis. DeLillo’s characters show none of the picturesque symptoms traditionally associated with mad women and men in literature (The Psychoses; and “On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis”). In this article I argue that DeLillo’s novels from Underworld to Point Omega are centrally concerned with changes in the structure of subjectivity under contemporary capitalism, which I analyze from a late Lacanian perspective as a shift from a dominant neurosis to what Jacques-Alain Miller calls “ordinary psychosis” (Miller, “Ordinary”). Over the years, a few of DeLillo’s many critics have problematized a standard account of his characters as postmodern, at times sug- gesting that the author was in the process of crafting “a new kind of subjectivity” (Yehnert 360). Yet none have taken the prominence of psychotic protagonists in his fiction as a starting to point to analyze DeLillo’s description of the self in these terms. Madness thus plays an important but overlooked role in DeLillo’s oeuvre. From the debut novel Americana onwards, psychopathology functions on a broad metaphorical level. To return to my earlier example, The Names deploys tropes of madness—both in the attribution of mental illness to several characters and the analysis of the religious cult at its center—to diagnose a social crisis in the making. The same motivation underlies the repeated reference to madness across DeLillo’s fiction. Novels like Ratner’s Star or White Noise evince a Foucauldian awareness of the ideological origins of separating reason from unreason. Mad- ness casts a persistent shadow on these narratives: it marks their outer limits, both enabling and questioning their coherence, as it does of modernity at large. As Ratner’s Star affirms, “[l]atent in any period’s estimation of itself as an age of reason is the specific history of the insane” (387). Over the last decade and a half, DeLillo’s imagination of psychosis has become increasingly refined. Casual uses of psychopathological terms have been supple- mented by a keen investigation of today’s subjects in terms of psychosis. Two inter- secting socio-political changes may be seen to underlie this development. Firstly, the increasing dominance of financial capitalism and the intensification of political repression in the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York seem to have further diminished the author’s already weak belief in emancipatory alternatives. DeLillo’s recent novels eye an imploding present and empty future and they lack the narrative sweep of his earlier fiction. Awkwardly sparse and taut, his sentences now eschew temporal synthesis wherever they can: they break off to re- veal, one by one, their cracked edges, and make space for silence. Secondly, DeLillo has long observed a breakdown of social norms that undermines distinctions between sanity and madness and results in a gradual universalization of psychosis. Taken together, these two developments produce an acute contradiction. For the shift towards ordinary psychosis as a dominant psychological structure disarms nor- mative judgments by, as it were, normalizing madness. DeLillo’s recent novels thus Ordinary Madness 37 alternate between a refusal to medicalize a madness that is elevated to a dominant cognitive logic and a reinforcement of pathologization. In what follows, I begin by introducing the concept of ordinary psychosis against the background of Lacan’s last phase of teaching in the 1970s. Despite the enormous influence of his earlier work, the superficial continuity of Lacan’s central terms and the lack of widely available translations mean that his late work remains almost completely absent from literary studies. In light of widespread transformations in subjective organization and practices of power as they characterize U.S. society today, Lacan’s prescient analysis deserves wider attention. After briefly considering DeLillo’s earlier fiction, my reading will concentrate on three representative novels: Underworld, The Body Artist, and Point Omega. The essay connects these texts to broader developments in the cultural appropria- tion of madness, including U.S. conspiracy culture. Where the analysis of Under- world focuses on what I call ‘ordinary paranoia’, a sub-category of contemporary forms of madness, The Body Artist moves ordinary psychosis to the center of DeLillo’s imagination, a development whose social and emotional impact is explored further in the final novel. Throughout, my article moves away from traditional understandings of madness as irrational and pathological, or illuminating and subversive. This reassessment counters a critical tradition that often views insanity as a sign of deep-seated illness, or opposes such pathologization by naively romanticizing it. Both traditions, dialectical mirror images of each other, are replaced by an emphasis on the structural role madness plays in American literature and in DeLillo’s fiction in particular. A short conclusion discussing DeLillo’s contribution to changing attitudes to madness situates my analysis in the broader framework of the medical humanities. From Extraordinary to Ordinary Psychosis As a thinker, Lacan fundamentally questions traditional assumptions about the distinction between reason and unreason. Thus, he understands the imaginary relation, “the most general structure of human knowledge,” as paranoid, as it involves a process in which any object is defined solely by virtue of its reflection in the ego (“Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis” 90). In Lacan’s early writing, man’s integration into the symbolic—the world of inter-subjective speech—defused an imaginary paranoia. Having failed at such neurotic integration, a submission to rules and conventions that allows for a certain leeway within them, psychotics are shackled all the more tightly to authority’s unmediated force—to which delusion provides a personalized response. The reversals of Lacan’s later work on psychosis stem from the proposition that “the Other does not exist” (“The Subversion of the Subject” 688). The Other, as the subject’s particular relation to symbolic authority, is in itself lacking: in other words, society does not deliver the complete satisfaction of desire that the subject seeks from it. The acquiescence to existing reality is therefore dependent on an element of choice, precisely the subject’s participation in or withdrawal from society. In the later case, the subject seeks enjoyment, or jouissance, not in the Other 38 Alexander Dunst but in her- or himself.

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