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. 3 James Gourley, Terrorism and Temporality in the Works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013), 39. 4 This roughly connects to the argument Maurizio Lazzarato makes in his essay "The Making of the Indebted Man," as the whole financial system of credit and debt relies on ensuring that debtors will repay creditors in the future, which requires the fixing of existing social relations. See Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition, trans. Joshua David Jordan, Semiotext(e) Intervention (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012). The Rubble of History 3
the principal dynamics of late capitalist culture as “locomotion, speed [and] acceleration,” which “dissolve the traditional coordinates of time and space,” with “the increase in speed only [resulting] in a decrease in temporal and spatial points of reference.”5 If memory could be described as a collection of these points of reference, then it follows that their loss directly impedes the production of memory, which worsens in direct relation to the increasing speed of exchange. As a result of this induced memory loss, the production of both meaning (at the individual level) and history (at the collective level) find themselves under significant threat. And it is this process that would come into stark relief on 9/11.
Symptoms of this memory loss presented in the days after the attack, when the
American public was, as Linda Kauffman notes, “clamouring for answers.”6 A traumatised nation, having largely witnessed the attacks through the mediation of television, again turned to television in search of these answers. Implicit in this scenario is the degree to which the media performs the work of memory, as it both recalls and interprets history in order to frame the interpretation of current events. In short, the media forges narrative connections between events. But the attacks resisted this incorporation, as their scale and surprise—the first impact was thought to be an accident until the second—left the media unable to explain exactly what was happening and why. Frank Lentricchia and Jody
McAuliffe note how this effect was largely intentional as, “thanks to the cameras, which bin
Laden could confidently assume would be there, images of a spectacular sort were generated,
5 Philipp Wolf, Modernization and the Crisis of Memory: John Donne to Don DeLillo, Costerus (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2002), 177. 6 Linda S. Kauffman, "The Wake of Terror: Don Delillo’s “In the Ruins of the Future,” “Baader-Meinhof,” and Falling Man," MFS Modern Fiction Studies 54, no. 2 (2008): 353. William Chapman 4
framed, and replayed endlessly.”7 In devising an attack that doubled as media spectacle, the terrorists managed to interrupt the media’s presentation of a total narrative and substitute it with their own. As Jean Baudrillard writes in his essay “The Spirit of Terrorism,” “the terrorists exploited the ‘real time’ of images, their instantaneous worldwide transmission, just as they exploited stock-market speculation, electronic information and air traffic.”8
Baudrillard’s connection between the “real time” of images and “stock-market speculation” suggests that the terrorists’ irruption into the endless succession of image-time undermines the mechanism on which techno-capitalism relies: the power to regulate temporality.
DeLillo alludes to this in his essay with the claim “Today, again, the world narrative belongs to terrorists.”9 In his specific phrasing, he implies that the techno-capitalism he describes is not—and has not always been—in control of this world narrative, instead insinuating a struggle for control of this narrative between the diametrically opposed forces of technology and terrorism. He asserts that “the primary target of the men who attacked the Pentagon and the World Trade Center was not the global economy,” but America itself, citing the “thrust of [American] technology” and “the blunt force of [American] foreign policy” and “the power of American culture to penetrate every wall, home, life and mind” as explanations for the terrorists’ “fury.” In making this distinction between the global economy and America, DeLillo undermines the distinction between the terrorists and the terrorised, implying that technology and terror share an underlying motive. This explains his subsequent reference to the “protesters in Genoa, Prague, Seattle and other cities” who
7 Frank Lentricchia and Jody McAuliffe, Crimes of Art + Terror (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 17. 8 Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2002), 27. 9 DeLillo, "In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September," 33. The Rubble of History 5
wanted to “decelerate the global momentum that seemed to be driving unmindfully towards a landscape of consumer robots and social instability.” Although DeLillo does not explicitly connect these protests to the anti-globalisation movement, he does cite “the chance of self-determination probably diminishing for most people in most countries” as a motivating factor behind the protests, suggesting that resistance to the totalising impulses of techno-capital is not the sole province of terrorism. DeLillo makes this distinction explicit, praising the protesters for “trying to slow things down, even things out, hold off the white-hot future,” drawing a direct contrast with “the terrorists of September 11,” who
“want to bring back the past.”10 In framing the antagonism between techno-capital and terrorism as one of past versus future, DeLillo reveals how both forces have identical totalising impulses while preserving the rhetorical space for an alternative model.
DeLillo returns to this framework in the second half of his essay, wherein he interrogates the relationship of technology, something he describes as “our fate, our truth,”11 to history itself. He further describes technology as “what we mean when we call ourselves the only superpower on the planet,” the “materials and methods we devise [that] make it possible for us to claim our future.” In this view, technology is less a natural consequence of historical progression than the means by which history is directed. DeLillo bears this view out further in writing how “the World Trade towers were not only an emblem of advanced technology but a justification, in a sense, for technology’s irresistible will to realise in solid form whatever becomes theoretically allowable.”12 As a writer who has lived through both the construction and destruction of the towers, as well as having
10 Ibid., 34. 11 Ibid., 37. 12 Ibid., 38. William Chapman 6
mentioned them in several of his works—in Mao II they are described as “two black latex slabs that consumed all the available space”13—the symbolic significance of the towers is not lost on DeLillo. The towers—in their very (over)extension into space and their sheathing of the mechanisms of the Western techno-capitalist order—were, as Baudrillard aptly phrases it, “perfect embodiments, in their very twinness, of that definitive [global] order.”14 Despite the towers’ symbolic claim to authority over the world and the course of history, DeLillo reminds us that history can nevertheless still be contested, as “for all those who may want what we’ve got, there are all those who do not.”15 The terrorists’ desire for
“what they used to have before the waves of Western influence” thus leads them to see
“something innately destructive in the nature of technology” as it “brings death to their customs and beliefs.” Just as the World Trade towers displaced a considerable portion of lower Manhattan, global capitalism has displaced a considerable number of cultures and belief systems, along with their histories. For DeLillo, technology is also the means by which individuals become locked out from participation in their own history, leaving it to those with financial and political power to exploit for their own ends.
Insofar as technology represents the narrative of global capitalism, DeLillo explicitly identifies “terror’s response”16 as a narrative as well. But he flags a key distinction, drawing a contrast between the “open circuit of work, talk, family, and expressible feeling” of
American life and the “far narrower format” of the terrorist, who “builds a plot around his
13 Mao II (New York: Viking, 1991), 165. 14 Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers, 6. 15 DeLillo, "In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September," 38. 16 Ibid., 33. The Rubble of History 7
anger and our indifference.”17 In describing how “plots reduce the world,” DeLillo identifies how terrorism structures the world in the reductive terms of plot. In their analysis of the September 11 attacks, Lentricchia and McAuliffe observe how
“there were authors (bin Laden, Atta, etc); there was plot—a structure of events with deep narrative inevitability; there were thousands of characters […] with no knowledge that they’d been cast to die, [and] there was an audience with no choice but to experience terrorist narrative once that narrative found its true medium, the media without which terrorist art is ineffective and conspicuously completes its totalitarian trajectory.”18
Significantly, this transformation of terrorist plot into terrorist narrative takes place at the level of material reality: the plot is an abstraction until the moment the hijacked airplanes hit the towers, at which point the spectacle of the event triggers the reconfiguration of media narratives. DeLillo finds an analogue for this inherent to the nature of technology, noting how the “chain of reconsiderations” brought about by the attacks implies “that the ruin of the towers is implicit in other things.”19 As the terrorists used Western technology
(most notably airplanes and, indirectly, the media) against the West, DeLillo suggests that technology—“the new Palm Pilot […], the stretch limousine […], the midtown skyscraper under construction” are “haunted in a way by what has happened, less assured by their authority, in the prerogatives they offer.” This sense of technological betrayal poses a fundamental challenge to America’s narrative sense of identity because it implicates it in its own destruction: technology and terror exist on a feedback loop part of an enclosed, total system. Or, in DeLillo’s words: “Two forces in the world, past and future.”20 In this light, the fundamental conflict reveals itself to be one of totalitarian temporality: total past versus
17 Ibid., 34. 18 Lentricchia and McAuliffe, Crimes of Art + Terror, 14. 19 DeLillo, "In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September," 39. 20 Ibid., 40. William Chapman 8
total future. In their shared quest for totality, both promise ever-increasing levels of destruction in their respective attempts to eliminate the other. But this totality is not a permanent state, as DeLillo implies when he writes: “This is over now. Many things are over. The narrative ends in the rubble and it is left to us to create the counternarrative.”21
This thesis is about how, over the past thirty years, DeLillo’s fiction has attempted to create counternarratives. More specifically, it will examine the ways in which DeLillo’s fiction—specifically his novels Falling Man (2007), Mao II (1991) and White Noise
(1985)—attempts to intervene in the production of totalising mass narratives by exposing the basis of their power over human perception. DeLillo provides an example of this power in his essay when he mentions the first Iraq War and how “people had trouble separating the war from coverage of the war,” leaving people to feel as though a “layer of consciousness had been stripped away”22 once coverage of the war dissipated. He compares this with the coverage of the events of September 11, observing how
“The raw event was one thing, the coverage another. The event dominated the medium. It was bright and totalizing, and some of us said it was unreal. When we say a thing is unreal, we mean it is too real, a phenomenon so unaccountable and yet so bound to the power of objective fact that we can’t tilt it to the slant of our perceptions.”23
The bifurcation of the events of September 11 into the raw event and the media event demonstrates the power of official narrative, as the narrative subsumes the event and reduces it to a plot point in a historical drama, effacing the human dimension of the attacks from the historical record. This is what DeLillo means when he describes the counternarrative as being comprised of “a shadow history of false memories and imagined
21 Ibid., 34. 22 Ibid., 38. 23 Ibid., 38-9. The Rubble of History 9
loss,” the “rumor, fantasy, and mystical reverberation” of the Internet, the “cell phones, the lost shoes, […] the box cutters and credit cards […] the smaller objects and more marginal stories in the sifted ruins of the day.”24 He argues that “[w]e need them, even the common tools of the terrorists, to set against the massive spectacle that continues to seem unmanageable, too powerful a thing to set into our frame of practiced response.” In this view, the singularity of individual stories becomes the means of effectively opposing totalising power. Consequently, the counternarrative—a narrative that emphasises singularity as a counter to the totalitarian impulses of both technology and terrorism—thus represents a vision for the ethics and politics of fiction after the events of September 11, wherein narrativity becomes a tool for exposing totalising impulses and does not impose a fixed interpretation onto events.
What ultimately connects the three novels selected for this study together is this attempt to assert the primacy of their characters’ singularity against the totalising forces of terror and technology. Beginning with Falling Man in Chapter One, I examine how the ethical and political vision for fiction set out in “In the Ruins of the Future” translates into the novel form, analysing how DeLillo’s portrayal of a survivor, Keith Neudecker, and his family in the days, months and years following the attacks serves as a counternarrative to media interpretations of September 11. In locating the historical and cultural fallout from the events at the individual level, DeLillo can explore the relationships between language, identity and memory in order to reveal the ways in which cultural memory structures all three. In order to demystify this process, DeLillo depicts the challenge each character faces in reconciling his or her personal experience attacks with a mediatised perceptual schema,
24 Ibid., 35. William Chapman 10
situating the fallout of the attacks at the level of memory. Moreover, by having Keith experience the reality of the attack and his wife Lianne experience it at the level of representation, DeLillo captures the manner in which representations of the attacks subsume reality and form an ersatz cultural memory that can be readily manipulated and overwritten. In response to this spectacular discourse that claims authority over representations of the attacks, the novel develops an ethics and politics of representation that allow for the recovery of individual memory and for the return of these singular narratives to history. Through this lens, it becomes possible to see these ethics and politics at work in DeLillo’s earlier novels, revealing correspondences of form and content that evince a long-standing project to employ fiction as a means of regaining the past, as he intimated in his 1997 essay “The Power of History” in describing “the lost history that becomes the detailed weave of novels.”25 This thesis charts a similar course, dredging up the lost history within Mao II and White Noise to regain the insight those novels provide on the post-9/11 condition.
Chapter Two focuses on Mao II, in which I analyse how DeLillo constructs a dialectic between word and image in order to examine the totalising power of images and their relation to both terrorism and fiction. Through the figure of the reclusive novelist Bill
Gray, who agrees to have his photograph taken by the photographer Brita Nilsson as part of her project to document writers, the novel employs frequent shifts in time and perspective to explore the power of language and fiction in a world increasingly populated by images. In shifting perspective between the cast of characters—including Bill’s controlling assistant Scott Martineau and Scott’s ex-cult member partner Karen Janney—
25 "The Power of History," New York Times Magazine 146, no. 50908 (1997). The Rubble of History 11
DeLillo dissects the totalitarian appeal of images by pitting the singularity of his characters against the forces that seek to transform individuals into masses that can be manipulated for political purposes. Mao II also explicitly meditates on the possibilities of art in a world increasingly being shaped by terror, as Bill finds himself embroiled in a scheme in which he must participate in a televised press conference in order to secure the release of a Swiss poet held hostage by a Maoist group in Beirut. DeLillo’s analysis of the ways in which media images encode their own interpretation finds expression in Bill’s narrative arc, as he attempts to secure the release of the poet without becoming incorporated into the spectacular logic of terrorism. In its attempt to depict an art that remains external to the spectacular logic of media and terrorism, it exhibits a similar ethics to Falling Man in which fiction’s ability to restore singularity to history forms the foundations of a resistance to the totalising functions of technology and terror.
In Chapter Three, I again go back in time to DeLillo’s most well-known novel,
White Noise, in order to re-examine it through the twin lenses of terror and image found in both Falling Man and Mao II. Narrated through the first-person perspective of its protagonist Jack Gladney, White Noise reads as a critical examination of how spectacle, and its accompanying logic, infiltrates the institutions of everyday life and structures the individual’s relation to them. In this light, the novel’s central conflict surrounding Jack’s mounting fear of death—a perception amplified by the image-time of television and brought to fever pitch by an industrial waste accident known as the Airborne Toxic
Event—reveals itself to be a philosophical problem arising from the spectacle’s effacement of the distinction between the abstract and the real. With the narrative device of an experimental drug called Dylar that claims to eliminate the fear of death, DeLillo depicts William Chapman 12
how technology drives the world deeper into abstraction, alienating individuals from their material reality with increasingly disastrous consequences. This reveals the fundamental condition facing the characters in Falling Man and Mao II, and, through White Noise’s detection of spectacular logic in the institutions and rituals of everyday life, the ethics of fiction set out by DeLillo in “In the Ruins of the Future” can thus be understood as the use of fictional representation to set off individual history from the totalising narratives that seek to incorporate it. Through its deployment of the ironic mode, White Noise opens up a critical distance that allows for this recovery of individual history from the self-evidence of master narratives. In short, White Noise reveals how counterhistories—which are themselves counternarratives—prove to be the most effective methods of countering terror.
Ultimately, the correspondences of both form and content in these novels reveals both the elegance of DeLillo’s fictional interventions into material reality and his creation of an ethics of fiction that works against the will of technology to render the world into pure representation. This too surfaces in his post-9/11 essay, when he breaks up his analysis with anecdotes and stories from the day itself in order to create an effect that the critic
Marco Abel compares to “the meandering look of the neorealist camera eye, following no narrative yet many at once,” which allows DeLillo to “[intensify] the experience and concept of narrative as a mode of seeing.”26 In his essay, DeLillo references the “hundred thousand stories crisscrossing New York, Washington, and the world,” stories that “take us beyond the hard numbers of dead and missing and give us a glimpse of elevated being.”27
Even though the stories may not all be entirely true, they all attain value in how they
26 Marco Abel, "Don DeLillo's "In the Ruins of the Future": Literature, Images and the Rhetoric of Seeing 9/11," PMLA 118, no. 5: 1240. [Emphasis in the original.] 27 DeLillo, "In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September," 34. The Rubble of History 13
restore human dimensions to spectacular events. For DeLillo, fiction represents the means through which the world can be seen otherwise and thus serves as an ideal locus for the creation of counternarratives and of counterhistories. When Abel describes this “mode of seeing” as “a narrative mode that works from within the image event instead of imposing itself on it,” he describes nothing less than the ethics of DeLillo’s body of work. By using fiction to break through the proverbial glass of image events, DeLillo can reveal how their temporal manipulations structure human subjectivity and, consequently, history. This, in turn, allows fiction to become the site where subjectivity and history can be recovered, and where a new relationship with temporality can be forged. As DeLillo himself writes in “The
Power of History:” “Fiction is all about reliving things. It is our second chance.”28
28 "The Power of History." William Chapman 14
Chapter One Excavating the Rubble: Language and the Structures of Meaning in Falling Man
Upon its publication in 2007, Don DeLillo’s highly anticipated novel Falling Man received a mixed mainstream critical reception, with many critics left puzzled as to why
DeLillo—whose previous work appeared to make grand pronouncements on the state of
American culture—failed to do so on the subject of the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Michiko Kakutani’s review of the novel for The New York Times epitomises this sentiment, in particular when she writes that, in spite of the “parameters of reduced expectations” regarding the historical recentness of the attacks, the novel “feels small and unsatisfying and inadequate.”29 Critiquing DeLillo for making “no effort to situate [his] two very self- absorbed characters within a larger mosaic of what happened that September morning,” her review indicates a desire for DeLillo’s fiction to provide a verdict on the attacks’ historical significance, “illuminating the zeitgeist in which 9/11 occurred or the shell-shocked world it left in its wake.” Yet such pronouncements represent precisely what DeLillo sets out not to do, as his 2001 essay “In the Ruins of the Future” suggests. In proposing a counternarrative to “set against the massive spectacle” of the attacks, DeLillo flags a return to “the smaller objects and more marginal stories in the sifted ruins of the day,”30 anticipating Falling Man’s use of a domestic setting in order to examine the attacks’ effect on American culture. In missing DeLillo’s outright refusal to impose meaning on the attacks, Kakutani’s review instead illuminates the novel’s central question on the
29 Michiko Kakutani, "A Man, A Woman and a Day of Terror," New York Times 156, no. 53939 (2007). 30 DeLillo, "In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September," 35. The Rubble of History 15
relationship between memory and representation, and the tendency of spectacular discourse to privilege the latter at the expense of the former.
In contrast, other critics have been more receptive to Falling Man and its representational experiments. Identifying in his body of work what can generally be described as a desire to write against the economic and cultural forces that limit individual freedom, many DeLillo scholars have read Falling Man within this context. As Peter Boxall writes in his book Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction, “DeLillo’s fiction is organized around the possibility of a counterfunction, of a counternarrative that might preserve a radical revolutionary spirit, that might keep possibility31 alive in the thin air of the ‘end of history.’32 In asserting that DeLillo’s novels “posit a world in which the nonexistent, the unnameable, the unthinkable, have been eradicated; in which cultural truth is disseminated by the forces of a globalized capital from which there is no escape,” Boxall alludes to the very purpose of DeLillo’s fiction: an attempt to reclaim a space for what the spectacular discourse of televisual media renders non-existent and unthinkable. In specifically taking up
DeLillo’s coinage of the counternarrative, Boxall elucidates the connection between
DeLillo’s essay and his fiction, adding that “DeLillo’s fiction suggests a deep underlying connection between technology, violence and capital, a connection which undermines the possibility of historical progression,”33 themes DeLillo explicitly discusses in his essay. It is in this context that Falling Man should be read, as the novel’s domestic setting allows
31 Boxall uses this word to refer to the concept of possibility, or, in short, the possibility of historical (read: economic and cultural) change. 32 Peter Boxall, Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction, Routledge Transnational Perspectives on American Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 5. 33 Ibid., 7. William Chapman 16
DeLillo to reveal how the nexus of technology, violence and capital manifest in the spectacle of the attacks articulates itself at the level of individual language.
