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 normative 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 appropriation 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. For the Lacan of the 1950s, society’s imposition of external authority, the so-called Name-of-the-Father, provided an anchor for symbolic knowledge and joined it to the imaginary and the real. With the inconsistency of the Other, the Name-of-the-Father becomes simply a fourth term that knots three radically distinct orders—without according any of them precedence over the others. As a consequence, for Lacan the conventions of neurotic normality are similar in structure to the delusions of the psychotic and only one of many impositions of meaning on a baffling world. What distinguishes neurosis and psychosis is not their inherently rational or irrational nature. Psychosis is “not an irredeemable deficiency but rather another form of subjective organization” (Voruz and Wolf xiv). Both are delusions in the strict sense of the word. However, neurosis acts as a shared delusion, as it institutes a socially-accepted limit to behavior. In contrast, psychotics must construct this limit individually, and they often fail at it. Lacan exposes the supposed epistemological privilege of sanity as a form of shared belief: precisely, the subject’s conviction in the inherent logical difference of a supposedly sane organization of reality. It is thus that Miller can write that “[e]veryone is crazy. It is only then that it becomes interesting to make distinctions” (“A Contribution of the Schizophrenic to the Psychoanalytic Clinic”). Such a conception of psychosis leads not, as one might assume, to conceptual confla- tion. Sanity is not denied existence as a category but defined as a sub-category of madness distinguished by its hegemonic status—the one madness accepted as rational. As the symbolic loses the status of a cure, a privilege extended to it under the presupposition of its fullness, the delusional act of reality-production now includes symbolic knowledge. The emphasis on sanity as hegemonic madness also introduces, more strongly than before, a theorization of historical change. These revisions of Lacan’s thought do not invalidate the traditional category of a hallucinatory paranoid psychosis, in which the subject is limited to an imaginary logic, but situate it as a special case of delusion. What late Lacan allows for is a differentiation between schizophrenia and paranoia on the one hand—the latter defined both as the imaginary structure of human knowledge and as paranoid psychosis—and on the other the delusional madness inherent in any construction of reality, including neurosis. It is on this basis that Miller establishes the concept of ordinary psychosis. In his late seminar Le Sinthome, Lacan considers James Joyce a novel kind of psychotic. In contrast to the neurotic, whose structure of meaning entails the acceptance of social authority, or to the delusions of the paranoiac, no external instance provides Joyce with sense. Joyce unhinges himself from the Other and the relation of desire that characterizes the neurotic bond. With the help of his writing, Joyce establishes a radically singular knowledge as a mode of enjoyment, his sinthome. As a consequence, this independence from the Other, or psychosis, does not result in hallucinations. As noted above, the understanding of sanity as hegemonic madness moves the question of historical change to the foreground. For what happens when authority and its supposedly universal discourse slowly disintegrate, when social repression is partially replaced by a multiplication of lifestyles and the constant demand to enjoy ourselves? In reaction, Lacanians speak of ordinary psychosis as the dominant structure of subjective organization today. The ordinary psychotic Ordinary Madness 39 is characterized by his or her non-integration into authority and the dominance of jouissance over a neurotic desire dependent on the Other. Ordinary psychosis derives from Lacan’s reading of Joyce, but there are differences. Given the failure of traditional norms, and their replacement by a regime of jouissance, no intellectual labor on the scale of Joyce’s creative odyssey is required. Rather than constructing a subject position as the exception to social norms, today’s ordinary psychotics achieve a measure of stability from their identification with normalcy: the adherence to the outward signs of an ordinary existence. The remainder of this article reads DeLillo’s recent novels as an engagement with the development of late capitalist structures of subjectivity. In my analysis, I purposively understand ordinary psychosis in broader terms than much clinical literature. Some of DeLillo’s characters do not retain or achieve psychological stability—a criterion often seen as necessary for a diagnosis of ordinary psychosis. Yet these subjects share what the concept of ordinary psychosis so uniquely captures: the shift from an extraordinary psychosis to a contemporary madness no longer built on exception and idiosyncrasy but characterized by its drifting temporality, inconspicuousness, and banality.

