Don DeLillo’s Promiscuous Fictions:

The Adulterous Triangle of Sex, Space, and Language

Diana Marie Jenkins

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

The School of English

University of NSW, December 2005

This thesis is dedicated to the loving memory of a wonderful grandfather, and a beautiful niece. I wish they were here to see me finish what both saw me start. Contents

Acknowledgements 1

Introduction 2

Chapter One 26

The Space of the Hotel/Motel Room

Chapter Two 81

Described Space and Sexual Transgression

Chapter Three 124

The Reciprocal Space of the Journey and the Image

Chapter Four 171

The Space of the Secret

Conclusion 232

Reference List 238

Abstract

This thesis takes up J. G. Ballard’s contention, that ‘the act of intercourse is now always a model for something else,’ to show that Don DeLillo uses a particular sexual, cultural economy of adultery, understood in its many loaded cultural and literary contexts, as a model for semantic reproduction. I contend that DeLillo’s fiction evinces a promiscuous model of language that structurally reflects the myth of the adulterous triangle. The thesis makes a significant intervention into DeLillo scholarship by challenging Paul Maltby’s suggestion that DeLillo’s linguistic model is Romantic and pure. My analysis of the narrative operations of adultery in his work reveals the alternative promiscuous model. I discuss ten DeLillo novels and one play – Americana, Players, The Names, White Noise, Libra, Mao II, Underworld, the play Valparaiso, The Body Artist, Cosmopolis, and the pseudonymous Amazons – that feature adultery narratives. I demonstrate that these narratives resist conservative models of language, space, and sex by using promiscuity as a method of narrative control. I argue that DeLillo’s adultery narratives respond subversively to attempts to categorise his work, and that he extends the mythologised rhetoric of the adulterous triangle by adopting sexual transgression as a three-sided semantic structure that connects language, sex, and space. I refer to theories of narrative, postmodernity, space, desire, and parody to show that DeLillo’s adultery narratives structurally influence his experiments with linguistic meaning. My analysis reveals that contradiction performs at several spatial, sexual, and dialogical levels to undermine readings that suggest DeLillo’s language models pure meaning. I identify the sexualised fissure within DeLillo’s semantic style that is exposed by the operation of contradiction. I believe this gap distinguishes DeLillo from postmodern fiction’s emphasis on the placeless, because it is a meaningful space that emphasises the reproductive adulteration of signification. I expose several sites of dialectic rupture, including the hotel/motel room, oppositional and metaphorical description, the journey, the image, and the secret. I contend that sex in these transgressive narratives is a model for something else: promiscuous meaning. This thesis demonstrates that DeLillo’s fiction charts the typography of the mythical third side of the adulterous triangle in order to respond to language’s own promiscuity.

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank my friends and mentors within the School of English at the University of New South Wales, where I have been fortunate to enjoy the innumerable benefits of both. I am so very grateful to my supervisor, Dr Elizabeth McMahon, without whose timely commitment, editorial rigor, and tireless instruction, this thesis would have floundered. I also thank Professor Bruce Johnson for his early supervision; Dr Suzanne Eggins, for her kind encouragement throughout my candidature; the Head of School, Professor Bill Ashcroft, for his accessible leadership and efficient assessment of my draft; and members of faculty who have been cheer squads and occasional lunchroom/coffee cart companions: Anne, Brigitta, Sue, Clare, Roslyn, Bill W., and Peter K. I’d also like to thank the staff at the Library for their ready assistance throughout my project, in particular the invaluable team at Interlibrary Loans. To the uni crew – I hope you know the difference you’ve made – thank you: Susan P., Marita, Drew, Chris, Sandy, Motoko, Kate, Katherine, Will, Josh, Bronwyn, and most of all Warwick Shapcott and Tim Roberts, who have both made me think harder, work harder, and laugh harder over these years than would have been conceivable without them. Thanks, guys.

Friends and the families of friends here and abroad have been unbelievably supportive and patient, and I thank them with love. I shout out a huge THANK YOU to you all, and you do know who you are, for every time you asked (and didn’t ask, especially towards the end!), and took such a sincere and active interest in my advancement and well-being. I am floored and humbled by my support network. To Brett House, across the seas, the Becks are on ice, buddy.

To the two sides of my family, and honorary members Sarah, Janet, and John, your friendship, encouragement, and humour have been the tools of my progress. Thank you Kate, Daniel, Alek, Mal, and Nana, for managing to support me whilst enduring so much personal heartache. Many thanks to my welcoming and loving new family: Katie, Peter, Simon, Marisa, Felicity, and the birthday girl, celebrating one hundred years, Molly Newsam (A.K.A. Grandma), who have been so firmly on my side during this process. To Llewellyn, my husband and best friend, I owe everything, including over four years of my undivided attention…! Your unwavering belief in me is the reason this project was commenced as well as the reason for its completion. Happy Anniversary, Llewie. Finally, I extend a grateful ciao to “the other man”: Mr Don DeLillo, whose fiction altered the course of my life.

Diana Jenkins 1 December 2005 Introduction

James: What is the sacrament of matrimony?

Diana: Matrimony is the sacrament by which a baptized man and a baptized woman bind themselves for life in a lawful marriage and receive the grace to discharge their duties.

James: What are their duties?

Diana: That part is hazy (DeLillo 1979, pp. 41-2).

Discussing the three years of writing The Names (1982) in Greece, DeLillo describes the experience as one of “confronting new landscapes and fresh languages” (Harris 2005, p. 18). This comment encapsulates three of his principal and related concerns: space, language, and reproduction. The newness and freshness of his spatial and linguistic experience creates a renewable vision of both. Where DeLillo reminds us elsewhere that ‘Rilke said we had to rename the world,’ and that ‘[r]enaming suggests an innocence and a rebirth’ (LeClair 2005, p. 9), this thesis demonstrates that DeLillo’s project of renaming productively complicates the conventional trope of artistic reproduction so that it is not only sexualised but promiscuous. Taking up J. G. Ballard’s contention in The Atrocity Exhibition, that ‘the act of intercourse is now always a model for something else’ (Ballard 1990, p. 77), I show that DeLillo uses a particular sexual and cultural economy of adultery, understood in its many cultural and literary connotations, as a model for 1 semantic reproductionTPF FPT. This model is based on the mythologised trope of the adulterous triangle, and characterises linguistic meaning as impure, erotic, contradictory, secretive, deceitful, and reproductive. This reading is an important addition to academic assessments of DeLillo’s view of language, because it argues that the structure of his linguistic model is transgressive and fecund, rather than ‘pure,’ ‘Romantic,’ and ‘pristine’ (Caton 1997; Dewey 1990; Maltby 1998).

1 TP PT For a detailed discussion of Ballard and DeLillo, see Hardin (2000).

Diana Jenkins 2 December 2005 Adultery is the sexual model that best represents DeLillo’s semantic vision, which is, I argue, that linguistic meaning is intrinsically promiscuous. There are many sexual incidents in DeLillo’s oeuvre. Sexual intercourse is literally a model for something else in the case of adulterous relations, which are defined by their negative relation to the rites of marriage. Narratologically, the trope of adultery also relates to the novel form, which has been theorised as a transgressive mode. DeLillo’s representations of adultery contribute to his constant remodelling of meaning by exposing linguistic practice as a sexualised and transgressive form.

This thesis repositions DeLillo’s fiction by demonstrating that labels, including realism, modernism, and postmodernism, overlook the promiscuous nature of his constructions of meaning, which traverse these and other categories. Building on readings of DeLillo that concern the America of realist fiction and the America of postmodernity, I suggest an alternative interpretation of his narratological strategies that dissolves the mutual exclusivity of categorisation. As part of DeLillo’s endeavour “to confront realities” (Harris 2005, p. 18), his fiction develops a conflict of narrative styles that reflects the contradictory operation of semantics in narrative space. DeLillo’s texts negotiate perceived fissures between different fictional models, resisting their accepted meanings and redefining their narrative function.

Laura Barrett, Tom LeClair, and Paul Maltby all identify DeLillo’s problematic and contradictory emphasis on place in the midst of ‘accounts of the postmodern experience of living in a hyperreality’ (Maltby 1998, p. 500) that is ‘located precisely nowhere’ (LeClair 2005, p. 15). This spatial paradox productively affects linguistic meaning. Indeed, when DeLillo says of his 1978 novel Running Dog that ‘the style and language reflect the landscape’ (LeClair 2005, p. 7), he suggests that language and space can mirror each other. DeLillo’s adultery narratives demonstrate that this union between space and language produces a transgressive effect on meaning. Adopting the rhetorical schema of the adulterous triangle, I investigate the narrative operation of mirroring, doubling, reproduction, contiguity, opposition, and mobility in DeLillo’s topographical experiment with sexual meaning.

Diana Jenkins 3 December 2005 This thesis relies on theories of narratology, postmodernity, parody, and space, as well as on theorists of cultural, psychoanalytic, and textual practice. These theorists specifically include Freud, Foucault, Baudrillard, Derrida and Lacan, whose philosophical and cultural insights I deploy in reading DeLillo’s textual practices. The pronounced self- reflexive strain in his work means I take neither a purely cultural, historical overview of adultery, nor attempt to excavate a literary history of adultery in the novel. Instead, I consider DeLillo in the broader context of both historical and literary models, because the metatextual nature of his fiction reveals an overarching concern with both conventional and literary history.

The narratological implications of DeLillo’s sexual semantic vision have been critically overlooked. There remains a significant gap in the literature on DeLillo’s work, warranting a close investigation of the literary, theoretical and structural implications of his sexualised and promiscuous model of language. My thesis addresses this absence, and undertakes a detailed reading of DeLillo’s adultery narratives that interprets the sexualised meaning embedded within his fiction. These narratives are an essential component of DeLillo’s semantic posture. His fiction repeatedly draws an adulterous triangle connecting linguistic meaning, transgressive sexual relations, and space, demonstrating that intercourse is a model for something else: a metaphor of reproductive meaning in DeLillo’s consummate experiment with language.

In order to demonstrate that DeLillo’s model of language is both sexual and transgressive, I frame my investigation around the theme of adultery in his fiction. His practice of representing this classical realist theme against the background of postmodern space is evidence that DeLillo is a hybrid novelist. Despite his reputation as a postmodernist, DeLillo’s novels contain enough adultery and other realist concerns to claim a place in the ongoing and contradictory history of American realist literature that is, according to Leslie Fiedler, ‘essentially and at its best non-realistic, even anti-realistic’ (Fiedler 1970, p. 28). This contradiction, intrinsic to the realist genre in its tendency to conceal ‘the socially relative or constructed nature of language’ (Eagleton 1999, p. 117), is expressed by Georg Lukács’s summary of a novelist’s double experience of reflection:

Diana Jenkins 4 December 2005 His reflection consists of giving form to what happens to the idea in real life of describing the actual nature of this process and of evaluating and considering its reality. This reflection, however, in turn becomes an object for reflection (Lukács 2000, p. 180).

Because the realist genre ‘[gives] form to what happens to the idea in real life,’ it has been particularly well placed to chart its position in both literary and broad historical contexts. It is against the backdrop of the emerging independence of both women and America that the nineteenth century European novel of adultery establishes itself as a popular realist genre (Mayer 1982, p. 28). Representations of women ‘who do not wish to live as a minority and who meet their ruin through their minority status’ (Mayer 1982, p. 28) are iconically represented in literature by figures including Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Effi Briest, and Pozdynshev’s wife in The Kreutzer Sonata. These characters are among the most famous representations of women in the novel of adultery, a literary phenomenon whose rise Hans Mayer connects to the advent of modernity. Tony Tanner’s related suggestion that the novel, ‘in its origin, might almost be said to be a transgressive mode, inasmuch as it seemed to break, or mix, or adulterate the existing genre- expectations of the time’ (Tanner 1979, p. 3), implicates the realist literature of 2 postmodernity so that it too can be read as an adulterated formTPF FPT. As Tanner notes in his authoritative study Adultery in the Novel (1979), these figures:

…incarnate a potentially disruptive or socially unstabilized energy that may threaten, directly or implicitly, the organization of society, whether by the indeterminacy of their origin, the uncertainty of the direction in which they will focus their unbonded energy, or their attitude to the ties that hold society together and that they may choose to slight or bend (Tanner 1979, pp. 3-4).

Tanner’s characterisation of such protagonists reads like a catalogue of the literary preoccupations of postmodernism: displacing, disruptive, destabilizing, threatening, 3 organizing, unbindingTPF FPT. Tanner pays ‘challenging and innovative attention’ (Brown 1989, p. 99) to the nineteenth-century novel of adultery, and his insights are also applicable to

2 TP PT Also see Tanner’s (2000) article dealing specifically with DeLillo. Favourable to Libra, the article is critical of both Mao II and Underworld, and expresses frustration with DeLillo’s ‘voices’ in an unfavourable comparison with Thomas Pynchon. 3 TP PT See Mayer (1982) on the transformation of women into outsiders in the remainder of the nineteenth- and in the early twentieth-century.

Diana Jenkins 5 December 2005 the currents of postmodernity. Tanner discerns ‘in the nineteenth-century modern European novel of adultery a dynamic pattern of contract and transgression, relevant both to the social situation and to the constraints and innovations of the novel as a literary form’ (Brown 1989, p. 99), an assessment that productively aligns this genre with DeLillo’s dynamic codes of form and content. John Updike’s trilogistic appropriation of Hawthorne’s seminal American novel of adultery, The Scarlet Letter (1850), was motivated by the desire to ‘updat[e]…the myth, the triangle redefined by D. H. Lawrence’ (Schiff 1992, p. 132). DeLillo’s adultery narratives are an important extension of the trope’s American mythology because he applies the adulterous triangle’s transgressive structure to forms of verbal meaning.

Critical comparisons blurring DeLillo’s fiction and contemporary American culture emphasise the extent to which his work is grounded in the ‘social situation’ (Brown 1989, p. 99) of the real world. DeLillo’s own admissions regarding the importance of place in his narratives suggest they belong to the realist genre:

…place has more important meanings. So much modern fiction is located precisely nowhere…Fiction without a sense of real place is automatically a fiction of estrangement, and of course this is the point…I can’t write that way myself. I’m too interested in what real places look like and what names they have (LeClair 2005, p. 15).

DeLillo further notes that place is ‘tied up’ with language, and I build on existing critical comment to suggest that adulterous intercourse is one of the ‘rough surfaces’ that brings ‘color and texture’ to the connection (LeClair 2005, p. 15). Though abundant, sexual relations in DeLillo’s work have traditionally failed to garner much critical interest, a shortfall noted by Philip Nel in his article ‘Amazons in the Underworld: Gender, the 4 Body, and Power in the Novels of Don DeLillo’ (2001)TP F FPT. Nel discusses the evolution of DeLillo criticism and the slow movement toward addressing DeLillo’s treatment of race and gender, acknowledging that ‘[s]cholars, reviewers, and interviewers have had little to

4 TP PT Nel’s article is one of only a handful dealing with DeLillo’s pseudonymous text Amazons (1980), narrated by his first of only two female protagonists, the second coming more than twenty years later in The Body Artist’s Lauren Hartke (2001). Also see Keesey (1993) and Cowart (2003). Nel also maintains the Don DeLillo Society website, an excellent resource. Another useful site is Curt Gardner’s Don DeLillo’s America, which also offers frequently updated information.

Diana Jenkins 6 December 2005 say on the subject of gender in DeLillo’s work’ (Nel 2001, p. 1). Nel’s suggestion that ‘the perception that [DeLillo’s] novels center on masculine universes and male characters has caused his treatment of women to elude critical commentary’ (Nel 2001, p. 1) observes a general truth. DeLillo’s treatment of women has largely escaped critical 5 scrutiny, as has his treatment of sexuality and sexual relations across the boardTPF FPT. The recurrent activity of adultery has only been touched upon in academic writing on DeLillo, and I contend that DeLillo’s treatment of the trope is worth interrogating in detail.

This critical silence around sexual activity and sexuality exists in spite of the fact that DeLillo’s investment in ‘real places’ means that his fiction engages the broad spectrum of sexual identities and practices found in postmodern America, including heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, promiscuity, infidelity, illegitimacy, matrimony, divorce, pornography, domination, and fantasy. The abundance of sex in DeLillo’s fiction raises questions not just of representation but also of meaning. If Ballard’s contention is accurate, and intercourse is always a model for something else, then what is all this sexual intercourse modelling beyond the idea that sex is an activity and concern of contemporary America? It is fruitful to build upon such questions, particularly due to the relative failure of extant criticism to address issues of sex and gender in DeLillo’s work. The abundance of adulterous intercourse, for one, is so marked and varied across DeLillo’s oeuvre that its absence from the majority of critical debate is curious, and an attempt to read its tropology overdue.

The plurality of discourses concerning narratives of adultery and the innumerable questions such narratives raise is polyphonic, its proliferation promoting questions about both the realist genre and the cultural reality of America. Investment in the debate around adultery texts is visibly, and importantly, political and social. In this context, my narratological study is conceptually aligned with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s cultural theory:

5 TP PT The pioneers of this area of critical debate include analyses of whiteness in White Noise (Engles 1999; Traber 1988) and analyses of representations of homosexuality in End Zone (Deardorff 1999; Hardin 2000; Higginbotham 1989).

Diana Jenkins 7 December 2005 Axiom 1: People are different from each other…A tiny number of inconceivably coarse axes of categorisation have been painstakingly inscribed in current critical and political thought: gender, race, class, nationality, sexual orientation… [and] even people who share all or most of our own positionings along these crude axes may still be different enough from us, and from each other, to seem like all but different species (Sedgwick 1990, p. 22).

Nowhere is Sedgwick’s axiom more in evidence than in the critical reception of DeLillo’s work. George Will’s notoriously scathing review of DeLillo’s fictionalisation of the assassination of President Kennedy, Libra (1988), calls the book ‘an act of literary vandalism and bad citizenship’ (Will 2000, p. 56), a common misreading of DeLillo’s 6 realist fiction as a reflection of his own ideologies and practicesTPF FPT. Frank Lentricchia, renowned authority on DeLillo, characterises the author’s investment in contemporary America differently:

[DeLillo’s books]…are montages of tones, styles, and voices that have the effect of yoking together terror and wild humor as the essential tone of contemporary America. […] It is the sort of mode that marks writers who conceive their vocation as an act of cultural criticism (in the broadest sense of the terms); who invent in order to intervene; whose work is a kind of anatomy, an effort to represent their culture in its totality; and who desire to move readers to the view that the shape and fate of their culture dictates the shape and fate of the self (Lentricchia 1998, pp. 412-3).

The dialogic character of DeLillo’s authorial mode is suggested by Lentricchia’s account. In a manner after Mikhail Bakhtin, DeLillo’s work reflects the extent to which ‘[l]anguage in the novel not only represents, but itself serves as the object of representation’, through which ‘[n]ovelistic discourse is always criticizing itself’ (McKeon 2000, p. 317). DeLillo’s adultery narratives are especially caught in this double bind, even as they also afford a different perspective on better-known themes like

6 TP PT Libra is one of DeLillo’s most widely discussed novels, along with White Noise and Underworld. See Lentricchia (1999a; 1999b), who doCarmo (2000) calls ‘perhaps DeLillo’s most devoted critic,’ and Crowther (1999). Columnist for the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley, called Libra ‘beneath contempt’ a few weeks before Will’s review appeared in the same newspaper on 22 September 1988. For extracts from Yardley, see Lentricchia and Crowther. Yardley and Will’s almost hysterical criticism of DeLillo recalls Sir Richard Blackmore’s 1695 denunciation of the Restoration poet/playwright (Weber 1986, p. 7). See Knight (2000) on the effect of the Kennedy assassination on DeLillo’s writing career, as well as Carmichael (1993) Ickstadt (1996), and O’Donnell (2000). For contributions concerning the relationship between American history and Libra, see in particular Happe (1996), Johnston (1994), Michael (1994), Millard (1994), Mott (1994), Parrish (1999), Thomas (1997), and Willman (1999).