However, this complicates DeLillo’s desire for a counternarrative that resists the spectacular discourses of terror and technology, as it must devise a form of language resistant to spectacle’s incorporation. As such, the task of DeLillo’s post-9/11 work becomes to find a model of such a language, working through multiple models of language to find their points of differentiation. DeLillo alludes to such a differentiation in his essay, writing that although the “event itself has no purchase on the mercies of analogy or simile,” in the aftermath of the attacks, “living language is not diminished.”34 This distinction between figurative language and living language provides a useful framework for understanding the different models of language at work, as DeLillo signals a break away from the reductive, explanatory language of metaphor and simile towards a language of singularity. Consequently, Falling Man can be read as an attempt to identify and utilise the characteristics of language as a medium that can resist the spectacular discourse of technology, violence and capital, which, in its reification of language, reduces reality to its representation. In the novel, DeLillo employs language to interrogate this relationship between representation and reality, between word and thing. Fiction thus reopens the linguistic gap that technology and terrorism seek to close in order to manipulate reality through its representation. The role of language in Falling Man thus becomes the entry point into understanding the novel, as the symbolic violence of terrorism renders legible the symbolic discourse of technology and capital that terrorism seeks to disrupt. Yet terrorism
34 DeLillo, "In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September," 39. The Rubble of History 17
also seeks to impose a vision of the world structured by its own reified language, and it is this tendency DeLillo identifies and responds to in Falling Man.
Moreover, the basis for this theoretical framework that structures the novel initially surfaces in his essay, as when he directly compares Western technology and terrorist violence, asking the reader to
“Think of a future in which the components of a microchip are the size of atoms. The devices that pace our lives will operate from the smart quantum spaces of pure information. Now think of people in countless thousands massing in anger and vowing revenge. Enlarged photos of martyrs and holy men dangle from balconies, and the largest images are those of a terrorist leader.”35
Although DeLillo’s comparison implies a stark contrast between technology and terror, upon closer reading the distinction between the two reveals itself as one of degree, not kind.
Whereas the power of technology derives from its ability to operate from dimensions beneath perception, the power of terrorism derives from its ability to completely occupy the visual field of perception. One becomes total by shrinking out of sight; the other becomes total by occupying the visual field. Fiction, then, must utilise language in a way that renders these processes legible and, by extension, visible. This is what DeLillo sets out to do with
Falling Man, as he adapts his ethics of fiction to uncover ways in which language can resist becoming incorporated by spectacular discourse. More specifically, the novel interrogates three models of language: the object language of the protagonist, Keith Neudecker, the educative function of language that appears in scenes involving the fictional terrorist
Hammad and Keith’s son Justin, and the language of embodied memory that surfaces in the narrative arc of Keith’s wife, Lianne. Through these models, Falling Man reveals how
35 Ibid., 40. William Chapman 18
the language of spectacular discourse estranges individuals from lived experience and works toward a language that recovers their lost history.
I. Approaching Ground Zero: Language and the Narrative Voice
Falling Man begins with a direct approach to the scene of the attacks, opening in medias res after the collapse of the South Tower of the World Trade Center:
“It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night. He was walking north through rubble and mud and there were people running past holding towels to their faces or jackets over their heads. They had handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths. They had shoes in their hands, a woman with a shoe in each hand, running past him. They ran and fell, some of them, confused and ungainly, with debris coming down around them, and there were people taking shelter under cars.”36
DeLillo’s particular use of language is in evidence from the first sentence, as he describes the smoke-filled New York street as “a time and space” unto itself in order to emphasise the spatial and temporal discontinuity of the attacks. This discontinuity extends to the identities of the individuals depicted in the first chapter—no one is given an identifying name for the entire chapter—as the attacks produce a rupture in time and space that severs the continuity of identity and memory and destabilises the assumed relationship between language and reality. DeLillo’s framing of the scene as a self-contained world enables this direct approach to the scene, using descriptive language to open up a space for contemplation as though “all of this […] might be placed in a state of abeyance.”37 This
“state of abeyance” mirrors the function of language in the scene, as it refrains from producing commentary on the event in order to produce what Hamilton Carroll describes
36 Falling Man: A Novel (New York: Scribner, 2007), 3. 37 Ibid., 4. The Rubble of History 19
as “a narrative lacuna in which meaning is suspended.”38 DeLillo produces this suspension of meaning by narrating the scene from the third person perspective of an unnamed man— only referred to as “he”—whom DeLillo describes as wearing “a suit and [carrying] a briefcase” and who has “glass in his hair and face, marbled bolls of blood and light.”39 By leaving the reader in the dark as to the man’s identity, DeLillo leaves the reader to contemplate the scene unfolding in front of the man and to process it as if seeing it for the first time. This produces a breakdown in the production of meaning, as the decontextualized framing suspends the scene’s significance.
Moreover, this breakdown of meaning takes place within the man’s frame of vision, as DeLillo narrates:
“In time he heard the sound of the second fall. He crossed Canal Street and began to see things, somehow, differently. Things did not seem charged in the usual ways, the cobbled street, the cast-iron buildings. There was something critically missing from the things around him. They were unfinished, whatever that means. They were unseen, whatever that means, shop windows, loading platforms, paint-sprayed walls. Maybe this is what things look like when there is no one here to see them.”40
Here DeLillo’s use of language captures the breakdown of meaning inherent to the attacks themselves, as they force a reconfiguration of the system of objects that results in objects losing their “charge,” or their connection to other objects that produces meaning. In locating this reconfiguration of significance within the man’s field of vision, DeLillo shows how language structures seeing by depicting what happens when words can no longer fully account for what one sees. When the man hears the collapse of the second tower—for the second time—DeLillo writes that it “was him coming down, the north tower,” collapsing
38 Hamilton Carroll, ""Like Nothing in this Life": September 11 and the Limits of Representation in Don DeLillo's Falling Man," Studies in American Fiction 40, no. 1: 111. 39 DeLillo, Falling Man: A Novel, 3. 40 Ibid., 5. William Chapman 20
the distinction between the man and the tower to intimate the collapse of language’s ability to differentiate the two and to produce meaning from this difference. Language fails in the rubble of the towers, and it is from here that language must be reconstructed.
The collapse of language articulated in the novel’s opening chapter comes into stark relief once the novel leaves the scene of the attacks in the next chapter, as the reader gradually makes the connection that the unnamed man from the opening chapter is the novel’s main character, Keith Neudecker. Keith’s use of language throughout the novel can be seen as a continuation of this initial proximity of language to the event: it is Keith for whom language has collapsed into the system of objects and which he must reconstruct in the wake of the towers’ collapse. This is, DeLillo suggests, an action that can only be performed through language, but the novel’s depiction of Keith largely concerns his inability to perform this reconstruction. An exemplary moment of this comes in a scene where Keith examines the contents of the briefcase he carries home from the towers after realising that it is not his own:
“He found a set of headphones and a CD player. There was a small bottle of spring water. There was a cell phone in the pocket designed for that purpose and half a chocolate bar in a slot for business cards. He noted three pen sleeves, one rollerball pen. There was a pack of Kent cigarettes and a lighter. In one of the saddle pockets he found a sonic toothbrush in a travel case and a digital voice recorder, sleeker than his own. He examined the items with detachment. It was somehow morbidly unright to be doing this but he was so remote from the things in the briefcase, from the occasion of the briefcase, that it probably didn’t matter.”41
With a language that restricts itself to the objects of his immediate environment, Keith loses the capacity to “charge” the relationship between objects and instead lets them dictate their relation to one another. Instead of referring to the singular individual to whom the
41 Ibid., 36. The Rubble of History 21
objects belong, the objects simply refer to each other. Such is the “detachment” with which
Keith examines the items, as he is “so remote from the things in the briefcase” that he cannot imagine the person to whom they belong. Moreover, it is precisely this object language that inhibits Keith’s ability to reconstruct his sense of identity after the attacks.
From the beginning, the novel foreshadows Keith’s inability to use language in order make the narrative connections required to reconstruct his sense of identity. In
Chapter Two, wherein Keith’s estranged wife Lianne and her mother Nina discuss Keith’s surprise return to Lianne’s apartment after fleeing the towers, Nina pointedly asks Lianne what she and Keith have discussed in the three days since the attack, to which Lianne answers: “There’s nothing to discuss right now. He needs to stay away from things, including discussions.”42 While Lianne’s response implies a desire to not impose on her husband’s traumatic experience, her comment that Keith “needs to stay away from things” acquires a double meaning in the view that “things” comprise the only language to which
Keith has recourse after the attacks. This imbues Nina’s one-word reply of “reticent” and
Lianne’s subsequent “[y]ou know Keith” with peculiar significance, as both comments imply that Keith’s limited facility with language existed before the attacks. In expressing her admiration for Keith’s reticence, Nina remarks that it “gives the impression there’s something deeper than hiking and skiing, or playing cards,” imputing a larger significance to Keith’s identity that cannot be articulated. Before the reader gets to hear Keith attempt to speak for himself, DeLillo establishes the limited scope of his ability to do so, as his inability to express himself in language before September 11 anticipates the object language that follows the attacks.
42 Ibid., 9. William Chapman 22
Keith’s reliance on the object world to structure his sense of self appears more clearly in the subsequent chapters, wherein details about Keith’s identity emerge through his relation to objects. Early in Part One, Keith returns to the downtown apartment he had been living in prior to the attacks—now located in the exclusion zone near the rubble of the Twin Towers—to collect his belongings. Although he initially sees “nothing that mattered to him,” Keith finds his attention taken by his poker table:
“There was the card table, that was all, with its napped green surface, baize or felt, site of the weekly poker game. One of the players said baize, which is imitation felt, he said, and Keith more or less conceded this. It was the one uncomplicated interval of his week, his month, the poker game—the one anticipation that was not marked by the bloodguilt tracings of severed connections. Call or fold. Felt or baize.”43
The card table’s evocation of Keith’s memory exemplifies the object language at work, as the physical presence of the table provides a connection between Keith’s past and present.
DeLillo’s insertion of the phrase “that was all” serves a double purpose in that it identifies the importance of the poker table to Keith while simultaneously refusing its connection to his past; the materiality of the table is “all” there is. Nonetheless, the significance of the poker table emerges in Keith’s mourning for “the one uncomplicated interval” of his life, as
DeLillo collapses temporality—“his week, his month, the poker game”—into the table, reducing the potential significance of the object to the materiality of the object itself.
However, the material of the table is a simulation, as it is not felt but imitation felt, baize, simulated material for the simulated reality of the poker game, where Keith and his friends could test “the forces that govern events.”44 More crucially still, the simulated reality of the poker game reduces the individual’s degree of agency to its narrowest point. The choice of
43 Ibid., 26-7. 44 Ibid., 96. The Rubble of History 23
“call or fold” supplants and represses the complex and ambiguous choices (with moral and ethical repercussions) Keith makes in his life—notably his separation from his wife and child—with ones predicated almost entirely on the abstract, arbitrary calculus of economic logic.
DeLillo’s focus on the poker table within the context of the apartment Keith lives in to “center” his life underscores how Keith’s object language enables the repression of his lived experience. In the next paragraph, Keith selects the belongings he wants to take with him from the apartment, taking “a few shirts and trousers and his trekking boots from
Switzerland and to hell with the rest.”45 Keith’s failure to locate meaning in most of the goods that fill his apartment signifies the insufficiency of object language, as the only objects that Keith values are the ones that connect him to his singular memory. DeLillo makes this connection in observing that Keith takes “the Swiss boots because the boots mattered and the poker table mattered but he wouldn’t need the table, two players dead, one badly injured.” While the boots connect Keith with his life before the attacks, in the wake of the attacks the poker table becomes charged with the history of the event, as it evokes the death of his friends in the towers. Consequently, he rejects the history signified by the table, instead showing preference to the objects that are not charged with such history. In addition to the “single suitcase” of goods Keith collects from his apartment, he also takes “his passport, checkbooks, birth certificate and a few other documents, the state papers of identity.” With his identity contained by the objects that affirm it, Keith finds himself unable to reconstruct his sense of self in the wake of the attacks as his identity
45 Ibid., 27. William Chapman 24
depends on the combination of objects in his immediate environment, an arrangement that is always left to chance.
Ultimately, it is this immersion in object language that drives Keith into becoming a semi-professional poker player, as the simulated reality of the Las Vegas casinos allows him to repress his traumatic memory. In a scene where Keith encounters Terry Cheng, one of his old friends in New York who is now a full-time professional player, Terry brings up a memory of Keith’s friend Rumsey, who died in the towers on September 11. Keith’s subsequent reflection on Terry’s lifestyle includes the observation on how “private games with easy banter and wives arranging flowers […] could not match the crucial anonymity of these days and weeks, the mingling of countless lives that had no stories attached.”46 For
Keith, Las Vegas offers the possibility of escape from his own story, from the burden of history that he carries within his singular memory. But it is ultimately an illusion, much like the waterfall in the casino Keith “stare[s] into,” unable to determine “whether it was real or simulated.”47 After Terry mentions that he heard Rumsey “went out a window,”
DeLillo describes how “Keith looked into the waterfall. This was better than closing his eyes. If he closed his eyes, he’d see something.”48 In this moment, the authenticity of the object becomes subordinate to its function in allowing Keith to repress his traumatic memory. At the end of the novel, Keith’s immersion in the object language of poker precludes the possibility of his finding closure after his experience, as his reliance on the objects of his immediate environment strictly limits his ability to imagine himself outside of the relations dictated by the same objects.
46 Ibid., 204. 47 Ibid., 203. 48 Ibid., 205. The Rubble of History 25
II. Learning from Language: Hammad and Justin
DeLillo dramatizes another function of language in a short chapter depicting
Hammad, a fictional hijacker, and his recruitment into the September 11 plot. In this chapter, set off from the numbered chapters depicting Keith and Lianne with the title “On
Marienstrasse,” DeLillo examines how language structures Hammad’s sense of identity and how Hammad’s change from foreign engineering student to jihadist takes place through the manipulation of language. A technical student in Hamburg, Germany, Hammad listens to the conversations of a group of men who congregate in a flat on the Marienstrasse, in particular to the man “who led discussions, this was Amir and he was intense, a small thin wiry man who spoke to Hammad in his face.” On the next page, the reader learns that
Amir is none other than the ringleader of the September 11 attacks, Mohammed Atta.
DeLillo repeats the phrase describing how Amir speaks to Hammad “in his face” multiple times in the chapter, literalising the connection between individual identity (symbolised by the face) and how language fundamentally structures the perception of one’s own identity.
Amir verbalises this notion when he tells Hammad explicitly: “The world changes first in the mind of the man who wants to change it. The time is coming, our truth, our shame, and each man becomes the other, and the other still another, and then there is no separation.”49 By speaking to Hammad “in his face,” DeLillo dramatizes Amir’s attempts to shape Hammad’s identity through language, by giving him a preformed vocabulary with which to describe his relation to the external world. In order to do this, Amir develops a language to describe “the feeling of lost history”, which is “what [the men in the flat] talked about, being crowded out by other cultures, other futures, the all-enfolding will of capital
49 Ibid., 80. William Chapman 26
markets and foreign policies.” Recalling the language of his post-9/11 essay, DeLillo connects these material processes to the process of identity formation Amir mobilises, “his mind […] in the upper skies, making sense of things, drawing things together.”50
However, DeLillo refrains from depicting Hammad’s transformation from technical student to jihadist as a straightforward process. DeLillo gives Hammad a romantic interest, “a woman who was German, Syrian, what else, a little Turkish,” setting up a direct conflict between Hammad’s individual desires and Amir’s totalising historical vision. Although being with the woman allows Hammad to feel “the draw of some huge future landscape opening up,”51 his desires find themselves corrected by the power of
Amir’s rhetorical constructions. Amir asks Hammad “What is the difference between you and all the others, outside our space?” as a means of reinforcing both the linguistic construction of “us versus them” that defines their group identity and gives it power.
Toward the end of the chapter, Hammad remarks that the beard he has been growing as a sign of his “brotherhood”—with his face again serving as the material manifestation of his identity—“would look better if he trimmed it.”52 However, he instantly reaffirms his commitment to his new collective identity:
“But there were rules now and he was determined to follow them. His life had structure. Things were clearly defined. He was becoming one of them now, learning to look like them and think like them. This was inseparable from jihad. He prayed with them to be with them. They were becoming total brothers.”
With this passage, DeLillo implies that the allure of this identity comes from the structure it provides in being “clearly defined,” sacrificing the possibilities of ambiguity in pursuit of what James Berger describes as “the imagined former state of social harmony and perfect
50 Ibid., 81. 51 Ibid., 82. 52 Ibid., 83. The Rubble of History 27
correspondence between word and thing.”53 Hammad’s identity is thus a form of acquired language, taught to him by Amir. In depicting how Hammad acquires his identity through language, DeLillo engages with the cultural politics of perception in order to reflect how the same educative function of language operates in the white, upper-middle-class lives of
Keith and Lianne.
This educative use of language appears most prominently in scenes involving Keith and Lianne’s son Justin, as his experiences with language interrogate language’s ability to structure reality. The sense of “structure” and learning “to think like them” present in
Hammad’s identity formation reflects back onto a scene in Part One of the novel in which
Justin (Keith and Lianne’s son) attempts “to speak in monosyllables only, for extended stretches,” a school exercise “designed to teach the children something about the structure of words and the discipline required to frame clear thoughts.”54 The larger significance of this activity appears when Lianne “half seriously” comments that it sounds “totalitarian,”55 betraying a mistrust in the restriction of language to its fundamental units, a
“fundamentalism” that threatens to reduce the world. When Justin responds that the exercise helps him “go slow” when he thinks, DeLillo immediately draws a comparison to
Keith, who is also “going slow, easing inward,” adding that
“He used to want to fly out of self-awareness, day and night, a body in raw motion. Now he finds himself drifting into spells of reflection, thinking not in clear units, hard and linked, but only absorbing what comes, drawing things out of time and memory and into some dim space that bears his collected experience.”
53 James Berger, "Falling Towers and Postmodern Wild Children: Oliver Sacks, Don DeLillo, and Turns Against Language," PMLA 120, no. 2 (2005): 343. 54 DeLillo, Falling Man: A Novel, 66. 55 Ibid. William Chapman 28
The contrast between Justin’s linguistic exercise and Keith’s mental state mirrors
Hammad’s condition in “On Marienstrasse,” as Hammad takes on a preformed identity that breaks down the world into clearly defined units, much like Justin’s monosyllables.
But the comparison to Keith’s memory reveals the fragmentary nature of these “clear” units, which cannot account for the totality of experience by their very nature. Ultimately,
DeLillo suggests, language always undermines itself. Justin’s educative language exercise illustrates Linda Kauffman’s observation of how the characters in Falling Man “adapt to the post-9/11 climate by adopting a set of rituals, superstitions, or obsessive-compulsive behaviours,”56 as the characters seek to restructuring their relationship to the external world that the attacks render unfamiliar.
However, Justin’s use of language in relation to the attacks works directly to undermine the notion that language can reliably structure one’s relation to the world.
Much of the narrative surrounding Justin in Part One of Falling Man stems from Lianne’s concern regarding Justin and his “two best friends” (whom Lianne refers to as “the
Siblings”) and their mysterious behaviour, which Lianne describes as them looking out the window and “endlessly whispering things in this semi-gibberish” about a man whose name they “mumble back and forth.”57 The name in question is “Bill Lawton,” an Anglicised mishearing of bin Laden. This mishearing of bin Laden’s identity, as Joseph M. Conte points out, allows “this mass murderer to be mistaken for a white American stockbroker,
Chevrolet dealer, or middle-class businessman.”58 Conte also notes how “the familiar name
56 Kauffman, "The Wake of Terror: Don Delillo’s “In the Ruins of the Future,” “Baader- Meinhof,” and Falling Man," 371. 57 DeLillo, Falling Man: A Novel, 17. 58 Joseph M. Conte, "Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and the Age of Terror," MFS Modern Fiction Studies 57, no. 3 (2011): 569. The Rubble of History 29
is transposed on the mass murderer, but in return the attributes of the mass murderer are transposed on one very like us,”59 revealing the distinction between bin Laden and Bill
Lawton to be primarily linguistic, with each name structuring a different narrative of the attacks. When, at the end of Part One, Keith learns the story behind the name Bill Lawton, he tells Lianne that the children believe him to be a mythical figure with a “long beard” and
“long robe,” who “flies jet planes and speaks thirteen languages but not English except to his wives.”60 Justin’s mishearing allows him to construct a mythology from the fragments of information he overhears, just as Amir creates a mythology from the fragments of history that suit his totalising narrative and just as the media creates a mythology surrounding
Osama bin Laden from the fragments that suit its narrative.