Underworld’s Ordinary Paranoia

The boundaries between sanity and madness have never been clear-cut in DeLillo. The Names defines madness as the loss of social ties. Portraying a com- munity of North American expatriates in Athens who are rocked by the violent rejection of U.S. imperialism, DeLillo contrasts them with a religious cult whose answer to a world already ridden with death is seemingly random murder. The cult’s insanity consists of its dissolution of the Other, “our need to structure and classify,” as the archaeologist Owen Brademas says, “to build a system against the terror in our souls” (308). Nevertheless, the cult draws in most of the novel’s main characters, from the protagonist James Axton to Brademas (who becomes a member of sorts and fails to prevent the death of its last victim), to the film director Volterra. Against such willful destruction, Axton can only fall back on the social bond of love: “I believe deeply in the idea of two. Two people. It’s the only sanity” (162). Madness plays an even more central role in Libra, DeLillo’s seminal account of the John F. Kennedy assassination, which foreshadows his later novels with its choice of a psychotic protagonist, Lee Harvey Oswald. His portrayal of Oswald as a psychotic, while over-determined by the Warren Report’s depiction of him as a mentally- troubled loner, follows a deeper logic (President’s Commission 375-424 and 669-740). For cultural responses to November 22, 1963 can be seen to negotiate an increasing disintegration of a hegemonic symbolic order, so that the abiding resonance of Ken- nedy’s death retrospectively enacts the gradual death of the Lacanian Name-of-the- Father. It is only fitting that DeLillo’s megalomaniacal Oswald feverishly imagines his special relationship with the father figure Kennedy in his cell and posits himself as the law whose symbolic representative he is accused of having shot (435). Oswald represents the novel’s greatest “aberration in the heartland of the real,” its foremost deviation from reason (15). A “fatherless boy,” madness becomes an 40 Alexander Dunst ever-present threat from Oswald’s childhood onwards when a policeman sends “him downtown to a building where the nut doctors pick at him” (4, 11). All the usual ingredients are collected in Libra, but they still make for a subtle biography of a psychotic: the lack of a father, hints at incestuous desire, and a specific awk- wardness that speaks of a failed integration into the Other. “He was not connected to anything here,” thinks Oswald, “and not quite connected to himself” (89). As we near Libra’s end and the day of the assassination, Oswald’s psychosis becomes more pronounced, and DeLillo now depicts him as clinically paranoid. Persecuted and megalomaniacal, Oswald appears truly external to society: “a dis- torted figure in some darkness outside ordinary night” (424). But Libra also resists the traditional pathologizations of madness in whose footsteps it treads. As Frank Lentricchia writes in an early appreciation, “[t]he disturbing strength of Libra […] is its refusal to offer its readers a comfortable place outside of Oswald” (204). Os- wald ultimately shares his paranoia with every major character: the conspirators David Ferrie and Guy Banister, Oswald’s mother Marguerite and his murderer Jack Ruby—all are clearly depicted as paranoid in their everyday interactions, while the renegade CIA agents Win Everett and Larry Parmenter show a similar pattern in their hatred of Cuba’s newly-communist regime. Even Nicholas Branch, research- ing the past in Libra’s present, succumbs to paranoia. What distinguishes DeLillo’s novel from straightforwardly pathologizing depictions is perhaps as simple as this: in Libra there is no secure place outside madness, outside delusion. As DeLillo has said, Underworld shares with Libra a decisive link, their investigation of “real events and historical characters, the power they carry,” so that writing “Underworld brought [him] back into history” (Moss 162). But to emphasize history also highlights the novels’ different vantage points: on the one hand, the world politics of Libra, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Kennedy assassination viewed from the re-ignited Cold War of the Reagan years; on the other, the political attrition of the 1990s, a historical blockage where change and movement seem reduced to the economy, and politics remains in the background. Underworld is then also a novel of masses and flows, the crowds of New York’s Giants stadium and the ceaseless circulation of capital and informa- tion. It is a novel of biopower rather than of the disciplinary procedures, great individuals, and power blocs of Libra. As a result, the forms of madness, but in particular paranoia, that each novel depicts also differ. “The paranoia in Libra flows from unknowable plots being worked out in hidden corners. In Underworld it comes from the huge overarching presence of highly complex and interconnected technological systems,” DeLillo has said (Howard 124). Something else distinguishes Underworld’s paranoia, a mutation in structure that can be characterized as quotidian and banal. Initially, an understanding of paranoia as ordinary in this sense of the word would seem to clash with Miller’s conception, which carefully distinguishes the inconspicuousness of ordinary psychosis from the strong personality of the paranoid psychotic. The exception to