Diana Jenkins 8 December 2005 consumerism, a defining feature of contemporary America and an abiding fascination of 7 DeLillo’s since his first novel, Americana (1971)TPF FPT. This Gordian knot of representation frequently impacts upon academic discussion of DeLillo’s canon. Critics including John McClure and Gregory Salyer engage DeLillo’s Catholicism in efforts to discipline the problem of realism theorised as real (Furst 1995). Judith Pastore’s discussion of DeLillo’s treatment of marriage and divorce, groundbreaking in its focus, restricts itself 8 to a thematic account that identifies a subtext of Italian Catholic traditionalismTPF FPT. DeLillo’s Italian ethnicity is proffered in analysis, and his increasingly improbable 9 reputation as a recluse has for some critics provided the means of interpreting his fictionTPF FPT.

DeLillo’s preoccupation with ‘America’s craving for and dependence upon images’ is, as William E. Cain suggests, ‘complicated and enriched’ by the people and places of the Kennedy assassination, which is a principal image of DeLillo’s work along with New York City (Cain 2000, p. 66). This fascination with the imagistic, spatial character of America, in particular Dallas and New York, suggests again that ‘DeLillo, despite what some of his adulatory critics suggest, is a realist’ (DePietro 2005, x), albeit one whose

7 TP PT For useful discussions of DeLillo’s fiction in relation to contemporary America and its literature, see Aldridge (1983), Heffernan (1995), and Millard (1994). The relationship between literature and cultural practice helps explain why Victorian representations of the adulteress prompted a contemporaneous critical conflation with the deviant woman of prostitution. See Thomas (1999) and Mayer (1982) on representations of the spatial status of women during this period. In addition, see Labanyi’s (1997) discussion on the link between a capitalist economy and novels of adultery including Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1874-6), Eça de Queiroz’s O primo Basílio (1878) and Os Maias (1888), and Alas’s La Regenta (1884-5). 8 TP PT Pastore (1990) suggests on several occasions a marriage has failed when it is not clear from the text that the marriage in question is over. Although they spend the majority of the novel apart, and both commit adultery, there is no closure in Pammy and Lyle Wynant’s marriage in Players, indeed no closure generally, and Babette and Jack Gladney’s marriage is intact at the end of White Noise. These unions are wildly dysfunctional, certainly, but that is not the same condition as terminal. Neither couple ever mentions divorce in relation to their own marriage. Jack Gladney does not even make it out the door after Babette’s confession of adultery (DeLillo 1986, p. 196). The article also erroneously calls the Axtons in The Names divorced; they’re not, James taking pains to point out to his friend George Rowser that he and Kathryn are only separated (DeLillo 1999(a), p. 47), whilst Kathryn refers to herself as James’s wife (DeLillo 1999(a), p. 31). On the influence of Christianity on American space, see Foucault (1986), and on the relationship between DeLillo, America, religion, and paranoia, see Knight (2000) and Towers (1988). Critical interest in DeLillo’s religious convictions has been encouraged to an extent by the author. See DeLillo’s responses in Moss (2005). 9 TP PT See Gardaphè (1996) on DeLillo’s Italian American narratives. DeLillo’s reputation as a recluse is being progressively dismantled by critics and by the author himself, who has submitted to interviews and public appearances in increasing numbers in recent years. See Moran (2000) and DePietro (2005), who address the language of reclusion in critical characterisations of DeLillo.

Diana Jenkins 9 December 2005 10 ‘stratagem [is] of a spy within the postmodernist citadel’ (Cowart 2003, p. 13)TPF FPT. Certainly it is a hybrid brand of realism, a result of his being ‘a modernist writing about the consequences of postmodernism’ (Parrish 2002, p. 87), connecting his work to the transformation described in The Education of Henry Adams (1907):

Henry Adams describes his disorientation spatially: he finds himself in an alien territory. This shift would come to signify the transition from modernism to postmodernism – that of a concentration on time to a concentration on space – that was already happening in the fin de siècle America. Adams’s estranging modernist terrain resembles postmodern space, which is “apt to be skewed or distorted, subject to abrupt shifts and transformations, and ambiguous as to its 11 boundaries” (Barrett 1999, pp. 788-9; McHale 1992, p. 158)TPF FPT.

The boundaries of DeLillo’s terrain are similarly ambiguous. His dedicated modernist interest in place is confronted and influenced by the challenges of representing the space of American postmodernity. The problem with the fallacies and hazards of categorisations like ‘modern,’ ‘postmodern,’ and ‘realist,’ is that they deny DeLillo his facility of multiplicity. DeLillo’s range is increasingly recognised in the critical arena (Cowart 2003; Nel 2002; Weinstein 1993), and his fiction ‘transgresses traditional boundaries by spanning romanticism, modernism, and postmodernism, interweaving various dialects and jargons, and even connecting literature and film’ (Barrett 1999, p. 803). It remains salutary to consider DeLillo in terms of the postmodern theories of Lacan, Derrida, and Baudrillard, including ‘the unmooring of subjectivity, radical discontinuity, replication and parody, awareness of the constructedness of all knowledge and all myths, [and] resistance to closure’ (Cowart 2003, p. 11). In particular, ‘replication,’ ‘parody,’ ‘constructedness,’ and ‘resistance to closure’ are central to my reading of DeLillo’s adultery narratives. What is most significant about his work is not whether it fits into one schema more than another, but, as Cowart suggests, that it evinces a complex exploration of boundaries:

10 TP PT See Barrett’s (1999) suggestion that the architecture of New York offers a spatial realisation of DeLillo’s own situation abreast modernism and postmodernism. In connection to the architectural experience of New York post-September 11, see Zizek (2001, 2002), who also persuasively problematises the category of ‘Outside.’ 11 TP BarrettPT describes Andy Warhol and Mao II in terms that recall interviews with DeLillo (DeCurtis 1999; Nadotti 2005; Remnick 2005) that, among other insights, discuss DeLillo’s appearance in person in terms of the photographic image.

Diana Jenkins 10 December 2005 Critics have occasionally suggested that DeLillo takes up, seriatim, the major conditions or institutions or obsessions of contemporary American culture […] But however useful such rubrics may seem, they promise more system than DeLillo will sanction. In his interview with Anthony DeCurtis, he makes clear his impatience with schematic approaches to his work (Cowart 2003, p. 9).

DeLillo’s impatience with schematicism traditionally had little effect on the academic discourse surrounding his work. Asked by David Remnick in a 1997 interview whether he recognised himself in criticism and reviews, DeLillo said “Not really”:

“What’s almost never discussed…is the language in which a book is framed. And there’s good reason. It’s hard to talk about. It’s hard to write about. And so one receives a broad analysis of, perhaps, the social issues in one’s work but rarely anything about the way the writer gets there” (Remnick 2005, p. 141).

DeLillo’s lament has been heard, and criticism increasingly takes account of the importance of language as a subject as much as a tool in his writing. This is an identified debate, but I advocate new terms that deal with the textual impulses – spatial, sexual, and semantic – that are most contradictory in his work. The blanket labelling of DeLillo’s textual devices as either ‘postmodern’ or ‘realist’ should be challenged by academic criticism in the same way it is by the author himself, who frequently undermines the theoretical parameters assumed by these categories of critique. Because such terms have come to imply many, sometimes contradictory, literary conventions, contradiction itself must be dissected.

Avoiding schematicism allows space for contradictions and ambivalences within the text, and paradox and uncertainty are crucial to my reading of adultery in DeLillo’s fiction. Harold Weber’s correlative argument for interpreting the ‘rake’ in Restoration theatre is helpful to reading DeLillo’s adulterous tropologies. Where Weber speaks of the rake, I substitute adultery, since it too ‘necessarily raises ambivalent responses, for the sexual energy that [it] represents threatens the stability of the social order even while it promises to provide the vitality that must animate the structures of that order’ (Weber 1986, p. 6). Though DeLillo repeatedly represents traditional notions of order through the institution of marriage, he at the same time recognises ‘the power and attractiveness…of those forces threatening to disrupt it’ (Weber 1986, p. 6).

Diana Jenkins 11 December 2005 Representing sexual activity is one of DeLillo’s established concerns. I analyse those texts that explicitly contain adultery narratives, or, as in the case of The Body Artist 12 (2001), a suggestion of adulteryTPF FPT. The selected texts are revealing individually and for what they suggest overall about DeLillo’s narrative technique. Covering thirty-two years, they span the breadth of DeLillo’s career to date. In chronological order, they are the following: Americana (1971), Players (1977), the pseudonymous Amazons (1980), The Names (1982), White Noise (1985), Libra (1988), Mao II (1991), Underworld (1997), the play Valparaiso (1999), The Body Artist (2001), and Cosmopolis (2003). To use a phrase DeLillo appropriates from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), other primary texts are incorporated based on the idea that ‘everything is connected.’ DeLillo’s fiction ‘must not be read in a vacuum, for like any other body of writing it follows or coexists with a host of literary currents’ (Cowart 2003, p. 200). My use of other sources is restrained; attempting to comprehensively canvass all the adultery intertexts would 13 require its own vast discussion (Cowart 2003, p. 201)TPF FPT. I refer to writers including James Joyce, John Updike, and Thomas Pynchon, who share aspects of DeLillo’s enterprise and who may influence his literary practices. My focus remains, however, with dissecting DeLillo’s narrative practices, since I am concerned with the sexual-semantic impact of his language choices. Such choices exhibit the regenerative capabilities of linguistic form, as well as the sexual and transgressive modal character of the novel via the recurrence of narrated adulterous intercourse.

DeLillo’s literary pedigree, to borrow Cowart’s term, includes the notable influence of Joyce and the canonical Ulysses (1922), which was initially criticised as being ‘unfit for reading because it was about sex’ (Brown 1989, p. 100). The embedded adultery metanarrative in Joyce’s masterpiece emphasises more than the literary trope of adultery’s long history in narrative. Tanner suggests the novel is a transgressive mode,

12 TP PT In the interests of ensuring that my study is as materially rich as possible, I focus on DeLillo’s book- length publications, although adultery also features in his early short stories ‘Take the “A” Train’ (1962) and ‘Creation’ (1979). I include both de facto unfaithfulness and oral sex in the catchment of ‘adulterous activity.’ 13 TP PT Cowart’s extensive summary of the metatextual fabric of Underworld is still nowhere near a complete catalogue of connection in this novel alone. Attempting to join all the intertextual dots across DeLillo’s body of work and between all connective threads would be an enormous undertaking.

Diana Jenkins 12 December 2005 and transgression is a fundamental tropism in narrative as a whole. The oral history of Homeric legend, for instance, famously places the adulterous Helen at the centre of the Trojan War. In theology, the Fall is the origin of transgression, and these ‘ancient alternatives – fidelity and adultery – parallel the choices once offered in Eden’ (Tallent 14 1982, p. 11)TPF FPT. Traditionally, adultery is overwhelmingly a gendered narrative, as tales of sexual secrecy and betrayal are primarily concerned with the figure of the woman (Armstrong 1976; Krause 1999; Mink and Doubler Ward 1991; Overton 2002; White and Segal 1997). Within this narrated history, even the innocent woman may be a suspect, as with Shakespeare’s doomed Desdemona. This dual position is suggested by Simone de Beauvoir’s landmark treatise The Second Sex (1949), in which she characterises mythologies of woman:

The myth is so various, so contradictory…Delilah and Judith, Aspasia and Lucretia, Pandora and Athena – woman is at once Eve and the Virgin Mary. She is an idol, a servant, the source of life, a power of darkness; she is the elemental silence of truth, she is artifice, gossip, and falsehood; she is healing presence and sorceress; she is man’s prey, his downfall, she is everything that he is not and that he longs for, his negation and his raison d’être (de Beauvoir 1988, p. 175).

The ambivalence that de Beauvoir captures highlights the contradiction of the so-called feminine narrative, contextualising the generic contradictions of realism (Furst 1995). This subterranean level of contradiction destabilises the basis of narrative construction in the way Tanner suggests of the novel form’s dynamic exegesis of contract and transgression. This instability is seen in ambivalent artistic representations of the sexually secretive, and explicitly dangerous, woman (Stocker 1998):

It is a suprapersonal, exceedingly sinister and threatening perspective in which Salome, Judith, and Delilah have been placed since the beginning of the bourgeois, secularized, modern age. They signify the world as hell…They are decidedly antifeminine pictures, painted, depending on circumstances and chronology, as warning; as repulsive contrast of femininity with its negation; finally as coquettish juxtaposition of passion and death, the sensuousness of the female body and the murder performed by its hands (Mayer 1982, p. 23).

14 TP PT See Thomas’s (1999) discussion of the association of the sinful wife with the Fall as a common motif in mid-nineteenth century novels like Wilkie Collins’ Basil and Thackeray’s The Newcomes. Also see Plath (1999) and Greiner (1985) for further discussion of the Edenic motif in novels of adultery.

Diana Jenkins 13 December 2005 Because of this inherently contradictory structural lineage, the foundation of narrative is sexual and traditionally gendered, often schematised in terms of contemporaneous cultural contexts relating to sexuality in a given period or place that themselves rarely present a single point of view (Hutcheon 1984; McKeon 2000; Watt 1968; Winnett 1990). The sexually voracious ‘rake’ figure, for example, emerges in Restoration comedy only once ‘sexuality is displaced from…divine hierarchy’ (Weber 1986, p. 18). This change in comic drama reflects a broader societal transformation, whereby sexual appetites ‘are not morally condoned, but they are no longer judged as expressions of absolute evil’ (Weber 1986, p. 18). The rake symbolises a new concern with sexual behaviour that French thinker Michel Foucault regards as central to modernity (Weber 1986, p. 19):

What is peculiar to modern societies…is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret (Foucault 1978, p. 35).

Modern narrative is a central means of expressing sexuality, and the novel is a primary 15 mode of expressing transgressive sexuality as the narrated secretTPF FPT. To this extent, narrative insists on its own cultural context as an expression of fertile adulteration, and literature’s history reveals a mode founded on the illegitimacy of multiple paternities, one that ‘represents a complex interaction between past and present, tradition and innovation, conservative parents and radical offspring’ (Weber 1986, p. 13). The history of narrative is inextricably bound to the history of sexuality. I take this relationship to be necessarily fraught, demonstrated by narratologist Mieke Bal’s summary of the problems of character:

15 TP PT In terms of this hyper-articulation, and also invoking Foucault, Billie Melman (1988, p. 145) suggests that the 1920s distinguished itself by a ‘quickening’ of the discourse of sexuality that became ‘extraordinarily intense and self-consuming.’ Her account of the gradual disappearance of the word ‘flapper’ from the vocabulary of sexuality is notably similar to Weber’s analysis of the Restoration ‘rake’ and the vocabulary of demonic sexuality.

Diana Jenkins 14 December 2005 Characters resemble people. Literature is written by, for, and about people […] [Characters] are fabricated creatures made up from fantasy, imitation, memory: paper people, without flesh and blood. That no satisfying, coherent theory of character is available is probably precisely because of this human aspect... It has no real psyche, personality, ideology, or competence to act, but it does possess characteristics which make psychological and ideological descriptions possible. Character is intuitively the most crucial category of narrative, and also most subject to projection and fallacies (Bal 1997, p. 115).

DeLillo’s extensive cast of adulterers certainly exhibit sophisticated psychological, ideological, and sexual profiles, and I focus on the way these characters destabilise meaning. If the novel is a transgressive mode, and characters are especially prone to producing unanswerable narratological questions, then adultery narratives manifest the broader problematics of character and the novel combined. Given Bal’s contention that no coherent theory of character exists, it is not surprising that the literature of postmodernity is invested in exposing the incoherence of character as a narrative construct (Connor 2002). Critical discourse reflects the atmosphere of reader disenfranchisement and confusion that often results from the reading process. As Hal Crowther notes, a ‘conventional way of discussing DeLillo is in postmodern terms like “the paranoid novelist” whose characters resemble figures in Thomas Pynchon and even Kafka’ (Crowther 1999, p. 93), and DeLillo’s narratives of secrecy help account for his postmodernist reputation. However, one of the consequences arising from the irreconcilabilities of character is that character-based narratives must a priori contain the secrets of these unresolved issues, suggesting that DeLillo’s promotion of secrecy has more to do with acknowledging structure than following a particular theme. Diane Johnson suggests this strategy of DeLillo’s when she notes that ‘[a] novel whose plot contains a plot might be the postmodern novel’, and that ‘[a]ll of Don DeLillo’s’ fiction contains…conspiratorial models of the world’ (Johnson 2000, pp. 52-3). Johnson implicates the characters behind the plots and conspiracies, characters that model the conspiratorial form of narrative as much as they model a conspiratorial world.

Foucault suggests sex is the secret compulsively articulated in modernity, and DeLillo’s adultery narratives are a response to the impossibility of constructing a novel’s plot without a sexual secret. His metafictional representations of adulterous sexual behaviour enter the fray of the history of sexuality identified by Foucault in 1978, recording a stage

Diana Jenkins 15 December 2005 in the sexualization of narrative that simultaneously, and by its nature, continues to reproduce:

Rather than the uniform concern to hide sex, rather than a general prudishness of language, what distinguishes these last three centuries is the variety, the wide dispersion of devices that were invented for speaking about it, for having it spoken about, for inducing it to speak of itself, for listening, recording, transcribing, and redistributing what is said about it (Foucault 1978, p. 34).

Placed in the context of ‘these last three [and a half] centuries,’ written narrative has established itself as one of the dominant devices for speaking about sex. DeLillo’s narrative method evinces the departure from the ‘general prudishness of language’ towards an uncensored vocabulary that aligns him with nineteenth-century realist authors of novels of adultery. Authors like Gustave Flaubert and the American Kate Chopin also ‘[refuse] to direct readers’ moral judgements’ and ‘[refuse] to offer moral certainties’ (Asbee 2001, p. 276), modernist techniques that place DeLillo’s narratives within an archetype pioneered by Flaubert’s iconic novel of adultery, Madame Bovary (1857). Moreover, DeLillo’s metanarratives incorporate aspects of parody that resemble practices prominent in Restoration theatre. In fact, as Cowart notes, DeLillo is such an intertextual author that, although reluctant to name them himself, antecedents embedded within his narratives constantly rise to the surface. I would suggest, for instance, that DeLillo’s language also recalls John Webster’s The White Devil (1612) and Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserv’d (1682), all three seeming to ‘insist on the primacy of the sexual and the demonic,’ all portraying sexuality ‘as the chief engine of human motivation,’ and all three capable of envisaging ‘a frightening world lost in the corrupt, perverse, and demonic’ (Weber 1986, p. 31). DeLillo destabilises meaning through subtextual references and metaphorical clues that articulate the shifting vocabulary of demonic sexuality.

My positive reading of adulterated meaning identifies the reproductive effect of the narratological triangle DeLillo draws between space, sex, and language. This model helps structure the plot overall, despite being perpetually unstable. This aspect of contradiction is essential to DeLillo’s strategy of interrogating the structure of verbal meaning making

Diana Jenkins 16 December 2005 via its spatial processes. In Players (1977), for example, Lyle Wynant reads a system of meaning into his mistress Marina’s body that he is paradoxically unable to decipher:

It was a mystery to him, how these breasts, the juncture of these bared legs, could make him feel more deeply implicated in some plot. Her body was “meaningful” somehow. It had a static intensity, a “seriousness” that Lyle could not interpret. Marina nude (DeLillo 1991, p. 188).

