Tion of Don Delillo

ORBIT-OnlineRepository ofBirkbeckInstitutionalTheses Enabling Open Access to Birkbeck’s Research Degree output Delirious USA: the representation of capital in the ﬁc- tion of Don DeLillo https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/40479/ Version: Full Version Citation: Travers, Thomas William Lynn (2020) Delirious USA: the representation of capital in the ﬁction of Don DeLillo. [Thesis] (Unpublished) c 2020 The Author(s) All material available through ORBIT is protected by intellectual property law, including copy- right law. Any use made of the contents should comply with the relevant law. Deposit Guide Contact: email Birkbeck, University of London Delirious USA: The Representation of Capital in the Fiction of Don DeLillo Thomas William Lynn Travers Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2019 1 Declaration I, Thomas William Lynn Travers, declare that this thesis is my own work. Where I have drawn upon the work of other researchers, this has been fully acknowledged. 2 Abstract In this thesis I offer a new reading of Don DeLillo’s fiction through an engagement with contemporary Marxist literary theory and political economy. Beginning in the 1960s, the thesis traces the launch, expansion, and shattering of DeLillo’s narrative apparatus as it recomposes itself across the genres of the short story, the conspiratorial thriller, the historical novel, and the novel of time. Developing on theories of the novel as a capitalist epic, the thesis takes the insistent appearance of surplus populations in DeLillo’s work as an opportunity to reflect on, but also to revise and reconceptualise, Marxist accounts of the novel and its philosophy of history. The DeLillo that emerges from this thesis is less an exemplar of postmodernism and more a novelist of the dispossessed whose central representational task is the invention of a multitude. Chapter One contends that DeLillo’s early short stories from the 1960s acquire a new recognisability in the wake of his late turn towards an aesthetic of suspension. The chapter questions whether the forms of stasis depicted in DeLillo’s short fiction generate new historical futures or if they contribute to a de-collectivised eternal present that later consumes his work. Chapter Two addresses DeLillo’s off-kilter conspiracy novels and reads their discovery of pockets of uneven development through and against the concept of ‘cognitive mapping’. Chapter Three examines the formal means by which DeLillo appropriates Georg Lukács’s classic account of the historical novel and reconfigures it through an irrational historicism that hinges on the non-presupposition of the people. Chapter Four considers the extent to which the non-anthropogenic subjects of history that constrain and inform DeLillo’s twenty-first century fiction constitute political resignation or if they intimate historical futures beyond a catastrophic present. The thesis concludes with a brief reflection on passages out of DeLillo’s epic representation of capitalism. 3 Acknowledgements Foremost I would like to express my gratitude to my PhD supervisor John Kraniauskas, whose unfaltering encouragement and unending patience sustained me throughout the duration of the thesis. John often knew where the project was going before I did, and I will be forever grateful for his timely interventions in periods of drift and uncertainty. These have been some of the most rewarding and happy years of my life and I consider myself extremely fortunate to have had the opportunity to develop my thinking and reading under John’s guidance and intellectual friendship. For keeping me balanced and settled I am endlessly indebted to Christopher Pell, Oliver Porter, and Paul Ellet. Ellen Payne and Jasun Martz not only welcomed me into their family but in a profound way made the completion of the thesis possible. I cannot begin to repay their faith and kindness. Without the unconditional support and generosity of my longsuffering parents, Benita and Tom, I would never have been in a position to commence doctoral studies, let alone finish them. Their loyalty has been a source of great solace. I would have abandoned the PhD several times over if it wasn’t for Teal Martz, who continued to see the value in the project despite my own flurries of despair. Teal has taught me more about literature and life than I could possibly imagine to the extent that the thesis is inconceivable without her love. 4 Table of Contents Introduction: ‘Breathing the Fumes of Free Enterprise Forever’: Don DeLillo and Marxism 6 Chapter One: DeLillo’s Operaismo: Refusal and the Contemporaneity of the Early Short Stories, 1960-1972 21 Bless the Multitude (1960-1965) 31 Pepsi Generation Blues (1966-1970) 56 Chapter Two: American Rhizomes; or, Conspiracy, Cognitive Mapping, and Development 81 Players: Surplus Capital and Surplus Populations 98 Running Dog: Porno-Accumulation 118 The Names: ‘The Off-Lineage of Some Abrupt Severance’ 137 Chapter Three: Dialectics Derailed: DeLillo and the Historical Novel 157 Libra: The Historical Novel Dislocated 176 Underworld: The Historical Novel after Communism 197 Chapter Four: Enfolded in the Will of Capital: Twenty-First Century DeLillo 221 Cosmopolis: Finance, Labour, and Subsumption 229 Falling Man: Natura Morta; or, History as Still Life 243 Point Omega: A Crisis of Historicism 261 Zero K: Archaeology for a Future Age 275 Conclusion: ‘Symptoms of the Future’? 