this represents what Miller calls “sensitive paranoia,” whose features he sees as less clear-cut and more difficult to detect (“Ordinary Psychosis Revisited” 162). It is thus that Underworld’s ordinary paranoia should be understood: a paranoia at once ubiquitous and nearly invisible, not antagonistic but deeply wedded Ordinary Madness 41 to irony and world-weary cynicism, a pragmatic and local barrier against an excess of jouissance. In its function as a limited rather than universal defense, ordinary paranoia stops short of the broader paranoid interpretation or even florid hallucinations of the paranoid psychotic. Thus ordinary paranoia forms a partial crutch supporting today’s subjects, who appropriate strategies of reality-construction in a society where the Name-of-the-Father has lost its universality. Literary and cultural critics have observed similar changes in conspiracy culture for some time but have yet to relate them systematically to wider economic or social changes (Knight, “Outrageous Conspiracy Theories” and Knight, “Everything is Connected”). In presenting us with a historical kaleidoscope of paranoia from the early 1950s to the 1990s, Underworld invites such theorization more than other narratives. For not only is capitalism a constant presence within the novel but paranoia’s role here is to trace its hidden contours without ever presenting us with the determinate meaning and shape that would stall its epistemological capacity. It all begins, rather fittingly, with J. Edgar Hoover’s paranoia of “an all-per- vading medium of pathogens, microbes” and is carried into the novel’s present by Sister Edgar, the “cold war nun” who is Hoover’s sibling through the decades (19, 245). It continues with Marvin Lundy, whose search for the baseball that decided the famous game with which Underworld begins mirrors the mystery of Kenne- dy’s assassination. There are the good old conspiracy theories of Freemasons and the spread of HIV in black ghettoes, as well as the “Conspiracy Theory Café” that seems to be straight out of Pynchon (319). In DeLillo’s novel no objective vantage point escapes a madness that, like the “neighborhood crazy” in the opening scene, comes “dragging ever closer” (28, 39). Like so many of the novel’s undercurrents, madness is tied to the economy and the decline of U.S. cities. Both the artist Klara Sax and the nuns who work in the inner-city slums of the Bronx are repelled and darkly fascinated by New York’s apocalyptic ruin, not an exception to the state of America but its deeper truth. As Sax observes: “[T]he streets were taking on a late medieval texture, which maybe meant we had to learn all over again how to live among the mad” (391). This integration of madness into everyday sanity can be seen most clearly through Nick Shay, Underworld’s protagonist. Shay, another fatherless son, refuses the sense of postmodern dislocation diagnosed by his old lover Sax for the stern belief in established knowledge: I lived responsibly in the real. I didn’t accept this business of life as a fiction, or whatever Klara Sax had meant when she said that things had become unreal. History was not a matter of missing minutes on the tape. I did not stand helpless before it. I hewed to the texture of collected knowledge, took faith from the solid and available stuff of our experience. […] I believed we could know what was happening to us. We were not excluded from our own lives. That is not my head on someone else’s body in the photograph that’s introduced as evidence. (82) Nick Shay’s definition of himself as a hard-headed realist and his equation of Sax’s skepticism with conspiracy theories is challenged twice in the novel. First, when a television commercial advertises toll free numbers for sufferers of a wide variety of serious illnesses to Shay. Among them is Korsakoff’s psychosis, a brain disorder that results in amnesia, lack of insight, and apathy. The episode remains ambiguous but 42 Alexander Dunst does little to reassure Underworld’s readers of Shay’s ability to distinguish between objective reality and paranoia. Is psychosis so widespread that it pays to advertise on TV? Does Shay’s insistence on objective reality speak of his amnesia with respect to America’s recent history, the Kennedy assassination and Watergate—a history so full of official lies that, as one character says, it would be stupid not to be paranoid? More unequivocally, the novel questions Nick Shay’s resistance to paranoia when we learn that his father was not killed by the Mafia, as he insists, but simply left his family, never to return. His brother Matt diagnoses him with “emotional delusion,” so that Nick’s personal conspiracy theory “became the only plot, the only conspiracy that big brother could believe in. Nick could not afford to suc- cumb to a general distrust” (454). Shay’s local delusion secures his understanding of the world and makes any further conspiracy theories unnecessary. Yet such a survival strategy constitutes only one of many attempts by the novel’s characters to attain knowledge of a world that has escaped the containment narratives of the Cold War (Nadel). As Michael Wood rightly emphasizes, Underworld’s characters sometimes evince a nostalgia for the conspiratorial secrets of old, but this does not keep them from adapting paranoia to a changed world (Wood). Its most remarkable new forms are an ironic paranoia and paranoid cynicism. Whether in a