Lyle observes that Marina is ‘spacious’ (DeLillo 1991, p. 189), but the meaningfulness he identifies in Marina’s body, literally the place of adulterous sex that ‘plots’ Lyle’s narrative to the reader, is suspended. He is unable to read her, and the reader is unable to read the meaning of the couple’s adultery plot. Both Marina and the plot in which Lyle feels implicated – that of Players – remain mysterious. Marina’s body provides only an ambiguous resource for ‘mapping out the possibilities, dangers, and stimulations of their human social landscape’ (Sedgwick 1990, pp. 22-3). Sedgwick’s language is spatial, and emphasises the extent to which the work of language is fundamentally tied to expressing experiences of sexuality in space (Brent 1994). Theories of space are crucial to my study of the operations of meaning in DeLillo’s work, which bear out Foucault’s 1967 claim:

The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and the far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed (Foucault 1986, p. 22).

Foucault believes ‘that the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space’ (Foucault 1986, p. 23), a contention reflected by the spatial vision underpinning even the 16 most recent of DeLillo’s sexualised narratives of American uneaseTPF FPT. Space is also required for movement, and the kinetic landscape of DeLillo’s language recalls Baudrillard’s ‘[t]ravelling signs, media, fashion and models, the blind but brilliant 17 ambience of simulacra’ (Baudrillard 2000, p. 75)TPF FPT. DeLillo’s oeuvre reveals an

16 TP PT See Barrett (1999), Mitchell (1994), and Karnicky (2001) for discussions on Warhol and the priority of space over time in DeLillo’s work. 17 TP PT Discussion of DeLillo in relation to Baudrillard and the simulacrum is plentiful, particularly in relation to White Noise. For several insightful readings, see Heller (2000), Rettburg (1999), and Johnston (1995; 1998). Baudrillard’s summary of the rise of New York’s graffiti culture in the 1970s appears in DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) as Ismael Muñoz’s poverty-stricken team of teenage graffiti artists. Ismael’s tag is Moonman 137, and Klara Sax endeavours to find him representation as an emerging artist.

Diana Jenkins 17 December 2005 awareness of the trajectory of replication in the experience of postmodern space (Marks 2002).

DeLillo is expert at capturing the ‘banal reality of the everyday’ (Baudrillard 2000, p. 75), and his investment in space pertains to the topoi of realist fiction in particular. In addition, space in DeLillo’s work is inextricably connected to the sexual and the linguistic, and their triangular connection focuses my enquiry into the way DeLillo destabilises meaning through stories of adultery. Michel de Certeau’s idea that ‘[s]tories about places are makeshift things’, and that ‘[t]hey are composed with the world’s debris’ (de Certeau 1988, p. 107), is also the core paradox of DeLillo’s work, and of his reputation as a postmodern author. Although DeLillo creates a world of profound social and spatial decay, in which sexual transgression features, he simultaneously represents its decomposition by building meaning, perpetuity, and an inherently sexualised reproductivity, into broad visions of nihilism and apocalypse.

As Timothy Parrish observes, ‘DeLillo’s remarkable body of work emerges out of his engagement with the interconnected systems of meaning-making that define the postmodern era’ (Parrish 2002, p. 79). Parrish distinguishes between the postmodern era and DeLillo’s fictional work, and recognises that reflecting the currents of postmodernity in fiction does not necessarily make DeLillo a postmodernist. Crucially, Parrish also emphasises the extent to which DeLillo is concerned with meaning making, not the 18 disintegration of meaning popularly characterised under the rubric of ‘postmodern’TPF FPT. Paul Maltby also qualifies DeLillo’s postmodernist reputation, and claims that DeLillo’s work betrays Romantic qualities that appeal to a vision of animation more than decline 19 (Maltby 1998, p. 500)TPF FPT. Beyond Maltby’s reconception of DeLillo’s fiction, which he suggests makes ‘Romantic appeals to a primal language of vision’ through ‘signifiers of a mystical order of cognition’ (Maltby 1998, p. 512), the author distinguishes himself from postmodernism via a trenchant commitment to the experience of space in postmodernity.

18 TP PT See King (1991) on the debate over postmodernism as a cultural logic or set of representational practices, and Cowart’s (2003) reservations about and response to King’s position. 19 TP PT For an additional Romantic focus on White Noise, on which, along with The Names, much of Maltby’s argument is based, see Caton (1997).

Diana Jenkins 18 December 2005 DeLillo resists the postmodern movement of characters into the placeless by continuing to inscribe space with texture and meaning:

“…many modern characters exist precisely nowhere. There isn’t a strong sense of place in much modern writing…this is where I differ from what we could call the mainstream…I think all my novels have a strong sense of place.”

“In contemporary writing in general, there’s a strong sense that the world of Beckett and Kafka has descended on contemporary America, because characters seem to live in a theoretical environment rather than in a real one. I haven’t felt that I’m part of that. I’ve always had a grounding in the real world, whatever esoteric flights I might indulge in from time to time” (DeCurtis 1999, p. 62).

This thesis identifies ways in which DeLillo’s fiction inhabits such positions, and considers the impact of spatial descriptions on his texts. This avowed commitment to place is evident across the fiction of his career, as is his experiment with language, through which DeLillo reinscribes the meaning of conventional narrative sites. His work displays ‘an element of contempt for meanings’ because he wants ‘to write outside the usual framework’ (LeClair 2005, p. 12), and this apparent disregard for meaning is, I argue, a reproductive process that delimits narrative frameworks. Because DeLillo believes that “the crux of the whole matter is language” (Remnick 2005, p. 47), his language choices allow this ‘outside’ to emerge as the space of hidden, new, and recast meaning. His vision of language transgresses the boundaries of ‘the usual framework’ to occupy the ‘outside’ of spatial, semantic, and sexual secrets. When Lyle is unable to decipher the meaning of Marina’s body, the scene in Players captures a trajectory of secrecy that involves space, meaning, and sex:

She knelt on the edge of the bed. He watched the still divisions her eyes appeared to contain, secret reproductions of Marina herself. He tried helplessly to imagine what she saw, as though to bring to light a presiding truth about himself, some vast assertion of his worth, knowledge accessible only to women whose grammar eluded him. The instant she glanced at his genitals he felt an erection commence (DeLillo 1991, p. 189)

Something is communicated between the characters in this scene, but the precise meaning of the exchange remains unclear, specifically secret. Lyle’s failure to grasp Marina’s ‘grammar’ suggests, as DeLillo has done, that ‘[t]he “untellable” points to the limitations

Diana Jenkins 19 December 2005 of language,’ but it also paradoxically extends language’s limits, just as DeLillo counters his own observation by asking, ‘Is there something we haven’t discovered about speech? Is there more?’ (LeClair 2005, p. 8). I believe this is DeLillo’s point: the language he employs in scenes of adulterous erotica extends meaning, and the model of meaning he derives through language is always and already promiscuous itself. It is fruitful to consider DeLillo’s meditations on the nature of language, and the constantly shifting meaning he ascribes, specifically in terms of sexual adultery. This focus on sexual adultery exposes the degree of semantic adulteration in his work, and challenges criticism that suggests DeLillo’s model of language is pure.

While such extant criticism allows me to define my core issues, it does not address in any detail the significance of adultery in DeLillo’s work, nor its sexual semantic properties. This thesis is thus distinguished from such discourse; although others identify what I call ‘semantic promiscuity’ in DeLillo, such promiscuity has not been addressed in terms of the specifically sexual promiscuity that repeatedly figures as adulterine narrative. My concentration on this aspect of transgressive sexuality in DeLillo has implications for reading other latent sexual narratives in his work, and his overall use of language. I believe that DeLillo regards language through an implicitly sexualised lens in which meaning becomes promiscuous. This reading qualifies interpretations of DeLillo’s work that assert that his model of language is unadulterated, and makes explicit the many occasions on which his language proves to be the opposite.

Such contradictory analyses of DeLillo’s work are compatible with the noted paradoxes characterising the history and interpretation of the novel of (traditionally wifely) adultery. The fact that its ‘antagonistic qualities arrayed one next to the other are not at all of equal substance,’ and ‘do not even complement one another as mythic parts to a whole’ but ‘rather mask the phenomenon of woman’s state as outsider’ (Mayer 1982, p. 24), underscores the paradox that saturates this branch of study. Woman is an outsider, but she is simultaneously positioned as the quintessential insider of domestic life. This paradox further illustrates the way that the language traditionally employed to describe women and transgressive sexuality fundamentally concerns space. Narratives of adultery, historically concentrated on a female figure of transgression, exhibit a contradictory

Diana Jenkins 20 December 2005 vocabulary that is strikingly spatial. These aspects of space and contradiction also feature in the vocabulary of DeLillo’s adultery narratives, where the language used to deal with questions of infidelity is similarly spatial and frequently paradoxical in its terms.

DeLillo identifies place and language as important to his work, and examining the impact of both on his construction of adultery narratives is essential. Incorporating various insights from a range of categories of thought anchors both DeLillo’s and my own spatial and linguistic imperatives by exploring the way the relationship between narrative space and narrative language has been critically theorised. Cowart notes that ‘[f]rom Americana to Cosmopolis DeLillo has problematized language’ (Cowart, 2003, p. 225). There is a gap in the debate about this semantic agitation that has left unanswered questions concerning the recurrence of adultery, and the current of sexualised space, as part of DeLillo’s destabilisation of the word’s meaning. This thesis contributes to the growing critical comment on DeLillo’s ongoing experiment with the vagaries of linguistic meaning. DeLillo is interested in the postmodern experience of space, but this concentration is not restricted to recurrent physical spaces like the hotel/motel, the aeroplane, and the World Trade Centre (Barrett 1999, p. 809). His narratives also deal with the link between space and sexual reproduction, Cowart observing that ‘the word [is] strangely eroticized’ in DeLillo’s fiction, ‘for language and sex share…the capacity to create’ (Cowart 2003, p. 226).

DeLillo’s ‘creating’ language has been extensively theorised by critics including 20 21 22 23 24 25 CowartTPF FPT, John FrowTPF FPT, Thomas LeClairTPF FPT, NelTPF FPT, Mark OsteenTPF FPT, Arthur SaltzmanTPF FPT and

20 TP PT I am particularly indebted to Cowart. A small note of correction: discussing Underworld (Cowart 2003, p. 190), Cowart, in a rare misstep, wrongly attributes to adulteress Marian Shay a comment made to Brian Glassic, ‘her feckless lover’: “You used to have the same dimensions as the observable universe,” and “Now you’re a lost speck.” This is actually said by Marvin Lundy, the keeper of the novel’s mythical baseball, who eventually sells the symbolic grail to Marian’s husband, Nick Shay, in one of the novel’s innumerable intersections. 21 TP PT Frow’s essay ‘The Last Things Before the Last: Notes on White Noise’ (1999) discusses DeLillo’s fascination with the construction of typicality, relevant to a number of my concerns; Frow’s book Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity (1997) is an influential interpretation of space and postmodernity as evinced by DeLillo’s fiction. 22 TP PT LeClair’s In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel (1987) was the first book-length study of the author, making it an essential foundational text that continues to influence critical consideration of DeLillo’s work. LeClair’s demonstration that the plots of DeLillo’s novels operate as open-ended systems

Diana Jenkins 21 December 2005 26 Arnold WeinsteinTPF FPT, and this thesis extends Cowart’s suggestion that DeLillo’s vision of language contains sexual elements. My analysis of adultery in DeLillo’s texts claims that his semantic vision is spatial and erotic, the element of adulteration critically clouding its 27 framework and making his vision ‘sexually hazy’TPF FPT. A sexual haze is my spatial metaphor for DeLillo’s transgressive model of linguistic meaning. His representation of space is as broad and as intertextual as his literary allusions, as offered by Barrett:

Previous texts, the already written words and images that make up current art, rise, like palimpsests, from beneath the new designs that nearly efface them. […] “[The]…text opens continuously into other texts, the space of intertextuality,” as in an advertisement (73). Similarly, postmodern space is evident in the unbreachable gap between the actual events of the past and all subsequent attempts to represent them (Barrett 1999, p. 809; Burgin 1986).

This space of ‘endlessly proliferating meaning’ (Barrett 1999, p. 809) is the domain of my enquiry. The transgressive streak in DeLillo’s language means that contradictory responses to his work are related and reproductive (Cowart 2003; Maltby 1998; Nel 2001, 2002; Saltzman 1998). DeLillo’s model subsumes ‘everything from traditional notions of referentiality to deconstruction and écriture’ (Cowart 2003, p. 225):

is a central idea that in my view also operates as a narrative remainder; spatial operations of adultery are encoded with unresolvable semantic potential, perpetually disrupting what LeClair calls the ‘feedback loop.’ 23 TP PT Nel’s ‘Don DeLillo’s Return to Form: The Modernist Poetics of The Body Artist’ (2002) offers a detailed consideration of that novella’s metaphorical language, and takes up the challenge implicitly offered to scholars in the Remnick interview. 24 TP PT In American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture (2000), Osteen considers such relevant aspects as connections, secrets and spectacle, informing my reading of these social systems in DeLillo’s adultery narratives. Osteen additionally edited and introduced the Viking Critical Edition White Noise: Text and Criticism in 1998 and has published articles on DeLillo. 25 TP PT Saltzman, in addition to published articles on The Names, White Noise, Ratner’s Star, and Underworld, is the author of This Mad “Instead”: Governing Metaphors in Contemporary American Fiction (2000). In it, he reprints ‘The Figure in the Static: Don DeLillo’s White Noise,’ but the volume additionally offers narratological insights into the work of other authors, such as Kathy Acker and John Updike, helpfully situating DeLillo among peers other than Thomas Pynchon, with whom he is more frequently compared. 26 TP PT Weinstein’s ‘cardinal belief in the freedom and maneuvering room made available to us in language and literature’ is a guiding principle of this thesis, and his comprehensive book-length study Nobody’s Home: Speech, Self, and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo (1993) speaks to my major investments and the terms in which I approach adultery as both a verbal and spatial concern. 27 TP PT This Introduction’s epigraph, from DeLillo’s first play, The Engineer of Moonlight, is understood in terms of the fact that Diana Vail is divorced from the four-times-married Eric Lighter. Consider the haze in multiple meanings of the word ‘discharge’ in the context of their failed union – it could mean fulfil, dismiss, and/or release, and the ‘duty’ of fidelity is rendered ‘hazy.’

Diana Jenkins 22 December 2005 …but he also raises questions about the newer thinking that, from de Saussure and Peirce to Derrida and Lacan, has ushered in a much discussed crisis of representation [...] Though he grapples with and deconstructs the myths of Babel and Pentecost, he leaves unimpaired the larger idea that language, in its mysterious plenitude, defies all attempts to treat it reductively (Cowart 2003, pp. 162-3).

The scale and complexity of DeLillo’s challenge is reflected by Cowart’s comprehensive study of DeLillo’s relationship with language. The rhetorical triangle of meaning I draw around DeLillo’s adultery narratives, between language, sex, and space, is anticipated and contextualised by Cowart’s discussion of Running Dog (1978), in which he suggests a link between language, sex, and secrecy:

The sexual thematics here (including both ostensibly sensational pornography and a quite rich psychoanalytic subtext) represents a further development of DeLillo’s sustained meditation on language and its attributes…DeLillo takes an interest in the idea that all language has what Moll, in Running Dog, calls “sexual sources and coordinates” (Cowart 2003, pp. 56-7; DeLillo 1999(d), p. 111).

Cowart’s analysis bears out my sense that DeLillo’s language produces and conceals sexual secrets. Where Cowart defers to issues of psychosexual development to explore this connection, I focus on the trajectory suggested by Running Dog’s topographical reference to ‘coordinates.’ The sexual secrets of language – its hidden meaning – are spatially expressed in DeLillo’s fiction, making the concealed visible and the known unknown. In Libra, when Larry Parmenter says to his wife Beryl, “Funny. I thought women were the secret” (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 128), Beryl replies:

“No no no no no,” she said softly, as if correcting a touchy child. “That’s the wisdom handed down from man to boy, through the ages, a hundred generations of knowledge and experience” (DeLillo 1991(b), p. 129).

Like Beryl, my thesis resists further mythologising woman as ‘the secret,’ arguing instead that secrecy functions in the adultery narratives of DeLillo’s canon as a space of semantic coquetry. In The Body Artist, the narration flirts with transgression because the adultery is speculative in nature; we never know if Rey Robles cheats on his new wife with his ex- wife. My thesis aims to invigorate academic debate about this and other DeLillo novels via their sexual atmosphere of semantic availability. From within the gap in the

Diana Jenkins 23 December 2005 narrative’s disclosure in The Body Artist, the reader must indefinitely ponder whether or not Rey is unfaithful. The aspect of uncertainty that exists in the novella’s structure concerns the transfer of knowledge.

My own trajectory is structured to reflect the triangular structure of meaning I attribute to DeLillo’s linguistic model. The interconnected three sides of this triangle are space, language, and sex. Chapter One is a phenomenology of the hotel/motel room in DeLillo’s fiction. My examination of his predominantly psychosexual representations applies theories of the uncanny, doubling, the compulsion to repeat, resemblance and the simulacra. Although this site is conventional in realist fictions of adultery, I argue that theories of resemblance and reproduction reveal contradictions and discontinuities in the narrative of the site as a spatial expression of postmodernity. These discontinuities and contradictions expand the conventional function of the space and reinscribe its meaning, altering the adultery narrative’s progress.

Having examined the physical space of the hotel/motel room, in Chapter Two I analyse structural elements of DeLillo’s language. Abjection theory exposes the decisive tension between Eros and Thanatos that repeatedly delineates the narrative’s trajectory. The semantic spaces created by DeLillo’s use of descriptive oppositions, and metaphors including television, are as unreliable in their function as the uncanny space of the hotel/motel room. This narratological focus on DeLillo’s descriptive practices further illustrates that DeLillo’s semantic model evinces a promiscuous dissociative strategy. This strategy influences the linguistic structure of his adultery narratives and shows the novel to be an intrinsically transgressive mode. The vocabulary of adulterous intercourse is, recalling Ballard, a model of adulterated meaning.

Also directed toward narrative operations, Chapter Three focuses on the propulsive operation of DeLillo’s adulterous triangle, which produces the movement without end that characterises the relationship between the three sides of space, language, and sex. I argue that journey space is a narrative apparatus that contains additional meaning via the perversion of its normative function. The journey in DeLillo’s adultery narratives exchanges narrative operations with the image, and their reciprocal mutating structure

Diana Jenkins 24 December 2005 manipulates meaning. These perverse aspects, I argue, are reproductive and, by extension, positive.

The combined elements of space, language, and propulsion in the first three chapters drive the analysis toward the third side of the triangular model: sex. As Foucault suggests, sex is the secret, and Chapter Four’s focus on the adulterous secret shows that meaning is productively unmoored in DeLillo’s fiction. Secrecy is fundamentally concerned with meaning, what is and is not known, and how knowledge can or can fail to transfer. Earlier chapters typographically indicate that language creates a dynamic space of residual meaning that is always secret and sexual. Chapter Four argues that the trajectory of adulterous secrecy is a compelling addition to the endlessly circulating, open system of proliferating meaning abundantly discussed in DeLillo criticism, historically with reference to other tropes. Appealing to the spatial tropology of the closet of queer theory, I argue that gaps generated by the adulterous secret offer semantic additions, the promiscuous remainder transferring between systems of knowledge, and evincing 28 DeLillo’s perversely reproductive, triangular model of meaning without endTPF FPT.

Adultery is abundant in DeLillo’s fiction. Its presence in his first novel, Americana, and his latest, Cosmopolis, more than thirty years later, book-end DeLillo’s abiding fascination with the trope. Tracing the narratological and linguistic function of adultery in DeLillo’s fiction, I contend that narrative instability marked by infidelity is an important part of DeLillo’s broader linguistic strategy. The structure of DeLillo’s adultery narratives evinces a breakdown of certainty that reflects his overall concern with promoting, exploring, and sexualising fissures in the capacity of language to convey meaning.

28 TP PT The closet space has important specificities within queer theory, its particulars taken up by theorists including Sedgwick (1990) and Bloom (1988) and which I hope I honour and keep visible.

