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The Rubble of History: Counternarrative and the Ethics of Fiction in Don Delillo

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The Rubble of History: Counternarrative and the Ethics of Fiction in Don Delillo The Rubble of History: Counternarrative and the Ethics of Fiction in Don DeLillo William Daniel Chapman ORC ID: 0000-0002-9948-6236 Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (Research) School of Culture and Communication The University of Melbourne Supervisor: Dr Joseph Hughes March 2017 William Chapman ii Abstract In his nonfiction essay “In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” the novelist Don DeLillo proposes the concept of the counternarrative as a mode of response to what he sees as the collapse of grand historical narratives in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. DeLillo refrains from specifically defining the term counternarrative, instead making gestures in his essay towards an ethics of fiction that resurfaces in his 2007 novel Falling Man, which depicts the life of a survivor during and after the attacks. Starting with Falling Man, this thesis examines the way in which DeLillo has developed this ethics of fiction over his body of work and the ways in which his previous novels use this ethics to produce counternarratives. In Chapter One, I examine how DeLillo depicts multiple models of language in Falling Man in order to find a mode of representation that, in contrast to the spectacular media discourse that contains the event, does not impose meaning onto events and instead allows for the formation of a relation to the event at the individual level. Chapter Two looks at DeLillo’s 1991 novel Mao II, in which he thematises the spectacular image in order to depict their function in the reproduction of totalising narratives. Through the novel’s writer figure of Bill Gray, I argue that DeLillo interrogates the relationship between word and image in order to recover the singularity of the individuals that images render into masses. In Chapter Three, concerning DeLillo’s 1984 novel White Noise, I study how DeLillo depicts the infiltration of everyday life by spectacular discourse, which effaces the distinction between the abstract and the real and estranges individuals from their own lived experience. I argue that the novel’s ironic mode responds to the infiltration of individual microhistory by creating an ironic distance that allows the reader to form a relationship that holds the individual narrative separate from the totalising narrative depicted in the novel. In working back through these novels, I demonstrate how DeLillo’s novels effect this linguistic separation from totalising mass narratives. The Rubble of History iii Declaration I, William Daniel Chapman, declare that this thesis is my own original work towards the total completion of the degree of Master of Arts (Thesis). Furthermore, I declare that due acknowledgement has been made in the text to the authors whose work and opinions I have cited. This thesis is fewer than the maximum word limit in length, exclusive of bibliographies, as approved by the Research Higher Degrees Committee. William Chapman iv Acknowledgements Although my name stands alone on the front cover of this thesis, the production of this thesis certainly did not feel like an individual effort (except for the writing of course), and so I must take a moment to acknowledge the people who have contributed to the conditions that made this possible. First, I must express my infinite gratitude to my supervisor, Joe Hughes, who always was there to provide support and encouragement for this thesis and never wavered in his belief in it, even when my own faltered a bit. His insights with regard to the structure and content of this thesis were always of incredible value and I am eternally grateful to have had the opportunity to both work with and learn from him. Secondly, I must thank my partner James, who consistently refused to allow me to give up on this project and always provided the encouragement I needed to keep going. It is with his support that I have made it to completion, and I will always be grateful for that. Next, I must thank all of my friends and family—near and far—for allowing me to retain my connection to the world outside this long, all-consuming thing, and for always being around to listen to me express my alternating moments of excitement and mild despair during the development of this project. Particular thanks go to my officemates Tyne, Anna, Emily, Joe and Andrew, who very kindly accommodated my sporadic chattiness and kept me from feeling completely alone while pursuing this endeavour. Finally, I must thank the University of Melbourne for generously funding this project with a Melbourne International Research Scholarship that has allowed me to both undertake this project and to live in the wonderful city of Melbourne. The Rubble of History v Table of Contents Abstract………………………………………………………………………......ii Declaration………………………………………………………………………iii Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………iv Introduction……………………………………………………………………...1 Counternarrative, Counterhistory, Counterterror: “In the Ruins of the Future” and the Narratives of Terror and Technology Chapter One….