Moreover, the parallel between Justin and Hammad’s experiences with language deepens in the light of Lianne’s increasingly desperate attempts to correct her son’s misapprehensions. After the Siblings’ mother first mentions the name Bill Lawton, Lianne questions Justin about taking a pair of binoculars to his friends’ high-rise apartment,
“preparing to remain for three, four, five days, in the context of parental body language, or until he answered.”61 Her response to what is essentially child’s play can thus be read as symptomatic of the attacks’ challenge to language, as she invokes her parental authority in an attempt to enforce what she believes to be the correct interpretation of events. But Justin refuses to give her any answers, denying her the opportunity to impose her language on his own. Keith’s observation on how Justin’s friend Robert (one of the “Siblings”) might have come up with the name Bill Lawton becomes of particular interest, commenting that
59 Ibid., 570. 60 DeLillo, Falling Man: A Novel, 74. 61 Ibid., 39. William Chapman 30
Robert may have “heard the name once, or misheard it, then imposed this version on future occasions” and “never adjusted his original sense of what he was hearing.”62 Keith’s observation articulates how this educative model of language functions, as the language of the children’s misapprehension structures their relation to the event. Lianne finds herself disturbed by this idea, openly lamenting the “protective distance between children and news events,”63 a remark ironically oblivious to the protective distance the media places between people and events. Lianne’s inability to perceive this distance indicates the extent to which the distinction between event and representation has been effaced, eliminating the possibility of alternate interpretations by fixing the relationship between word and thing.
Ultimately, Justin’s misapprehensions reveal the identical logic at work in Amir and
Lianne’s attempts to impose a particular interpretation of the world through language.
However, in depicting how Justin’s use of language undermines Lianne’s attempt to impose her own, DeLillo identifies the basis for a language that does not impose meaning onto events.
III. Seeing and Believing: Lianne and the Mediation of Memory
As the first two models of language substitute representation for memory, Falling
Man’s third model of language actively interrogates the relationship between memory and representation. This relationship specifically hovers over Lianne’s narrative arc, as she struggles to reconcile her lived experience of the attacks with their omnipresent representations. Through the conversation Lianne has in the first scene with her mother
Nina, an art professor who goes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and look “at three or
62 Ibid., 73. 63 Ibid., 74. The Rubble of History 31
four pictures in an hour and a half of looking,” at “what was unfailing in its grip on the eye and mind, on memory and identity,”64 DeLillo neatly invokes the visual arts to articulate the relationship between memory and interpretation. With the detail that Nina looks at only three or four pictures in an hour and a half, he constructs an implicit contrast with the photographic media representations of the attacks and the flood of images they produce.
Whereas the perspectival abstractions of painting maintain the distance between event and representation, photography’s claimed proximity to reality collapses this distance, allowing for a single perspective to be imposed on events. DeLillo develops this contrast further with
Lianne’s description of her mother’s living room, with a particular focus on “two still lifes” by the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi:
“These were groupings of bottles, jugs, biscuit tins, that was all, but there was something in the brushstrokes that held a mystery she could not name, or in the irregular edges of vases and jars, some reconnoiter inward, human and obscure, away from the very light and color of the paintings. Natura morta. The Italian term for still life seemed stronger than it had to be, somewhat ominous even, but these were matters she hadn’t talked about with her mother. Let the latent meanings turn and bend in the wind, free from authoritative comment.”65
Lianne’s refusal to allow her mother authoritative comment on her interpretation of the paintings exemplifies how meaning arises from the interface between the individual subject and the object world, which takes place through language. In foregrounding Lianne’s singular perspective on the paintings, DeLillo introduces a model for the relationship between representation and memory in which representations do not perform the work of memory but instead facilitate it, allowing “latent meanings” to form “free from authoritative comment.”
64 Ibid., 11. 65 Ibid., 12. William Chapman 32
Fittingly, it is in Lianne’s narrative arc where DeLillo attempts to extend this model into the domain of writing. Providing background into how Keith and Lianne’s separation
“had been marked by a certain symmetry, the steadfast commitment each had made to an equivalent group,” DeLillo describes Lianne’s “storyline sessions,” gatherings of “five or six or seven men and women in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease” who come together to write about “events in the world and in their lives.” 66 The use of writing as a counter to memory loss recalls a key claim the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs makes in his book On
Collective Memory, describing how “verbal conventions constitute what is at the same time the most elementary and the most stable framework of collective memory.”67 Halbwachs’ observation dovetails with Linda Kauffman’s observation that “Alzheimer’s is a metaphor for the post-9/11 condition,” wherein “history is receding more and more rapidly from us—along with our will, imagination, and power to anchor it in anything approaching the familiar.”68 In this light, the “storyline sessions” become a model for how writing can anchor history in the familiar, in the singular language of experience. Echoes of this appear in Lianne’s thoughts about the sessions:
“Sometimes it scared her, the first signs of halting response, the losses and failings, the grim prefigurings of a mind beginning to slide away from the adhesive friction that makes an individual possible. It was in the language, the inverted letters, the lost word at the end of a struggling sentence. It was in the handwriting that might melt into runoff.”69
As Marni Gauthier writes, Falling Man “emphasizes written expression against forgetting, against ineluctable loss,” noting that the sessions allow for “individual memories [to]
66 Ibid., 29. 67 Maurice Halbwachs and Lewis A. Coser, On Collective Memory, The Heritage of Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 45. 68 Kauffman, "The Wake of Terror: Don Delillo’s “In the Ruins of the Future,” “Baader- Meinhof,” and Falling Man," 368. 69 DeLillo, Falling Man: A Novel, 30. The Rubble of History 33
become collectively cradled.”70 Moreover, DeLillo emphasises the materiality of writing— the “handwriting that might melt into runoff”71—to build an implicit contrast with the televisual memory of spectacular discourse, which renders all language uniform. DeLillo deepens this contrast when he describes how the group members experience “a thousand high times” when “given a chance to encounter the crossing points of insight and memory that the act of writing allows.”72 In depicting how the act of writing forms a material connection between the individual subject and the object world, DeLillo identifies writing’s ability to counter the distance spectacular discourses place between the individual and history.
But this model forms a stark contrast with Lianne’s experience after the attacks, as her ability to maintain her own critical perspective outside of spectacular discourse comes under significant strain. After the attacks, the storyline sessions take on “a measure of intensity,” with the group members near-unanimously wanting “to write about the planes.”73 However, before the scene in which the group members write about the attacks,
DeLillo reveals Lianne’s personal connection to Alzheimer’s disease, as her father had committed suicide shortly after being diagnosed with senile dementia. This revelation inserts a motive into Lianne’s interactions with the group members, whom she sees as “the
70 Marni J. Gauthier, Amnesia and Redress in Contemporary American Fiction: Counterhistory, 1st ed., American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 162. 71 DeLillo's phrasing calls to mind Marshall Berman's book All That Is Solid Melts into Air, a reference that resurfaces in a later scene where Lianne tells her story to the group, whose members DeLillo describes as "waiting for words from her side of the line, where what is solid does not melt" (127). 72 DeLillo, Falling Man: A Novel, 30. 73 Ibid., 31. William Chapman 34
living breath of the thing that killed her father,”74 inadvertently using them to make sense of her father’s demise. Although explicitly advised by the supervising doctor not to make the sessions about her own problems, Lianne nonetheless continues to use the group as a way of making sense of the events of her life. When the group members write about the attacks, their collective attention turns to the role of God in the attacks. Their discussion leads Lianne to reflect on her own struggle “with the idea of God,” having been “taught to believe that religion made people compliant” by her mother, who adds that people “want to transcend, […] to pass beyond the limits of safe understanding, and what better way to do it than through make-believe.”75 Of course, the qualities ascribed to religion here also describe the act of writing fiction, which can transcend the “limits of safe understanding” and form the basis of a shared humanity.
While DeLillo allows space for the reader to produce these insights, Lianne’s desire to impose meaning onto the events in her life blinds her to the insights produced by the group members. Noting how none of the group members “wrote a word about the terrorists” or spoke about them in the subsequent discussions, Lianne prompts the group to talk about the “nineteen men come here to kill us,” despite not being “certain what she wanted to hear” in their responses.76 In her attempt to get the group members to make sense of the terrorists, Lianne unwittingly reframes the conversation within the spectacular discourse that the group had been resisting. The group catches onto this disjunction, as when Anna C. pointedly refuses this framing:
“But this, what happened, it’s way too big, it’s outside someplace, on the other side of the world. You can’t get to these people or even see them in their pictures in the
74 Ibid., 62. 75 Ibid., 62-3. 76 Ibid., 63-4. The Rubble of History 35
paper. You can see their faces but what does it mean? Means nothing to call them names. I’m a name caller before I was born. Do I know what to call them?”77
Half buried in Anna’s comment is the insight that the individuals behind the attacks are different from the representations of them circulated by the media, which are framed in a way to provoke a response “defined in terms of revenge” that Lianne reads into Anna’s story. Lianne’s interpretation of Anna’s story within the framework of spectacular discourse blinds her to Anna’s insights into the distortions of spectacular discourse, which uses visibility to conceal its own representational distance. The conclusion of Anna’s story specifically undermines this distortion, as she discusses the impossibility of revenge for the attacks:
“He78 dies in a car crash or walking across the street, hit by a car, you can kill the person in your mind a thousand times, the driver. You couldn’t do the actual thing, in all honesty, because you don’t have the wherewithal, but you could think it, you could see it in your mind and get some trade-off from that. But here, with these people, you can’t even think it. You don’t know what to do. Because they’re a million miles outside your life. Which, besides, they’re dead.”79
Anna’s insight betrays the central obfuscation of spectacular discourse: the replacement of individuals with representations. The phrase “a million miles outside your life” evokes the distance between individual and representation that spectacular discourse collapses, resisting the corruption of her own memory by images to which she shares only an abstract connection. Ultimately, Anna’s desire to record her own memory leads her to refuse the language of spectacular discourse, which corrupts memory through the insertion of abstract memories that connect to nothing.
77 Ibid., 64. 78 Anna’s story concerns a fireman she knew named Mike, who went missing (and presumably died) in one of the towers. 79 DeLillo, Falling Man: A Novel, 64. William Chapman 36
DeLillo brings the conflict between the language of spectacular discourse and the language of lived experience to a head in a confrontation between Lianne and her downstairs neighbour Elena that spans the first two parts of the novel. Toward the end of
Part One, Lianne hears “music located in Islamic tradition” coming from Elena’s apartment and, finding that it “was beginning to make her angry,” tries to think of a way to
“stop the noise.”80 Significantly, DeLillo intersperses Lianne’s brainstorming of ways to confront Elena with details of Lianne’s media consumption of the attacks, including that she “read stories in newspapers until she had to force herself to stop.” In attempting to rationalise her anger over the music, Lianne has the thought that Muslim people “think alike, talk alike, eat the same food at the same time,” despite knowing that “this wasn’t true” and that she needs to not “allude to the underlying theme of a certain kind of music as a certain form of political and religious statement,” instead couching her discomfort in “the language of aggrieved tenancy.”81 The dissonance between Lianne’s generalisation of
Muslims and her acknowledgement of its falsehood captures the process by which, as Linda
Kauffman describes, “[m]edia images colonize the unconscious, fixing meaning and history.”82 Through media images and representations, the language of spectacular discourse becomes the language of Lianne’s unconscious, producing what DeLillo subsequently describes as “[t]houghts from nowhere, elsewhere, someone else’s.”83 In Part
Two, when Lianne directly confronts Elena about the music and ends up physically
80 Ibid., 67-8. 81 Ibid., 68-9. 82 Kauffman, "The Wake of Terror: Don Delillo’s “In the Ruins of the Future,” “Baader- Meinhof,” and Falling Man," 366. 83 DeLillo, Falling Man: A Novel, 69. The Rubble of History 37
assaulting her, she immediately recognises that “she was going crazy”84 and later tells Keith that although she could “hear [herself] speaking,” her “voice was like it was coming from somebody else.”85 Although she can identify the thoughts structured by the language of spectacular discourse, she cannot stop herself from acting out a form of the displaced revenge fantasy that the Alzheimer’s patients deny her.
This dissonance between media representations of the attacks and lived experience comes to the fore when DeLillo narrates Lianne watching the infamous television footage of the attacks. DeLillo emphasises the compulsiveness of the footage in his narration, recalling the endless repetition of the footage in the days following the attacks:
“Every time she saw a videotape of the planes she moved a finger toward the power button on the remote. Then she kept on watching. The second plane coming out of that ice blue sky, this was the footage that entered the body, that seemed to run beneath her skin, the fleeting sprint that carried lives and histories, theirs and hers, everyone’s, into some other distance, out beyond the towers.” 86
The specific reference to “footage that entered the body” implies, as Hamilton Carroll observes, that “Lianne comes to perceive viewing as a form of bodily experience,”87 allowing the language of spectacular discourse equal status with that of her own experience. This is, of course, the same category mistake that led to her physical altercation with Elena.
However, in this instance she finds herself confronted by how the “ice blue sky” in the footage contrasts with the “skies she retained in memory,” which “were dramas of cloud and sea storm.” The stormy skies of Lianne’s memory captures a dimension of her experience that the images cannot: her singular lived experience of the event. The disparity
84 Ibid., 119-20. 85 Ibid., 123-5. 86 Ibid., 134. 87 Carroll, ""Like Nothing in this Life": September 11 and the Limits of Representation in Don DeLillo's Falling Man," 118. William Chapman 38
between the documentary truth of the images and the gestalt of Lianne’s memory renders the conflict between them legible, as the novel reproduces both images in language.
Lianne’s inability to interpret her own memory exemplifies how spectacular discourse impedes the ability to construct meaning from lived experience, as it saturates the environment with media images that can fix meaning by capitalizing on their proximity to an “objective” reality. This poses a direct challenge to literature, as both ultimately rely on language to construct representations of an external reality that can be broadcast to individuals. However, by interrogating the relationship between individual subjects and external reality, literature reopens the possibility of interpretation that spectacular discourses close down.
Conclusion: Of Falling Men
In his book Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language, the critic David Cowart describes how in DeLillo’s body of work, “language reveals itself as a system defiant of systems, a system whose complexity is at least as vast and inexhaustible as that of the world it constructs or attempts to represent.”88 The sheer inexhaustibility of language will undermine any attempt to systematise the world through language, as DeLillo works in
Falling Man to undermine the authority spectacular discourse claims over representations of the September 11 attacks. DeLillo’s use of language to undermine the relationship between image and event extends to the title Falling Man, which acquires multiple significances throughout the novel. But it most prominently alludes to Richard Drew’s infamous photograph of a man falling from one of the towers, published in The New York
88 David Cowart, Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language, Rev. ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 6. The Rubble of History 39
Times the day after the attacks and subsequently pulled from circulation for years due to the public anger it caused. 89 As the photograph looms over the novel as a stand-in for the spectacular discourse DeLillo aims to deconstruct, he has little choice but to respond to the photograph’s challenge to the literary imagination. DeLillo’s response comes in the figure of the performance artist Falling Man, who stages surprise reenactments of Drew’s photograph, suspending himself above public places in “a business suit, one leg bent up, arms at his sides,”90 mimicking the pose of the man in the photograph. Lianne encounters two of his performances over the course of the novel, forming a productive contrast between her direct experience of his performances and her mediated experience of the attacks.
DeLillo’s narration of Lianne’s first encounter with Falling Man’s performance captures how it undermines spectacular discourse by collapsing the distance between individual and event:
“There were people shouting up at him, outraged at the spectacle, the puppetry of human desperation, a body’s last fleet breath and what it held. It held the gaze of the world, [Lianne] thought. There was the awful openness of it, the single falling figure that trails a collective dread, body come down among us all. And now, she thought, this little theater piece, disturbing enough to stop traffic and send her back into the terminal.”91
In describing Falling Man’s performance as “spectacle,” DeLillo invites a direct comparison with the photograph to which the performance alludes in order to delineate the contrasts between the two-dimensionality of the photograph and the three-dimensionality of the performance. Whereas the photograph keeps the event at a safe distance, the performance
89 Susie Linfield, "Jumpers," New York Magazine (2011), http://nymag.com/news/9- 11/10th-anniversary/jumpers/. 90 DeLillo, Falling Man: A Novel, 33. 91 Ibid. William Chapman 40
brings the event into direct contact with the public, who find themselves confronted by
“the awful openness of it,” as they have no interpretive framework with which to make sense of his act. DeLillo emphasises the singularity of the performance—the “single falling figure,” the “body come down among us all”—against the infinite reproducibility of the photograph, which renders the materiality of the body abstract and incorporates it into the language of spectacular discourse. The performance resists this incorporation, demanding the audience to see it on its own terms without any mediating intervention.
When Lianne encounters Falling Man for the second time towards the end of Part
Two, she bears witness to the entirety of his performance from preparation to execution.
Although she identifies what she sees as performance art, she notes that “[Falling Man] wasn’t here to perform for those at street level or in the high windows,” but “for a train to come, northbound, […] an audience in motion, passing scant yards from his standing figure.”92 As those on board the train will only see Falling Man jump from the platform,
Lianne wonders if “this was his intention, to spread the word this way, by cell phone, intimately, as in the towers and in the hijacked planes.”93 In this light, Falling Man’s performance attempts to elicit active, multiform communication from person to person, directly opposing the media model of communication in which most people are passive receivers of a uniform message. DeLillo uses Falling Man’s performances to systematise his models of language, as the performances counter both object language and educative language through their elimination of the mediation and fragmentation that enables the audience’s repression of the reality behind the representations. As a result, the performances elicit the singular connections of memory that media representations inhibit, opening up
92 Ibid., 164. 93 Ibid., 165. The Rubble of History 41
the possibility for the resolution of the conflict between living language and the language of spectacular discourse.
This resolution arrives for Lianne in Part Three—in which the timeline of the novel jumps forward to 2004 (“these three years past”94)—when she stumbles on the obituary for a “man named David Janiak, 39.”95 The obituary identifies him as “the performance artist known as Falling Man,” a connection that activates Lianne’s memory, as she immediately goes to search for more information about him on the Internet. DeLillo describes the results of her search, providing background information on David Janiak that makes explicit the implicit aspects of his performance art, such as the details that the “performance pieces were not designed to be recorded by a photographer,” that he worked with only a safety harness and “no bungee cord to absorb the shock of longer falls,” and that he “had no comments to make to the media on any subject.”96 Through these details, both Lianne and the reader come to see the manner in which Falling Man purposefully resisted being incorporated by spectacular discourse, as the details create connections that increase the meaning of the performances. Moreover, as Julia Apitzsch notes, the jump Lianne had witnessed is not among these search results, observing that “[i]t is [Lianne’s] memory that serves as a recording medium in this case, accurately defining her role in the narrative.”97
Lianne arrives at the same realization: “She was the photograph, the photosensitive surface.