Diana Jenkins 25 December 2005 Chapter One

29 The Space of the Hotel/MotelTPF FPT

“Motels. I like motels. I wish I owned a chain, worldwide. I’d like to go from one to another to another. There’s something self-realizing about that” (DeLillo 1991, p. 3).

Space and reproduction are fused to the point of inseparability in DeLillo’s fiction, and spatial theories of the uncanny double, the reproducible double, postmodern aura, and the simulacra assist the analysis of sexual, spatial, and semantic promiscuity of his work. The repeated appearance of the hotel/motel room exemplifies the sexual synthesis between space and reproduction in DeLillo, and emphasises the semantic vibrancy of his adultery narratives. Rather than simply representing a site of clichéd adulterous action, this chapter argues that narrative sequences are productively corrupted by discontinuities in the hotel/motel room’s function.

Many critics have dealt with DeLillo’s treatment of space, often in terms of its role in representing central concerns in his work. Such preoccupations include the trope of the frontier, consumption and capitalism, waste and contamination, time, the image, and language as a space-filling mass, such as the cult’s murderous alphabet tagging in The Names (1982), later mirrored by Ismael Muñoz/Moonman 157’s graffiti tagging of the New York subway in Underworld (1997), and Bill Gray’s swelling manuscript in Mao II (1991). This preoccupation with space has been explored by critics including Barrett, Cowart, and John N. Duvall, the latter noting that DeLillo ‘has long been fascinated with crowds and people’s collective urge to be part of something larger’ (Duvall 2000, p. 258), Frow, Lentricchia, who argues DeLillo’s characters are concerned with ‘large and nearly invisible things’ (Lentricchia 1999(b), p. 193), Osteen, who furthers LeClair’s work on

29 TP PT In reality, the American hotel and motel exhibit historical, architectural, and idiosyncratic spatial and cultural differences. See Jakle et al (1996), Denby (1998) and Donzel et al (1989). In DeLillo’s fiction, the narratological behaviour of both the hotel and the motel room suggests similar sexual and linguistic operations, and in this context the rooms for rent in each are not differentiated here.

Diana Jenkins 26 December 2005 DeLillo’s open-ended systems by noting that ‘the major structural tropes in [DeLillo’s] fiction are figures of broken exchange and failed reciprocity’ (Osteen 2000, p. 2), and Saltzman. This chapter widens their collective focus still further to include the trope of adultery, and the space/s it occupies in DeLillo’s fiction.

DeLillo’s topographical interests in space are broad; whilst cities are a fixture of his fictional landscapes, so too are deserts and open plains. Adultery in his texts often occurs in a place outside the core geography of the characters, a spatial manipulation suggested by Tanner’s distinction between ‘the city’ and ‘the field.’ The ‘city’ is the area that is inside society, and the ‘field,’ where the adultery occurs, is the area that is outside (Tanner 1979, p. 19). Tanner emphasises that while the field need not be literal, in the novel of adultery it sometimes is, such as in Hester Prynne and Dimmesdale’s wood in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), Rodolphe and Emma’s forest in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), and more recently Sarah Worth’s desert 30 ashram in the third of John Updike’s Scarlet trilogy, S. (1988)TPF FPT. On the other hand, Emma Bovary’s second affair, with Léon, is famously ‘fielded’ in a hotel room, where in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), Edna Pontellier’s ‘field’ is Alcée Arobin’s horse- drawn carriage. Despite its status as a nominal ‘field,’ the fictional hotel/motel room also achieves part of its narrative potency by being especially prone to upsetting clearly marked boundaries such as inside and outside.

Part of Tanner’s strategy in theorising the novel of adultery is to ground his argument in space. This foundation offers a conceptual entry point to DeLillo’s use of space in his adultery narratives, and affords an additional lens through which to view spatial aspects of his work. For instance, attempting to understand DeLillo’s hotel/motel rooms in Tanner’s terms proves difficult, as these spaces manipulate the neat clarity of such demarcations as ‘city’ and ‘field,’ refusing to belong exclusively to either realm. Tanner’s own topography helps articulate the hotel/motel’s narrative affects precisely because this blurring resists his definition. The hotel/motel refuses to conform to a set spatial and

30 TP PT The first two novels in the series that radically reworks Hawthorne’s A Scarlet Letter are A Month of Sundays (1975) and Roger’s Version (1986). Updike’s novels frequently contain adultery.

Diana Jenkins 27 December 2005 topographical categorisation. This site operates in adulterous texts as a spatial changeling, capable of being familiar and unfamiliar, known and unknown, a space that passes in between, back and forth, and transgresses borders.

There is an element of the illicit in the hotel/motel’s activities, given its transgressive reputation, and something regenerative about the resultant flux. This concept of narratological renewal through the use of space is visually represented by English painter Augustus Egg’s triptych Past and Present (1858). Displayed at London’s Royal Academy, Past and Present ‘proved a popular handling of the theme of the fallen woman’ (Phillips 2002, p. 249), and retains a high profile as a comprehensive visual representation of – in this case wifely – adultery. Although often discussed in terms of Egg’s technique of ‘incorporating symbolism in naturalistic ways’ (Phillips 2002, p. 249) – for example, the adulteress’s two daughters and their building of a house of cards; pictures on the walls including the expulsion from Eden; and a rotten apple cut open by the husband – Julia Thomas provides an extended reading of the piece:

As well as destroying the home in Past and Present, the unfaithful wife also expands its boundaries, occupying a maternal space, a home/womb/dome that sweeps beyond the canvas and undermines the distinction between an inside and outside. Significantly, Freud locates this curious mixture of transgression and containment in the female genitalia: it is the “unheimlich place”, the source of the adulteress’s deviance, and the entrance to the former Heim [home] of all human beings” (Thomas 1999, p. 389).

The blurring of boundaries in Egg’s triptych through the image of the unfaithful double supports a reading of sexual transgression that extends the meaning of certain places, a concept critical to my argument concerning the hotel/motel room. DeLillo cultivates representations of this specific spatial doubling from his very first novel, Americana (1971), when the protagonist, David Bell, has adulterous motel room sex with married Edwina Meers. Adultery in Americana offers a chronological frame for my entire analysis of DeLillo’s adultery narratives, since the novel is the starting point for both the author and his representations of this trope. A motel room provides the spatial context for David Bell’s episode in Americana, and marks the first in a series whereby DeLillo’s characters experience adulterous sexual intercourse in a hotel/motel room, including Lyle Wynant in Players (1977), Cleo Birdwell in the pseudonymous Amazons (1980), Babette

Diana Jenkins 28 December 2005 Gladney in White Noise (1984), Nick Shay in Underworld (1997), Livia Majeski in the play Valparaiso (1999), and Eric Packer in Cosmopolis (2003). This chapter argues that the site resists the homogeneity one might expect to result from such repetition. These multiple occasions in DeLillo’s texts support a Baudrillardian reading, whereby this quality of resemblance, so integral to the hotel/motel room’s narratological as much as physical architecture, has a reproductive energy that affects its meaning.

The focus here is a serial sexual space and its textual behaviour. My examination of the hotel/motel room in DeLillo’s work considers it not only as a literal site of adultery but also as a compulsively adulterated space: that is, a perversion of the home’s role both as a metonym of the married couple and as a conventional narrative locale. As such, different theorists of postmodernity, space, parody, affect and narratology are employed within the chapter. Bal asserts that ‘the semantic content of spatial aspects’, like the hotel/motel room, in this case, ‘can be constructed in the same way as the semantic content of a character’ (Bal 1997, p. 135). Her theory provides a way of reading DeLillo’s evocation of the hotel/motel room as driven in part by the concept of individuation. This serial space is paradoxically endowed with the capacity for change.

The hotel/motel in DeLillo’s texts, specifically in the context of his adultery narratives, is a space of continually shifting signification. This refusal to establish spatial familiarity in a hyper-familiar site represents an important instance of DeLillo’s explications of contemporary America’s unease, as revealed through its contradictory experience of space (Marks 2002). Numerous affects of this space are discussed in postmodern theory, but comprehension of the full significance of such affects on the reading of DeLillo’s fiction benefits from a consideration of Sigmund Freud’s theory of the uncanny, which makes visible other doubling impulses. The promiscuous double emerges as an important means of articulating the particular and postmodern experience of the hotel/motel, and of understanding its multivalent functioning in DeLillo’s fiction.

Whilst concluding with Baudrillard, this chapter also deploys theories of Walter Benjamin, Foucault, Frow and others in order to open up DeLillo’s treatment of this space. These theorists lead to a consideration of the Baudrillardian double in their various

Diana Jenkins 29 December 2005 treatments. Freud’s work on the uncanny informs my reading of these later theorists via an expansion of the terms of the doubling impulse he identifies. The double also applies to the room’s aspect of compulsive reproduction, or the construction of typicality (Frow 1999). Reproduction characterises the later branch of thought and finds its fullest expression in Baudrillard. Foucault’s formulation of heterotopias, like Freud’s uncanny, concentrates on the individual’s experiences in space, and links the core concepts of the uncanny double and the reproducible double.

The hotel/motel room is the bespoke space for these theories. Despite the existence of other uncanny, heterotopic and compulsively reproduced spaces in postmodernity and its literature, such as the airport, the aeroplane, the mall, and the cinema, only the hotel/motel room makes a direct claim of intimate acquaintance with the self. Whilst Denis Diderot may well be the author who ‘represented a first real awareness that man is double to the final depths of his soul, the prey of conflicting psyches both equally himself’ (Fiedler 1970, p. 32), DeLillo reconceives this conflict of the self sexually and spatially. The home holds status as ‘a place, region, or state to which one properly belongs, in which one’s affections centre, or where one finds refuge, rest or satisfaction’ (oed.com), and these associations of the home confer profound narrative power on its mirror image, the home that is not home.

The chapter considers theoretical approaches to the hotel/motel space, particularly in postmodern theory. These provide the apparatus for a brief overview of representations of this site in both fictional and contemporary America, and inform my analysis of the hotel/motel in DeLillo’s adultery narratives. His double vision challenges the validity of discrete dimensions in the postmodern experience of space, and his texts instead suggest a radical slippage between sites. His hotel/motel proves to be the exemplary double, both mirroring the uncanny familiarity of the site as the place of adulterous action, and spatially representing a sexually ‘bound energ[y] aim[ing] for [its] own demise’ (Baudrillard 2000, p. 23).

The hotel/motel room is a significant postmodern space. The site is popularly cast in postmodern theory as both ‘unreal,’ as in Christopher Isherwood’s poetic exclamation

Diana Jenkins 30 December 2005 (Zizek 2001), and as a ‘non-place,’ as termed by Marc Augé and Ian Buchanan, which is ‘defined in contrast to place, itself a standard anthropological concept meaning a “concrete and symbolic construction of space”’ (Buchanan 1999, p. 171; Augé 1995, p. 51). Its status as a supposed non-place negates the site’s familiarity, a spatial irreconcilability in the narrative that is glimpsed in Augé’s own hypothesis:

If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place (Augé 1995, pp. 77-8).

Building on this definition, Buchanan further suggests that ‘[s]uch generic spaces as airports, hotels, [and] train stations…are…non-relational, unhistorical, and unconcerned with reality’ (Buchanan 1999, p. 171). However, within the context of narrative construction, the hotel/motel room can be a definite place, defined by relational, historical and identity-based associations. The generic site of the American roadside motel, with its tired, circa 1950s-style design, and its neon VACANCY sign flashing out on some lonely stretch of Route 66, is so fixed in the collective imaginary that its fictional representations achieve a degree of recognition and visibility rivalling any supposedly sturdier ‘place.’ The rented room is an iconic locale in television, film, design, photography, architecture, art, fiction and non-fiction. Iconic films such as Psycho (1960) and The Shining (1980), the cult classic Paris, Texas (1984), and the more recent Thelma and Louise (1991) and Lost Highway (1997) combine to create an indelible visual impression of the American hotel/motel. In contemporary design, Ian Schrager’s reinvention as the mastermind behind a contemporary hotel empire has succeeded coast-to-coast (Stein 1995).

The rented room forms part of America’s social and cultural landscape, and occupies an equally significant place in the country’s fiction. With such iconic examples as T. S. Eliot’s poem Preludes (1910-11), Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), as well as the popular anthem of The Eagles’ 1976 hit song Hotel California to its national credit, American writers across decades and modalities continue to capture the hotel/motel, with its series of identical rooms, as an aspect of postmodernity that seems particularly their own. The advertising

Diana Jenkins 31 December 2005 slogan for the New Dressler hotel in Steven Millhauser’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (1996) crystallises the connection with the words ‘MORE THAN A HOTEL: A WAY OF LIFE’ (Millhauser 1996, p. 235). In the reader’s imagined experience, this way of life is American (Hebel 2004; Saltzman 2001). That the hotel/motel can be found elsewhere, indeed in some form virtually everywhere, does little to displace the sense in which one encounters the site as an ideal manifestation of America’s culture. The hotel/motel lends itself potently to Umberto Eco’s suggestion in Travels in Hyperreality (1973) that America is ‘a country obsessed with realism, where, if a reconstruction is to be credible, it must be absolutely iconic, a perfect likeness, a “real” copy of the reality being represented’ (Eco 1987, p.5). American popular culture from the late twentieth-century onwards, as Zizek notes of Philip Dick’s Time Out of Joint (1959) and Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998), demonstrates ‘that the late capitalist consumerist Californian paradise is, in its very hyper-reality, in a way IRREAL, substanceless, deprived of the material inertia’ (Zizek 2001, p.1). The hotel/motel represents this hyper-reality’s evolution into unreality. Anticipating Zizek, Fiedler suggested in the late 1960s that representing this cultural phenomenon of the unreal created a paradoxical mode of American realism that has at its origin ‘the dusky horror of gothic romance’ (Fiedler 1970, p. 28):

That tradition was born of the profound contradictions of our national life and sustained by the inheritance from Puritanism of a ‘typical’ (even allegorical) way of regarding the sensible world – not as an ultimate reality but as a system of signs to be deciphered (Fiedler 1970, p. 28).

In the case of the hotel/motel, the contradictory, defining strangeness of its sign is so utterly ‘typical’ it comes to seem a movie set or photo shoot instead of a material structure, a Truman-style, perfect fakery featuring a façade behind which one only finds wooden backing supports. As Zizek sees it:

…the ultimate truth of the capitalist utilitarian despiritualized universe is the dematerialization of the “real life” itself, its reversal into a spectral show. Among others, Christopher Isherwood gave expression to this unreality of the American daily life, exemplified in the motel room: “American motels are unreal!/…/they are deliberately designed to be unreal./…/The Europeans hate us because we’ve retired to live inside our advertisements, like hermits going into caves to contemplate” (Zizek 2001, p. 1).

Diana Jenkins 32 December 2005 The contradiction extends to Zizek’s identification of the operation of reversal, since Isherwood’s proclamation that the motel’s ‘unreal’ design is its only reality suggests that no reversal takes place. The unreal is the only real. In addition, Isherwood deploys a contradictory conflation of the public advertisement with the private ‘inside.’ This archetypal advertisement inside which Americans live relies on the subject’s apprehension of the room’s aspect of de-materiality, and this contradiction, in turn, makes the hotel/motel a potent spatial tool in fiction.

If theory is the intellectual product and reflection of the world in which we live, then the space given to discussion of the hotel/motel site complements the ubiquity of the site itself. Its very commonality becomes what is noteworthy, since ‘it is precisely the preponderance of hotels, airports, and malls that signals that things have changed, that spatially things are different’ (Buchanan 1999, p. 171). This observation of a shifting theoretical and physical landscape suggests that these proliferating, uniform spaces have the paradoxical capacity to bring about change. These indistinguishable places create the conditions for discernible transformations, further conceiving the hotel/motel as an active site with the potential to interrupt or alter narrative outcomes in the way theorists including Augé, Buchanan, Eco, and Zizek suggest of the altered landscape of post- and super-modernity.

Despite Buchanan’s sense that things have changed, recent celebrated postmodern theories of space are as already known and familiar as an umpteenth motel room in a Best Western chain. There is an aspect of indefinite rotation to theoretical discussions of the non-place that ironically reflects such a space’s fundamental reproducibility. Foucault’s 31 essay ‘Of Other Spaces’ (1967/1984TPF FPT) posits heterotopias as ‘presuppos[ing] a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable’ (Foucault 1986, p. 26), a system reminiscent of the hotel/motel’s private rooms for public hire. With the room key, a guest is assured this heterotopic site ‘is not freely accessible like a public

31 TP PT Note 1 includes the following information: This text, entitled “Des Espaces Autres,” and published by the French journal Architecture-Mouvement-Continuité in October, 1984, was the basis of a lecture given by Michel Foucault in March 1967. Although not reviewed for publication by the author and thus not part of the official corpus of his work, the manuscript was released into the public domain for an exhibition in Berlin shortly before Michel Foucault’s death.

Diana Jenkins 33 December 2005 place’ (Foucault 1986, p. 26). In addition, ‘the individual has to submit to rites and purifications,’ like the presentation of photo ID and the completion of room registration, tasks that give them ‘a certain permission’ as well as requiring that they ‘make certain gestures’ (Foucault 1986, p. 26). The space of the hotel/motel evidently controls the individual’s access to it, activating a clear set of known behaviours, such as parking one’s car in the spot directly outside one’s own motel room.

The ‘rites and purifications’ Foucault identifies include the guest’s relationship with hotel/motel time. Temporal sequencing is an important component in determining the narrative operation of the hotel/motel site, in particular because it offers itself as a temporary, fleeting space. Time partially defines the space, which operates as a heterotopia in precisely the way Foucault describes in ‘Of Other Spaces’:

[There] are those [heterotopias] linked…to time in its most fleeting, transitory, precarious aspect, to time in the mode of the festival. These heterotopias are not oriented toward the eternal, they are rather absolutely temporal [chroniques]. Such, for example, are the fairgrounds, these marvelous empty sites on the outskirts of cities that teem once or twice a year with stands, displays, heteroclite objects, wrestlers, snakewomen, fortune-tellers and so forth (Foucault 1986, p. 26).

The distinction between a heterotopia and a non-place, then, might be that the inherent structure of a heterotopia is temporary. ‘Time at its most fleeting’ applies to both, and is distinguished by the fact that the heterotopic fairground big top is also fleeting structurally, whereas the non-place of the hotel/motel is fleeting experientially. The relationship between the two types of space remains binding. The precarious temporal modality of the festival Foucault identifies can be applied to the extramarital affair, and, like the fairground he imagines, the scene of the affair is also often on the outskirts. Americana’s David Bell and Edwina Meer’s early morning sexual encounter takes place in Tanner’s ‘field,’ a roadside motel ‘roughly seventeen miles from the center of Chicago’ (DeLillo 1990, p. 258). The motel room of their adulterous liaison brings the consideration of time to the non-place and transfers its status to that of heterotopia. Temporality, then, defines the action within both spaces as fleeting, and extends its influence in the case of the affair and the fairground to collapse the structural evidence that the action ever took (heterotopic) place.

Diana Jenkins 34 December 2005 DeLillo’s fictional representations of the hotel/motel room recognise nuances and debates in the realm of postmodern space, and some of his characters’ observations directly engage it. Pammy Wynant in Players (1977), for instance, is an adulteress who ‘defines her world architecturally, in terms of “spaces” and “places” (elevators, for example, are places), but all her places seem to be constantly in transit’ (Osteen 2000, p. 145). Her mutually unfaithful husband, Lyle, observing his sleeping lover whilst far away from his wife, considers motels to be ‘the idea of something’ an idea to which ‘the traveler, the motorist, the sojourner…provides the edible flesh of this concept’ (DeLillo 1991, pp. 209-10). The motel is as fleeting a structure as the restless and always shifting fairground, host to a sexualised concept more than a sexual event.