character’s wry assertion that the government is lying about the true number of African Americans, which provides him with unmistakable pleasure, or rumors about nuclear tests, spread with contemptuous ennui: neither conforms to traditional conceptions of paranoia as marked by absolute certainty. Ironic paranoia slyly subverts social authority by publicly humoring it. Irony’s distancing act acknowledges the continued functioning of ideology—such as the systematic rac- ism perpetrated against America’s black population—while simultaneously expos- ing its powerlessness to command the subject’s belief. In contrast, cynical paranoia secretly functions as psychological scaffolding for power, mocking symbolic structures that function all the better in the absence of any critical questioning (Žižek 22-23). Together, these reactions provide evidence of a fundamental loss of belief in U.S. government and showcase the cognitive defenses that shield its people from insight. Underworld’s history of paranoia brandishes an unintended consequence of the national security state to which these late conspiracy theories react: that to systematically alienate its citizens from political participation risks their retreat from its values and norms, bringing to an end their subjectification to the American state. Ironic and cynical paranoia are not exclusive to Underworld. The X-Files and Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, to name just two seminal conspiracy narratives of the 1990s, make heavy use of both. The dominance of more local forms of paranoia in these fictions may be connected, once more, to the disintegration of the Other. With the absence of an overarching structure of repression in contemporary capitalism—which no longer limits the subject’s enjoyment in the interest of a strict work ethic but exploits that enjoyment directly—paranoia becomes one of several pragmatic “defenses against the real,” a real now intimately tied to language and the circulation of knowledge (Miller, “A Contribution of the Schizo- phrenic”). Fictions such as Underworld mark what could be described as a fear of the real’s constant circulation (Voruz and Wolf ix-x). Cultural paranoia is no longer directed at isolated experiences of the real but reacts to a real from which Ordinary Madness 43 no escape can be imagined. As a consequence, Underworld’s characters eschew paranoid certainty for the ceaseless circulation of epistemological hypotheses. DeLillo’s opus magnum has been taken as evidence of paranoia’s slow demise in a “post-paranoid” era (Wood). Yet what Fredric Jameson has said of contemporary culture also pertains to a culture of paranoia: namely that the dissolution of hegemonic normality has led to its “prodigious expansion […] throughout the social realm”—not post-paranoia but its explosive dissemination and normalization (Jameson 87). In the process, conspiracy culture morphs from a clearly identifi- able structure into a basic sub-atomic particle of U.S. society. DeLillo’s characters repeatedly describe their world as one that has outlived the secrets that once held it in place and long with aching desire for this now historical emotion. Underworld’s “defenses against the real” are not limited to paranoid irony or cynicism. The novel ends on another solution, which shows strict similarities with psychosis but lacks its persecutory quality. In the epilogue, titled “Das Kapital,” the homeless girl Esmeralda is brutally raped and murdered. Shortly afterwards her face appears on a billboard promoting cans of orange juice each time a passing train shines its headlight on the ad. A crowd gathers: not one of the foreign masses that induce such anxiety in Mao II but a fleeting collective that rises in the ruins of the Bronx. Para- noia’s investment of the real with meaning returns in a quasi-religious metaphysics, the formation of microcommunities that spread with the disintegration of the Other. The inexplicable appearance of Esmeralda’s face has such power that Sister Edgar overcomes her decade-old paranoia, a Cold War habit engrained in every missed em- brace, only to die when the moment passes and the billboard returns a blank stare the next evening. But in dying Edgar passes into the world wide web, into a different age and a novel anxiety: She senses the paranoia of the web, the net. There’s the perennial threat of virus of course. Sister Edgar knows all about contaminations and the protective measures they require. This is different—it’s a glow, a rushing force that seems to flow from a billion distant net nodes. (825) Here, in cyberspace, in the new age of limitless capital, an older paranoia has given way to a circulation that leaves no containment, and no escape, intact. “There are only connections. Everything is connected,” writes DeLillo (825). If everything is connected to the flow of capital, if juice cans look like barrels of napalm to Matt Shaw in Viet- nam and the same orange juice blesses the children held up to Esmeralda’s electric face by their awed mothers, then fantasy remains intact. Underworld’s ending, its final investment with magic and metaphysics, marks the point of its historical blockage: the empty interregnum of the neoliberal 1990s and the absence of any emancipatory politics that contrasts so sharply with the novel’s insight into the real of capital, and its characters’ scorn for America’s imperialist wars abroad and oppression at home.

