White Male Nostalgia in Don Delillo's <Em>Underworld</Em>

Eastern Illinois University The Keep Faculty Research & Creative Activity English January 2015 White Male Nostalgia in Don DeLillo's Underworld Tim Engles Eastern Illinois University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://thekeep.eiu.edu/eng_fac Part of the Ethnic Studies Commons, and the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Engles, Tim. "White Male Nostalgia in Don DeLillo's Underworld." Postmodern Literature and Race Len Platt nda Sarah Upstone, eds. Cambridge Universtiy Press, 2015: 195-210. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the English at The Keep. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Research & Creative Activity by an authorized administrator of The Keep. For more information, please contact [email protected]. CHAPTER 12 White Male Nostalgia in Don DeLillo's Underworld Tim Engles Contemporary white men in the United States are not what they are more likely than others to think and feel they are - free-floating individ uals without significantly raced and gendered identities. Don Delillo has long been lauded for revealing pervasive contemporary threats to individualism and yet, in his depictions of protagonists who follow the dictates of middle-class white masculinity, he repeatedly exposes late rwentieth-century American hyper-individualism as a pathological sham. In his later novels, Delillo hones in more intensively on the irony that sociohistorical forces in the Cold War era contributed to specific constructions of white male individualism, a conundrum that Daniel S. Traber succinctly terms the 'individualism paradox'.• Al; legal scholar Ian Haney L6pez reminds us, 'Fathoming the content of white identity requires a shift from thinking about races as categories toward concep rualizing races in ·terms of relationships. [... ] It is in the elaboration of these relationships - invariably of domination and subordination, nor mativity and marginality, privilege and disadvantage - that white iden tity is given content." Perhaps because Delillo is commonly grouped with·other white male literary postmodernists, whose work tends to be read as if their own racial status and that of their white characters has no significance, his intricate depictions of dominant American racial iden tities, and the social dynamics that both form and destabilise them, have gone relatively unexamined. John N. Duvall's description of Delillo's most commonly lauded 'postmodern' novel, White Noise (1985), as 'a meditation on postmodernity - what it feels like co live in the age of media saturation', holds true for many of Delillo's other novels as well.• In Underworld (1997), Delillo provides his most extensive dismantling not only of contemporary modes of American de facto white supremacy, but al~o of white male individualism's interiorised machinations, espe cially the fraught feelings chat simmer within the discontented core of hegemonic dominance. 195 TIM ENGLES White Male Nostalgia in Don DeLillo's Underworld 197 In this time-hopping novel's narrative present, Delillo's fifty-seven-year of an atomic bomb by a rivering baseball game, establishes the novel as an old protagonist Nick Shay feels a nagging ontological uncertainty, a lon_ely ambitious assessment of American life during the ensuing Cold War con sense of'quiet separation' from his 'phony role as husb~nd and father, ?1gh text. By beginning in 1951 with a lengthy focus on Cotter Martin, a young, corporate officer'.• Delillo anchors shuttling perspect:ves amo~g a d1~zy gate-crashing and self-consciously black baseball fan, Delillo esrablishes ing array of characters wirh a continual return to Nick_s nostal!\1c long1~gs a probing, insightful depiction of nor only a shifi: in American collec for a seemingly pre-whitened and more authentic vers10n of himself. Nick tive identity towards a relational self-conception via the emerging Soviet tries to assuage his emotional distress in part by reestablishing himself as Union, but also new formations of the anxious and fearful white suprem an Icalian-American descendant, in both familial and cultural terms, and acy that obstinately undergirds domestic demographic arrangements. by reaffirming direct ries with the remaining estranged members of h~s Within the idealised 'communitas' of a baseball stadium, Cotter can immediate family, including his wife, mother and brother, as well as his feel a tenuous cross-racial alliance with a middle-aged white man, Bill •' own descendants.' However, while Delillo does embed decidedly mod Y. Waterson, but a disciplinary, ever-hovering white gaze intrudes when a ernist rhemes and aesthetics in this novel (which he has described as per \t black peanut vendor works his way towards them: 'Isn't it strange how haps 'rhe