94 Ibid., 182. 95 Ibid., 219. 96 Ibid., 220-2. 97 Julia Apitzsch, "The Art of Terror—The Terror of Art: DeLillo's Still Life of 9/11, Giorgio Morandi, Gerhard Richter, and Performance Art," in Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction: Transatlantic Perspectives on Don DeLillo, ed. Peter Schneck and Philipp Schweighauser (New York: Continuum, 2010), 100. William Chapman 42
That nameless body coming down, this was hers to record and absorb.”98 In bringing the event to human dimensions, Falling Man’s performance art allows for Lianne to reconfigure her relation to the event. However, Lianne’s reconstruction takes place within the spectacle of the performance art, as it is the visual field that triggers her linguistic reconstruction of experience, the very reconstruction unavailable to Keith.
This accounts for the novel’s conclusion, in which Lianne receives the resolution withheld from Keith. In the final scene of Falling Man’s numbered chapters, DeLillo depicts Lianne’s reconstruction of her own experience in the language of embodied memory:
“She had normal morphology. Then one late night, undressing, she yanked a clean green t-shirt over her head and it wasn’t sweat she smelled or maybe just a faint trace but not the sour reek of the morning run. It was just her, the body through and through. It was the body and everything it carried, inside and out, identity and memory and human heat. It wasn’t even something she smelled so much as knew. It was something she’d always known. The child was in it, the girl who wanted to be other people, and obscure things she could not name. It was a small moment, already passing, the kind of moment that is always only seconds from forgetting.”99
This return to the body directly corresponds to her experience witnessing the performances of Falling Man, who elicits the memory connections that furnish the vocabulary of this passage. Moreover, the reference to normal morphology prompts the reader to make a similar connection, as DeLillo symbolically resolves the question of Lianne’s memory. But
DeLillo imbues this resolution with ambiguity, with the final sentence of the chapter describing Lianne “ready to be alone, in reliable calm, she and the kid, the way they were before the planes appeared that day, silver crossing blue.” But, significantly, this calm comes from Lianne’s linguistic relation to the spectacle and not to the event itself. DeLillo
98 DeLillo, Falling Man: A Novel, 223. 99 Ibid., 236. The Rubble of History 43
further interrogates the relationship between language and spectacle in his novel Mao II, which examines the way in which spectacular images encode interpretations onto events.
William Chapman 44
Chapter Two The Writer and His Double: The Image, the Author and the Mass Narrative in Mao II
I. Words and Pictures, or, How to Read an Image
The first key moment in Don DeLillo’s 1991 novel Mao II occurs before the novel’s first sentence. A black-and-white reproduction of a photograph serves as the background to the title page, a visual sea of gray and white that blurs into near-abstraction, save for an uncanny figuration in the background. The figuration is the Tiananmen Gate, identifiable by the blurry outlines of the iconic portrait of Mao Zedong that occupies a pride of place at the centre of the gate’s lower wall. Having now identified the geographical place of the image, the mottled grey mass beneath Mao’s portrait becomes identifiable as a crowd of individuals, a teeming mass of faces rendered blurry and indistinct. Amid the crowd are rectangular shapes, angled and with the faint traces of text, tying the image to a moment in time: the pro-democracy protests that took place in Tiananmen Square on 27
April 1989. In light of Mao II’s thematic preoccupation with the crowd—underscored by the assertion that the “future belongs to crowds”100 that boldly closes the novel’s prologue—the placement of this image on the novel’s title page proves critical to an understanding of the novel, as DeLillo effectively asks us to read the image literally avant la lettre. For the novel is largely a meditation on the large role images—especially photographic images—have assumed in society, and how these images are captured, manipulated, manufactured, disseminated and ultimately read by various publics. In other words, Mao II uses the language of fiction as a means of decoding a global discourse increasingly staged by images.
100 Mao II, 16. The Rubble of History 45
That this image is blurred and requires a linguistic supplement for its significance to emerge emphasises a second important characteristic of image reading. Although the printed quality of the image on the title page renders the figures depicted largely abstract, a close examination of the image allows the reader to identify what the image depicts.
Literature works in an analogous manner. A writer uses particular combinations of words— which are also abstractions—in order to create an identifiable depiction of the visible world that exists outside of the page. The act of reading an image is not unlike the act of reading a novel; however, the former is complicated by the image’s—and particularly the photograph’s—claim to an objective representation of a definable reality. The blurring of the photographic representation on the title page thus serves a double purpose: not only does it require the reader to perform a reading of the image in order to understand it, but it also serves to call the image’s claim to an objective reality into question. In doing so, a space opens up between the image and the event it claims to represent into which the writer can intervene, providing a linguistic supplement that allows the reader to interpret the image through a framework different to the one that would otherwise automatically be applied.
This is what DeLillo does in Mao II: undermine the image’s claim to objectivity in order to reveal the textuality of images that can be contested.
In line with the novel’s oft-quoted statement at the end of the prologue that “the future belongs to crowds,” an ahistorical reading of the image on the title page could contend that the crowd in Tiananmen Square has been brought together to stage a show of popular support for a program of the Chinese Government, symbolized by the portrait of
Mao hanging in the square. However, when the image is read in tandem with the other images of crowds reproduced in the novel as section headings—a mass wedding of the William Chapman 46
Reunification Church101, the human crush of the Hillsborough Stadium disaster102, and the funeral of the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran103—a pattern emerges. All of the events depicted in these images took place in 1989, the year in which the novel is set. More important, however, is the historical detail the Tiananmen Square protests were made by Chinese who wished to see democracy implemented into what was (and still is) an authoritarian state, a state that then cracked down on the protestors with brutal violence in the name of retaining power. The historical relationship between the photographs reproduced in the novel restores the historical and political dimensions of the depicted events that are effaced by the nature of images themselves: captured moments in time that can be reproduced and redistributed into other moments in time, each increasingly distant from the specific historical context from which they emerge. The novel further restores this sense of history by integrating these events into the world of the novel, providing a political and historical context for the actions of each individual character. Ultimately, the photograph that prefaces the novel not only anticipates the novel’s key themes and obsessions—the individual and the crowd, the domestic and the foreign—but also requires the reader to resituate the photograph within its historical and political context in order to make sense of it. Although images may appear apolitical, their publication and dissemination—or their suppression, in the case of the Tiananmen Square photographs within China—can be marshalled to serve ideological ends. Being able to read images thus becomes an essential task for anyone wishing to participate in contemporary political and ideological discourse, as Mao II demonstrates.
101 Ibid., 1. 102 Ibid., 17. 103 Ibid., 105. The Rubble of History 47
This chapter examines how DeLillo thematises the spectacular image, interrogating their totalitarian appeal in an attempt to recover the singularity of the individuals who those images render into masses. Each of the three major plots structuring the novel—
Karen’s wedding, Bill’s struggle, Brita’s photography—thematises a different dimension of this problem. In what follows, I untangle each of these strands, and argue that each demonstrates the imperative to narrate the image.
II. Uniform Vision(s): Cults of the Word, Cults of the Image
The novel’s written text begins with the prologue “At Yankee Stadium,” preceded by a title page containing a photograph of a mass wedding, which portrays a mass wedding like that of the photograph, in this instance presided over by the Reverend Sun Myung
Moon of the Reunification Church. DeLillo focuses the prologue on Karen Janney, one of the brides in the mass wedding who will come to play a larger role in the novel, but focalises it from the perspective of her parents—Rodge and Maureen—who, sitting in the grandstands, look upon the proceedings as the celebrants march “into American sunlight.”104 As Linda Kauffman notes in her piece “The Wake of Terror,” DeLillo uses this phrasing to suggest that, “far from being alien, an Absolute Leader who promises policing and protection is right at home on American soil.”105 Moreover, the entire prologue serves as a means of collapsing many of the oppositions that pervade the novel, as DeLillo foregrounds the perspective of two middle-class Western parents and their unease at what they see as the encroachment of the Other into their domestic lives. Watching the mass
104 Ibid., 3. 105 Kauffman, "The Wake of Terror: Don Delillo’s “In the Ruins of the Future,” “Baader- Meinhof,” and Falling Man," 354. William Chapman 48
wedding unfold, Rodge sees “a strangeness down there that he never thought he’d see in a ballpark,”106 a phrasing that implies that the “strangeness” Rodge observes stems from
Moon’s appropriation of American cultural conventions—the wedding, the ballpark—and the ease with which Moon shifts their significance.
This process comes into view in the next sentence, when Rodge remarks on how
“they take a time-honored event and repeat it, repeat it, repeat it until something new enters the world.” Here the adjective “time-honored” has a double meaning, referring to not only the idea of marriage as a historical institution, but also the idea of marriage as being honoured or sanctified by its specificity, marriage as the coming together of two discrete individuals at a certain point in time. The Moonie mass wedding unmakes this singularity, as the betrothal of 13,000 individuals is less about the prerogatives of marriage in the Western sense—largely as a property contract sanctified by the state—than about marrying people into the church itself. Thus the point of the mass wedding is less about the couples getting married—Rodge cannot find his daughter in the crowd of “bridegrooms in identical blue suits, the brides in lace-and-satin gowns” even with binoculars—than it is about sanctifying the authority of the patriarchal figure at its centre, the Mao lofted above the crowd. Using a similar approach, it is possible to read the Western/American ideal of marriage in a similar fashion: a contract between two individuals simultaneously regulated by both state and religious authority, which simultaneously the authority of the state and of religion in individual lives. The distinction thus collapses into one differentiated by the nature and representation of authority, between the diffuse authority of bureaucratic state and religious structures and the embodied authority of messianic (or cult) figures.
106 DeLillo, Mao II, 4. The Rubble of History 49
Moreover, the novel’s overarching concern with the question of how authority legitimates its power over its subjects invokes the question of how authority speaks to its subjects. Many of DeLillo’s critics have written about how Mao II addresses this question, with a focus on how the text incorporates images in order to represent how they mediate the relationship between authority figure and the mass. As Mark Osteen writes, “Mao II presents itself as a multimedia event, as a text that is also a crowd of photos” in order to
“use the discourse of images to redefine them, denaturalize them, and subject them to a dialectical reading,” which “thereby generates a dialogue with those cultural forms that both criticizes their consequences and appropriates their advantages.”107 By inverting the relationship whereby images frame the text that describes them, DeLillo uses text to frame the images within the novel in order to reveal their relation to one another, uncovering the power dynamic between them. DeLillo explicates this dynamic in an interview with Maria
Nadotti, stating that Mao II “is asking who is speaking to these people” who find themselves in “different sorts of crowds,” specifically whether “it is the writer who traditionally thought he could influence the imagination of his contemporaries or is it rather the totalitarian leader, […] the terrorist, those who are twisted by power and who seem capable of imposing their vision on the world.”108 In his construction, DeLillo establishes a key distinction: writing’s ability to “influence the imagination” versus the totalitarian leader’s desire to “impose [his or her] vision.” The power of the former derives from language; the latter’s power derives from images. Shortly after, DeLillo makes the
107 Mark Osteen, American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo's Dialogue with Culture, Penn Studies in Contemporary American Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 193-4. 108 Maria Nadotti, "An Interview with Don DeLillo," in Conversations with Don DeLillo, ed. Thomas DiPietro (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), 110. William Chapman 50
sharp observation that “the photographic image is a sort of crowd in itself, a jumble of impressions very different in kind from a book in which the printed lines follow one another.” In this light, Mao II can and should be read as fiction that attempts to verbally dissect an image-based discourse that takes place around and between the novel’s characters.
By incorporating images into text, DeLillo produces the space in which the textuality of these images can be contested.
To accomplish this, the text must provide a sort of cartographic legend for the relationship between images and ideological power. In Mao II, this legend comes in the form of the artworks of Andy Warhol, to which the novel’s title refers. The aesthetic theory underpinning Warhol’s visual works applies in large part to DeLillo’s written works, for as the critic Jeffrey Karnicky notes, both Warhol and DeLillo “are concerned with the media that allow the repetition of words and images: the tape recorder, the camera, the television” and “investigate the ways that these forms of mechanical reproduction are intimately intertwined with the creation of subjectivity.”109 Karnicky cites a moment in DeLillo’s
1996 novel Underworld wherein Warhol attends Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball wearing a mask made of a photograph of his own face, and how that moment “illustrates how the proliferation of an image can render subjectivity” void because “Warhol is not a procession of simulacra that refer back to the lost origin of his physical being” but rather because “he is nothing more or less than the serial production of an image series.”110 In essence, Karnicky argues, individual identity is no more than a sequence of outward projections made towards other individuals, which becomes problematized in the works of
109 Jeffrey Karnicky, "Wallpaper Mao: Don DeLillo, Andy Warhol, and Seriality," Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 42, no. 4 (2001): 340. 110 Ibid., 340-1. The Rubble of History 51
Warhol and DeLillo via the process of mechanical reproduction. But the writer can provide the cartographic legend in a way that the visual artist cannot, for it is the writer who establishes the series by narrating the images’ relationship to one another.
While Karnicky’s argument does well to explain the relationship between Warhol’s art and its integration into DeLillo’s novel, it only brushes against the way in which image discourses can be manipulated into producing a mass subjectivity, exemplified in the novel by the mass wedding. In this sense, it is essential to note the way in which the mass production of subjectivity via the mass wedding reflects back on how subjectivity is produced by a system of social and cultural contexts, in this instance the “Middle American” subjectivity exemplified by Karen’s parents. Whereas the Middle American process of subjectivation could roughly be described as a series of consumer choices (more on this later), the vision of subjectivity offered by Reverend Moon reduces these choices to one: the acceptance of a readymade belief system that supersedes all others. In this system, all possibilities of subjectivity are homogenised and made indistinguishable from one another.
Moreover, it is also the system of readymade belief that generates the serial production of the self. This is how “Master Moon” becomes the “true father” of the “blessed couples,” who “know him at molecular level,” for he “lives in them like chains of matter that determine who they are.”111 As the “true father” of his faithful, Moon offers an alternative authoritarian, patriarchal structure—in contrast with the privatised patriarchal authority of the American father typified by Rodge—allowing them to become “immunized against the language of self.”112 DeLillo’s casting of the self—of subjectivity—as a language points to the way in which the subjectivity Moon offers his followers structures itself through
111 DeLillo, Mao II, 6. 112 Ibid., 8. William Chapman 52
language, creating a vocabulary with which they can define themselves in relation to the outside world.113 And it is control over this language that gives Moon power over his followers, who come to depend on him for their senses of self. Moreover, the spectacle of the mass wedding functions like advertising, encoding the language of the Moonie subjectivity into images that can be endlessly iterated—the mechanical reproduction of subjectivity.
This is the process by which this “immunization” takes place, or, in other words, how the individual subject comes to desire the transcendence of his or her own subjectivity by means of readymade belief. DeLillo hints at this when he writes how Karen, while waiting to file past “Master Moon” in the mass wedding procession, “sees him with the single floating eye of the crowd, inseparable from her own apparatus of vision but sharper- sighted, able to perceive more deeply.”114 By describing Karen’s subjectivity in terms of her vision, DeLillo draws a connection between the mass wedding and the televisual spectacle,
“the single floating eye” that delivers uniform visions to individual subjects. DeLillo’s specific phrasing of “single floating eye” evokes the camera lens, and, more specifically, the way in which photographs appear to transcend the individual perspective from which they are taken and become objects in the world with little evidentiary trace of their authorship.
In describing his concept of the “technical image,” the philosopher Vilém Flusser writes that such images—defined as images that signify abstract concepts in comparison to
“traditional images” that signify phenomena—“appear to be on the same level of reality as
113 This is identical to the process by which Amir (the fictionalised Mohammed Atta) offers Hammad an identity through language in Falling Man. 114 DeLillo, Mao II, 7-8. The Rubble of History 53
their significance.”115 Consequently, such images “do not appear to be symbols that one has to decode but symptoms of the world through which, even indirectly, it is to be perceived.”
If read like a technical image, the mass wedding as viewed through Karen’s “single floating eye”—which already suggests a sort of flattened vision—can be read as an image-event that manipulates the visual language of the wedding (its symbolism) and its connotations of belonging, family, and community into what is essentially an advertisement for Reverend
Moon and his church. Although it lacks the written text advertisements often use to identify themselves as such, the mass wedding can itself be read as a text designed for mass- reproduction and consumption by means of the image.
Of course, DeLillo remains aware of the degree to which images efface their own authorship and, consequently, the political nature of such authorship. In writing a fictional account of a fictional character’s experience as a participant in the image-event of the mass wedding, he can figuratively “zoom in” to the individual stories within the crowd and retrieve them from the uniform vision of Reverend Moon by restoring to sight what the camera cannot see, the details of the lives that the camera conspires to efface in favour of the bigger picture. The shifts in perspective from Karen’s parents to Karen herself forms a kind of dialectic structure that allows for the reader to get a sense of why Karen, with her typically American nuclear family upbringing, would come to desire the putative offerings of Reverend Moon’s church and, perhaps more significantly, desire her own subjection to the authority of Reverend Moon. An answer to this question arises in the rituals of Karen’s life in the church, in which she remembers “all those nights she slept in a van or a crowded room, rising at five for prayer condition, then into the streets with her flower team,” where
115 Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (Göttinger, West Germany: European Photography, 1984), 14-5. William Chapman 54
she “worked to make the four-hundred-dollar-a-day-standard.”116 DeLillo adds that Karen even speaks in the “voices of the workshops and training sessions, lecturing the sisters in the van, pressing them to sell, make the goal, grab the cash,”117 capturing the power of ritual to infiltrate the details of Karen’s life through language. Although the reader can clearly see the system of hierarchical exploitation surrounding Karen, the language of ritual—and the sense of identity it provides—blinds Karen to the politics inscribed in her actions.
Ultimately, the mass wedding sequence that opens the novel serves to demonstrate how images attain authoritative power by veiling their status as political texts. As the philosopher Marie-José Mondzain points out in her book Image, Icon, Economy, this process has a philosophical basis that stretches back to Byzantine Iconoclasm. The
Iconoclasts, who wanted to ban the use of religious images, she writes, “never renounced
[the icon’s] services to assist them in their reign; on the contrary, they wanted to monopolize it themselves and deprive the ecclesiastic powers of it, which they did by means of theological argument.”118 Mondzain’s analysis reinforces Flusser’s idea of the technical image as the naturalisation of abstract concepts, in that the abstract concepts represented in such images have textual origins but use the materiality of their appearance to provoke the reality they project. In other words, images have the power to cut out the textual middleman and impose an ideological vision by making it appear to be a pre-existing reality.
This is what Moon attempts to do through the mass wedding: impose a single ideological vision through the occupation of the visual field, effectively crowding out other possibilities
116 DeLillo, Mao II, 12. 117 Ibid., 13. 118 Marie-Jose ́ Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy: the Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 15. The Rubble of History 55
from the symbolic imagination. This poses a problem for writers, who use language to produces new possibilities for the symbolic imagination and the material reality it engenders. And it is precisely this problem that Mao II attempts to work through by way of the fictional novelist Bill Gray.
III. The Medium and the Narrative
Bill’s role in the novel as the embodiment of this power struggle between word and image becomes apparent early on, in a scene where his manager Scott meets with the photographer Brita Nilsson, whom Bill has selected to take his photograph for the first time in “multi decades.”119 While the scenario of Bill allowing himself to be photograph is significant—and will be returned to later—what ultimately emerges from Scott’s meeting with Brita is a sense of the uneasy relationship between form and content in photography itself. Brita describes the origins of her project to produce a photographic catalogue of writers—describing it as a “disease called writers”—after having grown dissatisfied with how her previous work shooting street scenes in New York, as she found all their “horror, reality, misery, ruined bodies, bloody faces,” looked “so fucking pretty in the end.”120
Instinctively dissatisfied with the way that the form of her work overshadowed its content,
Brita turns to photographing writers—who thus become content—as a “form of knowledge and memory” that allows her to furnish “her own kind of witness” onto them and their work. Specifically, she considers her work to be “a record” and tries to “eliminate technique and personal style to the degree that this is possible,” despite knowing that she is “doing
119 DeLillo, Mao II, 24. 120 Ibid., 24-5. William Chapman 56
certain things to get certain effects.”121 This contradiction undermines the photograph’s claim to objective historical representation, as photographs that appear to not have style or technique still bear authorial markings in their finer details. Thus, Brita effectively authors the image of the writers she photographs. Although she doubts “the importance of a photograph if you don’t know the writer’s work,” she nevertheless recognises that “the writer’s face is the surface of the work.” Under such conditions, a writer’s image shapes the interpretation of his or her texts and thus limits a text’s capacity to intervene in the production of the writer’s singular image.