Mark Seltzer contends that ‘the relays progressively articulated between bodies and places such that the home, or, more exactly, the homelike, emerges again and again as the scene of the crime’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 201), and the fictional space of the hotel/motel is a well-recognised unhomelike site of both violent and sexual crime. One of the popular effects of this disturbed image of the domestic bedroom is a complementary disturbance to marital fidelity and its attendant literary conventionalities. The instance of an adulterous outcome in fictional representations of the hotel/motel narrative is such that adultery becomes the clichéd, apparently foregone conclusion of a hotel/motel room sexual liaison. DeLillo’s fiction harnesses the resulting expectation of both readers and characters that certain action will issue from the space. These expectations centre on the space as a classic ‘scene of the crime.’ By withholding, exaggerating, and inverting its established literary function, DeLillo’s hotel/motel creates the space for unforeseen outcomes that replenish its narrative utility as a domain of sexual secrecy. As I show, the unreliability of the site’s function in DeLillo’s fiction is a sexualised model of spatial coquetry, its multivalent narrative possibilities meaning the hotel/motel is as unfaithful to its type as the married characters who stray.

DeLillo has said that he regards himself as someone who has ‘an idea of what it’s like to be an outsider in [American] society’ (DeCurtis 1999, p. 50), and the hotel/motel, lining highways and city limits, seems a fitting metaphor for DeLillo’s ambiguity about his own ‘place.’ As noted by Tom LeClair:

Diana Jenkins 35 December 2005 …the social distance of [DeLillo’s] upbringing [as the son of Italian immigrants growing up in the Bronx of the late-1930s and 1940s] contributed…to his double view of American life, its promises and mythologies, an appreciation of its rich potentialities and an ironic sense of its excessive failures (LeClair 1987, p. 14).

This double vision of DeLillo’s is omnipresent in his work, and is the defining impulse in his use of the hotel/motel in adultery narratives. Tantalisingly neither properly inside nor definitely outside, like the author himself, the site of the hotel/motel room is one replete with fictional possibilities. Indeed, part of the extended irony of DeLillo’s work is that his awareness of the hotel/motel room’s inherent ambiguity helps identify this migrant son as quintessentially American. The site’s instability and ambiguity problematises dichotomies including private/public, anonymous/personal, homely/unhomely, place/non- place, tensions DeLillo’s novels repeatedly exploit and which are also commonly invoked in relation to the novel of adultery. As Tanner and others such as Nicholas White have suggested, adultery upsets comfortable distinctions, introducing ‘a bad multiplicity within the requisite unities of social roles’ (Tanner 1979, p. 13). In the tradition of wifely adultery, the distinction between private and public spheres is blurred by the adulteress, who, ‘in her dual role of wife and lover…is both inside and outside marriage’ (White 1997, p. 101). The hotel/motel frequently features as a spatial symbol of this dual position in the fiction of adultery and, as the archetypal double space, the hotel/motel room is an important part of DeLillo’s broad, spatially-driven sexual dialogue with 32 America, and his representations of the duplicity of marital infidelityTPF FPT.

Imitation, re-enactment, and resemblance fundamentally inform representations of space in the doubled perspective of DeLillo’s fiction. The hotel/motel room bears on understanding the function of such compulsive doubling in his work in part because it is such a fixture across his oeuvre. DeLillo’s texts deliberately imitate previous representations of hotel/motel space, making the room repeatedly articulate and reinforce its type within the narrative. This aspect of imitation is seen in other spatial imaging in

32 TP PT DeLillo also uses the hotel/motel to appeal to the specific, postmodern irony of the trope of the American frontier. For a comprehensive argument that DeLillo’s Americana and Underworld repeatedly destroy the myth of the West as virgin land through profane, as opposed to romantic, origin, an argument critically informing my own thinking, see Gauthier (2001).

Diana Jenkins 36 December 2005 his texts, revealing a Baudrillardian serialisation of the serial. The experience of the hotel/motel space offered by DeLillo’s novels is locked in the self-conscious enactment of prior rented rooms. The type itself ‘loses its purity, since it can always be imitated, feigned…the type ceaselessly imitates itself’ (Frow 1999, p. 178). Indeed, DeLillo’s fiction belies an obsession with what Frow calls ‘the construction of typicality,’ one of the classical aims of the realist novel (Frow 1999, p. 177; Furst 1995). The hotel/motel room is a compelling example of DeLillo’s realist commitment to the construction of typicality, and he exploits the room’s profile as a familiar, indeed hyper-typical, topoi of American culture.

DeLillo’s narrative attention to spatial typicality troubles definitions of the postmodern placeless, and Barrett apprehends the inherent difficulty in defining the hotel/motel in DeLillo’s fiction as a non-place. According to her, DeLillo’s Mao II (1991) contains a ‘consummate postmodern space [in] a midtown hotel straight out of Jameson’s book- length study, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”’ where Jameson’s description of Los Angeles’s Bonaventure Hotel includes a lobby ‘accessed by an elevator, which isn’t always easy to find’ (Barrett 1999, p. 794):

Since “it does not wish to be a part of the city but rather its equivalent and replacement or substitute”, the postmodern hotel “aspires to being a total space, a complete world, a kind of miniature city” in which a “hypercrowd” congregates...Constructed of mirrored glass, the hotel is impossible to see: “[W]hen you seek to look at the hotel’s outer walls you cannot see the hotel itself but only the distorted images of everything that surrounds it” (Barrett 1999, p. 794; Jameson 1991, pp. 40-2).

There are several hotel/motels in Mao II, but the one Barrett compares with the Bonaventure is on New York City’s Broadway. This is the scene of supporting character Scott’s first meeting with the photographer Brita Nilsson. Scott is there to collect and deliver Brita to his reluctant ‘boss,’ the reclusive author and ostensible protagonist Bill Gray, so that she can take photographs of him for inclusion in her series on writers, itself 33 a study in repetition and resemblanceTPF FPT. Barrett suggests that the hotel in Mao II undoes

33 TP PT See Osteen (1999) and Duvall (1999), who both discuss the possibility that the photographer Brita Neilson represents DeLillo’s hope for art that incorporates spectacle without being absorbed into it.

Diana Jenkins 37 December 2005 ‘traditional concepts of space in a similar manner’ to Jameson’s hotel, creating a ‘deceptive transparency [that] renders the space…seemingly comprehensible’ (Barrett 1999, p. 794). The space is both there and not there, an effect that is achieved via spatial descriptions including the elevators as ‘“clear pods,” ris[ing] and drop[ping] as the clock above the bar “rotat[es] in an openwork tower”, and Scott and Brita spin[ning] in a large, glass-enclosed cylinder’ (Barrett 1999, p. 794). The deceptive character of the space is conveyed in the narrative by inexplicable spatial disturbances and faux transparency.

The feeling that ‘blocks of time and space had come loose and drifted’ (DeLillo 1992, p. 23) recurs in DeLillo’s fiction. The space of the hotel/motel repeatedly corrupts the meaning of terms like ‘place’ and ‘non-place’ by effacing the means of distinguishing between them. This corruption relates wholly to what I take to be the broadest and most dedicated project of all DeLillo’s fiction: to delight in the impurity of language and 34 meaningTPF FPT. Thus the hotel/motel room, ‘loose’ and ‘drifting,’ operates as a spatial metaphor of sexual transgression beyond its established narrative function as the transgression’s location.

Freud’s study ‘The “Uncanny”’ (1900, 1929) offers a clear process to explain these effects, and it anticipates several of DeLillo’s most marked concerns in the double and the compulsion to repeat. Freud’s frame of inquiry re-opens a site of critical debate around DeLillo’s constructions of space, and supports my contention that the hotel/motel room in his fiction is a space of sexual and secret renewal. The room in DeLillo expands and contracts in various manifestations of unhomelike and homelike behaviour, becoming another way of representing what Freud locates in female genitalia. It also maintains the narrative mystery for which female genitalia is obsessively examined and held to account, being a sexually charged site and one that is often misogynistically associated with the secret, the criminal, and the faithless. Freud’s psychoanalytic approach to female genitalia and DeLillo’s hotel/motel room conceptually intersect in

34 TP PT Maltby (1998) makes a different case, arguing that DeLillo’s work demonstrates a transcendent or visionary view of language. My resistance to this aspect of Maltby’s argument echoes Cowart’s (2003) and Nel’s (2002). I too would suggest that the zeal of DeLillo’s invocations is, at times, heavily ironic, and that DeLillo’s interest in this view of language is not necessarily his endorsement.

Diana Jenkins 38 December 2005 their shared subversion of psychosexual spatial knowability. Both transcend their physical dimensions and purpose, and both are popularly reconceived as sexually mysterious.

This spatial aspect of sexual mystery in DeLillo’s narrative construction, examined here against focal points of Freud’s study of the uncanny, affects the direction of the plot by eliciting certain action or behaviour from characters operating within it. The first point of analysis concerns Freud’s formulation of the temporal sequence that produces the uncanny. Freud states that ‘something has to be added to what is novel and unfamiliar in order to make it uncanny’ (Freud 2001, p. 931), later suggesting that what is added is familiar. This sequence is inverted in DeLillo’s novels, where the unfamiliar is added to the familiar in order to make it uncanny. Reversing this temporal order means that DeLillo’s fiction extends the terms of the uncanny encounter Freud imagines. By reversing the temporality without losing its uncanny affects, the sequence in these cases is strategically deployed to unearth the deep well of untapped psychic disturbance available for this and indeed any author’s use. The effect on the experience of reading such texts is that the atmosphere of disturbance is compounded. The incidence of disruption for both character and reader multiplies, offering a crucial tool of affect and doubling to authors such as DeLillo who are particularly invested in charting all the sleights and funhouse mirrors of the postmodern experience.

DeLillo’s fiction, through changes and experiments in sequencing to produce narrative effects, extends the application of Freud’s theory via a temporal agitation in the text, agitation that reflects the nature of the hotel/motel room’s narrative capabilities. The rented room’s fundamental character of transient indistinction has to do ‘with the phenomenon of the “double”’ (Freud 2001, pp. 939-40), and doubling is expanded by Freud to include resemblance, interchangeability, and an insistent acknowledgement of the compulsion to repeat. Freud’s considerations of the compulsion to repeat and the phenomenon of doubling find salient examples in DeLillo’s texts, particularly in characters’ recognition of the hotel/motel room as a site of serialised, adulterous sex. As Freud suggests of the uncanny experience, this encounter with something known and long familiar even proves frightening to some of DeLillo’s fictional characters.

Diana Jenkins 39 December 2005 The idea of an emotional encounter marks the domain of the uncanny. In Thomas 35 Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)TPF FPT, the heroine, Oedipa, hesitates for just ‘a second’ at the entrance to a motel displaying a sheet-metal nymph whose face ‘was much like Oedipa’s’ (Pynchon 2000, p. 16). Pynchon then immediately focuses Oedipa’s (and therefore the reader’s) attention elsewhere, and the reader is never sure of the extent of the likeness. Like DeLillo, Pynchon employs uncanniness as a textual device. The resultant uncertainty persistently nags in the way Freud and Ernst Jentsch suggest (Freud 2001, p. 935). This scene in The Crying of Lot 49 adheres to Freud’s model, and is aimed at producing the reader’s more than the character’s discomfort. Indeed, the likeness ‘didn’t startle Oedipa so much as a concealed blower system’ (Pynchon 2000, p. 16) and her failure to register her own image as disturbing ultimately directs the effect produced by the scene toward the reader’s growing paranoia about what this and other coincidences mean. Although it is reasonable to surmise that Pynchon’s signage nymph and Oedipa might coincidentally resemble each other, this particular narratological operation successfully embeds in the reader the anxious and psychological possibility of a larger connection, a paranoid worldview that ultimately prevails.

In addition to postmodern narratives such as DeLillo’s and Pynchon’s, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, both a classic realist text and possibly the iconic bourgeois novel of adultery, also adopts practices for the creation of an atmosphere that further identify the narrative operations of the uncanny. What distinguishes Flaubert’s treatment of the uncanny space from the apparent parameters of Freud’s theory, and from DeLillo’s own representations, is that Flaubert’s text, however inadvertently, splits the homelike from its semantic association with the familiar. Splits are integral to Freud’s psychoanalytic philosophies, perhaps most famously expressed in the split subject of the Oedipal process. He also gives the ‘extreme strangeness of the unconscious’ its due, paradoxically conceiving it as both ‘a place and a non-place…completely indifferent to reality, which knows no logic or negation or causality or contradiction’ (Eagleton 1999, p. 136).

35 TP PT For a lively comparison between DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon, concentrating on DeLillo’s White Noise, Libra, Mao II and Underworld, and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and The Crying of Lot 49, see Parrish (2002). Parrish isolates key differences in their approach, including the aspect of the divine in DeLillo’s representations of technology.

Diana Jenkins 40 December 2005 Adopting the homelike and the familiar as interchangeable within the terms of his essay, Freud, then, would presumably be neither surprised nor disturbed by the fact that in Madame Bovary they diverge.

Emma Bovary, Flaubert’s famous adulteress, and her lover Léon strive to introduce the homelike to the unhomelike during their hotel-based affair, initially suggesting the particular sequence outlined by Freud. Yet they also introduce an unfamiliar element into a familiar space, making their hotel/motel scene sequentially consonant with DeLillo’s preference for inverting elements to reflect a familiarÆunfamiliar order. Despite the variation in the sequence, the effect of the combination is the same. In addition, whilst DeLillo and Flaubert both privilege familiarity in establishing scenes of the uncanny, Flaubert’s sequence also combines the familiar and the unhomelike. Emma and Léon first consummate their desire at the Hotel de Boulogne, during what is perversely called a ‘real honeymoon’ (Flaubert 1957, p. 267). Later, once the lovers have established a weekly tryst in the same hotel room, they pretend ‘it is their own home, reproducing in a kind of parody or theatrical form an improvised domesticity’ (Tanner 1979, p. 343):

How they loved that friendly room, full of gaiety despite its somewhat faded splendour! […] [T]hey fancied they were in their own home, there to dwell for the rest of their lives, an eternal young-married-couple. They used to say ‘our room’, ‘our carpet’, ‘our armchairs’. There were even ‘my slippers’ – a pair to which she had taken a fancy and which Léon had given her (Flaubert 1957, pp. 275-6).

Emma and Léon’s determined effort to make homely the scene of their affair is undoubtedly peculiar. The reader is too aware that it is precisely this banal, domestic entrapment Emma has been at such pains to escape, although it is not this detail that most unsettles. That distinction belongs to the concerted attempt to transform the unhomelike space into the homelike, imagining their affair as, and articulating it in terms of, a legitimate marriage. The narrative succeeds in producing an atmosphere of Freudian uncanniness by engaging a fantasy of their unhomelike hotel that is utterly grounded in the reality and trappings of Emma’s home and marriage. To this extent, as argued by Nicholas White, Flaubert parodies the novel of adultery:

Diana Jenkins 41 December 2005 Emma Bovary, of course, finds in adultery all the platitudes of married life. Adultery is, in this view, just as boring as marriage. So the irony at the reader’s expense is grand (White 1997, p. 124).

Their hotel room, then, is utterly familiar to Emma and Léon; it defines and accommodates their affair literally and figuratively. Emma’s fantasy, as she acts it out in this familiar site, a public hotel, is of the home life she already has, resulting in a kind of psychic and semantic confusion for both Emma and the reader. Flaubert’s manipulation of this confusion exhibits his compatibility with DeLillo’s contemporary use of the space and with Freud’s formulation of the process of uncanniness. Flaubert’s temporal sequence is marked by the insistent advance of the lexicon of the homelike, into an unhomelike space familiar to the lovers to a fundamental degree.

The disavowal of uncanniness in a novel, via a character like Emma Bovary’s refusal to apprehend it, confers the expectation of recognition on the reader. Pynchon, for one, manipulates the narrative to engender an unease in the reader rather than simply narrating the uncanny experience of a character, extending what Timothy Melley calls ‘agency panic’ (Melley 2000, p. 84) to capture the reader in the narrative’s affect. Like Pynchon’s character Prentice in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), the reader’s ‘panic stems from the uncanny sense that [s/he] is not only out of control…but that [s/he] is under the control of someone or something else’ (Melley 2000, p. 83). In this case, the reader experiences an uncanny sense of being under Pynchon’s control, meaning the cerebral Gravity’s Rainbow unexpectedly bears upon the reading of DeLillo’s pseudonymous trash novel, Amazons (1980).

Cleo Birdwell, the heroine and supposed author of Amazons, spends a great deal of time in hotel rooms across America. One of the strengths of the hotel/motel space in terms of its narrative range is that it belongs to ‘that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’ (Freud 2001, p. 930), and Amazons uses the 36 tension between security and fear to maximum effectTPF FPT. In Amazons, Cleo has a second

36 TP PT The entire premise of Amazons is an example of DeLillo’s treatment of the uncanny. The novel introduces to the familiar (the New York Rangers, a male ice hockey team that competes in the National Hockey League) the unfamiliar Cleo (the ‘First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League,’ as

Diana Jenkins 42 December 2005 hotel room encounter with Sanders Meade, the Rangers’ general manager, with whom Cleo earlier has sex in a Toronto hotel at the conclusion of Chapter 4. Whatever misgivings suggested by DeLillo’s ambivalent attitude toward Amazons, including his use of a pseudonym and the portrayal of Cleo Birdwell’s voracious sexual modus operandi, compulsive repetition is an important element of the text. Amazons is an excellent illustration of Freud’s argument that ‘it is possible to recognize the dominance in the unconscious mind of a compulsion and repeat,’ and that ‘whatever reminds us of this inner “compulsion to repeat” is perceived as uncanny’ (Freud 2001, pp. 942-3).

When Sanders reappears, then, this time in a Chicago hotel near the end of Chapter 9, he is eager for a ‘repeat’ performance, believing his chances safely assured. Resemblance with their first encounter is achieved on several levels, including Sanders’ appearance in the same ‘broad-sashed, wide-sleeved kimono with matching sandals’ (Birdwell 1980, p. 201). There is also the same elaborate, increasingly absurd banter, again initially contributing to the foreplay between Cleo and her uninvited guest. In this second meeting, though, the expectation of repetition is interrupted via the juxtaposition of competing and antagonistic spatial elements apprehended by the two characters.

It has already been established by the text that Cleo’s, and Amazons’, eccentricity resides in the fact that the narrative never represents the heroine having sex with the same man twice. Each new lover constitutes the unfamiliar element in the familiar space of both the room itself and the narrative space for this type of scene. It is therefore as unfamiliar and confronting when Sanders returns as the introduction of an entirely new lover might once have been. The characters doubly deviate from expected behaviour in this scene since Sanders’ reaction to the space – erectile dysfunction – ultimately denies the possibility of

the novel’s subtitle informs us). The jacket announces that the book is Cleo’s own ‘intimate memoir,’ and includes a photo of a blonde and fully made-up ‘Cleo’ on the back dust jacket. The front cover is unnerving, displaying an artfully ironic combination of a locker-room bench, Rangers jersey, helmet and skates with a pair of high heels, hosiery and draped lingerie, the bra of which dangles suggestively over the side of the bench as though hastily removed. In fact, Amazons brings a discomforting edge to titular semantics, since the term ‘amazons’ was coined by the sexually insecure mainstream press of the 1930s and is associated with that press’s attempt to ostracise the (supposedly) mannish ‘amazon,’ otherwise known as the female sportsperson. Cleo is anything but mannish, depicted as (heterosexually) both desirable and available, making the meaning of the novel’s title both unfamiliar and ambivalent. See Cahn (2003) in relation to ‘amazons.’

Diana Jenkins 43 December 2005 this surprise second sexual union between the two, toward which the narrative is initially impelled.