lasr modernist gasp'},6 he repeatedly dismantles Nick'dongin~s their common color jumps between them? Nobody saw Cotter until the "{ ;}- vendor appeared, black rays phasing from his hands. One popular Negro for lost time in postmodernist rerms, by exposing them as heavily medi ·,~ ":"'- ,;: and crowd pleaser. One shifty kid trying not to be noticed' ( U, 20). ated fantasies - partially self-made myths that respond to quasi-historical r events that to a large extent are also mediated fantasies, mostly ge~erated ;t !. When Cotter manages to wrench the winning home run ball from the in the inreresrs of increasingly global capital. As with several of his other clutches of Waterson, he realizes, as a necessarily self-aware member of ; ~ backsliding white male protagonists, DeLillo confronts and counterposes a subordinated race, that since the white imagination groups him with Nick wirh characters who embody the projected raced and gendered other automatically suspicious black people, running in a mostly white otherness that initially helped erect the pinnacled role of constitutively crowd would mark him as a thief. As Waterson then pursues Cotter out dependent white male autonomy rhat has contributed to hi_s ~~aise.~ In side of the stadium in an increasingly vicious chase for the ball, Delillo rhese and other ways, Delillo dissects in Underworld the md1v1duahsm allegorises a question succinctly posed about Cold War domestic race fetish most fully embodied by mainstreamed white American masculinilJ'.; ·f ., relations by Leerom Medovoi: 'How could the United States claim to he diagnoses as well both rhe external circumstances that account for this ," defend human freedom against its totalitarian enemies abroad while it ·;{ Y· elevated identity status and the commonly resultant emotional states rhat '< waged a totalitarian race war at home every rime it terrorized. ~rs own not only drive his representative protagonist to reject his c~rrent life a~~ "· black (and other minority) populations?'' As Thomas Heise writes, self, but also lull him back into quiescent acceptance of the phony role It Delillo's focus on the ball itself 'immediately precipitates racial tension constitutes ( U, 796). over the right to property at a pivotal moment in history when the dry In sociohisrorical terms, continually morphing conceptions of collective is about to fall into a period of steep decline'.' A subsequent section white American identity have depended on countervailing conceptions, depicting Cotter's family and home life is encased within pages printed and consequent abuses, of racial others. As nationalistic unity during the entirely black on both sides, a graphic acknowledgement of not only Second World War spurred integration among workers at home and fight 'white flight', which proportionally darkened so many American cit ing forces abroad, demands of racialised minorities ,for equ~ity d~ring t~e ies in the years following the Dodgers-Giants game, but also of white ensuing 'Cold War' impelled the white .collectives psychi_c bunal of_ Its America's defilement-fearing and self-aggrandising consignment of own incriminating and ongoing abuses. Postwar celebtanons of -;h1te darker American populations to increasingly underfunded, deindustrial and-black reconciliation contributed to a feel-good fai;ade for excepnonal ised urban settings.'0 Thus, among the novel's many literal and figurative ist claims to an emerging American Century, but inequitable economic subterranean territories is that to which darker, and especially northern conditions and segregated residential and work spaces remain~d ~he ~orm. others were increasingly shuttled and contained, the gradually racialised Underworlds lengthy opening section, which depicts the ecl1psmg In ~he wastelands Jater occupied by such make-do figures as Underworlds graf mainstream American imagination of rhe Soviet Union's successful testing fiti artist Ismael Munoz and his minions. TIM ENGLES White Male Nostalgia in Don DeLillos Underworld 199 As Bill Watterson enjoys the ballgame and a pseudo-paternal camara whiteness, Italian-American or not, could well have helped the Constanza derie with Cotter, he reveals in reiterated adspeak chat he runs his own Shays into a 'fun' and exclusively white suburban setting, specific forma business, a construction firm: 'We're the people chat build the houses that tions and experiences of whiteness differ, with some aligning less snugly are fun to live in' ( U, 21). Despite the cozy, border-crossing familiarity than do ochers with notions of all-American-ness, bur with all nonetheless chat feels possible in this otherworldly ballpark space, mainstream profes joined in having been extended opportunities and perquisites denied to sional

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