When Brita has her first encounter with Bill at his secluded compound, he unsurprisingly evinces a greater awareness of what is at stake in his agreeing to be photographed for the first time in at least three decades. In their first extended exchange,
Bill makes some illuminating comments on the relationship he perceives between the writer and the image:
“Well it’s a weariness really, to know that people make so much of this. When a writer doesn’t show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God’s famous reluctance to appear.” “But this is intriguing to many people” “It’s also taken as an awful sort of arrogance.” “But we’re also drawn to the idea of remoteness. A hard-to-reach place is necessarily beautiful, I think. Beautiful and a little sacred maybe. And a person who becomes inaccessible has a grace and a wholeness the rest of us envy.” “The image world is corrupt, here is a man who hides his face.” “Yes,” she said. “People may be intrigued by this figure but they also resent him and mock him and want to dirty him up and watch his face distort in shock and fear when the concealed photographer leaps out of the trees. In a mosque, no images. In our world we sleep and eat the image and pray to it and wear it too. The writer who won’t show his face is encroaching on holy turf. He’s playing God’s own trick.”122
121 Ibid., 26. 122 Ibid., 36-7. The Rubble of History 57
DeLillo establishes this connection between the image and the sacred not only to allude to the historical nature of this debate, but also to foreground the impossibility of existing outside the image world: one either allows his or her photograph to circulate, or the refusal becomes one’s image.123 As the critic Christian Moraru notes, the “audience, the media, and the publishing now make up a whole machinery of voracious consumption, an entire demonology of domestication, control, and alienation”124 from which the author attempts to flee. Of course, Moraru adds, “it is while striving to preclude this alienation that the author alienates, isolates himself or herself.” And this, more or less, is precisely what Bill
Gray accomplishes in his seclusion. Without his person—or his photograph—in circulation, he leaves it to Scott to manage his authorial image, which only leaves him as susceptible to manipulation and control as having his photograph in public circulation.
It is from this point of view that Scott’s role in the novel takes on its full significance. As Bill’s emissary, he comes to wield power over Bill’s image that allows him to shape it to match his interpretation of Bill’s texts. This comes across when Scott recalls his experience reading Bill’s first novel to Brita:
“Somebody gave me Bill’s first novel to read and I said, Whoa what’s this? That book was about me somehow. I had to read slowly to keep from jumping out of my skin. I saw myself. It was my book. Something about the way I think and feel. He caught the back-and-forthness. The way things fit almost anywhere and nothing gets completely forgotten.”125
123 Critics have mentioned DeLillo’s allusion to the media’s staking out of J.D. Salinger in order to take his photograph, but have said less about the indirect allusion to Thomas Pynchon, who provided a blurb for the back of the Penguin paperback edition of Mao II. Thomas Pynchon’s mysterious reclusiveness has effectively become his image in lieu of his photograph, to the extent that Pynchon poked fun at it by appearing on The Simpsons, complete with a paper bag over his animated head. 124 Christian Moraru, "Consuming Narratives: Don DeLillo and the "Lethal" Reading," Journal of Narrative Theory 27, no. 2 (1997): 191. 125 DeLillo, Mao II, 51. William Chapman 58
Scott’s reaction to the novel reveals his interpretive framework to be almost entirely personal: he values the novel primarily because he can see himself reflected in it. While
DeLillo leaves the question of whether or not Scott has misread the text ambiguous—the reader never gets to read anything written by Bill—he does suggest a poverty (“the back- and-forthness”) of interpretation when literature comes to be valued solely to the degree to which it flatters its audience. Such a state of affairs becomes particularly toxic when readers like Scott become the gatekeepers of literature, just as Scott controls the release of Bill’s unpublished third novel, which exists in a “final version”126 despite Bill’s ongoing, seemingly endless revisions. Scott reveals this purpose when he later suggests to Brita at a dinner with Bill and Karen that the novel should remain unpublished because “the withheld work of art is the only eloquence left.”127 As Peter Boxall notes, such a statement evinces the possibility that “by withholding the artwork, by keeping it beneath the surface and out of sight, that it might bear witness to the exhausted possibilities of fiction.”128
However, in this light, Scott’s statement reveals how he—and, to a lesser extent, Brita— tries to make Bill into his Mao, his Mao II whose image enforces a singular interpretation of his work.
Moreover, Boxall picks up on this aspect of Scott’s power over Bill’s image when he writes that it becomes “difficult to see what the difference is between Scott’s detention of
Bill in his rural retreat, and [the Lebanese Maoist group leader Abu] Rashid’s detention of his poet hostage in his grey box in Beirut.” DeLillo collapses this distinction when, a few pages after Scott’s comment on the withheld work of art, Scott reveals a pre-formed media
126 Ibid., 53. 127 Ibid., 67. 128 Boxall, Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction, 166. The Rubble of History 59
strategy for how to maximize the impact of the publication of Bill’s photograph when he says: “The book is finished but will remain in typescript. Then Brita’s photos appear in a prominent place. Timed just right. We don’t need the book. We have the author.”129
Scott’s follow-up observation that “the book disappears into the image of the writer” undoes the notion that a withheld work of art could profess some sort of eloquence, as a withheld work of art would still require some form of mediation to make its existence known to the public. The withheld work of art might still be able to speak, but the artist does not necessarily determine what it will say. As Scott continues:
“The novel used to feed our search for meaning. Quoting Bill. It was the great secular transcendence. The Latin mass of language, character, occasional new truth. But our desperation led us toward something larger and darker. So we turn to the news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe. This is where we find emotional experience not available elsewhere. We don’t need the novel. Quoting Bill. We don’t even need catastrophes, necessarily. We only need the reports and predictions and warnings.”130
In casting the novel as “the great secular transcendence,” Scott identifies the novel as the ability to transcend one’s own limited perspective and to see the world through the perspective of another. This function has been replaced by television, as it performs a more complete transcendence that allows for the separation of reality from its substance. This is the crux of Scott’s plan: to transform Bill into a spectacular image so that his work might become transcendent once again.
But Bill resists Scott’s vision for his future—one that would flatten his work into image, rendering it futile—mounting a protest that leads him off the map and into the political and media wilderness that comprises the second half of the novel. Bill leaves his compound to attend a meeting with his editor Charlie Everson, who attempts to engage
129 DeLillo, Mao II, 71. 130 Ibid., 72. William Chapman 60
Bill in a scheme to participate in a press conference for a mysterious group holding a Swiss
UN worker and poet hostage in Beirut in order to secure the poet’s release. Charlie cites
“an excitement that attaches to [Bill’s] name” that will help “put a mark on this event, force people to talk about it and think about it long after the speeches fade,” as he wants “one missing writer to read the work of another.”131 DeLillo places emphasis on Bill’s “name” and his status as a “missing writer,” implying that anything Bill might say will be rendered subordinate to the fact of his saying it. Charlie’s ulterior motives for asking Bill to read the poet’s work at the press conference appear when he comments that he wants “our work to have a future,” and again soon after when he tells Bill directly that he wants “the new book.”132 Charlie, aware of the professional benefit to be gained from publishing the new
Bill Gray, recognises that the press conference could double as publicity for the new novel and thus could get Bill to self-promote under the guise of defending the freedom of expression. Charlie’s attempt to co-opt Bill for his professional purposes mirrors back onto the subtext of the entire hostage scenario: the little-known group using the publishing company to stage a press conference to effectively give themselves free publicity represents an identical form of co-optation.
It then comes as little surprise that Bill’s next move—realising the degree to which he himself has become a hostage—is to break free from Scott, sneaking out of the building to join “the surge of the noontime crowd.”133 The first part of the novel ends at this moment, and Part Two opens with a title page containing an image of a crowd gathered
131 Ibid., 99. 132 Ibid., 102. 133 Ibid., 103. The Rubble of History 61
beneath the image of the Ayatollah Khomeini,134 neatly underscoring the situational transfer that has just occurred. In becoming just another face in the crowd, Bill can more easily resist the attempts to co-opt his image and craft his own narrative. Although he travels to London to ostensibly participate in the press conference, he refuses to stay in the luxury hotel organised for him and repeatedly refuses to tell Charlie the name of the hotel where he decides to stay. When Bill and Charlie do finally meet in person in London before the press conference, a bomb threat prompts Bill’s musings on bomb threats as a form of control, as those who make bomb threats “want to believe they have the power to move us out of a building and into the street.”135 Bill’s hypothesis on the relationship between the threat of violence and control finds itself undercut moments later when a bomb does explode at the conference location, albeit with no one injured or killed, the bomb only has the effect of delaying the press conference, prompting Charlie to suggest that Bill “change hotels so that we can move quickly once we’re set” in a flagrant attempt to co-opt the violence of the bomb blast as a means of exerting tighter control of Bill. Alert to
Charlie’s machinations, Bill repeatedly changes the subject (including after Charlie mentions Bill’s unpublished novel), verbally evading Charlie’s attempts to influence his actions.
Bill’s attempts to exercise some degree of personal autonomy gain pointed significance when a man named George Haddad appears, who, according to Charlie, acts as
“a spokesman for the group in Beirut.”136 Although George disavows this title, he quickly
134 Ibid., 105. 135 Ibid., 124. 136 Ibid., 128. William Chapman 62
launches into a monologue about the affinities between the novelist and the terrorist, saying:
“Of course [the hostage is] innocent. That’s why they took him. It’s such a simple idea. Terrorize the innocent. The more heartless they are, the better we see their rage. And isn’t it the novelist, Bill, above all people, above all writers, who understands this rage, who knows in his soul what the terrorist thinks and feels? Through history it’s the novelist who has felt affinity for the violent man who lives in the dark. Where are your sympathies? With the colonial police, the occupier, the rich landlord, the corrupt government, the militaristic state? Or with the terrorist? And I don’t abjure that word even if it has a hundred meanings. It’s the only honest word to use.”137
George’s purposeful reference to the ambiguity of the word terrorist allows him to theorise a terrorism that encompasses all acts of resistance to power, placing the act of writing—and writing novels specifically—on a spectrum of terroristic acts that stem from individual grievances with social and institutional power structures. While George’s monologue represents a rather brazen attempt to get Bill to sympathise with the cause of terrorists worldwide, its subtext links the act of writing with acts of violence, insinuating that writing can legitimate acts of violence or even be an act of violence. The either/or construction of his statement—either your sympathies lie with the powerful or with the terrorist—occludes the possibility of a position outside this framework that could be both anti-power and anti- violence. DeLillo hints that George’s statement should not be taken at face value due to his questionable agenda, as Charlie later mentions that George is “an interesting sort of academic” whose name appears in an address book found at a French apartment producing bombs, in addition to his having been photographed “in the company of known terrorist
137 Ibid., 129-30.; Emphasis added. The Rubble of History 63
leaders.”138 Nonetheless, his presence raises the question of terror and its relationship to the act of writing that looms large over the remainder of the novel.
George Haddad’s appearance at this stage of the novel allows DeLillo to construct a dialogue between the novelist and a potential representative of the terrorist, allowing him to more directly unpack the connections and questions raised by the novel to this point. Of course, the ‘novelist’ in question is the fictional Bill Gray and not Don DeLillo, as Bill’s extreme individualism provides the perfect counterpoint to the configurations of mass identity that recur throughout the novel. As the critic Richard Hardack points out, Bill
“belongs to a lineage of isolated white male individualists who oppose, yet also depend on, the mass in American literature.”139 Something similar could be said for the novel’s non- white authoritarian figures—Reverend Moon, Mao, Abu Rashid—and their intermediaries—in this instance George Haddad—as they also depend on the mass but do not oppose it. Hardack notes that DeLillo engages in a “consistent strategy of displacement” that situates the mass identity as an Other, purposefully excluding references to white
American forms of mass identity—the question of American identity itself foremost among them—in order to “delineate and justify white/individualist anxieties before the invasion of foreign consciousness” before “the novel reveals this ‘mass consciousness’ as a reification of the ideology of American individualism.”140 If American individualism can be read as another form of mass consciousness, then what is at stake in the dialogue between Bill and
George is less a question of the relationship between writers and terrorists than the question
138 Ibid., 131. 139 Richard Hardack, "Two's a Crowd: "Mao II," Coke II, and the Politics of Terrorism in Don DeLillo," Studies in the Novel 36, no. 3 (2004): 376. 140 Ibid., 378-9. William Chapman 64
of preserving the possibility of difference—and thus also of meaning—in the world, a question that is very much in the interest of both Bill Gray and Don DeLillo.
IV. The Reins of Terror
DeLillo’s resolution to this question begins to surface when George discusses his reasoning for inviting Bill to Athens in order to broker a meeting between Bill and the
“terrorist” group leader Abu Rashid, as George considers them “men of the same measure in a way.”141 In response, Bill restores the distinction between novelists and terrorists, whom he believes to be playing a “zero sum game,” claiming that “the degree to which
[terrorists] influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought.”142 Although Bill could certainly be accused of romanticising the novelist’s influence historically, his perception of the relationship between novelists and terrorists proves productive in that it frames the issue in terms of consciousness and power, inviting the question of just who has the power to shape the boundaries of consciousness and thus define the boundaries of possibility and meaning. Bill cites Samuel Beckett as “the last writer to shape the way we think and see,” as “after him, the major work involves midair explosions and crumbling buildings” in what Bill describes as “the new tragic narrative.”
By invoking Beckett—whose name here stands in for the concept of new possibilities in language and literature—and encapsulating his connection to contemporary terrorists through the word narrative, DeLillo underhandedly reveals the stakes of Bill’s comment: literature’s ability to interrogate the world has been diminished by the spectacular violence of terrorism, which directly intervenes in the material world and produces a distinct
141 DeLillo, Mao II, 155-6. 142 Ibid., 157. The Rubble of History 65
alternative vision for it. Bill and Abu Rashid may be men of the same measure in wanting to influence social reality, but, as Bill’s conversation with George demonstrates, the similarities end there.
What ultimately emerges from Bill’s conversation with George in Athens is a defence of writing—and of the novel—as means of preserving the possibility of meaningful difference in the world. George prompts Bill into making such a defence when he professes his belief in the necessity “of a model that transcends all the bitter history” and of a “figure of absolute being” for “societies struggling to remake themselves, total politics, total authority, total being.”143 In response, Bill argues:
“Even if I could see the need for absolute authority, my work would draw me away. The experience of my own consciousness tells me how autocracy fails, how total control wrecks the spirit, how my characters deny my efforts to own them completely, how I need internal dissent, self-argument, how the world squashes me the minute I think it’s mine. […] ‘Do you know why I believe in the novel? It’s a democratic shout. Anybody can write a great novel, one great novel, almost any amateur off the street. I believe this, George. Some nameless drudge, some desperado with barely a nurtured dream can sit down and find his voice and luck out and do it. Something so angelic it makes your jaw hang open. The spray of talent, the spray of ideas. One thing unlike another, one voice unlike the next. Ambiguities, contradictions, whispers, hints. And this is what you want to destroy.” (Emphasis added.)144
By framing his response to George’s belief in the necessity of a renewed metanarrative in terms of the novel, Bill foregrounds the ability of literature to produce meaning in its
“spray of ideas” as meaning can only be produced in the exchanges between unlike things.
George’s proposed vision of the world eliminates the possibility of meaning in requiring submission to a total authority, which, in Bill’s view, only serves to “wreck the spirit.” By staging the argument in terms of the novel’s ability to mount resistance to total control,
143 Ibid., 158. 144 Ibid., 159. William Chapman 66
DeLillo draws attention to the “democratic shout” that is Mao II, with its multiple characters that form what Tom LeClair describes as “a collection of differences”145 that create meaning through their various interactions, coalescing into an extended exercise in self-dissent.
However, for as much as writing can be used to oppose power, it can also be used to further its prerogatives. The next time George and Bill meet, George comes prepared with remarks that counter Bill’s defence of the novel that closed their previous meeting, telling Bill that “there are different ways in which words are sacred.”146 George cites how
Mao Zedong’s prolific writings allowed him to become “the history of China written on the masses” by providing “the unchanged narrative every culture needs in order to survive.”147 George’s use of the word narrative flags a central question that stretches across
DeLillo’s body of work: how can writing oppose narratives of power and control from within the structures that serve to maintain those very narratives? DeLillo has made explicit reference to this problem, espousing concern to The Paris Review in 1993 that “sometimes
[American literature]’s a literature too ready to be neutralized, to be incorporated into the ambient noise,” adding that, for this reason, “we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against power, who writes against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of assimilation.”148 When George tells Bill that he thinks Bill “could have been a
Maoist” because he “would have written what the culture needed to see itself” due to
145 Tom LeClair, "Me and Mao II," http://www.perival.com/delillo/meandmaoii.html. 146 DeLillo, Mao II, 161. 147 Ibid., 161-2. 148 Adam Begley, "The Art of Fiction CXXXV: Don DeLillo," in Conversations with Don DeLillo, ed. Thomas DePietro, Literary Conversations Series (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), 96-7. The Rubble of History 67
having “seen the need for an absolute being, a way out of weakness and confusion,”149
DeLillo sets up the rationale for his later comments. Bill responds by bringing up the mass killings that often accompany such totalitarian visions and, in response to George’s moral punt that “mass killing asserts itself always,” brings the conversation full circle by suggesting that the pathway to mass murder “begins with a single hostage” who represents the “first tentative rehearsal for mass terror.”150 In delineating how the logic of assimilation connects the individual to the mass, Bill implies an ethics of literature in which writers can oppose power by refusing this very logic, instead drawing attention to the interrelationship of individuals and the power structures that envelop them.
In this sense, it is fitting that Bill’s attempt to free the Swiss hostage ends up being a sort of failed suicide mission. Faced with the dilemma of whether to continue towards
Beirut where Abu Rashid’s group would almost certainly kill him in order to “gain the maximum attention” or to go home knowing that, without his publicity-attracting presence, the hostage would likely be killed as another means of attracting attention, Bill—after being hit by a car in Athens and refusing subsequent medical attention—nonetheless continues to Cyprus, where he can catch the ferry to Beirut. In Cyprus, he reflects on his conversation with George, developing the strand of thought he had left unfinished:
“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, when you fill rooms with innocent victims, 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. He could have told George a writer creates a character as a way to reveal consciousness, increase the flow of meaning. This is how we reply to power and
149 DeLillo, Mao II, 163. 150 Ibid. William Chapman 68
beat back our fear. By extending the pitch of consciousness and human possibility.”151
Bearing in mind DeLillo’s comments in The Paris Review regarding the need for writers who oppose power, this moment in the novel appears to be the point where DeLillo the writer and Bill Gray the writer-character most neatly converge. Although the possibility remains that DeLillo might not fully agree with this conception of fiction, inserting it through the fictional avatar of Bill Gray allows the idea to float free of the authoritativeness that the novel positions itself against so unequivocally. By recognising the way in which power develops fictions that serve as means to its particular ends, DeLillo can develop fictions that “unfold” into the ‘real’ social order and reveal its fictional nature. If DeLillo had presented such an idea in a nonfictional essay, it would have been weakened by the implication of DeLillo’s authority in making such a pronouncement. But when presented within a fictional context, the idea can be approached differently.
Throughout the novel, DeLillo goes to great lengths to demonstrate how Bill Gray the author is a fictional construct, managed and maintained by the people who have a personal and financial interest in doing so. Towards the end of the novel, it is revealed that even Bill Gray’s name is fake, having changed it from Willard Skansey, a secret that only
Scott knows and “would never reveal […] to anyone.”152 Yet, despite this, DeLillo gives the reader no reason to doubt the plausibility or the authenticity of Bill’s actions and feelings.