From The Body Artist to Point Omega

In his earlier fiction, DeLillo’s inability to imagine an emancipatory politics had resulted in an emphasis on utopian collectivity—one thinks of Axton’s ascent to the Acropolis and its spiritual communion of speech in The Names, or Underworld’s 44 Alexander Dunst spectral resurrection of murdered teenager Esmeralda in a Bronx billboard—a contemporary American reversal of Benjamin’s allegory of the chess player, in which the hunchbacked dwarf of politics must hide inside the theological puppet (Ben- jamin 245). Even such potential is exhausted in these late novels. With the attacks of September 11, 2001, collective agency passes into the hands of Islamic Jihadists and the threatening foreign crowd, which has haunted DeLillo’s fiction for decades. Peter Boxall evokes Benjamin to emphasize that DeLillo’s late fiction lacks the imagination that allows a writer to “blast open the continuum of history” (Benja- min 253 qtd. in Boxall 227). The American present has finally become that “empty and homogenous” time which characterizes any historicism for Benjamin, a present limited to the transition between a forgotten past and an unimaginable future (260). This section approaches DeLillo’s imagination of madness by way of the most striking and consistent concern of his late novels: the fragmentation of historical time itself. The two themes share far more than may be initially apparent. For the dominance of neoliberal capitalism, “the surge of capital markets [that] has dominated discourse and shaped global consciousness,” compresses the present and obliterates the past in the onrush of an empty digital future of high-tech speculation (DeLillo, “In the Ruins of the Future”). As Jameson argued in a highly influential, if problematically simplifying, appropriation of Lacan’s work on psychosis, the disintegration of historical consciousness—society’s inability to narrativize the flow of time—may be compared to a state of schizophrenia. In De- Lillo’s fiction, this diagnosis takes the form of a radical reduction of the present to a momentary intensity, before which imaginary and symbolic relations dissolve for an experience akin to psychosis. Such a rendering of fragmented time moves to the center of his writing with the protagonist’s melancholia in The Body Artist and reaches new heights with Point Omega’s reimagination of 24 Hour Psycho. DeLillo has responded to today’s socio-political situation in two ways. Politically, he has reacted to the further narrowing of social alternatives accompanying the rise of a neoliberal hegemony with a renewed psychopathology of U.S. society. In the portrayal of his fictional subjects, however, this intensified pathologization has led to a simultaneous emphasis on the universality of psychosis—resulting in the contradiction I described at the beginning of this essay. After the historical rollercoaster of Underworld, The Body Artist begins gently, almost idyllically. Only in retrospect do we understand the freeze-frame evocation of a couple’s breakfast as the hallucinatory memories of a grieving lover. But even on this morning, the performance artist Lauren Hartke is already “going crazy in ways so humanly routine you can’t even stop and take note” (24-25). Soon, Hartke will be joined by Mr. Tuttle, whose madness, if that’s what it is, seems everything but ordinary. For Mr. Tuttle “time had no narrative quality” (65). He is a man “minus an identity, a language,” a “man anonymous to himself” (64, 95). Yet the novel refrains from medicalizing its mysterious character, rejects his identification as a schizophrenic or as mentally disabled, and refuses to affirm whether Mr. Tuttle is ultimately nothing but the mirage of Hartke’s mourning. Once more, there exists no outside to madness in The Body Artist except for the reader, whose imposition of meaning depends on an element of choice: whether to assume a position of normative reason and thus to classify others as healthy or Ordinary Madness 45 ill. Mr. Tuttle becomes Hartke’s dress rehearsal for another subjectivity, an artist’s probing of the ties that keep her in the world. Hartke’s choice upon returning to her empty house at the sea, if perhaps a form of psychosis, is also markedly re- moved from Mr. Tuttle’s inability to build a shelter out of time and speech. Hartke severs the social bond to find a different jouissance and a new self: “She wanted to feel the sea tang on her face and the flow of time in her body, to tell her who she was” (124). The contrast between Underworld and The Body Artist could not be more stark. The former’s grand vision gives way to a microscopic study of female