The site should be secure, both in its resemblance to the domestic bedroom and because Cleo and Sanders have had hotel room sex before, but it proves to be a frightening place second time around. Abjectly horrifying for him, Sanders’ erection deflates when Cleo makes two verbal blunders of poststructuralist proportions: the first by mentioning ‘Torkle,’ referring both to Eric Torkleson, Cleo’s Rangers team-mate, and his member, ‘a penis so humongous it was given a separate identity by the other players’ (Birdwell 1980, p. 46); the second by uttering the word ‘Watergate,’ which Sanders believes “was stalking the male American all through the seventies [with] the twin specter of Vietnam” (Birdwell 1980, pp. 204-6). Sander’s language here – stalking, spectre – invokes the gothic tradition, and these obsessions with past events that lurk in Sander’s psyche terrorise and emasculate him. This appeal to gothicism is consistent with Fiedler’s provocative observation that, ‘[h]owever shoddily or ironically treated, horror is essential 37 to [American] literature’ (Fiedler 1970, p. 26)TPF FPT. Sanders’ vocabulary supports the notion that through ‘gothic images are projected certain obsessive concerns of [American] national life’ (Fiedler 1970, p. 27). Where Fiedler says it is ‘not merely a matter of terror filling the vacuum left by the suppression of sex in [American] novels, of Thanatos standing in for Eros’ (Fiedler 1970, pp. 26-7), this failed sex scene in Amazons distinctly suggests it is terror itself that actively does the suppressing. Seltzer, in Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture, further suggests that:

The merger of individual and surroundings involves, at one extreme, the gothicization of space – the projection of semi-alive spaces that appear as the prosthetic extension of persons. It involves, at the other, the “melting” of persons into place or ground: an absorption experienced at once as self- extension and as a tendency toward self extinction (Seltzer 1998, p. 213).

The joint impulses of sex and death that reside within the space of the hotel/motel room make it a particularly potent illustration of Seltzer’s point. In Michael Arlen’s 1920s

37 TP PT Where Fiedler uses ‘our,’ I interpret him as meaning ‘American,’ and for coherence replace the former with the latter when quoting.

Diana Jenkins 44 December 2005 bestseller The Green Hat (1924), for example, Boy Fenwick’s early promiscuity results in his being terrorised by a sexually transmitted disease on his wedding night, rendering him unwilling or unable to perform. Instead, Boy is found, ‘on that dawn of his wedding- night, lying in the courtyard of the Hôtel Vendôme in Deauville’ (Arlen 1924, p. 104), dead after apparently leaping from the bridal suite. Sanders’s self-extinction in Amazons is also sexual in nature; his ability to perform sexually is extinguished by his projection of Watergate and Vietnam, two ‘semi-alive’ spaces of the American consciousness, into Cleo’s hotel/motel room.

The space of the hotel room is not simply frightening to Sanders; its ‘aliveness’ succeeds in grinding the sexual scene to an unceremonious halt, thereby arresting the narrative. The contradiction Seltzer identifies in the simultaneity of self-extension and self- extinction captures that at the level of immediate safety and fear cultivated within the uncanny space. The hotel room initially serves as a prosthetic extension of Sanders’ sexual intent and ability, whereby his surroundings encourage and embolden him. Yet even as Sanders attempts to use the space to self-extend, Cleo ‘jumbles’ (Foucault 1986, p. 25) the exchange and directs him not toward the little death of orgasm but toward impotence. This sexual death, what Seltzer calls self-extinction, is accidentally invoked via the potency of these other, more elusive spaces. The result is that narrative action is brought to a standstill, and the characters can only repeatedly articulate Sanders’ fears: Vietnam, Watergate, Iran.

The hotel/motel room in Amazons is disquieting in part because of its ubiquity, but also because of the prolepsis achieved when the experience of a character, in this case Cleo’s, echoes the reader’s expectations about the use of the space as a narrative device. Certain narrative action is conveyed via the use of the hotel/motel room, sexual or violent action in particular, and the reader’s familiarity with these norms reinforces the uncanny nature of the site when the expectation is met, and it is met in Cleo’s case with parodic regularity.

The reader’s helpless expectation of repetition in Amazons’ portrayal of the sexually athletic Cleo does not reduce the strangeness when the narrative continues to deliver

Diana Jenkins 45 December 2005 different sexual partners and different-without-difference sites of various hotels rooms and other unhomelike spaces. Freud argues that even ‘an unintended recurrence of the same situation…also result[s] in the same feeling of helplessness and of uncanniness’ (Freud 2001, pp. 941-2) and certainly Cleo does not intend her sexual situation to recur. Rather, she is locked in this repetition of the sexualised event, and it is the absence of agency that signifies the ‘helplessness’ to which Freud refers. The narrative’s modality extends the uncanniness since these scenes are mostly placed at the end of chapters: five of the first eight chapters end with Cleo having sex with a different man.

Apparently helpless to stem the flow of sexual partners, Cleo recognises the hotel/motel room as a site of serialised, adulterous sex. Her awareness exposes one of the chief aspects of the hotel/motel room’s narrative character in DeLillo’s texts: the site cultivates the Freudian compulsion to repeat, and the phenomenon of doubling. Cleo, in Cowart’s insightful linking of DeLillo to Voltaire and Barthelme, is both ‘a female Candide – a picara who chronicles a series of experiences on the ice and in the boudoir’, and a Snow White, who ‘sleeps with all seven of the major male characters’ (Cowart 2003, p. 244). Of Cleo’s ‘omnivorous sexuality’ (Cowart 2003, p. 244), Nel notes that ‘[i]n none of these seven episodes does the sexual encounter result from any plausible relationship’; instead, ‘as in a bad pornographic film, one gratuitous sexual encounter follows another’ (Nel 2001, p. 2). The only plausible relationship that exists is between the hotel room and Cleo’s behaviour within it, whereby the serial site elicits a particularly sexualised serial response. Each hotel room’s resemblance to the last produces a pathologised sexual re- enactment, as Cleo’s sexual appetite is gradually revealed to be nothing more than the programmed effect of the space. Cleo’s reaction to the hotel room space resembles a puppet’s manipulation from without, and it is Cleo’s external environment that appears to control her (largely sexual) movement.

The parody of Cleo’s banalised sexual activity is to this extent reminiscent of Emile Zola’s Pot-Bouille (1882), in which the adultery ‘seems to happen virtually all the time,’ in a world in which ‘copia is the order of the day’ (White 1997, p. 125). Cleo’s sexual proclivities are uniform in a profoundly inexorable way that complicates Freud’s observation that ‘[o]rder is a kind of compulsion to repeat which…decides when, where

Diana Jenkins 46 December 2005 and how a thing shall be done, so that in every similar circumstance one is spared hesitation and indecision’ (Bauman 1997, p. 1). These multiple encounters, more than sparing Cleo hesitation and indecision, baldly fail to suggest any level of eroticism or pleasure in her experience, producing instead an atmosphere of detachment that implies ‘DeLillo is both intrigued by and has misgivings about this kind of Warholian repetition’ (Nel 2001, p. 6). With Warhol’s career-making fascination with the image and its potential for unnerving manipulations of resemblance and doubling, the artist and the 38 author make compelling bedfellowsTPF FPT.

Just as Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow engenders greater unease via transfers of paranoia from Prentice to the reader, so too is the reader of Amazons in tandem with Cleo’s growing metatextual awareness that the narrative’s approach toward another chapter’s close probably signifies her next hotel/motel sexual encounter. On a flight between hotel rooms, Cleo eventually decides to review her personal life:

I had betrayed my friend Floss with Archie. I had betrayed Archie with Murray, in Archie’s own house. I had betrayed Glenway with Manley, his half brother. I had betrayed Sanders with Jeep. I had betrayed Shaver with Sanders, Glenway, Jeep, Murray, and Manley (Birdwell 1980, p. 344).

Rather than representing an autonomous admission from Cleo, one that frees her from the imposed narrative structure just as the flight releases her from the spatial dimensions of the hotel room, this reflection fails to arrest the degree to which Cleo and the reader are controlled. Instead, Cleo’s catalogue of betrayals is not only the novel’s sexual climax, ending her run of promiscuous escapades, it also marks the end of chapter 14 and, just for 39 good measure, Part 2TPF FPT. Cleo and the reader are still uncomfortably aware of external manipulation. Although Cleo’s consciousness of her deeds grasps at some level of self- determination, it ultimately fails because the novel’s structure aggressively overrides her

38 TP PT Beyond the pun, this is true well beyond Nel’s observation regarding Amazons, and in particular in Mao II. The ambivalence Nel identifies in the tenor of Amazons seeps into DeLillo’s next novel, 1982’s The Names, where the adulterous sex between protagonist James Axton and married amateur dancer Janet Ruffing is unpleasantly murky on the question of Janet’s consent. 39 TP PT Whilst Cleo and Shaver Stevens are not married in the novel, they quickly establish a de facto relationship, and Cleo’s conviction that she has betrayed Shaver with all these other partners indicates her perception of Shaver as distinct from the other men. The question of Cleo’s unfaithfulness is undoubted in this regard.

Diana Jenkins 47 December 2005 as the controlling element, making visible to the reader the unmistakable strings of an omnipresent, all-powerful puppeteer and denying any possibility of conventional escape into a character’s fictional world.

Developing the Thanatos and Eros gothic parody of Amazons, the next novel of DeLillo’s to explicitly link the hotel/motel room and adultery is White Noise (1985), his ‘mordant satire of consumerism, television and the post-nuclear family’ (Osteen 2000, p. 5). The 40 novel in between, 1982’s The Names, employs both separatelyTPF FPT. In White Noise, Babette Gladney trades sex with scientist Willie Mink in exchange for a supply of Dylar, a drug that purports to remove the fear of death, the chief condition plaguing both Babette and her husband throughout the novel. Despite being determinedly cast in shades of grey, including being called “Mr Gray” (DeLillo 1986, p. 194), Mink is familiar to the reader, since, as Osteen notes, he recalls David Bell in Americana, who also conducts interviews in a motel to find his research subjects (Osteen 2000, p. 186). When first person protagonist Jack Gladney listens to Babette confessing her infidelity to him as they lie in their marital bed, the confession includes a brief description of the scene itself:

“We went to a grubby little motel room. Never mind where or when. It had the TV up near the ceiling. This is all I remember. Grubby, tacky” (DeLillo 1986, p. 194).

This admission of Babette’s in White Noise, central to DeLillo’s fifth adultery narrative (if we include the pseudonymous Amazons), is significant because it is the first to 41 represent a character voluntarily confessing adulterous guilt to their spouseTPF FPT. In addition, whilst the whole of Amazons is structured as confessional, given its purport to be Cleo’s ‘intimate memoir,’ White Noise, although also employing a first person narrator,

40 TP PT The Names is set in Greece and largely concerns American expatriates. It might therefore be expected to be full of hotels, but in fact the hotel/motel’s presence is very subdued. Adultery in The Names is taken up in more relevant chapters of this thesis. This break in the relationship between adultery and the hotel/motel in DeLillo’s novels echoes his novels of the 1970s, where his first novel Americana (1971) introduces the link between the two not seen again until 1977’s Players, four novels later. These gaps get smaller as DeLillo’s career progresses. Adulterous sex has taken place in hotel/motel rooms in three of his four most recent texts, including his second play, 1999’s Valparaiso, and his most recent novel, Cosmopolis (2003). 41 TP PT In The Names, despite Charles Maitland insisting to James Axton in another context that “I listen. I listen all the time. I pick things up, listening” (DeLillo 1999(a), p. 41), James has to tell him about his wife Ann’s affair with Andreas Eliades (DeLillo 1999(a), p. 258).

Diana Jenkins 48 December 2005 distances the protagonist from the adulterous act. The ambivalence Nel identifies in Amazons (ambivalence that continues in similar circumstances in The Names) is partially addressed in White Noise. Jack Gladney, the protagonist and narrator, is not the adulterer, which dilutes the reader’s emotional response to Babette’s transgression.

Although this structural detachment reduces the sense of ambivalence, Babette’s adultery still disturbs in the Freudian sense since her confession takes place in the familiar space of the marital bedroom. When Babette admits to Jack that her affair went on “More of less on a continuing basis for some months,” Jack grasps at familiar, domestic banality in his response: “There’s some Jell-O with banana slices” (DeLillo 1986, p. 195). The effect of the confession of the motel-based affair on White Noise’s broader narrative is to trouble the borders of the home. Babette’s confession is the double of the Airborne Toxic Event, invading their space for a second time. Earlier in the novel, during loudspeaker announcements demanding that people “Abandon all domiciles, Now, now” (DeLillo 1986, p. 120), the Gladney family continues to sit ‘over sponge cake and canned peaches’ (DeLillo 1986, p. 119). Jack’s reference to dessert in the fridge following Babette’s confession is his own SIMUVAC, or ‘simulated evacuation,’ this time in an attempt to escape his wife’s confession for the relative safety and familiarity of their refrigerator’s contents. Like the members of the SIMUVAC squad the family encounters once they do eventually flee their home, Jack appears to ‘use the real event in order to rehearse the simulation’ (DeLillo 1986, p. 139). Jack’s gesture toward the prosaic ensures that a ‘kind of unintentional parody hovers over everything, a tactical simulation’ (Baudrillard 2000, p. 75). His response adheres to the perceived rules of the homelike, just as he earlier refuses to respond to the full-scale evacuation during the Airborne Toxic Event. In this instance, the domestic bed and bedroom are infected by the unhomelike, both the deed and its situation. This unhomelike invasion is, of course, by now paradoxically familiar to the narrative and to the Gladney household; both Jack and the reader experience Babette’s confession, as Freud’s theory anticipates, as already and repeatedly known.

The distinction between the familiar and the unfamiliar continues to be effaced in this extended narrative sequence between Jack and Babette. First, Babette introduces the unfamiliarity that resides in the semantically altered “we” (familiarly referencing Babette

Diana Jenkins 49 December 2005 with Jack, not Babette with her lover Willie Mink) – marking a circumstance in which 42 ‘the familiar can become uncanny and frightening’ (Freud 2001, p. 930)TPF FPT. The subtlety of this change in circumstances suggests a more sophisticated exploration of the frailty of domestic security than Sander’s more grandiose fears of Watergate and Vietnam in Amazons. The unfamiliarity is compounded when Jack characterises Babette and Mink’s behaviour as prescribed by the space his wife describes, asserting an unnerving familiarity with both the site and its consequences that emphasises the unfamiliar elements, being the third person and the adulterous deed:

“You entered a motel room, excited by its impersonality, the functionalism and bad taste of the furnishings. You walked barefoot on the fire-retardant carpet. Mr. Gray went around opening doors, looking for a full-length mirror. He watched you undress. You lay on the bed, embracing. Then he entered you” (DeLillo 1986, p. 194).

Here, Jack expresses knowledge, feelings, and experience in common with the other, and this re-enactment of his wife’s infidelity reconstructs the scene with what the reader experiences as certain accuracy. Jack’s verbal imitation of Babette’s infidelity is eerie, a rather dark example of the inner compulsion to repeat (Freud 2001, p. 943), and for the reader elicits an uncanny sense of sexual transgression in this archetypal postmodern space. The reader encounters Jack’s summation as accurate; it mirrors Babette’s adulterous world as well as the reader’s sense of it. Jack relives the action effected in the space as though it is entirely known and predictable.

The narrative chaos issuing from Mink’s motel room is not represented by Jack’s psychosexual knowledge, which leads him straight to the room in the role of enraged husband, nor even by Jack taking a gun and shooting Mink with it. On the contrary, these 43 literary outcomes are almost hackneyedTPF FPT. Jack’s act of violence, ‘performed in a stylized way’, is, to apply Jeremy Green’s general observation, ‘typical of a culture of imitation, repetition, and amnesia’ (Green 1999, p. 572). Indeed, ‘[t]hroughout the confrontation

42 TP PT Engles (1999) suggests the novel’s racial subtext registers marginalized, racialized others like Willie Mink and the Iranian newspaper deliveryman. 43 TP PT See Keesey (1993) and Osteen (2000), who suggest that violence has infected Jack like a virus. Both identify a different exchange between Jack and the airborne toxic event to the one I discuss earlier, and their comparison demonstrates some of the text’s even more embedded repetitions.

Diana Jenkins 50 December 2005 with Mink, Jack repeats his plan again and again: find Mink, shoot him three times, put the gun in his hand, steal the Dylar, drive the neighbors’ car back to their garage’ (Osteen 2000, p. 186). Instead, the site’s deviance from a fictional norm is first evinced by Mink’s responses to uttered phrases. When Jack says “Plunging aircraft,” Mink braces, and, ‘kick[ing] off his sandals, fold[s] himself over into the recommended crash position, head well forward, hands clasped behind his knees’ (DeLillo 1986, p. 309). The narrative then swerves away from the formulaic avengement of Jack’s cuckolding when Mink shoots him back, following Jack’s absurd attempt to make Mink’s wounds appear self-inflicted by placing the gun in his hand.

The unfamiliar element introduced to this familiar motel room is not Jack; he has already established his uncanny familiarity with the site of his wife’s adultery. Rather, it is the exhaustion of the trope that marks the motel room’s strangeness here. Emptying it of all meaning, Jack and Mink’s mutual retreat into a kind of theatre sports improvisation is the unfamiliar ingredient that marks the scene as strange. Mink, for one, resembles the straitjacketed character in Act 2 of DeLillo’s 1987 play The Day Room, channelling the voices of TV (Cowart 2003; Moses 1991; Osteen 2000). As Osteen observes, ‘[w]hat’s worse, he can no longer distinguish signifier from signified: hence, when Jack says “hail of bullets,” Mink ducks in terror’ (Osteen 2000, p. 187). The strangeness of Mink’s responses demonstrates the effect of alterations to the hotel/motel room’s function as the site of adultery. The aspect of unfamiliarity mushrooms within the room, temporally derailing both the narrative and the characters from all logical action and dialogue. Such is the resultant refunctioning of the site that some critics completely overlook the adultery narrative preceding this confrontation. In Albert Mobilio’s review of the novel, a detailed summary of the narrative that leads Jack to the showdown with Mink completely erases Babette’s infidelity, even suggesting Babette simply ‘volunteered to test Dylar’ (Mobilio 1998, pp. 372-3) when the situation is undoubtedly a far seamier ‘capitalist transaction’ (DeLillo 1986, p. 194) of the exchange of goods for services rendered.

The narrative’s devolution into farce further evinces the narrative derailment brought about by the collapse of the motel room’s function. Jack drives them both to a clinic filled with German nuns, in front of whom Jack puts on a display of infantilism,

Diana Jenkins 51 December 2005 ‘engag[ing] in [the] childlike dialogue’ of his beginner’s German, counting to ten and naming ‘colors, items of clothing, parts of the body’ (DeLillo 1986, p. 317). The core of familiarity established by the motel haemorrhages; having changed the motel’s function, the narrative is freed of conventional resolution, and proceeds beyond the room without logic or reason. This penultimate chapter of the novel ends with Jack conducting a surreal conversation with Sister Hermann Marie that secures the absurdity of this episode once and for all (DeLillo 1986, p. 318; Osteen 2000, p. 188).

The clinic extends Mink’s motel room, losing its own familiar function via its replication, and continues a narrative, by now erratic and almost nonsensical, that veers from convention the moment Jack first arrives at the Roadway Motel. Jack knows the motel at the deepest level, and yet unfamiliarity confronts him from the outset and starts the loss of narrative purpose in motion. An inversion of Oedipa’s experience of seeing her own face in the sign at Echo Courts in The Crying of Lot 49, Jack sees something unfamiliar instead: a sign on the motel office’s door that reads NU MISH BOOT ZUP KO (DeLillo 1986, p. 305). Gibberish, as Jack acknowledges. This apparently meaningless notice signposts the commencement of the random narrative activity that issues from Jack’s a priori encounter with the scene of his wife’s adultery. The change in the motel room’s meaning activates a chain reaction throughout the remainder of the chapter that devolves the purpose of both the clinic and the nuns’ religious order.