While Bill is in many ways a pathetic figure, his ideas about fiction’s role in adding meaning to the world can be received in a sympathetic light as he engages in a noble—even if foolish and misguided—attempt to reach and release the hostage as a means of defending
151 Ibid., 200. 152 Ibid., 185. The Rubble of History 69
his beliefs. But he doesn’t make it, instead dying anonymously (presumably of the injuries sustained in Athens) on the ferry to Beirut, with his “passport and other forms of identification” stolen by the cleaning crew to “sell to some militia in Beirut.”153 The clever out DeLillo obtains in having Bill’s demise take place in this manner is that it allows the idea of Bill Gray to continue in the world and allow both the people in his life and his readers to make of his disappearance what they will. Bill’s death even takes on a sort of optimistic tone when compared with what would likely have happened had Bill managed to find Abu Rashid in Beirut, in which case he likely would have been murdered and assimilated into the terrorists’ narrative, the unifying story about the world that necessitates the destruction of all other possibilities. Bill’s dying before reaching Beirut means that Bill
Gray’s story continues beyond his own death. In evading the incorporation of terror’s spectacular logic, Bill himself becomes a counternarrative. This is the essence of DeLillo’s ethics of fiction, in which language does not form a closed circuit of meaning but instead opens up onto the material world it represents, onto possibilities of reconfiguring the world outside the novel’s pages.
Conclusion: A Postcard from the Dead City
But the novel does not end with Bill’s death. Instead, the novel completes Bill’s journey to Beirut, where Brita is “on assignment for a German magazine, here to photograph a local leader named Abu Rashid.”154 The narrator reveals that Brita “does not photograph writers anymore” but instead “takes assignments now” after her project to
153 Ibid., 217. 154 Ibid., 227-8. William Chapman 70
photograph all writers “came to a quiet end.”155 Brita’s return to photojournalism—which she earlier disavows for being “so fucking pretty in the end”—suggests, according to John
Carlos Rowe, the “triumph of commodity and celebrity culture”156 wherein being seen becomes more important than being heard, a situation uniquely attended to by photography’s purely visual form of communication. Under such conditions, Brita’s being on assignment in Beirut to photograph Abu Rashid will only serve to bring attention directly to Abu Rashid and his cause, with the Swiss hostage that Bill attempted to reach now both literally and metaphorically out of the picture. Brita thus works from within this economy of spectacle, producing images that attain their value from the attention they create, not only for Abu Rashid but also for the German magazine that will publish his photograph. In bringing Brita to Beirut, DeLillo brings the novel full circle: Brita’s production of spectacular images in the final chapter maps onto Karen’s consumption of them in the mass wedding of the opening chapter.
DeLillo reiterates this relationship between the production and consumption of images and their relation to material reality. On her way to meet Abu Rashid, Brita sees
“signs for a new soft drink, Coke II, signs slapped on cement-block walls, and she has the crazy ideas that these advertising placards herald the presence of the Maoist group.”157 This parallel between Coke II and the novel’s title, Mao II, signals the underlying connection between Rashid’s Maoist group and multinational corporations such as The Coca-Cola
Company, as both seek to convert and integrate ever-larger numbers of people into a prescribed structure of social relations, whether as followers or as customers. DeLillo’s
155 Ibid., 229-30. 156 John Carlos Rowe, "Mao II and the War on Terrorism," The South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 1 (2004): 38. 157 DeLillo, Mao II, 230. The Rubble of History 71
implication of American capitalism in the production of its prevailing counternarratives— primarily terrorism—has been noted by his critics, including Rowe, who connects the end of Mao II to DeLillo’s post-9/11 essay “In the Ruins of the Future,” wherein DeLillo suggests that terrorists’ grievances might in part stem from “the power of American culture to penetrate every wall, home, life, and mind.”158 It is no accident, then, that DeLillo describes the Coke II signs as “stacked ten high in some places, up past the second storey, and they crowd each other, they edge over and proclaim, thousands of Arabic words weaving between the letters and Roman numerals of the Coke II logo.”159 Of the many crowds in Mao II, it is this crowd of images that comes into sight at the end, the logical extension of the novel’s other crowds, as they compete to assert their authority by occupying the visual field.
When Brita arrives at Abu Rashid’s compound, she comes across “two hooded boys standing watch on the stairs with photographs of a gray-haired man pinned to their shirts.”160 Brita confirms that the man in the photographs is Rashid when she asks him about the boys wearing his photograph, prompting Rashid’s interpreter to speak for him:
“What does this accomplish? It gives them a vision they will accept and obey. These children need an identity outside the narrow function of who they are and where they come from. Something completely outside the helpless forgotten lives of their parents and grandparents. […] We teach them identity, sense of purpose. They are all children of Abu Rashid. All men one man. Every militia in Beirut is filled with hopeless boys taking drugs and drinking and stealing. Car thieves. The shelling ends and they run out to steal car parts. We teach that our children belong to something strong and self-reliant. They are not an invention of Europe. They are not making a race to go to God. We don't train them for paradise. No martyrs here. The image of Rashid is their identity.”161
158 "In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September," 33; Rowe, "Mao II and the War on Terrorism." 159 DeLillo, Mao II, 230. 160 Ibid., 231. 161 Ibid., 233. William Chapman 72
That Rashid’s interpreter speaks for Rashid—mirroring how Scott tries to speak for Bill— ironically confirms the way in which images become legible forms of authority and control, as Rashid need not bother explaining the function of his own image. DeLillo draws another parallel with corporate branding, as the boys—hooded to reduce any visible sign of difference—wear Rashid’s photograph like a logo, undermining the distinction between the prerogatives of Coke II and Rashid (a potential Mao II). The interpreter subverts this distinction further, claiming that with the sense of identity provided by Rashid, the boys
“don’t need their own features or voices” as they are “surrendering these things to something powerful and great.”162 Rashid’s image literalises the process of identity formation Karen undertakes in the mass wedding, as his image literally replaces the boys’ singular features with his own. This, Rashid adds, is how “terror makes the new future possible,” allowing “men [to] live in history as never before.”163 Such is the power of the image: it allows for the formation of a connection to history that has collapsed into spectacle.
As both Rashid and Brita operate within the same spectacular logic, Brita’s subsequent attempt to use her art to rebut Rashid’s totalising ideology finds itself condemned to failure by the inability of the image to escape its own logic. After listening to
Rashid’s impassioned defence of Maoism and thinking it “eloquent macho bullshit” but saying “nothing because what can she say,” Brita walks over to one of the boys and roughly removes his hood, “takes two steps back and snaps his picture.”164 Thinking that using her last exposure to reveal the boy’s singular features will form an effective counternarrative to
162 Ibid., 234. 163 Ibid., 235. 164 Ibid., 236. The Rubble of History 73
Rashid’s ideology, Brita engages in the symbolic violence of exposing the boy both literally and metaphorically. However, a photograph alone cannot restore the boy’s sense of individual identity: it must be invested with a narrative that extends beyond the frame of the camera lens. This is where fiction steps in, as DeLillo’s text provides the linguistic supplement that Brita’s photograph alone cannot supply. It is only through the text that the reader can “read” Brita’s photograph, as the photograph does not capture the “look of slow and intelligent contempt” the boy gives Brita afterwards. Nor does it capture how the boy responds to the symbolic violence of Brita’s actions by physically attacking her and her camera, a correspondence that can only be captured in the image’s textual supplement, which in this instance is the entirety of Mao II.
DeLillo concludes Mao II with an eloquent defence of the power of fiction in the novel’s final scene, wherein Brita witnesses a wedding party moving through the streets of
Beirut in the middle of the night. Woken by “a sense of some heavy presence, a grinding in the earth,” Brita moves to her balcony and sees a tank coming onto the street, “an old
Soviet T-34, some scarred and cruddy ancient, sold and stolen two dozen times, changing sides and systems and religions.”165 However, instead of heralding the arrival of violence into Brita’s field of vision, the tank announces the wedding party following behind, “the stunning thing that takes her a moment to understand.”166 DeLillo’s subversion of expectation produces a similar stunning moment for the reader, who can now make the connection between this singular wedding and the mass wedding from the novel’s first chapter. Significantly, as Laura Barrett notes, Brita does not photograph this wedding,
165 Ibid., 239. 166 Ibid., 240. William Chapman 74
producing “a contrast to the image of the cult factory marriages arranged via camera.”167
Only through DeLillo’s text is the singularity of the marriage Brita witnesses restored, as he is able to position it within the frame of her singular perspective. This is the power of fiction: to restore the singularity of time and space that images render infinitely exchangeable. And it is this spectacular logic that DeLillo interrogates further in White
Noise.
167 Laura Barrett, ""Here But Also There": Subjectivity and Postmodern Space in Mao II," MFS Modern Fiction Studies 45, no. 3 (1999): 800. The Rubble of History 75
Chapter Three Seeing Double: The Ironic Dimension of Counternarrative in White Noise
White Noise poses a fundamental problem for the practice of counternarrative.
Falling Man, I argued, charts the psychological fallout from the violent puncturing of an insulating hyperreality while Mao II expresses the difficulties inherent in attempting to produce meaningful literature from within spectacular discourse. In their attempt to write around the totalising image, both implicitly conceive of that image as exterior and confined to privileged spaces: the instruments and institutions of mass media. Both assume a zone of experience which would be immune to that image, and which a narrative—attentive to the details of microhistory—might be able to render visible. White Noise, by contrast, represents the spectacle’s infiltration of the microhistory that, in the previous two novels, serves as the foundation of counternarratives.
Scholars have largely engaged with White Noise in terms of its kinship with works of postmodern theory, as Duvall describes how “DeLillo’s American proto-fascism […] functions in what Frederic Jameson has identified as the cultural logic of multinational or late capitalism in which the social, the political, and the aesthetic flatten out into what Jean
Baudrillard calls the simulacrum.”168 While Baudrillard is perhaps the theorist most associated with DeLillo’s work (and whose theory of the simulacrum, wherein reality is substituted with its representation, certainly informs White Noise), attention should also be directed towards Guy Debord, whose 1968 work The Society of the Spectacle presages many of the cultural trends under examination in DeLillo’s novel. Debord’s book, which attempts to describe the process by which “all that once was directly lived has become mere
168 John N. Duvall, "The (Super)Marketplace of Images: Television as Unmediated Mediation in DeLillo's White Noise," Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 50, no. 3 (1994): 128. William Chapman 76
representation,” defines the spectacle as “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.”169 Developing this idea, Debord writes, “The spectacle’s job is to cause a world that is no longer directly perceptible to be seen” as the sense of “sight is naturally the most readily adaptable to present-day society’s generalized abstraction.”170 As
Stacey Olster notes in her critical examination of White Noise, Debord’s analysis raises the problem of how “the very vehicle that enables us to apprehend the world through visual images ends up replacing the history of that world with a set of consumable images, representations divorced from their referents and subject to the political whims of their manufacturer.”171 Under an economic ideology that sanctifies the individual and denies the social—in effect privileging the representation over the referent—the spectacle becomes the means through which this ideology both exercises its power and reproduces itself. For many of DeLillo’s critics, the society depicted in White Noise is indeed the Society of the
Spectacle.
However, the infiltration of spectacle into everyday life poses a significant problem for the production of counternarratives that resist spectacle’s totalising tendencies. As this chapter will explore, the novel’s characters perceive themselves and their place in society in terms of spectacular logic and, consequently, unwittingly act out the spectacle’s ideological imperatives. As Marc Schuster demonstrates in his book, which maps out the connections between DeLillo’s novels and the theory of Jean Baudrillard, spectacular logic appears most visibly in the relationship between human beings and the objects they produce. Schuster
169 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle [La société du spectacle], trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 1967/1994), 12. 170 Ibid., 17. 171 Stacey Olster, "White Noise," in The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, ed. John N. Duvall (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 80. The Rubble of History 77
reads White Noise through the lens of Baudrillard’s The System of Objects, in which he summarises Baudrillard’s argument that “the relationship between people and the objects that constitute their world stifles subjectivity,” as “consumerism aims to assimilate everyone into […] the system of objects or simply ‘the system.’”172 More directly, he adds that
“within this system, according to Baudrillard, the apparent freedom to reshape ourselves and society through our purchases […] is ultimately illusory; the only real ‘freedom’ we have within the parameters of consumer culture is the freedom to accumulate and arrange commodities in a way that reflects our continuing advances in social status.”
Implicit in this description is how the illusion of spectacle infiltrates material reality through the commodities that then structure one’s relationship to reality. It is in this manner, as Schuster paraphrases Baudrillard, that individuals “come to behave as objects,”173 as spectacle actively effaces the distinction between its abstractions and material reality. The task of the counternarrative, then, is to render this grammar of spectacle legible and open up onto the restoration of the subject’s active engagement with reality.
And it is in this manner that White Noise responds to this problem of counternarrative. As this chapter will argue, White Noise—in both structure and content— uses the ideal nature of fiction to take the logic of the consumer society to its ends and, in identifying its fracture points without puncturing the artifice of its fictional world, ultimately reflects how the same logic operates in the physical world outside its pages. By working through each of the novel’s three parts, the structural logic of DeLillo’s novel comes into view, as he depicts the way in which spectacle increasingly infiltrates Jack’s life and shapes his relation to it, most notably his relation to his own death. With the first part
172 Marc Schuster, Don DeLillo, Jean Baudrillard, and the Consumer Conundrum (Youngstown, N.Y.: Cambria Press, 2008), 11. 173 Ibid., 12. William Chapman 78
of the novel charting the ways in which spectacle structures the rituals of everyday life, Part
Two’s Airborne Toxic Event brings Jack into direct contact with the possibility of his own death, which Jack can only relate to through the technological abstractions of spectacle.
This sets up the final part of the novel, in which Jack seeks an experimental pharmaceutical called Dylar (that claims to eliminate the fear of death) and ends up devising a plot to murder the drug’s inventor, bringing the abstract and real modes of relating to death into direct contact.
As critics such as John N. Duvall have noted, White Noise’s comical treatment of
“academic and domestic life” serves as a “satiric examination of the ways in which contemporary America is implicated in proto-fascist urges.”174 Notably, the novel grounds itself in the first person perspective of its (putative) protagonist, Jack Gladney, which allows
DeLillo to filter his observations on contemporary life directly through his protagonist’s consciousness. Much of the novel’s satire originates from the ironic distance this positioning creates, as the reader observes Jack’s inability to see the absurdity and internal contradictions of his own “postmodern” condition. This ironic mode keeps the reader’s perspective separate from Jack’s first-person perspective, creating a double vision that allows for the reconstitution of the distinction between the abstract and the real. If DeLillo’s positioning of Jack as both an academic and as a husband/father allows him to depict how spectacular logic structures the institutions of everyday life and inserts its reified abstractions into lived experience—effacing the distinction between the abstract and the real—then, at the same time, I argue, White Noise renders this process legible through the mode of irony, placing the reader at a critical distance that allows for the reconstitution of
174 Duvall, "The (Super)Marketplace of Images: Television as Unmediated Mediation in DeLillo's White Noise," 127. The Rubble of History 79
the distinction between the abstract and the real. It is the critical distance established by the double vision of irony that enables the production of counternarratives, as it restores the human dimensions of time and space that spectacle flattens out.
I. The World as Supermarket
White Noise begins with a ritual—a contemporary American ritual—of the arrival of students and their parents onto a university campus in anticipation of a new academic year. In this ritual, and the mere two-and-a-bit pages it occupies in the novel, DeLillo manages to establish both the setting of the novel and its thematic preoccupations with sardonic ease. The first sentence—“The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus”175—foreshadows not only the degree to which people have come to be represented by their objects, but also the reduced significance of time and place in the vague descriptors of “noon” (it is the reader’s conjecture as to what month and year it is) and “the west campus.” But DeLillo quickly returns to the signifying power of objects by listing, in extensive detail, what these students have brought with them:
“The roofs of the station wagons were loaded down with carefully secured suitcases full of light and heavy clothing; with boxes of blankets, boots and shoes, stationery and books, sheets, pillows, quilts; with rolled-up rugs and sleeping bags; with bicycles, skis, rucksacks, English and Western saddles, inflated rafts. As cars slowed to a crawl and stopped, students sprang out and raced to the rear doors to begin removing the objects inside; the stereo sets, radios, personal computers; small refrigerators and table ranges; the cartons of phonograph records and cassettes; the hairdryers and styling irons; the tennis rackets, soccer balls, hockey and lacross sticks, bows and arrows; the controlled substances, the birth control pills and devices; the junk food still in shopping bags—onion-and-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut creme patties, Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum Dum Pops, the Mystic Mints.”
175 Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985; repr., London: Picador, 2011), 3. William Chapman 80
Two tendencies are immediately apparent: the first being the list’s increasing specificity, growing more absurdly unnecessary as it moves from essentials like clothes and sheets to branded inessentials like Dum Dum Pops and Mystic Mints, and the second being the fact that these students are represented entirely by their material possessions. The exhaustive length of possessions intimates how the proliferation of objects does not produce a singular subjectivity, but instead renders the individual one object among others. Not one word describes what any of these students looks like or where they might come from; they have been homogenised by their belongings, the specificity of which stands in for the erstwhile specificity of individual characters. Opening with a model of how spectacle effaces subjectivity, DeLillo then proceeds to position it within the perspective of a singular subject.
It is at this point that DeLillo begins to narrate through the first-person perspective of Jack Gladney, who states that he has “witnessed this spectacle every September for twenty-one years.” In describing the ritual as spectacle, Jack signals the degree to which spectacle has infiltrated ritual, as the words become interchangeable. However, DeLillo places emphasis on the ritual aspects of this “spectacle,” in particular when Jack describes how the parents “feel a sense of renewal, of communal recognition” as the “assembly of station wagons, as much as anything they might do in the course of the year, more than formal liturgies or laws, tells the parents that they are a collection of the like-minded and the spiritually akin, a people, a nation.”176 DeLillo’s connection of this “spectacle” of students and their consumer goods to a sense of nationhood—with the implication that this sense no longer provided by religion or the rule of law (both being the historical foundations for all nation-states)—indicates that the constitutive element of this society is
176 Ibid., 4. The Rubble of History 81
less a sense of shared belief than the performance of rituals that reaffirm one’s existence and status in the world. As Jean Baudrillard writes in The Consumer Society: Myths and
Structures:
“By their number, redundancy, superfluity and formal extravagance, by the play of fashion and all that exceeds pure and simple function in them, objects merely simulate the social essence – status – that grace of predestination which is only ever bestowed by birth to a few and which the majority, having opposite destines, can never attain. […] It is status which arouses this frenzy, this berserk world of knick- knacks, gadgets, fetishes, all of which seek to mark out a value for all eternity and prove salvation by works, since salvation by grace is unattainable.”177
The event depicted in these opening two paragraphs ultimately serves a similar logic. It reaffirms the status of the parents and their children, as they have the means to participate in a ritual that allows them to display their status (in the form of object-commodities) and affirm it through the gaze of others. Through spectacle’s infiltration of ritual, objects become the means of communication between participants, whose self-segregation into nuclear family units provides the structure necessary for its perpetuation.
It is no accident, then, that the novel focuses sharply on Jack’s two socially defined roles: as husband/father and as university professor, the social insider and the critical observer. Yet DeLillo immediately problematizes these positions as well. The next paragraph of the first chapter describes the town in which Jack and his wife Babette and their “children by previous marriages” live, which is described as having “Greek revival and
Gothic churches” and “an insane asylum with an elongated portico, ornamented dormers and a steeply pitched roof topped by a pineapple finial.”178 This mishmash of architectural styles and details parallels Jack’s family structure, as in both cases outward appearances take
177 Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures, trans. Sage Publications, Theory, Culture & Society (London: SAGE Publications, 1998), 60.; Emphasis in original. 178 DeLillo, White Noise, 4. William Chapman 82
precedence over any historical significance, becoming structures flattened by their ostensible interchangeability. The function of the churches, the insane asylum, and the family becomes subordinate to their outward appearance as institutions. Under this logic, history becomes repressed, driven underground, as when Jack describes the “expressway beyond the backyard now, well below us” where the traffic creates “a remote and steady murmur around our sleep, as of dead souls babbling at the edge of a dream.” DeLillo’s simile makes precisely this implication, suggesting that Jack’s role as patriarch is merely a historical form voided of significance, with the question of its purpose and meaning having been reduced to such a remote and steady murmur.