281 Bibliography 287 5 Introduction ‘Breathing the Fumes of Free Enterprise Forever’: Don DeLillo and Marxism For many of us, Don DeLillo has been the most interesting and talented of American post- modernist novelists My laudatory epigraph is taken from a surprising source: Fredric Jameson’s brief but coruscating review of The Names (1982), Don DeLillo’s seventh novel and the first to be situated outside the United States—although, importantly, not beyond the sphere of American economic and political power. Product of a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Names is often cited as a pivotal moment in DeLillo’s career: a formal breakthrough which, combined with institutional recognition, marks a transitional stage on the route towards literary canonisation. Jameson, in his contemporaneous review, performs the opposite gesture and reads The Names ‘as a determinedly minor work’. The novel is the latest instalment in a literary project which revives and ‘self-consciously’ rewrites popular genres ‘across the distance of pastiche’: post- autonomous artworks that stylistically register the complete commodification of social relations.1 The Names, Jameson adds, underscores the ‘spatial dilemma confronted by contemporary fiction’: namely, the incommensurability ‘between individual experience, existential experience, as we go on looking for it in our individual biological bodies, and structural meaning, which can now ultimately derive only from the world system of multinational capitalism’. An ‘epistemological’ writer, DeLillo takes ‘this ineradicable tension between fragmented, private experience and the “scientific” explanation of the world’, as the fundamental representational problem ‘to be solved formally’ by his novels. The Names, though, does not resolve this contradiction through a maximalist ‘totalisation by fiat’ but, 1 Fredric Jameson, ‘The Names, and Richard A’, Minnesota Review, 22 (Spring 1984), 116-122 (p. 119). 6 rather, investigates the microscopic and unnameable experiences of ‘life among the unlinked fragments of the same untotalisable world’.2 Instead of a dialectical unity between fragment and immense global totality, the constituent episodic units of The Names threaten to de- dialecticise the eternal present of bodily affect from the abstract movements of historical time—scenic fragments that are nonetheless marked ‘with a peculiar structural absence’.3 What is so tantalising about this review is that it indicates DeLillo’s presence in the formative stages of Jameson’s account of postmodernism, a presence virtually erased from Jameson’s major theorising.4 A reconstruction of this non-encounter between DeLillo and Jameson is one of the subplots of the following study. Jameson’s Capital and the Theory of the Novel In this thesis I offer a new reading of Don DeLillo’s oeuvre through an engagement with contemporary Marxist literary theory and political economy. Beginning in the 1960s, the thesis tracks the launch, expansion, and shattering of DeLillo’s narrative poetics as it adopts and recomposes itself across the genres of short fiction, the conspiratorial thriller, the historical novel, and the philosophical novel of time. The accumulation and subsequent contraction or crisis of narrativity in DeLillo’s work, the thesis will argue, registers conceptually and encodes aesthetically a breakdown in Marxist theories of the novel, whereby the relationship between individual consciousness and the material conditions of embodiment can no longer be presented in terms of rational historical progress. DeLillo’s fiction is both a determinate response to punctual moments of crisis within twentieth and twenty-first century US history 2 Jameson, ‘The Names’, p. 116. 3 Ibid., p. 122. ‘Maximalism’ and ‘minimalism’ are two options available to the novel in Jameson’s ‘Literary: Allegoresis in Postmodernity’, in Allegory and Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 2019), pp. 309-348. 4 There is a glancing reference to ‘DeLillo’s transitional novels’ and their ‘private languages’ in Jameson’s review of Karl Ove Knausgaard, ‘Itemised’, London Review of Books, 40.21 (8 November 2018), 3-8 (p. 5). 7 and determined by structural

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