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Strong Words, Weak Subjects: a Critical Examination and Theoretical and Historical Contextualisation of the Novels of Don Delillo

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Strong Words, Weak Subjects: a Critical Examination and Theoretical and Historical Contextualisation of the Novels of Don Delillo STRONG WORDS, WEAK SUBJECTS: A CRITICAL EXAMINATION AND THEORETICAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXTUALISATION OF THE NOVELS OF DON DELILLO JAMES CHRISTIAN THOMAS A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of the West of England, Bristol for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Bath Spa University College Faculty of Humanities, Bath Spa University College October 2001 Contents Acknowledgements 3 Abstract 4 Introduction 5 Chapter One - An 'Assimilation of Perspectives': DeLillo in Theory 25 Postmodern (Hyper)Realism. Survival in a Baudrillardean Environment 27 "Bang, You're Dead" - Language, Violence and the Return of the Real 48 The Battle Over Human Consciousness: The Writer and the Terrorist 69 Chapter Two - Ghostwritten into the Historical Sublime: Libra and the Textual Manipulation of an Assassin 85 Chapter Three - "Language is the mirror of the world." Ratner's Star. Reflections of the Inexpressible 115 Controlled Monologism and Collapsed Oppositions 117 Cognitive Mapping and the Chronotopic Genre of Ratner's Star 134 Chapter Four - Mystical Twins: Waste and Warfare in Don DeLillo's Underworld 162 Chapter Five - Conclusions - DeLillo in Context 186 References 211 Bibliography 220 Acknowledgements First of all I would like to thank my supervisors - Richard Kerridge, Gavin Cologne- Brookes and Neil Reeve - for their enthusiastic and informed backing of this work. Without their help, advice and support the project might have foundered in its early stages. Thanks must also go to Tracy Brain for persuading me to continue with my studies at the end of my degree; Jeff Rodman for 'theoretical inspiration' and useful references; William Hughes for his friendly guidance; and Jean Gardiner and all who reside in the Academic Office for providing me with a warm and sympathetic temporary home. Most of all however, I would like to offer my sincere gratitude to Bath Spa University College for providing me with a studentship that allowed me to devote a year of my life to writing up the thesis, and the perfect environment in which to undertake this process. I feel privileged to have been offered this opportunity. This study is dedicated to my parents, brother and Nina. Abstract This thesis is a theory focused critical contextualisation of the novels of Don DeLillo that situates the author at the forefront of contemporary literatures of resistance. Through a detailed examination of a number of his works, and a generic discussion of all, it makes the argument that, by foregrounding a number of radical aesthetic methodologies such as controlled monologism and what Fredric Jameson terms 'the transcoding of perceptual terminologies' - or the emplacement of multiple theoretical positions within the totality of the novel - DeLillo attempts to compel his reader into coming to terms with their linguistically circumscribed personal ontology. The first, introductory chapter, an analysis of the writer's depictions of the social environment of contemporary America and his metatheoretical solutions to what cultural commentator Jean Baudrillard calls 'hyperreality' - the hegemonic prevalence of serial signs and simulations that self-reproduce and separate humanity from the 'real' world - sets up the proposition that DeLillo's ambivalent attitude to language, his representations of subjects struggling to find their own voice and name, is connected to a politically motivated aesthetic that provides the reader with a kind of 'cognitive mapping,' enabling them to contextualise themselves within the confusing spatial and temporal dimensions of the late-capitalist postmodern world. The propositions introduced in chapter one are then built upon in three wholly original close-readings of some of DeLillo's best known works. Chapter two examines DeLillo's controversial metafictional historiography Libra through the critical lens of the sublime and Jean-Francois Lyotard's binary of the discursive and figural - discussing how DeLillo's Oswald is constructed within the text in order to connect with Lyotard's ideas on postmodern representation. This is followed in chapter three by a Bakhtinian reading of DeLillo's early work Ratner's Star that clarifies the process of cognitive mapping, and an ecocritical analysis of Underworld in chapter four that consolidates and expands the drive of the thesis. The thesis will conclude by offering a final chapter that summarises DeLillo's methodology and opens the argument out to include parallels between DeLillo's practice and that of comparable European metatheorists. Introduction "I've never attempted to embark on a systematic exploration of American experience." (Don DeLillo)1 For most critics, DeLillo is a cut and dried postmodernist: a novelist at one time working in the margins, who has now entered the mainstream, writing within the limits of a form accepted and admired in all the right academic circles. His public reputation, prior