Such detachment extends to Jack’s professional life, as the following paragraph reveals his job as “chairman of the department of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill,” a discipline which he “invented […] in North America in March of 1968.” In giving Hitler
Studies a birth date and place, DeLillo positions it as a uniquely American phenomenon, especially when put in contrast with the European intellectual developments during the same period, namely the original French publication of The Society of the Spectacle in 1967 and the student and worker-led civil conflicts in France in May 1968. More pointedly, the ethical bankruptcy of a Department of Hitler Studies becomes more pronounced when
Jack recalls that when he “suggested to the chancellor that we might build a whole department around Hitler’s life and work, he was quick to see the possibilities.” DeLillo adds that the “chancellor went on to serve as adviser to Nixon, Ford and Carter before his death on a ski lift in Austria.” This ironical addition of detail underscores the subtext that the so-called possibilities of Hitler Studies do not include taking an ethical point of view on the most murderous tyrant in human history, but likely do include furthering the power, The Rubble of History 83
prestige and wealth of those connected to the discipline. In divorcing Hitler from the
History Department, Jack essentially builds his academic reputation in divorcing Hitler from history. Hitler Studies, then, is the study of the spectacle of Hitler, a separation made possible by spectacle’s inversion of the order of significance, in which the abstract precedes the real.
Moreover, it is this logic that governs the world of the novel. And its ultimate expression comes in the form of the supermarket, which serves as synecdoche for the entire network of social relations the novel aims to represent. When Jack looks upon the mass of groceries in his car after a shopping trip, he sees
“in the mass and variety of our purchases, in the sheer plenitude those crowded bags suggested, the weight and size and number, the familiar package designs and vivid lettering, the giant sizes, the family bargain packs with Day-Glo sale stickers, in the sense of replenishment we felt, the sense of well-being, the security and contentment these products brought to some snug home in our souls—it seemed we had achieved a fullness of being that is not known to people who need less, expect less, who plan their lives around lonely walks in the evening.”179
The supermarket, here associated with “fullness of being,” evokes a sense of awe in Jack that resembles that of a religious epiphany, with the ontological category of “well-being” signifying a Baudrillardian “salvation by works” that reaffirms Jack’s ontological status in the world. DeLillo continues this extended metaphor in the a subsequent supermarket scene, where Murray compares the supermarket to the Tibetan belief in “a transitional state between death and rebirth,” explaining to Babette how
“Tibetans try to see death for what it is. It is the end of attachment to things. This simple truth is hard to fathom. But once we stop denying death, we can proceed calmly to die and then go on to experience uterine rebirth or Judeo-Christian afterlife or out-of-body experience or a trip on a UFO or whatever we wish to call it. We can do so with clear vision, without awe or terror. We don’t have to cling to life artificially, or to death for that matter. We simply walk toward the sliding doors.
179 Ibid., 24. William Chapman 84
Waves and radiation. Look how well-lighted everything is. This place is sealed off, self-contained. It is timeless. Another reason why I think of Tibet. Dying is an art in Tibet. A priest walks in, sits down, tells the weeping relatives to get out and has the room sealed. Doors, windows sealed. He has serious business to see to. Chants, numerology, horoscopes, recitations. Here we don’t die, we shop. But the difference is less marked than you think.”180
Murray’s linkage of the supermarket and death opens up onto Jack’s increasing preoccupation with death—Jack wants “to hear everything” Murray says—and signals the fundamental incompatibility between spectacular logic and human subjectivity. In saying
“[h]ere we don’t die, we shop,” Murray identifies how objects become the primary means of denying death, as they enable the very attachment to the material world that death nullifies. But this becomes problematic in a world where objects become models for human existence, as their object permanence—what Murray describes as “timeless”—cannot be reconciled with the inevitability of mortality.
At the end of Part One, DeLillo brings the prerogatives of this spectacular logic into question in a sequence where Babette appears on television. Her appearance on the screen disorients Jack, who phrases his disorientation in the language of object permanence:
“A strangeness gripped me, a sense of psychic disorientation. It was her all right, the face, the hair, the way she blinks in rapid twos and threes. I’d seen her just an hour ago, eating eggs, but her appearance on the screen made me think of her as some distant figure from the past, some ex-wife and absentee mother, a walker in the mists of the dead. If she was not dead, was I? A two-syllable infantile cry, ba-ba, issued from the deeps of my soul.”181
That the televisual image of Babette threatens Jack’s sense of psychical orientation demonstrates television’s internal contradictions; Babette’s televisual proximity signifies, for
Jack, a temporal distance that can only be imagined in terms of death. Television’s flattening out of three-dimensional space also contributes to this disorientation, as Jack
180 Ibid., 44-5. 181 Ibid., 123. The Rubble of History 85
struggles to reconcile the three-dimensional Babette he had seen an hour prior and her televisual double as a temporal continuity and not a disjunction. However, he quickly adjusts to this perceptual challenge, observing how:
“All this compressed in seconds. It was only as time drew on, normalized itself, returned to us a sense of our surroundings, the room, the house, the reality in which the TV set stood—it was only then that we understood what was going on.”
Although the family quickly comes to understand that they are watching Babette teach her posture class, DeLillo’s description of Jack’s momentary perceptual breakdown emphasises television’s ability to make abstractions appear real. Jack’s integration of the abstract, televisual Babette into a temporal continuity with the real Babette collapses both spatial distance and temporal duration—the two being functions of each other—and renders the virtual indistinguishable from the real. Television conceals its temporal disjunction in making the virtual exchangeable for the real. But this logic is nevertheless fundamentally incompatible with human finitude, as DeLillo sets Jack up for an encounter with death in
Part Two.
II. The Airborne Toxic Event, or The Return of the Repressed
The second part of White Noise chronicles the “Airborne Toxic Event,” wherein an accidental spill of the industrial waste product Nyodene Derivative forms a toxic cloud that forces Jack and his family to evacuate their home. From the beginning, the inversion of the real and the abstract shapes how the family experiences the looming disaster, as captured in
Jack’s attempt to reassure his daughter Steffie that “nothing is going to happen” with the justification
“These things happen to poor people who lived in exposed areas. Society is set up in a way that it’s the poor and the uneducated who suffer the main impact of William Chapman 86
natural and man-made disasters. People in low-lying areas get the floods, people in shanties get the hurricanes and tornados. I’m a college professor. Did you ever see a college professor rowing a boat down his own street in one of those TV floods? We live in a neat and pleasant town near a college with a quaint name. These things don’t happen in places like Blacksmith.”182
Jack’s faith in the abstract signification of his life as means of defence against disaster would sound patently ridiculous had DeLillo not already gone through the trouble of recounting the family’s shared habit of watching disaster footage, using the representations as both substitution and prophylaxis for the lack of real disasters in their lives. Yet Jack’s perception of immunity from real events relies entirely on the distancing effect of television, which is here directly connected to the idea that Jack’s social status—his accumulation of money— allows him to purchase this immunity, which is then visually represented to him in the form of disaster footage that always takes place elsewhere. While these abstractions absorb the fear that derives from the disasters’ threats to his life, they also give Jack a false sense of belief that these symbolic protections apply outside of these abstractions. In short, what
Jack ultimately signifies is his own repression of the real.
The degree to which the family chooses to remain blithely sceptical of the dangers facing them signals the degree to which spectacular logic represses the possibility of death.
When an evacuation message sounds in addition to the alert sirens, Babette’s first instinct is to ask Heinrich whether he gets “the impression they were only making a suggestion or was it a little more mandatory,” adding that she is “sure there’s plenty of time […] or they would have made a point of telling us to hurry.”183 Babette’s reaction reads as being hysterically unrealistic—no one in his or her right mind would question the urgency of an evacuation order—yet DeLillo’s carefully crafted depiction of hyperreality in Part One
182 Ibid., 133. 183 Ibid., 138-9. The Rubble of History 87
makes her reaction logical in the world of total relativity the novel depicts. When the family does finally evacuate, Jack feels encouraged by the halting of traffic from the opposite direction, remarking that “what people in an exodus fear most immediately is that those in positions of authority will long since have fled, leaving us in charge of our own chaos.”184 In the world of the novel, the meaning of authority matters less than the signs of its existence, a scenario that sets the dramatic stakes for the Airborne Toxic Event, which stages a Return of the Repressed dramatically heightened by the complete failure of authority figures to understand the unfolding disaster. The fear of “leaving us in charge of our own chaos” becomes so many alternate words for the fear of an encounter with mortality kept in perpetual deferral by the continued presence of authority figures, whose authority comes to derive solely from maintaining the appearance of authority. This, obviously, does not come without its problems.
When Jack and his family finally arrive at the evacuation centre, Jack is screened for possible exposure to Nyodene D. (having left the car to refuel) by an emergency management team known as SIMUVAC. It quickly becomes apparent that what
SIMUVAC—short for simulated evacuation— ultimately manages is the language describing events, and not the events themselves. A SIMUVAC technician describes Jack’s potential exposure as a “situation” that is part of a “high-definition event […] packed with dense concentrations of byproduct,”185 a description that uses vivid language as cover for the lack of mastery over the event, recalling the pure jargon of Jack’s academic colleagues.
Yet is the appearance of expertise, the “access to data,” that leaves Jack “prepared to be servile and fawning if it would keep [the SIMUVAC technician] from dropping casually
184 Ibid., 140. 185 Ibid., 161. William Chapman 88
shattering remarks about [Jack’s] degree of exposure and chances for survival.”186 Jack’s commitment to his faith in authority figures remains unchecked even when the technician tells him that they think they can use the data from the real evacuation “as a model” for their simulations, an articulation of the inversion of significance that plagues the whole novel. When the technician plugs Jack’s data into SIMUVAC’s software, Jack stands “with
[his] arms folded, trying to create a picture of an impassive man,” thinking it “the only way to neutralize events, to counteract the passage of computerized dots that registered [his] life and death.”187 When faced with the total authority of machine calculations, Jack assumes a physical posture gleaned from the televisual image of “someone in line at a hardware store waiting for the girl at the register to ring up his heavy-duty rope.” Yet this posture obviously offers no actual protection, foreshadowing the complete breakdown of Jack’s psychical defences.
When Jack’s details are plugged into SIMUVAC’s software, it returns “big numbers” and “bracketed numbers with pulsing stars” that—crucially—only signify the possibility of
Jack’s death and not its actual eventuation. Jack’s questioning of the technician only elicits extended non-answers and deferrals, as the technician cannot answer with any certainty whether Jack will die as a result of his exposure to Nyodene D., telling Jack that the software’s pulsing stars mean that he is “the sum total of [his] data.”188 Despite being both inconclusive and ultimately meaningless, the symbolic authority of the computer program nonetheless forces Jack to consider his own mortality:
“You are said to be dying and yet are separate from the dying, can ponder it at your leisure, literally see on the X-ray photograph or computer screen the horrible alien
186 Ibid., 162. 187 Ibid., 163. 188 Ibid., 165. The Rubble of History 89
logic of it all. It is when death is rendered graphically, is televised so to speak, that you sense an eerie separation between your condition and yourself. A network of symbols has been introduced, an entire awesome technology wrested from the gods. It makes you feel like a stranger in your own dying.”
This conception of death as something external to the self—something that can be quantified and represented symbolically—reveals the assumption that death can be a thing separable from life, that it can be controlled through its visual representation. Crucially, this illusory (what Jack calls “eerie”) separation is reinforced by television. As Michael
Valdez Moses writes, television’s imposition of “an increasingly automatic and involuntary identification with the camera eye […] fosters the illusion that the witnessing consciousness of the individual television viewer, like the media themselves, is a permanent fixture possessing a transcendental perspective.”189 Such an identification necessitates the collapse of individual temporality into the generalised temporality of television, which Valdez
Moses connects to the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s conception of “public time” or
“clock time,” which, in its reduction of time to “an infinite series of quantifiable units […] interchangeable with every other and equally available to all persons […] diverts the individual away from finitude, and threatens to strand authentic being (Dasein) in the fallen public world in which time is endless.”190 Television, despite providing the illusion of ontological security, enforces the spectacular logic that ultimately estranges individuals from their own conditions.
This state of affairs only serves to deepen Jack’s existential distress, as his only recourse is to a televisual imaginary that only serves to further repress the reality of his own finitude. After drawing the connection between television and the symbolic separation of
189 Michael Valdez Moses, "Lust Removed from Nature," in New Essays on White Noise, ed. Frank Lentricchia (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 73. 190 Ibid., 74. William Chapman 90
death from life, Jack comes to want his “academic robe and dark glasses,”191 the visual symbols of his illusory immortality. At the evacuation centre, Babette reads tabloid stories of afterlife and apocalypse to the assembled crowd of evacuees, leading Jack to reflect on how the “tabloid future, with its mechanism of a hopeful twist to apocalyptic events, was perhaps not so very remote from our own immediate experience,” and how “the small audience of the old and blind recognized the predictions of the psychics as events so near to happening that they had to be shaped in advance to our needs and wishes.”192 In becoming
“part of the stuff of media disaster,” Jack unwittingly articulates how the media has become a public imaginary in shaping perception so as to absorb the anxieties of a world increasingly on the brink of technological catastrophe, which here takes the form of the
Airborne Toxic Event.193 Moreover, these anxieties originate in the very irreconcilability of the finite temporality of the individual and the infinite temporality of technology.
Television—and by extension, the media—sells the cure to its own disease. It is no accident, then, that the tabloid preoccupations of afterlife and apocalypse resonate so strongly with the evacuees, as they represent the only imaginable escape from the existential distress imposed by an infinitely exchangeable temporality.
Television’s inability to reconcile these contradictions comes into stark relief in the last scene of Part Two, as “a man carrying a tiny TV set” walks through the room with the television aloft “in order to display the blank screen” to everyone in the room. Having been quarantined at a second evacuation centre in Iron City, the man brings to the attention of the evacuees that their plight is not being covered on television:
191 DeLillo, White Noise, 165. 192 Ibid., 171. 193 This is a good time to mention that the novel eerily anticipated the Bhopal Disaster, the real-life industrial gas leak that happened shortly after the novel’s publication. The Rubble of History 91
“No film footage, no live report. Does this kind of thing happen so often that nobody cares anymore? Don’t these people know what we’ve been through? We were scared to death. We still are. We left our homes, we drove through blizzards, we saw the cloud. It was a deadly specter, right there above us. Is it possible nobody gives substantial coverage to such a thing? Half a minute, twenty seconds? Are they telling us it was insignificant, it was piddling? […] This is the most terrifying time of our lives. Everything we love and have worked for is under serious threat. But we look around and see no response from the official organs of the media. The airborne toxic event is a horrifying thing. Our fear is enormous. Even if there hasn’t been great loss of life, don’t we deserve some attention for our suffering, our human worry, our terror? Isn’t fear news?”194
The man’s language evinces the idea that media attention has become a form of currency, as though the units of clock time—twenty or thirty seconds—can compensate for the terror and mortal threat of the airborne toxic event. While this sounds ridiculous (and purposefully so), the underlying logic aligns perfectly with that of the spectacle. As John
Frow notes, television’s
“importance lies not in the sheer quantity of representations that it generates, nor even in their content as messages, but in the fact that they are always directly linked to commodity production and the generation of profits, and that in order to serve these ends they work as an integral part of a system for the shaping and reshaping of human identity.”195
As advertising demonstrates that each second of televised attention has a quantifiable value, the lack of media coverage is problematic for the evacuees as it implies that their suffering has no value. What this sequence ultimately reveals is the extent to which spectacular logic shapes language and, by extension, the production of meaning. Unable to consume the mediated representation of their suffering, the characters have no other available means of producing meaning from their experience. Despite being in a room full of people who have shared the same experience, television’s monopoly on the ability to confer meaning on
194 DeLillo, White Noise. 195 John A. Frow, "The Last Things Before the Last: Notes on White Noise," South Atlantic Quarterly 89, no. 2 (1990): 423. William Chapman 92
events leaves the characters without a framework to interpret their encounter with death.
And so they—and Jack—must seek other options.
III. Dylar and the Existential Credit Default
The crisis of meaning exposed by the Airborne Toxic Event neatly leads into the final part of White Noise, wherein DeLillo brings the abstract denial of death and its reality into direct contact. The first scene marks an immediate return to the supermarket—the key motif of the novel—where Jack shops with his infant son Wilder, in what ostensibly appears as a return to the typicality of everyday life depicted in Part One after the upheaval of the Airborne Toxic Event. However, after Jack’s unmediated encounter with mortality, the security previously implied by the profusion of objects comes into question. He becomes “suddenly aware of the dense environmental texture”196 of the supermarket and observes a “self-conscious quality” in the display of fruit, noting that it “looked carefully observed, like four-color fruit in a guide to photography.”197 Although Jack’s observation again reflects the inverted relationship between the abstract and the real, it also implies that
Jack can now perceive it. Instinctually recognising the disparity between the world as it appears and the world as he has experienced it, Jack turns to the comfort provided by the presence of Wilder, for whom the world “was a series of fleeting gratifications,” as he “took what he could, then immediately forgot it in the rush of a subsequent pleasure.” With deft irony, Jack comments that it is “this forgetfulness [he] envied and admired.” Of course,
Wilder’s forgetfulness is nothing less than the ideal state of consumerism, as Reeve and
Kerndge note that
196 DeLillo, White Noise, 195. 197 Ibid., 196. The Rubble of History 93
“[l]arge economic and political interests are at stake in the fomenting of a form of schizophrenia, whereby different experiences of consumption are presented as if they were radically disconnected from each other, and answered to the demands of differentiated selves which could never be permanently satisfied.”198
Split between the reality of his own mortality and the fantasy of perpetual renewal and rejuvenation made tangible by consumer goods, Jack finds himself in a place of schizophrenic tension between reality and its model double.
But the economic and political system alluded to by Reeve and Kerndge has ways of attempting to resolve these internal tensions, which surfaces in the novel in the form of the experimental pharmaceutical Dylar. DeLillo alludes to the existence of Dylar over the course of the novel, as Jack grows increasingly suspicious of what he perceives to be
Babette’s atypical behaviour, as when she quickly swallows an unidentified object during the Airborne Toxic Event evacuation. It is only in the last section of the novel however— which is titled “Dylarama”— that he discovers the prescription bottle and confronts
Babette with the evidence. In doing so, he learns of her participation in the pharmaceutical trial for Dylar, a drug designed to eliminate the fear of death. Reeve and Kerndge describe the effects of Dylar as producing an “unself-conscious state in which life is experienced as a continuous present from which all memories and fears are cut out,”199 essentially replicating the very infantile condition Jack envies. In eliminating the fear of death and, consequently, perception of the temporal boundary of human life, Dylar produces a state in which material reality assumes the ontological status of images, as the experience of moments in a continuous present also describes the experience of cinema. In short, Dylar is nothing less than the biological extension of clock-time, rendering the material world into image-
198 N. H. Reeve and Richard Kerndge, "Toxic Events: Postmodernism and DeLillo's White Noise," The Cambridge Quarterly XXIII, no. 4: 319. 199 Ibid., 315. William Chapman 94
signifiers and consequently occluding their material consequences. It is a technological response to a philosophical question200, a categorical error that precipitates the sequence of events to follow.