The spatial conflation of the motel room and the hospital room is repeated in DeLillo’s next published text, The Day Room (1987), a black stage comedy that develops White Noise’s suggestion that these sites combine powerfully, illustrating a spatial fickleness that disables the narrative’s sense-making imperative. Although breaking with the specific spatial repetitions of White Noise and The Day Room, DeLillo’s next novel, Libra (1988), the ambitious and controversial fictionalisation of the Kennedy assassination, helps chart DeLillo’s continuing deployment of the double. As suggested by Lentricchia, Libra concerns:

…being trapped in a system whose determinative power is grippingly registered by DeLillo’s double narrative of an amorphous existence haphazardly stumbling into the future where a plot awaits to confer upon it the identity of a role fraught with form and purpose (Lentricchia 1999(b), p. 202).

Diana Jenkins 52 December 2005 Libra also ‘encapsulates Oswald’s alienation’ by ‘metaphorically translat[ing] his social confusion into a spatial dimension’ (Willman 1999, p. 628), a relation that continues in DeLillo’s next novel, Mao II (1991), specifically via adultery and the space of the hotel/motel in his next experiment with the combination. Mao II is narrated in the third person, there is no confession of guilt, and its more ensemble presentation of characters means the aspect of transgression appears shared and, in fact, diluted. Only Karen, the kookily ethereal Moonie-escapee, is married, although she and Scott, Bill Gray’s self- appointed assistant, are simultaneously, albeit non-exclusively, de facto. This is also the first time that DeLillo conflates the hotel/motel room and adultery in order to present them as a set piece the narrative resists.

Like Amazons and White Noise before it, Mao II inverts the Freudian and Pynchonesque model of uncanniness when Scott first encounters Karen. Scott collects Karen from the street as if she were a stray animal, and as they start out toward author Bill Gray’s secret- hideaway home, the narrative moves the two strangers predictably from a car journey across Iowa and Illinois to mid-Ohio and their first motel stay. The novel uses the hysteron-proteron temporality of reversal to introduce the plot point of Scott and Karen’s meeting. DeLillo constructs the narrative so that their series of motel stays is told retrospectively; the reader knows by the time Scott relays the details of this journey that he and Karen are a couple. This latterÆformer sequence creates an uncanniness manipulated by the author: ‘They went back to the room. The time was still not right’ (DeLillo 1992, p. 82). Here Ballard’s contention that sex is always a model for something else is demonstrated by the importance of narrative temporality: time is the determining factor in the union between Karen and Scott, not the sexual act itself. This particular time in the narrative has already passed, the reader is beyond it, and the effect of the unchronological sequence recalls not just the latter detail, formerly told, but other occasions elsewhere – other hotel/motel texts, in other words. The time in these terms is very right indeed – it is the familiar occasion of the hotel/motel narrative – and it is the novel’s unfamiliar delay of consummation that unsettles. In this case, the motel room’s function is temporally suspended rather than reassigned, until the arrival of the unconsummated couple at Bill Gray’s house.

Diana Jenkins 53 December 2005 Beyond the temporal inversion, the suspension of the motel room’s function at this stage is key to the developing sense of the uncanny. Scott imagines Karen observing that ‘[t]he same room repeats itself in a crosscountry chain,’ and he anticipates, as if he were she, that ‘he’s going to make me stop at every one’ (DeLillo 1992, p. 81). The pair returns to the room after ‘a real dinner in a restaurant with tasseled menus and a footbridge to the main room’ (DeLillo 1992, p. 82), the restaurant reproducing spatial imagery redolent of first date cliché. When no sex transpires with this married woman in their motel room setting, Scott ‘wonder[s] if he [is] doing something wrong’ (DeLillo 1992, p. 82). It is not coincidental that even Scott thinks he should be having motel room sex with Karen – the text’s use of the motel room space encourages both reader and character to apprehend the expectation of the hyper-represented event. What goes awry is that the deed does not take place. Scott’s recognition of the narrative of sexually entwined strangers in a motel room helps ensure the ensuing surprise when the sexual entanglement fails to materialise. Scott follows his hotel/motel room cues. He even names the different types of sex suitable to his context, such as the heavily ironic ‘sex of compassionate rescue’ and ‘sex of self- effacement’ (DeLillo 1992, p. 82), recalling Flaubert’s derisive attitude toward ‘that lyrical legion of adulteresses’ of Emma Bovary’s voracious reading (Flaubert 1957, p. 175, pp. 47-51). Like Emma’s fantasies of romantic fulfilment, so established is Scott’s expectation that sex will occur in the hotel/motel space that he experiences its absence as an occasion of doubt and uncertainty about his actions within it.

The room’s failure to deliver on Scott’s self-conscious, expectant familiarity with the site results in psychosexual disturbance and self-parody. That Scott can follow cues, on the other hand, and characterise his entitlement thus, reinforces the text’s debt to resemblance and the Freudian compulsion to repeat. Whilst Scott patiently bides his time, he also implies a specific knowledge of other sites: other motel room narratives where such sex has taken place. Scott’s familiarity with the site’s sexual character hints at the operation of the absurd in Amazons, White Noise, and The Day Room, where, in Act Two, Manville says “Tell me what’s sexy,” and Lynette declares, “Motels” (DeLillo 1989, p. 82). They are in the play’s nominal motel room at the time, and these two strangers then engage in a parody of pornographic dialogue that suggests the inevitable sexual intercourse that Scott anticipates from his motel room.

Diana Jenkins 54 December 2005 Freud talks about the compulsion to repeat as an ordering principle, and Scott’s self- doubt indicates the narrative’s manipulation of this regulation. It is Scott’s perception of the order of events that creates the mental disorder of his concern, and that of the reader’s expectation, when the sexual intercourse does not follow. Order is further removed from the concept of repetition when such obedience is discussed in terms of purity, which is a ‘a vision of order – that is, of a situation in which each thing is in its rightful place and nowhere else’ (Bauman 1997, p. 6). Scott and Karen’s situation in the motel is disorderly in both senses: they are ‘somewhere’ else, and Scott’s thinking about their spatial circumstances is explicitly eroticised and impure.

If, as in this case, a site is disturbing to them, characters inevitably react to that disturbance in a certain number of ways; character behaviour within a certain fictional site can function to signpost the peculiarity of that site. In Mao II, although Karen and Scott do ultimately sexually unite, the narrative casts their coupling in an uneasy light via the motel room’s refusal to support the expected scene of their adulterous consummation. Karen’s sexual evasiveness in the motel is a response to her familiarity with identical rooms. Emphasising its repetitive function beyond sexual encounters, the motel room transports her to earlier scenes of being held against her will for alternate programming and deprogramming, the former by the Moonies and the latter by wildly inept family members. The effect on the narrative of Karen’s reaction to the motel is the suspension of expectation. Despite the scene being well and truly set, it takes their retreat to an unfamiliar space that doesn’t conjure memories of her Moonie husband for Karen to engage sexually with Scott.

Scott and Karen’s failed motel narrative propels them to the (importantly unhomelike) home of reclusive author Bill Gray, where they remain, two uninvited strangers 44 constructing a homelike space in someone else’s homeTPF FPT. ‘Uncanny,’ insofar as Freud tells us, is the name ‘for everything that ought to have remained…secret and hidden but has come to light’ (Freud 2001, p. 933). In Mao II, Karen’s rejection of the motel as the

44 TP PT See Simmons (1999) in relation to critics including Keesey interpreting Bill Gray’s views as if they were DeLillo’s, and for an explanation of the moderate degree to which DeLillo actually draws a correlation between the writer and the terrorist in Mao II.

Diana Jenkins 55 December 2005 appropriate scene for adulterous transgression causes a collision of spatial norms within the narrative. Bill would have remained ‘secret and hidden’ but for the subsequent invasion of his idiosyncratic version of the homelike by the unhomelike. Bill’s reclusive, literal ‘hide-away’ is transformed, and by no small measure destroyed, first by Scott’s unannounced arrival and subsequent ensconcing, and second by his collection of and return with Karen. When Karen does consummate her relationship with Scott, and later Bill himself, the text further disrupts the fledgling romance by aligning Karen’s enamour not with Scott but with Bill’s novels, since it is only after she reads Bill’s novels that ‘she move[s] from the old sofa into Scott’s bed and it [feels] to him as though she’[s] been there always’ (DeLillo 1992, p. 84).

Scott is effectively excluded from the beginning of his own relationship, but the unfamiliar element – Bill’s novels – makes possible the intimacy and comfort connoted by his feeling that Karen has ‘been there always.’ Bill’s secret hideaway is a home away from home for both Scott and Karen, replacing the hotel/motel room’s ostensible function; the unfamiliarity of Bill’s enables them to claim an intimacy and domestic status within it. In Scott and Karen’s case, their unfamiliarity, both to each other and the ‘un-bedrooms’ they share in motels and Bill’s house, actively constitutes the later familiarity they share. However, the suspension of the motel room’s function as the site of adulterous transgression has a quietly catastrophic effect on the rest of the narrative. Its function is reassigned to Bill’s house, which duly becomes the scene of Scott and Karen’s affair, but the ordering aspect of the compulsion to repeat fails to transfer with the doubling impulse. The compulsion to repeat sees Karen conduct a simultaneous affair with Bill, but the absence of order, symbolically represented by Bill’s prolific production of an unwieldy manuscript, implodes their household. Bill leaves, apparently unable to reconcile himself to the homelike tendencies his retreat starts to display. The remainder of the novel predominantly concerns reactions to his leaving by others, on the one hand, and where he goes, on the other, which is toward a lonely death near the novel’s end. Changes to the motel room’s function in Mao II succeed in further deregulating its narrative symbolism, extending meaning and effect so as to render Bill’s home and the rest of the novel a virtual house of cards. Freud recognises the need to ‘proceed beyond the equation “uncanny” = “unfamiliar”’ (Freud 2001, p. 931), and Mao II is something of

Diana Jenkins 56 December 2005 a watershed in DeLillo’s development of the uncanny hotel/motel room in his fiction for the precise reason that it consolidates his earlier narratives’ interrogation of such equations.

Mao II marks the start of the author’s movement beyond representations of the double that seem most compatible with Freud’s identification of the operation of the uncanny, and their effect on the reader, toward an employment of doubling that is increasingly related to the double of mass production. In fact, ‘mass’ is a key word in Mao II, referring ‘both to the prevalence of crowds and to the mass-produced images that consume and are consumed by them’ (Osteen 1999, p. 646). The reader’s exposure to these earlier representations of the uncanny makes visible the slippage in DeLillo’s texts between these two types of doubling. The hotel/motel allows greater access to the sexual and spatial nuances of the postmodern double of compulsive reproduction. Mao II separates the double from the notion of uncanny familiarity, and attaches it to the concept of difference, a transfer visible in the novel’s resistance to considering ‘writing and photography as contrasting or complementary modes of representation and authorship’ (Osteen 1999, p. 645). The novel includes photos of real events, and while ‘real,’ the inclusion of these images allows Mao II to expose ‘the paradox of photography: its mimetic quality is always accompanied by a realisation of its artificiality (Osteen 1999, p. 645), revealing the degree to which the photographic image reflects the unhomelike nature of the hotel/motel room.

The paradox of the image in Mao II continues into DeLillo’s next novel, Underworld (1997), considered by many to be his masterpiece and which is in many ways the culmination of the twelve texts that precede it. Hotel/motels are an abiding spatial model of sexual intrigue in DeLillo’s earlier novels, and they continue to be so in Underworld. One hotel room early in the novel is particularly Freudian in its debt to the uncanny and the compulsion to repeat, made so in part by its phantasmic nature and because it is prefigured by the episode in White Noise, when Jack Gladney so accurately conjures the motel room scene of his wife’s adultery. The episode also emphasises the aspect of replacement that splinters the uncanny double and suggests a spatial resemblance that produces narrative and semantic renewal. In one of the first direct encounters the reader

Diana Jenkins 57 December 2005 has with Marian Shay, who is married to the novel’s protagonist, Nick Shay, she fantasises about meeting her husband’s friend and colleague, Brian Glassic, in a hotel room for sex. Nick Shay is the sometime first person narrator of Underworld; at other times, this novel of multiple narrative strands reverts to third person. Relayed in the third person, then, Marian and Brian meet for lunch in the dining room of an old hotel, and it is after this meal Marian’s mind turns to the possibility of adultery:

When they were finished they walked up a stairway to the lobby and in her mind she kept ascending to a shadowed room at the end of a long empty hall and saw herself folding down the bedspread and standing above the cool sheets waiting for a knock at the door (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 165).

Here, what Marian imagines is familiar in two apparently contradictory ways. She imagines a domestic scene in the act of turning down the sheets, and she makes the hyper-typical reference to the shadowed room at the end of a long, empty hallway; every floor of every hotel in America, in other words – the all-too-familiar, popular celluloid scene of the American affair. The knock at the door is the unfamiliar element that produces a point of tension – an unfamiliarity emphasised by Brian’s absence from Marian’s fantasy. Marian sees the space, imagines the room, but fails to imagine Brian. The knock on the door makes certain that this space is unstable, since it allows for multiple fantasies of multiple entrances of multiple men, into what is effectively the same hotel room. The familiar, established site of the adulterous fantasy and the unfamiliar, shifting entrant combine to render Marian’s phantasmic encounter uncanny, in both the ‘double’ and the ‘infinitely reproducible’ sense. In this regard, Marian’s waking dream recalls Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877), and the dream the eponymous Anna has ‘almost every night’:

She dreamt that both at once were her husbands, and lavished their caresses on her. Alexis Alexandrovich wept, kissing her hands, saying: ‘How beautiful it is now!’ and Alexis Vronsky was there too, and he also was her husband (Tolstoy 1980, p. 149).

Where Anna Karenina’s dream is gothic in origin, ‘weigh[ing] on her like a nightmare’ so that ‘she woke from it filled with horror’ (Tolstoy 1980, p. 149), Marian’s fantasy resonates because it transforms the unfamiliar un-bedroom into the ultra-familiar every-

Diana Jenkins 58 December 2005 bedroom, and matches the reader’s experience of postmodernity, in which hyperreality precedes reality. Since the hotel hallway Marian imagines is any hallway in any hotel, and the knock at the door is any man, anywhere, there is nothing in this scene that cannot be repeated nor replaced, no detail that would or could not be present in another hotel scene later in the text. Indeed, when other hotel/motel rooms are used later in the narrative, their resemblance to Marian’s imagined space appears compulsive and repetitious. Underworld extends Frow’s argument about the earlier White Noise: that is, DeLillo’s novels belie an obsession with the construction of typicality (Frow 1999, p. 177). This textual obsession invokes a Freudian recognition of the compulsion to repeat; Freud’s epistemology is embedded in Frow’s term.

Freud’s suggestion that the ‘invention of doubling …has its counterpart in the language of dreams’ (Freud 2001, p. 940) emphasises the self-cancelling paradox of mirrored reflection, and reveals the narrative potency of Marian’s hotel room fantasy (a waking dream) in Underworld (Dallenbach 1989; Hume 1984). The space performs as the fantasy double of an actual hotel/motel room. The text highlights the replacement aspect of the imagined sexual site, since it is not Marian who ultimately experiences adultery in a hotel/motel room. The point of expected repetition is disrupted by Marian’s absence. It is not Marian who ‘folds down the bedspread,’ and there is a crucial shift from the point of repetition to that of replication. Marian is dispensable to the fulfilment of the fantasy precisely because of the site and the scene’s inherent and sexual reproducibility; she is sexually replaceable. It is Donna, a delegate at a swinger convention who has a one-off affair with Marian’s husband, who ‘[takes] off her jeans…and [sits] on the bed’ (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 293) in Nick’s hotel room. Donna comes to possess ‘knowledge, feelings, and experience in common with the other’ (Freud 2001, p. 940), in this case Marian herself. The sexual confusion of these two women is realised in the narrative through the use of space, Donna’s encounter with Marian’s husband mocking Marian’s fantasy by fulfilling it in her absence. Although Marian’s fantasy in Underworld imagines a charged wait in a hotel room for her husband’s colleague Brian, the space will not deliver; the narrative diverges from that course and Brian and Marian are never seen in a hotel room together. The fantasy hotel room dislodges the expectation (both the reader’s and Marian’s) that the scene will be repeated in Marian’s real.

Diana Jenkins 59 December 2005 When Nick, a waste-analyst who inspects waste and landfills around the globe, and whose brother Matt works at a nuclear facility, returns home from the business trip during which he has sex with Donna, he confesses the transgression to Marian whilst she is reading in bed. As with Jack in White Noise, Marian navigates the ostensibly secure space of their marital bedroom by relying on its internal codes of excess order when her homelike space is threatened. Marian responds to her husband’s confession of adultery by attempting to return to the marital familiar: she turns a page of the book she is habitually reading in bed. The attempt fails; the confession contaminates their home with the unhomelike details of Nick’s infidelity, just as Babette’s bedroom confession in White Noise becomes Jack’s second toxic event. Contamination is a major theme both in White Noise and Underworld, as well as an enduring presence across DeLillo’s novels, and lends itself particularly well to his adultery narratives due to their related suggestion of 45 sexual corruptionTPF FPT. In these adultery sub-narratives of White Noise and Underworld, contamination threatens the couple’s married security at the level of confession. In both cases, the narrative achieves a spatially realised sexual rupture, first harnessing and then redeploying the established narrative of hotel/motel adultery via its confession in the home. The hotel/motel space has a generative effect, whereby the disturbance moves from the space of the transgression (the hotel/motel room) to the space of the confession (the bedroom). This spatial trafficking is the case partially because the domestic bed is homelike. Freud insists that the category of the homelike is ambiguous, being both ‘familiar and agreeable,’ as well as ‘what is concealed and kept out of sight’ (Freud 2001, p. 933).

45 TP PT In White Noise, aside from connections already noted, the Airborne Toxic Event exposes Jack Gladney to deadly radiation and results in altered sunsets in their town of Blacksmith at novel’s end. The concept of contamination in Underworld is represented variously but certainly in relation to the proliferation of garbage. See Kavadlo (2004), who lists some of the novel’s explicit waste metaphors, and identifies intermittent allusions to Pynchon’s WASTE conspiracy in The Crying of Lot 49. Also see Hantke’s (1998) review of Underworld, which negatively suggests the garbage metaphor is a recyling of DeLillo’s ideas. Given the high visibility of the phenomenon of the double in DeLillo’s work across themes and literary allusions much more varied than refuse, I believe this complex ‘recycling’ is absolutely self-conscious on the part of the author. In addition to White Noise, Underworld, and the information-contamination of Running Dog, Libra concerns the cultural contamination of American intelligence networks and its diabolical consequences in the assassination of President Kennedy. The protagonist of DeLillo’s latest novel, 2003’s Cosmopolis, is Eric Packer, a man who is obsessive-compulsive about personal hygiene despite his apparently rampant sexual promiscuity.

Diana Jenkins 60 December 2005 The home is not secure, overcome by Freud’s revelation of ambiguity at its spatial, psychosexual core: that is, the adult bedroom. DeLillo transforms the space into one that is constituent of the unknown (in the sense that it is the site of sexual concealment), rendering the familiar alien and developing the homelike ‘in the direction of ambivalence, until finally it coincides with its opposite, unheimlich’ (Freud 2001, p. 935). This same collision of types is theorised by Foucault’s essay on heterotopias. Foucault suggests this aspect of concealment is also found in ‘American motel rooms where a man goes with his car and his mistress and where illicit sex is both absolutely sheltered and absolutely hidden, kept isolated without however being allowed out in the open’ (Foucault 1986, pp. 26-7). Foucault’s example reveals the degree to which the unhomelike rented room resembles Freud’s homelike space. Thus the Gladney bedroom in White Noise and the Shay bedroom in Underworld both reflect the rented room of the affair, their likeness effacing the definition of opposites. Although Underworld’s Marian is the legitimate Other, it is Donna, with whom Nick has an uncharacteristically intimate experience, who acts out the hotel room adultery earlier imagined by Marian. Freud suggests that:

…there is a doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self. And finally there is the constant recurrence of the same thing – the repetition of the same features or character-traits or vicissitudes, of the same crimes (Freud 2001, p. 940).