subjectivity, a brittle consciousness that overcomes loss and reinvents itself with the help of a companion that may or may not be imaginary. Where Underworld depicted half a century of Cold War confrontation and its conspiratorial counter-histories, exploring tectonic shifts and psychological sea-changes, The Body Artist leaves the past behind to secure a fragile present and a self capable of inhabiting it. Possibly the last of DeLillo’s historical fictions, Underworld catalogued a series of coping mechanisms and makeshift defenses against environmental and political erosion. Published in February 2001, shortly before the epochal event of the early twenty-first century, The Body Artist concentrates on a singular subject position—psychosis. Unlike the florid madman that Lee Harvey Oswald becomes in the final pages of Libra, or the “neighborhood crazy” that teeters on the edges of Underworld, Lauren Hartke seems neither threatening nor, ultimately, out of her mind: confronted with a loss of time, identity and language in Mr. Tuttle, she moves forward to find a new center, even if it may be of her own construction. Therefore, DeLillo moves beyond a reductive image of madness as a lack of agency. When Mr. Tuttle disappears Hartke goes looking but soon returns to take her place—as a mad woman, perhaps, but also a figure in control of her emotions. Point Omega adds another facet to this omnipresence of madness. The Body Artist had established ordinary psychosis at the heart of the author’s narrative imagination. The later novel explores its epistemological and affective con- sequences. Both books share the emphasis on the intense apperception of the present. This may also explain DeLillo’s recent interest in visual art. In the short story “Looking at Meinhof,” alternatively titled “Baader-Meinhof,” an unnamed woman returns to New York’s Museum of Modern Art for four consecutive days to study Gerhard Richter’s eponymous cycle of paintings. Point Omega, in turn, describes a man’s visit to the MoMA to watch Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, which stretches Hitchcock’s film by reducing the number of frames per second to two. The reference to psychosis seems clear enough. Yet despite its cinematic origins Gordon’s piece does not engage with the psychopathology of Norman Bates, nor is DeLillo’s analysis of it a consideration of the moving image. For the view- er, 24 Hour Psycho leads to a breakdown of movement and narrative, and the appearance of pure image. As the novel’s spectator, who keeps returning to the exhibition until its closing day, observes, the film is “all broken motion without suspense,” “abstract moments, all form and scale,” and “outside all categories” (9, 101-02). DeLillo’s unnamed character wonders: “Would he walk out into the street forgetting who he was and where he lived […] would it be possible for him to live in the world? Did he want to?” (13). 46 Alexander Dunst

The intense and initially surprising fascination of Gordon’s piece—it is, after all, simply a slower version of a well-known film—lies in the isolation of the in- stant, the enlargement of the singular moment. In its discussion of 24 Hour Psy- cho the novel’s frame narrative outlines the fragmentation of the imaginary and symbolic relations: time and narrative, suspense and orientation, and their disintegration in an experience of overwhelming jouissance akin to psychosis. DeLillo stretches to new limits the minute observations and painfully slow pace of The Body Artist, conjuring a prose that achieves narrative momentum only by fiat of its opposition to the framing chapters. Such formal probing on DeLillo’s part may be read as the final exhaustion of his fiction that Boxall suggests, or as tracing the narrow confines of the capitalist continuum of history in novel form (226). We are returned to the constitutive problematic of Jameson’s schizophrenic postmodernism, with its intensities and nostalgia. Only this time even the affect necessary for nostalgia is absent, and the singular moment fails to deliver the ecstasy released by an earlier stage in the fragmentation of the symbolic. The centrality of symbolic fragmentation for Point Omega can be seen in the reappearance of something like entropy for the twenty-first century. The ever- faster obsolescence of technology had already given us a first glimpse thereof in Cosmopolis, published in 2003. In Point Omega, the “defense intellectual” Rich- ard Elster has retired to a house in the desert to witness the end of times: “‘Some- thing’s coming. […] Matter wants to lose its self-consciousness. […] We want to be the dead matter we used to be’” (28, 50). DeLillo