Babette’s description of the potential side effects of Dylar serves as a case in point, as she tells Jack that as a result of taking the drug:
“I could die. I could live but my brain could die. The left side of my brain could die but the right side could live. This would mean that the left side of my body would live but the right side would die. There were many grim specters. I could walk sideways but not forward. I could not distinguish words from things, so that if someone said ‘speeding bullet,’ I would fall to the floor and take cover.”201
The list of side effects shifts from a physical representation of schizophrenia—a split between sides of the body—to the inability to walk forward, a physical representation of the temporality imposed by the drug wherein past and future are abolished in favour of an endless latitude of the present. An inability to distinguish words from things further indicates the drug’s ability to flatten temporality, as the distinction between something and its representation is a function of temporal separation, as one must follow the other. As the critic Leonard Wilcox describes it, the literalizing of words “results from the isolation of signifiers in pure and unrelated presents and the consequent breakdown of the play of meaning,” reducing words to “mere signals which form a mechanical one-to-one relationship with their referent.”202 A series of “pure and unrelated presents” almost perfectly describes the temporality of television, in which events become signals (and also
200 Valdez Moses describes the events in “Dylarama” to be “the confrontation between Heidegger’s existential understanding of human finitude and Bacon’s scientifically reductive solution to the human fear of death.” Valdez Moses, "Lust Removed from Nature," 75-6. 201 DeLillo, White Noise, 222. 202 Leonard Wilcox, "Baudrillard, DeLillo's "White Noise," and the End of Heroic Narrative," Contemporary Literature 32, no. 3 (1991): 357. The Rubble of History 95
signifiers) that transmit simultaneously on distinct channels that appear unrelated to each other. In order to eliminate the fear of death, Dylar must chemically fix this one-to-one relationship of signals and referents through the collapse of temporality, which consequently collapses the distinction between physical objects and their representations.
This, in turn, brings an end to the production of meaning and fixes ideological imperatives in place. But, as Babette later reveals, Dylar does not work, leaving Jack without further means of suppressing his fear of death.
Without a way to suppress his fear of death in the abstract, Jack finds himself having to confront the real thing. This confrontation begins to take shape with a surprise visit from Jack’s father-in-law, Vernon Dickey. Not expecting the visit, Jack spots a “white- haired man sitting erect in the old wicker chair” in his backyard and initially believes him to be the incarnation of “Death, or Death’s errand-runner,” with his white hair being
“purely emblematic, part of his allegorical force.”203 Jack’s symbolic interpretation of his father-in-law’s surprise appearance reflects his increasing inability to distinguish between reality and representation. When he finally goes outside to confront the Death-like figure in his backyard, Jack keeps his “copy of Mein Kampf clutched to his stomach,”204 in an absurd moment that perfectly encapsulates the disconnect between the symbolic and the physical. By literalising Jack’s use of Hitler as protection from physical death, DeLillo brings the categorical error of Jack’s thinking into stark relief. This moment presages the narrative function of Vernon’s visit, as he gives Jack a handgun, the material form of protection from death. Unsurprisingly, Jack interprets this gesture symbolically, asking himself: “Did Vernon mean to provoke thought, provide my life with a fresh design, a
203 DeLillo, White Noise, 278-9. 204 Ibid., 281. William Chapman 96
scheme, a shapeliness?”205 He arrives at the conclusion that the handgun is “the ultimate device for determining one’s competence in the world,” a “concealed lethal weapon” that is also “a secret, a second life, a second self, a dream, a spell, a plot, a delirium.”206 Jack comes to view the gun as a powerful object not for its ability to kill but for the symbolic fantasy it enables, allowing for a move beyond the inversion of representation and reality to a complete separation of the two, a second life lived entirely at the level of symbolic representation, a life detached from death.
Pointedly, the fantasy that the handgun enables illustrates how spectacular logic facilitates Jack’s increasing detachment from reality. For Jack, the handgun enables a fantasy that serves as a counter to his obsessive visions of Mr. Gray, who frequently appears in his mind in televisual terms—“gray-bodied, staticky, unfinished,” a “half image”— but nonetheless exerts “mastery and control”207 over Jack’s thoughts. By contrast, thinking of the gun provides Jack with “a small intense sensation” he identifies as “a childhood moment, the profound stir of secret-keeping.”208 Although this connection to personal history ostensibly signals the beginning of a return to embodied memory, Jack’s abstracted relation to it reveals itself in his continued reflections on the handgun:
“What a sly device a handgun is. One so small in particular. An intimate and cunning thing, a secret history of the man who owns it. I recalled how I’d felt some days earlier, trying to find the Dylar. Like someone spying on the family garbage. Was I immersing myself, little by little, in a secret life? Did I think it was my last defense against the ruin worked out for me so casually by the force or nonforce, the principle or power or chaos that determines such things?”
205 Ibid., 291. 206 Ibid., 292. 207 Ibid., 277. 208 Ibid., 315. The Rubble of History 97
Even though the gun activates Jack’s sense of memory, he connects it with a future- oriented fantasy designed to replace the past-oriented “ruin worked out for [him]” by external forces. This opposition recalls a sentence DeLillo would write twenty-six years later: “Two forces in the world, past and future.”209 As with the terrorists in Falling Man and Mao II, the force of violence represents the possibility of transcending the forces of history. For Jack, the fantasy of violence the gun enables allows him to believe he has “a reality [he] could control, secretly dominate,”210 forming a like-for-like replacement for the failed fantasy of Dylar. The only thing missing is the moral justification.
And who else should provide this justification but Murray, the novel’s true believer in spectacular logic and thus the one person fluent in its moral vocabulary. In the midst of a conversation with Jack about death, Murray breaks down Jack’s use of Hitler as a defense mechanism: “On one level you wanted to conceal yourself in Hitler and his works. On another level you wanted to use him to grow in significance and strength. I sense a confusion of means.”211 As Duvall points out, Murray’s explication of Jack’s logical contradiction exposes “Jack’s last best defense mechanism” and thus “[empties] Jack of his means of repressing death.”212 After proposing faith in technology and faith in the afterlife as solutions to Jack’s fear of death—one logically contradicting the other—Murray offers a third way to respond to the fear of death:
“I believe, Jack, there are two kinds of people in the world. Killers and diers. Most of us are diers. We don’t have the disposition, the rage or whatever it takes to be a killer. We let death happen. We lie down and die. But think what it’s like to be a
209 "In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September," 40. 210 White Noise, 341. 211 Ibid., 331. 212 Duvall, "The (Super)Marketplace of Images: Television as Unmediated Mediation in DeLillo's White Noise," 143. William Chapman 98
killer. Think how exciting it is, in theory, to kill a person in direct confrontation. If he dies, you cannot. To kill him is to gain life-credit. The more people you kill, the more credit you store up. It explains any number of massacres, wars, executions.”213
Having offered two contradictory evasions of the fear of death, Murray rhetorically gives his absurd theory the appearance of being both logically sound and reasonable.214 This is supported by the invocation of the idea of “life-credit,” which recalls the “existential credit”
Jack builds earlier in the form of shopping. Although Murray’s theory could only logically apply to the abstract worlds of cinema or television (he tells Jack that his victim would
“replace [him], theoretically, in that role”), DeLillo’s studied depiction of a world that has come to model itself on its own abstractions demonstrates just how easily this logic could be extended to the physical world.
Aptly enough, such an extension arrives couched in the language of narrative and plot, as Murray seeks to assure Jack of his theory’s validity. When Jack condenses Murray’s theory on controlling death down to the phrase “plot a murder,” he adds: “But every plot is a murder in effect. To plot is to die, whether we know it or not.”215 In his comments, Jack, who earlier remarks to students in a Hitler Studies seminar that “[a]ll plots tend to move deathward,”216 instinctively recognises how these plots, in DeLillo’s words, “reduce the world”217 by transforming reality into an object of the will. Murray attempts to convince
Jack otherwise by inverting the significance, arguing that to plot “is to affirm life, to seek
213 DeLillo, White Noise, 335. 214 Duvall argues that the point of Murray's argument is "to convince Jack of its correctness," in the hopes that Jack will get caught committing a murder, thus freeing up both his academic post and his wife Babette. While I agree with Duvall's reading of Murray's intentions, my focus lies more in the specificity of Murray's logic and how it reflects the ideological conditions of the novel. 215 DeLillo, White Noise, 335. 216 Ibid., 30. 217 "In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September," 34. The Rubble of History 99
shape and control” and to “shape time and space,” adding that plotting “is how we advance the art of human consciousness.”218 In his reasoning, Murray uses the abstractions of plot and narrative to justify murder—effectively voicing the logic of terrorism as stated by Abu
Rashid in Mao II—a logic that relies on the inversion of reality and representation that suffuses the world of the novel. Although Murray is quick to contend that his theory is just that, spectacular logic’s effacement of the distinction between the abstract and the real enables Jack to put it into action, with absurd consequences.
As the critic Annjeanette Wiese writes, it is at this point in the novel that Jack
“starts to try to craft his actions within the framework of an already formed and unfolding story” in the form of “a highly stylized escapade to kill Willie Mink and take his Dylar.”219
Throughout his encounter, Jack repeatedly verbalises his plot, narrating his own image series as he plans to shoot Mink “three times in the viscera for maximum pain, clear the weapon of prints, place the weapon in the victim’s staticky hand, [and] find a crayon or lipstick tube and scrawl a cryptic suicide note on the full-length mirror.”220 The lead-up to his confrontation with Willie Mink unfolds in televisual style, as Jack witnesses his actions at a remove, watching himself “take each separate step” and sensing that he is “part of a network of structures and channels.”221 In seeing himself as the director of his own television channel, Jack conflates the words that he uses to describe his plot to kill Mink with the actions to which they correspond. Jack’s distanced vision—a literal tele-vision— produces similar effects to Dylar as it erodes the distinction between words and things,
218 White Noise, 335. 219 Annjeanette Wiese, "Rethinking Postmodern Narrativity: Narrative Construction and Identity Formation in Don DeLillo's White Noise," College Literature 39, no. 3 (2012): 17. 220 DeLillo, White Noise, 349. 221 Ibid., 350. William Chapman 100
lending credence to Duvall’s observation that “television itself, that means of forgetting death through aesthetization, is Dylar.”222 In order to forget the reality of his own death,
Jack must kill Mink in a stylised, symbolic fashion that corresponds to the meaning he assigns to it in advance. But, as DeLillo is well aware, reality does not function like television.
Hence when Jack finally encounters Mink, he finds Mink pathetically watching television with the sound off and throwing handfuls of Dylar tablets at his mouth, frustrating Jack’s attempts to dictate the narrative, not wanting to “compromise the plan.”223 To regain his sense of control, Jack uses this side effect of Dylar against Mink, noting how the drug makes “him act in a somewhat stylized way,”224 using the loss of distinction between word and thing to make Mink’s behaviour conform to his preconceived plot. Jack utters the words “hail of bullets” and “fusillade,” forcing Mink to
“show real terror, brilliant cringing fear,” which in turn allows Jack to see himself “from
Mink’s viewpoint, magnified, threatening.”225 Crucially, this televisual transference of perspective does not result in an epiphany of identification with his victim, but instead intensifies Jack’s televisual perception of the situation:
“The intensity of the noise in the room was the same at all frequencies. Sound all around. I took out the Zumwalt. Great and nameless emotions thudded on my chest. I knew who I was in the network of meanings. Water fell to earth in drops, causing surfaces to gleam. I saw things new.”
Jack’s perception of events retains the depth of the television screen, a gleaming surface that transforms reality into representation, eliminating the distinction between thoughts and
222 Duvall, "The (Super)Marketplace of Images: Television as Unmediated Mediation in DeLillo's White Noise," 147. 223 DeLillo, White Noise, 357. 224 Ibid., 356. 225 Ibid., 358. The Rubble of History 101
actions. This proves to be the mirror of Mink’s condition, as Jack too can barely distinguish words from actions, narrating his firing of “the gun, the weapon, the pistol, the firearm, the automatic” as though the words themselves were bullets that could inflict additional pain on Mink. However, after shooting Mink a second time, Jack again tries to see himself from
Mink’s viewpoint, “gaining life-power, storing up life-credit,” only to realise that Mink
“was too far gone to have a viewpoint.”226 Mink’s failure to play the role Jack devises for him undermines the spectacular logic of Jack’s plot, opening up a space for the reintroduction of reality into Jack’s vision.
This moment arrives when Jack places the gun in Mink’s hand to make the murder appear to be a suicide, when Mink pulls the trigger and shoots Jack in the wrist:
“The world collapsed inward, all those vivid textures and connections buried in mounds of ordinary stuff. I was disappointed. Hurt, stunned and disappointed. What had happened to the higher plane of energy in which I’d carried out my scheme? The pain was searing. Blood covered my forearm, wrist and hand. I staggered back, moaning, watching blood drip from the tips of my fingers. I was troubled and confused. Colored dots appeared at the edge of my field of vision. Familiar little dancing specks. The extra dimensions, the super perceptions, were reduced to visual clutter, a whirling miscellany, meaningless.”227
Jack’s physical wound precipitates an immediate return to the physical dimension of his body, the bullet puncturing his augmented, televisual perception and revealing it to be an illusion. It is at this moment that Jack sees Mink “for the first time as a person,” with the
“old human muddles and quirks […] set flowing again” Although the wound ostensibly serves as a reminder of his inevitable mortality, critics such as Wiese note how Jack
“recast[s] himself as the rescuer,”228 as rescuing Mink allows Jack to feel “large and selfless,
226 Ibid., 359. 227 Ibid., 360. 228 Wiese, "Rethinking Postmodern Narrativity: Narrative Construction and Identity Formation in Don DeLillo's White Noise," 18. William Chapman 102
above resentment”229 despite having just shot the man in the stomach. In the end, Jack suffers no legal or moral consequences for his actions, leaving the ending of the novel ambiguous as to whether the spectacular logic animating the novel has finally collapsed.
But this would be a false conclusion, as the last scene of the novel demonstrates.
Conclusion: Irony’s Binoculars
As a number of critics have argued, one of the most prominent formal features of
White Noise is the position it marks out for its reader.230 The reflective absurdity of the novel’s defining moments—Hitler Studies, the shopping mall, Dylar, the concluding murder plot—all position the reader firmly within the space of a dramatic irony. In this space, the reader sees reflectively what is obscure to the characters. In concluding this chapter, I want to suggest that this feature of irony opens up one further dimension of the practice of counternarrative that allows it to respond to the problem with which this chapter opened, specifically: how can an ethics of fiction that privileges microhistory over totalising narratives work when that microhistory itself is saturated with the spectacle.
In the preface to her book Irony in the Work of Philosophy, Claire Colebrook describes human vision in terms of irony, writing:
“The human eye is at one and the same time captured by this world and prompted to think beyond it. It is this capacity to see beyond one’s point of view that opens the possibility not only of philosophy and speculation but also of dissimulation, deception, and error. Seeing this present and evident world is bound up with a view toward what is not given. The human eye is ironic, capable of viewing this world from an unworldly perspective. The tradition of irony is a tradition that
229 DeLillo, White Noise, 361. 230 Philip Nel, "DeLillo and modernism," in The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, ed. John N. Duvall (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2008).; Duvall, "The (Super)Marketplace of Images: Television as Unmediated Mediation in DeLillo's White Noise."; Olster, "White Noise." The Rubble of History 103
interrogates the essentially bifurcated possibility of the human point of view, at once within and beyond its own world.”231
This possibility of seeing double is immediately actualized by the reader. Through this rhetorical positioning, DeLillo gives the reader “what is not given” in the world of the novel, which appears self-evident to the characters that occupy it. In allowing the reader to see beyond Jack’s limited point of view, DeLillo opens up the possibility of seeing beyond one’s own limited point of view, to see the points of intersection between the world of the novel and the world outside its pages. It is this bifurcated perspective that ultimately resolves the problem spectacular logic poses to the counternarrative, as DeLillo’s novel engages the reader in the necessary counterpart to Falling Man and Mao II’s emphasis on the art of writing: the art of reading. In doing so, White Noise allows the reader to position her- or himself at a distance from the totalising narrative that the novel renders legible.
And it is from this perspective that the final scene of the novel takes on its full sense.
For the first time in the novel, the focalised “I” of its first-person narration assumes this very posture of irony. Jack returns to his supermarket, only to find it rearranged, but he sublimates his own disorientation through a reflective relation to the disorientation of others:
“It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers. They walk in a fragmented trance, stop and go, clusters of well-dressed figures frozen in the aisles, trying to figure out the pattern, discern the logic, trying to remember where they’d seen the Cream of Wheat. They see no reason for it, find no sense in it. […] But in the end it doesn’t matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living.”232
231 Claire Colebrook, Irony in the Work of Philosophy (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), ix-x. 232 DeLillo, White Noise, 374-5. William Chapman 104
Jack’s ironic posture to the rearrangement of the supermarket shelves reflects this distance, as he positions it in relation to a larger, totalising narrative, the “language of waves and radiation,” that renders the particular arrangement of goods arbitrary. This is the irony of the counternarrative, which positions the singular microhistory against the totalising narrative and reveals the arbitrariness of the latter, its infinite configurability. Through this irony, DeLillo provides the “unworldly perspective” on the world the novel claims to represent, akin to a moment in his essay “The Power of History” where he describes the novel (in general) as “the dream release, the suspension of reality that history needs to escape its own brutal confinements.”233 Ultimately, irony unlocks the power of the counternarrative, as it holds reality in suspension to reveal the arbitrariness of its configuration. If the supermarket shelves of the novel can be rearranged, so too can fiction rearrange the real world.
233 "The Power of History." The Rubble of History 105
Conclusion The Material of History: Don DeLillo’s Vision of Language
At the beginning of DeLillo’s 2010 short novel Point Omega, an anonymous man stands in an art gallery watching Douglas Gordon’s art installation 24-Hour Psycho—Alfred
Hitchcock’s 1960 film slowed down to two frames per second, making the film twenty- four hours long—remarking on both the film and the people passing through the gallery.
Contained within this scene are remarks that mirror DeLillo’s fictional ethics—or what this thesis describes at length—as the man watches the famous shower scene from Psycho in slow motion:
“It takes close attention to see what is happening in front of you. It takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at. He was mesmerized by this, the depths that were possible in the slowing of motion, the things to see, the depths of things so easy to miss in the shallow habit of seeing.”234
In each of the three novels discussed in this thesis, DeLillo puts in the “pious effort” required to escape this “shallow habit of seeing,” to slow the ceaseless motion of everyday life to the point where it can be seen differently, just as Gordon does in 24-Hour Psycho.
But DeLillo’s work consists of words, not images, and it is this distinction that captures the purpose of fiction in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While the fiction of cinema remains within the visual field, the fiction of literature goes beyond it, into the language that connects things together.
Working back through DeLillo’s body of work—as this study has—reveals
DeLillo’s career-long effort to intervene in the material world through fiction, using language as a material force against the mimetic strictures of spectacular representations and their totalising power. As DeLillo writes in “The Power of History,” the writer sets “his
234 Point Omega (New York: Scribner, 2010), 16-7. William Chapman 106
creative delight in language and his sense of self-preservation against the vast and uniform
Death that history tends to fashion as its most enduring work.”235 As I have argued here, this is the counternarrative: the preservation of individual history in language. This can be seen in Falling Man, where DeLillo seeks a language adequate to the relationship between the individual and the event. It can also be seen in Mao II, which uses fiction to reveal the textuality of images and to open a space for the restoration of the human dimensions images reduce to flatness. And it can also be seen in White Noise, wherein DeLillo employs the second sight of irony to allow the reader to see what totalising narratives render self- evident. For DeLillo, language—and in particular the language of fiction—is the material with which history can be reconstructed. Through the reconstructions of fiction, history’s
“vast and uniform Death” can instead show signs of life.
235 "The Power of History." The Rubble of History 107
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Minerva Access is the Institutional Repository of The University of Melbourne
Author/s: Chapman, William
Title: The rubble of history: counternarrative and the ethics of fiction in Don DeLillo
Date: 2017
Persistent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11343/191622
File Description: Complete thesis
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