…………………………………………………………………14 Excavating the Rubble: Language and the Structures of Meaning in Falling Man Chapter Two………………………………………………….………………....44 The Writer and His Double: The Image, the Author and the Mass Narrative in Mao II Chapter Three…………………………………...………………………………75 Seeing Double: The Ironic Dimension of Counternarrative in White Noise Conclusion…………………………………………………………………….105 The Material of History: Don DeLillo’s Vision of Language Bibliography…………………………………………………………………...107 William Chapman vi “He could have told George he was writing about the hostage to bring him back, to return a meaning that had been lost to the world when they locked him in that room. Maybe that was it. When you inflict punishment on someone who is not guilty, you begin to empty the world of meaning and erect a separate mental state, the mind consuming what’s outside itself, replacing real things with plots and fictions. One fiction taking the world narrowly into itself, the other fiction pushing out toward the social order, trying to unfold into it.” —Don DeLillo, Mao II “There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.” —Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control” The Rubble of History 1 Introduction Counternarrative, Counterhistory, Counterterror: “In the Ruins of the Future” and the Narratives of Terror and Technology In the preface to his interview with Don DeLillo, Mark Binelli makes the shrewd observation that DeLillo has “been writing 9/11 novels for the past thirty years.”1 Given both DeLillo’s preoccupation with “postmodern” American culture and the repeated appearance of terrorists and terrorism in his novels, Binelli voices a popular critical opinion that a DeLillo novel dealing with the aftermath of the September 11 attacks was “inevitable.” Yet the attacks themselves posed significant questions to both literary production in general and to DeLillo’s thematic preoccupations in particular, as the utility of prognostic fiction significantly diminished in the wake of real catastrophe. Three months after the attacks, a rare nonfiction essay by DeLillo entitled “In the Ruins of the Future” appeared in Harper’s Magazine, in which he reflects on the significance of the attacks and, in doing so, begins to sketch out an ethics with which fiction can adequately respond to the magnitude of the attacks and their aftermath. This is encapsulated in the idea of the “counternarrative,” a term DeLillo invokes but does not specifically define, leaning heavily on the implications of the term itself: a challenge to “official” narratives that seek to unambiguously define and interpret history. Although the terrorists of September 11 doubtlessly sought to influence historical narratives, the narratives formed in response to the attacks played an equal role in shaping and interpreting the history that followed. DeLillo implies that it is at this level that fiction can intervene, reminding his audience that history, like fiction, is a matter of contention. DeLillo opens his essay with a striking piece of historical context, describing how 1 Mark Binelli, "Intensity of a Plot: Mark Binelli interviews Don DeLillo," Guernica, 17 July 2007. William Chapman 2 “In the past decade the surge of capital markets has dominated discourse and shaped global consciousness. Multinational corporations have come to seem more vital and influential than governments. The dramatic climb of the Dow and the speed of the internet summoned us all to live permanently in the future, in the utopian glow of cyber-capital, because there is no memory there and this is where markets are uncontrolled and investment potential has no limit.”2 Here, the Dow and the Internet represent the two prongs of Western techno-capitalism: free-market exchange and the ever-accelerating circulation of capital facilitated by the development and expansion of the Internet. For DeLillo, the symbiosis of the Dow and the Internet creates the experience of an accelerated temporality, the “utopian glow of cyber- capital” that ignores history and consequently augurs a permanent futurity where “there is no memory.” In his book Terrorism and Temporality in the Works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, James Gourley writes that the “dominance of technology engenders a complete shift in temporality.”3 He suggests that this shift results in a temporality “in which the past and future collapse in, rendering the present eternal.” But DeLillo implies that this temporal collapse is itself the future, in which the increasing speed of financial exchange allows for a detachment from the material present into the abstract realm of pure speculation.4 DeLillo directly links these prerogatives of late capitalism to a crisis of memory, as the twin abstraction machines of the stock market and the internet assert their dominance through the evacuation of historical memory. The critic Philipp Wolf describes 2 Don DeLillo, "In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September," Harper's, December 2001, 33.
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