to the publication of Underworld (1997), was built upon his ninth novel, Libra (1988), and this was probably due to his compelling realisation of a national obsession in the first instance rather than the innate quality of the writing. Since then he has been variously labelled in the media as: 'America's high priest of paranoia'2; 'The chief shaman of the paranoid school of American Fiction'3; and, 'a student of American derangement'4 and his early works have garnered deserved retrospective praise. To the initiate, he seems to have embarked upon a methodical dissection of prototypically American experience - film, rock music, sport. Indeed, it is easy to compartmentalise DeLillo's novels, to provide sweeping and, it has to be said, justifiable conclusions on the nature of what seems to be an ongoing project: a fictive anatomy of the 'real' America. One can certainly discern a method in the "good company and madness" he portrays, a writer's wish to delve beneath the cultural systems that locate the American citizen and provide them with their sense of national identity. However, as the above quotation affirms, DeLillo abjures any claim to an intentional mapping of formative influences. His work is less a systematic wade through the associative signifiers of 'Americana' than a seeking out of what he sees as underlying truths that lend "secret patterns"5 to American lives. In fact, much of DeLillo's work eludes classification. Novels will appear to fit conventional genres, such as 'autobiography', 'science-fiction' and 'the spy novel' but he uses these popular forms only to show "how readers are unconsciously trapped within reductive ideologies and cultural models of behaviour." Not everyone however is impressed with or even understands what he is attempting to achieve. DeLillo's supporters argue that the aspects of his work most criticized, such as its schematism, lack of humanity and concentration on ideology rather than personal conflict, reflect the society he is trying to anatomize. In Douglas Keesey's words: "DeLillo's fiction is about the media's flattening of character, the way representations of reality disturb our connection with the world, impoverish our experience, and reduce our dimensionality."7 Certainly, his ideal protagonist is Marcuse's one-dimensional man, ensconced in a small room and undergoing a process of self-actualization that may lead to extreme behaviour, and DeLillo would be the first to argue that social-realism, in its purest sense, is not his thing. Yes, there are moments when he achieves a kind of mimesis of the street, a near-perfect rendering of language and environment shorn of the abstractions and tangential embellishments characteristic of most of his work, but these are few and far between. His voice is not that of the distanced empiricist, no latter-day Frazer delineating the myths of urban tribalism. Rich in wry observation and dark humour, yet punctuated by phrases of poetic concision, his writing shuffles anxiously between the twin poles of contemporary American fiction - domestic realism (Carver, Tyler) and avant-garde postmodernism (Pynchon, Gaddis) - incorporating elements of both. Importantly, it is writing of ambiguity and ambivalence rather than the tendentiousness of the paranoid left as some of his detractors have suggested. For instance, he is fascinated by both the individual and the crowd, language and that which cannot be articulated, and consumerism and terrorism, while occupying the middle ground between such categories. Employing a range of literary systems in the telling of a story that find correlation in the worlds of social science and mathematics, DeLillo engages the reader by allowing them to trace the paths of his connections, parallels and narrative loops while, through his acute insights and philosophical enquiry, maintaining the sense that he too can be puzzled and awestruck on occasions. Above all, he is a writer who shows us what he is thinking about what he is showing. One reviewer in The New York Times, as if defending the intellectual demands DeLillo makes of his readers, described his work as possessing a "vernacular lyricism that is never inaccessible,"8 but one cannot escape the fact that the superabundance of his theories, and his refusal to submit to writing small-scale domestic dramas, causes much consternation in some circles, as if challenging the reader in any overt socio-analytical sense might be a bad thing. Ironically, when he does attempt to gain a grip on the actuality of the social and convey the kind of domestic realism critics are hankering after, he is roundly censured. Clearly DeLillo is at his best when writing about the counterpastoral, what Philip Roth calls the "indigenous American berserk"9 - the flip side of an idealised America where guns are not symbols of freedom but rather the tools of terror. Arguably, there is no greater symbol of American terror than Lee Harvey Oswald. The assassination of Kennedy had always informed DeLillo's work and thus a novel on the subject represented a logical culmination and a return to the material that inspired him. Even so, borrowing from history and giving in to "the nearly palpable lure"10 of large, real events was unacceptable for some critics.
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