subverts Teilhard DeChardin’s concept of the omega point, not a supreme fulfillment of consciousness but its apocalyptic disintegration. His protagonist Elster repeats the logic that the novel’s first chapter had discovered in Gordon’s video: rejecting personal experience for the “epochal time” of barren landscape, he flees from history to unravel reality for the real of the moment (72). While he attempts his cognitive escape, he is joined by the filmmaker Jim Finley—who tries to convince Elster to star in a documen- tary about the second Gulf War—and then his daughter Jessie. Elster’s social and intellectual retreat mirrors the psychological make-up of his daughter. As he recounts to Finley, as a child Jessie “had to touch her arm or face to know who she was […] [s]he was imaginary to herself” (71). Jessie also ex- presses this reduction to the imaginary relation in her lip-reading, the mimicry of her parent’s speech. When she joins the anonymous art enthusiast at the MoMA in the final chapter, she seems to him merely “a shadow unfolding from the wall” (111). Jessie’s presence is only really established by her absence, at first figurative- ly in her isolation from social surroundings, later in her mysterious disappearance from the house in the desert, which remains unsolved. Now, “[n]othing happened that was not marked by her absence” (86). His daughter’s possible murder reduces Elster to catatonia and metaphorical death. He is now “beyond memory,” “beginning to resemble an x-ray, all sockets and teeth” (96-97). As Finley can’t help but observe in a flourish of interpretation so typical of DeLillo’s writing, “[a]ll the man’s grand themes” are now “funnelled down to local grief, one body, out there somewhere, or not” (98). Elster’s rhetoric of entropy finds its darkly ironic truth in emotional devastation. Ordinary Madness 47

DeLillo’s bitter satire of the Bush years, its hubris and lies, its brutality and recklessness, by necessity revisits the event that marked their beginning. Like El- ster, the filmmaker Finley notices an unimaginable absence, of people and build- ings, but most achingly, of belonging. “There we were,” thinks Finley, “coming out of an empty sky. One man past knowing. The Other knowing that he would carry something with him from this day, a stillness, a distance” (99). Without an alternative that might transform anomie into the attachment to a different future, the novel’s nameless spectator retreats in its final pages to the complete immersion in the moment. “He returns his attention to the screen,” DeLillo writes, “where everything is so intensely what it is” (116). Where The Body Artist’s Lauren Hartke had overcome loss to build a fragile but determined subjectivity, Richard and Jes- sie Elster withdraw until no such agency seems possible. The portrayal of father and daughter provides a sober contrast to the upbeat perspective on Hartke’s re- invention, emphasizing the emotional toll of individual anomie and providing a nuanced account of contemporary forms of madness.

Conclusion

Psychosis has become an obvious, an ordinary, escape in these novels. None- theless, we should abstain from reading DeLillo’s late fiction as a withdrawal from a supposedly autonomous self. Rather, they are to be understood as its opposite: the flight from a neurotic subjectivity shaped by the internalization of authority, and thus from what binds these characters to society. DeLillo’s critical diagnosis contributes to debates that appear central to U.S.-American politics today, in particular the disintegration of collective solidarity and agency and the formation of, frequently opposed, microcommunities. Instead of simply joining in a chorus of cultural pessimism, however, DeLillo’s fiction keenly observes changes in subjective organization and explores their many facets. I have argued that DeLillo depicts a shift towards forms of what Lacanian psychoanalysts call ordinary psychosis, a subject position that disengages from seeking a fulfillment of desire in society and constructs alternative forms of enjoyment and emotional stabilization. The subjects of DeLillo’s recent fiction present a genuine departure from dominant depictions of madness. DeLillo’s refusal to reduce insanity to mental illness allows him to investigate the personal agency of people who are often understood as possessing none, and to go beyond a focus on suffering and existential chaos. At the same time, DeLillo’s mad women and men are not romanticized as visionaries. Instead, their psychosis is portrayed as a worldly reaction to wider shifts within capitalist modernity.

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