These notions of doubling, dividing and repeating are fundamental; they are critical to analysing the hotel/motel room as a site of adultery within DeLillo’s texts. DeLillo’s experimentation with these concepts is significant precisely because the recurrence of the same space, in this case the hotel/motel room, paradoxically generates alternative narrative outcomes. These changes expose the inescapable presence of replacement, or self-cancellation, in the aspect of reproducibility, on which such concepts fundamentally rely. The room’s meaning in the narrative adulterates because there is no stability in its function. The double incubates these slippages, a fact Donna’s experience potently reinforces because she shares it with Marian’s own husband Nick, creating a sexual doubling, division and interchange between Marian and herself.

Diana Jenkins 61 December 2005 Donna shares a marital intimacy with Nick from which she, the unfamiliar and unlawful, should be excluded. The temporal reversal of the mistress with the wife is unsettling. Donna mirrors the adulterous transgression Marian experiences as a dream state, dislocating the reader (Hume 1984). Marian’s later affair with Brian leads to the possibility that she, the homelike wife, is acting out, indeed repeating, Donna’s sexual deed in an attempt to reinscribe herself into the space of her erasure. Marian’s behaviour, then, resembles Donna’s; the illegitimate product of the identical space is capable not only of determining narrative outcomes, but of wreaking havoc with its operational rules. The supposed narrative order emitting from the double is compromised, and the ‘lethal absorption in place’ is nowhere clearer than ‘in the representation of such quasi-domestic environments’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 46) as the hotel/motel room.

Bauman recalls Freud when surmising that ‘[t]hose discontents which were the trademark of modernity arose from the “excess of order” and its inseparable companion – the dearth of freedom’ (Bauman 1997, p. 2), and these notions may be applied to narrative construction. If security ‘call[s] for the sacrifice of freedom; first and foremost, the individual’s freedom to seek pleasure’ (Bauman 1997, p.2), then the unsafety of the hotel/motel room helps protect and advance the freedom and lawlessness of narrative. In this regard it is unsurprising that the site has proven so popular in fiction generally and in DeLillo’s fiction specifically. Despite its character of compulsive resemblance, there is an aspect of reproductivity in the hotel/motel room’s potential for chaos in DeLillo’s narratives. In the conventional literary contamination of an order like marriage, the loss of narrative security, modelled on the loss of sexual security, is balanced by an affirmation of narrative renewal and possibility.

The notion of an identical site producing difference underscores the point that the generic hotel/motel room has been and continues to be theorised differently. The aspect that finds itself repeated in theory around the repetitious site is the doubling aspect that Freud identifies in his work on the uncanny, and there have been notable additions to ways of reading this phenomenon of replication since Freud’s contribution in 1919. Walter Benjamin’s famous study, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), recalls both the Freudian uncanniness of the double and the photographic paradox

Diana Jenkins 62 December 2005 of Mao II when he refers to ‘the estrangement felt before one’s own image in the mirror’ (Benjamin 2001, pp. 1176-7). Benjamin’s focus is not the uncanny aspect of this moment, but the apprehension of one’s reflected, as in reproduced, image. Benjamin’s understanding of reproduction speaks persuasively to DeLillo’s fictional representations, especially in his demonstration ‘that reproduction absorbs the process of production, changes its goals, and alters the status of the product and the producer’ (Baudrillard 2000, p. 55).

Reproduction of the hotel/motel room in DeLillo’s adultery narratives is evinced not only by the site itself, undoubtedly premised on replication, but also by both character and reader hyper-awareness of the contradictory aspects of repetition and replacement inherent in the expectation of hotel/motel guest behaviour. This awareness specifically applies to the expectation of adulterous sex by the reader of Amazons and by Scott in Mao II. These narratives rely on the intuitive apprehension of the site as one of established and therefore potential sexual transgression. Benjamin also examines the effect of reproduction on the aura of the work of art. Whilst ‘aura’ is a much-debated quality in modernist and postmodernist theory, Benjamin claims that aura has withered in the age of mechanical reproduction (Benjamin 2001, p. 1169). According to his thinking, space and ‘the masses’ corrupt aura, via a contemporary desire ‘to bring things “closer” spatially and humanly’ (Benjamin 2001, pp. 1170-1).TP ThePT sense in which this emphasis on human proximity can be read as sexual in nature is useful to reading DeLillo’s adultery narratives. The urge toward likeness and reproduction that Baudrillard identifies also expresses the motivation of sexual desire.

Spatial and reproductive elements reverberate along the mazing corridors of DeLillo’s fiction. Indeed, DeLillo’s texts appear encoded with critical responses to a variety of intellectual treatise, including Benjamin’s. The 1992 interview between DeLillo and Brigitte Desalm in the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger underscores the extent to which the author engages the processes of replacement, when he ‘wonders out loud whether the dynamics [Benjamin describes] have been superseded’ (Cowart 2003, p. 101):

Diana Jenkins 63 December 2005 “Today, I believe, we are at a point where reality itself is being consumed used up, and the aura is all we are left with…and reality is disappearing in a curious way…We have become unable to grasp something unmediated” (Desalm 1992).

The publication date of the Desalm interview points to DeLillo’s continuing interest in Benjamin’s ideas, coming seven years after the publication of White Noise. This novel arguably offers DeLillo’s best illustration of the object’s aura in the ‘The Most Photographed Barn in America.’ For Lentricchia, the real subject of this scene is the excitement of ‘the electronic medium of representation as the active context of 46 contemporary existence in America’ (Lentricchia 1999b, p. 195)TPF FPT. In White Noise and elsewhere in DeLillo’s fiction, this excitement registers the dominance of aura, rather than the decline Benjamin foretold, by repeatedly ‘retheoriz[ing] “aura” to explore the 47 vexed relationship between reality and simulacra’ (Nel 2001, p. 5)TPF FPT. In DeLillo’s third novel, Great Jones Street (1973), the rock star protagonist, Bucky Wunderlick, retreats from public life to ‘remove himself from the circulation of commodities to conjure up more authentic forms of value’ (Osteen 2000, p. 46). Instead, his withdrawal, like Bill Gray’s nearly twenty years later in Mao II, leaves a void that is filled by others. Anticipating Bill Gray, Bucky’s aura is augmented rather than diminished as his celebrity ‘become[s] a thing apart,’ and he ‘continues to reproduce and circulate in the form of simulacra’ (Osteen 2000, p. 48). Bucky becomes like the talk-show host Delfina in Valparaiso (1999), “liv[ing] in a box in a state of endless replication” (Osteen 2000, p. 48; DeLillo 1999(c), p. 94).

These episodes in Great Jones Street, White Noise, Mao II, and Valparaiso are among those that suggest DeLillo’s fiction makes a considered response to Benjamin’s theory, instead of uncritically absorbing Benjamin’s withered aura. Where Benjamin states that ‘[e]ven the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element; its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be’

46 TP PT In connection with the Most Photographed Barn in America, see Zizek’s (2002) discussion of the “thing itself.” 47 TP PT Lentricchia and Duvall both discuss Murray Jay Siskind’s use of the word ‘aura’ in the Viking Critical Edition of White Noise (1998).

Diana Jenkins 64 December 2005 (Benjamin 2001, p. 1168), DeLillo’s work repeatedly extends the limits of both time and space, and generates aura anew. These texts demonstrate, contrary to Benjamin, that ‘aura can exist apart from any thing itself – reproductions can have “aura,” too’ (Nel 2001, p. 5). The hotel/motel room’s fundamental quality of repetition does not dilute its narrative aura. Instead, DeLillo’s adultery narratives encourage the idea that familiarity through repetition ushers in the unknown, or what might also be called the transgressive replacement. As Roger Janney, Karen’s bewildered father, thinks to himself whilst watching his daughter’s mass Moonie wedding in Mao II, ‘They take a time-honored event and repeat it, repeat it, repeat it until something new enters the world’ (DeLillo 1992, p. 4). Benjamin concedes this possibility when he notes that ‘reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself’ (Benjamin 2001, p. 1169). This quality of extension, with which the copy is imbued, is represented by DeLillo’s hyper-realised hotel/motel room, where his ‘retheorized, postmodern sense of “aura” allows for further destabilization’ (Nel 2001, p. 6) of narrative expectation. As Nel argues, ‘[b]ecause aura can exist in reproductions, DeLillo can create tension between levels of “authentic” and “inauthentic” images’ (Nel 2001, p. 6). This tension in DeLillo’s fiction cultivates reproductive space as a site of narrative transgression and sexual chaos.

The recurrence of the hotel/motel room explores compulsive repetition in a way that, emphasising the aspect of replacement in reproducibility, is semantically generative and reproductive rather than restrictive or itself repetitive. Further, Frow’s reading of White Noise formally suggests DeLillo rejects the existence of a Romantically ‘ideal’ pristine order of meaning. The abundance of secondary representations denies the priority of a preceding, virgin ‘type’ (Frow 1999, p. 177), but DeLillo still uses the idea of such an order. The concept of the home proliferates rather than contracts through the aura of its unhomelike image in the hotel/motel. In their collision of narrative possibilities, these spaces become infinite and inseparable.

DeLillo incorporates various models for the behaviour of these kinds of spaces, models that are significantly explicated when referred through key theorists of space and the double, including Freud, Benjamin, Foucault, and Baudrillard. Their theories offer a

Diana Jenkins 65 December 2005 progressive anatomy of the hotel/motel space in DeLillo’s fiction. Freud’s etymological focus on the ‘home’ relates to Benjamin’s sense of the diminished aura of the lost original. Foucault’s theory of heterotopias is also concerned with the home and its mirror image, and Baudrillard develops this emphasis on the double through the specific lens of reproduction, offering an enabling view consonant with DeLillo’s (Cowart 2003; Desalm 1992; Nel 2001).

Foucault’s belief that the American motel room is the ‘absolutely hidden’ space of ‘illicit sex’ (Foucault 1986, pp. 26-7) recalls the ambiguity of the Freudian ‘homelike’ space, and finds its fictional equivalent in Americana, in which David Bell senses that ‘Men hold this motel firmly in their hearts’ (DeLillo 1990, p. 257). The pervasive influence of serial hotel/motel space, given its presence in novels across the three and a half decades of DeLillo’s oeuvre, suggests the author privileges both the product and its changed status, a radicalisation to which Benjamin and Baudrillard in particular allude. The hotel/motel’s allure is its familiar strangeness, and this paradox is key not only to understanding the spatial complexion of the site, but also to reading how that complexion translates theoretically in the text. The reason why the encounter with the hotel/motel room is first and foremost always familiar to both the reader and the character is that this site is the ultimate reflection or image of origin; the unhomelike contains the home in its etymology.

Foucault’s emphasis on the double makes his essay applicable to DeLillo’s fiction, and links him with Freud and Benjamin. Repeatedly referencing the functionality of these spaces, ‘Of Other Spaces’ is a significant means of reading DeLillo’s hotel/motel since it underscores time and again the capacity of such sites to generate change. Cleo’s hotel rooms in Amazons, for example, appear engineered as heterotopic sketches when approached from Foucault’s definition of heterotopias:

…closed or semi-closed sites of rest – the house, the bedroom, the bed [–]… have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror or reflect. These spaces, as it were, which are linked with all the others…contradict all the other sites (Foucault 1986, p. 24).

Diana Jenkins 66 December 2005 Cleo’s ‘site of rest’ is predominantly the un-bedroom of the hotel room, and her sexual activity within this site inverts ‘the set of relations’ belonging to the bedroom, so that the bedroom becomes the reflection. Foucault’s conceptualisation of heterotopias demonstrates that beyond their Freudian uncanniness, DeLillo’s evocations of the hotel/motel room are positively endowed with the capacity for narrative change, in spite and precisely because of its unsettling and fundamental nature of resemblance. According to Foucault, the functionality of this heterotopia is divisible and, therefore, in relation to reading the meaning of this space in DeLillo’s texts, narratologically unfixed:

Either their role is to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory…Or else…their role is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled (Foucault 1986, p. 27).

The ‘meticulous’ sameness of the room’s appearance contributes to the ‘illusion’ of real space exposed by DeLillo’s fiction. The resulting narrative unreliability appeals to Foucault’s forecast of ‘heterotopias of deviation’ (Foucault 1986, p. 25) that anticipates a space ‘in which individuals whose behaviour is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed’ (Foucault 1986, p. 25). With the hotel/motel room, DeLillo places individuals in a space whose norm is intrinsically deviant. Rather than offering an orderly shelter to individuals who were deviant in the external, prior place toward which Foucault gestures, this inversion corrupts the behaviour of inhabitants at the point of entry. Both a ‘meticulous’ space and a ‘space of illusion,’ DeLillo’s hotel/motel space actively ‘jumbles’ the character, in part by removing Foucault’s notion of ‘partitioning’ altogether. The narrative affectivity of the site in DeLillo’s texts relies on the dissolution of the ‘Either/Or’ dichotomy this section of Foucault’s essay postulates. The unstable, contradictory behaviour within the hotel/motel room’s interior is its fictive norm, insofar as the site is popularised as the scene of various sexual transgressions. Where Foucault and DeLillo coincide is within the shifting coordinates of the origin of disturbance, a space that recognises both the familiar site and the character behaviour within it as capable of sexual corruption.

Diana Jenkins 67 December 2005 When considered in terms of such theories of space and reproduction, the hotel/motel room aggressively asserts its sexualising influence on DeLillo’s texts, engendering the psychosexual disruption created by the (reproducible) double. This level of influence emitting from an imitative space emphasises the degree to which the narrative expands the conception of space to include the simulacra, in many ways the logical theoretical product of the kinds of self-reflexive thinking already discussed here.

Baudrillard celebrates rather than mourns reproductive chaos, and the hotel/motel site’s signification in the text resists even its own name, as the home away from home. As with Cleo’s model of the homelike hotel in Amazons, and Bill Gray’s unhomelike home in Mao II, ‘the question of signs and their rational destinations, their “real” and their “imaginary”, their repression, reversal, the illusions they form of what they silence or of their parallel significations, is completely effaced’ (Baudrillard 2000, pp. 57-8). Baudrillard recalls Nietzsche’s exhortation ‘[d]own with all hypotheses that have allowed belief in a real world’ (Baudrillard 2000, p. 61), and DeLillo’s hotel/motel room promulgates a similar rage against belief in conventional limits, which do not exist in narratives driven by deviant space. The site’s status is transformative, its ‘meticulous reduplication’ (Baudrillard 2000, p. 111) of the real home assisting the narrative’s propulsion toward an unknown end:

…the real becomes volatile, it becomes the allegory of death, but it also draws strength from its own destruction, becoming the real for its own sake, a fetishism of the lost object which is no longer the object of representation, but the ecstasy of denegation and its own ritual extermination: the hyperreal (Baudrillard 2000, pp. 71-2).

This ‘fetishism of the lost object’ of the home is represented as the ‘hyperreal’ hotel/motel room in DeLillo’s work, and helps define the individual and the individual’s behaviour rather than the other way around. During Americana, David Bell muses that ‘There is a motel in the heart of every man’ (DeLillo 1990, p. 257), as though the motel has an a priori relation to the individual as fundamental as that to the mother. Frow argues that ‘[t]he complexity and intricacy of the type – whether it is a character, a scene, or a landscape – is made possible by the constant repetition of its features’ (Frow 1999, p.

Diana Jenkins 68 December 2005 179), and David Bell describes this essential characteristic of repetition in the following way:

Postcards of itself at the desk. One hundred hermetic rooms…Repeated endlessly on the way to your room, you can easily forget who you are here; you can sit on your bed and become man sitting on bed, an abstraction to compete with infinity itself […] It embodies a repetition so insistent and irresistible that…[you] become, if you choose, the man on the bed in the next room (DeLillo 1990, p. 257).

In fact, David is the man on the bed in the next room, since he assists Edwina Meers to lengthen what is already “a long series of lovers” (DeLillo 1990, p. 261) she has taken 48 during her marriage to CharlesTPF FPT. David does not particularly desire Edwina, describing her naked as ‘even more plain,’ and he ‘direct[s] something like desperation’ into the act, seeing himself as having been ‘inserted into the televised dream of motel, the pleasure of 49 being other and none’ (DeLillo 1990, p. 261)TPF FPT. When David and Edwina immediately get into bed together, they presage White Noise thirteen years later and the gathering parents on the first day of term at the College on the Hill, since their ‘type is not a naïve given, an embodied universality, but a self-conscious enactment’ (Frow 1999, p. 178). Like the middle class parents in White Noise, David and Edwina ‘know the ideality they are supposed to represent, and are deliberately living up to it’ (Frow 1999, p. 178).

The effect of this enactment is a loss of the original into the type. As Frow suggests, the type ‘can always be imitated, feigned’; David Bell’s sex with Edwina represents the type that ‘ceaselessly imitates itself’ (Frow 1999, p. 178). David Bell is not just man sitting on bed, then, but man in bed with Edwina. Although David ‘had expected to enjoy it greatly’ (DeLillo 1990, p. 261), for Edwina he represents only a recurring type she inevitably sends “away out of sheer boredom,” even referring to her collective type as “my men” (DeLillo 1990, p. 262). Edwina’s adulterous series of lovers is Baudrillardian at heart. Edwina recognises the ‘possibility of two or n identical objects,’ and she comprehends

48 TP PT In another point of repetition, the ‘Charles’ cuckolded in Americana (Charles Meers) anticipates The Names (Charles Maitland), and both recall Charles Bovary of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. 49 TP PT David’s ‘dream’ presages Marian Shay’s waking dream in Underworld, published more than twenty-five years later, where after a hotel lunch with Brian Glassic, she imagines ‘ascending to a shadowed room at the end of a long empty hall,’ a passage already discussed in this chapter.

Diana Jenkins 69 December 2005 that the relation between her first lover and her last ‘is no longer one of an original and its counterfeit, analogy or reflection, but is instead one of equivalence and indifference’ (Baudrillard 2000, p. 55). Her adulterous liaisons ‘become indistinct simulacra of one another’ (Baudrillard 2000, p. 55), and she wittingly labels David’s resemblance with the rhetorical question: “You’re the type, aren’t you?” (DeLillo 1990, p. 262) For David, who ‘continually struggles to free himself from the mass-mediated images that constitute his identity,’ the sexual interlude with Edwina, as with everything else, ‘achieves little better than this liberation into third-person anonymity’ (Green 1999, p. 580).

Their motel room’s character of infinite resemblance exposes the spatial ‘scandal that an imitation can in its turn function as a reality to be copied (and so on endlessly)’ (Frow 1999, p. 181). Although the Platonic view of the hotel/motel’s simulacrum status would be to regard it as ‘[v]iolating an ethics of imitation’ (Frow 1999, p. 181), there is a persuasive power in its familiarity. There is a certain lulling, seductive appeal to resemblance. Resemblance creates the ‘illusion of eternal comfort [that] reposes in clubbiness,’ and the sense ‘that no earthly adventure, from puberty to death, is unprecedented’ (Hewitt 1999, p. 4; Updike 1989, p. 55) holds an odd kind of appeal. Still, the potential ‘clubbiness’ of the hotel/motel site is ultimately denied. A space that reminds the character that he or she is not the first fails to provide solace. DeLillo’s texts compound subject ambivalence by challenging the behavioural precedent, a challenge that directly affects the narrative. Instead of inhabiting a familiar sexual position as the replicant of past guests, the subject can be transformed, becoming an unpredictable, foreign element introduced to the overly familiar space.

In Players (1977), DeLillo’s first novel after Americana to situate adulterous sex in the hotel/motel room, Lyle Wynant muses on the fact that ‘He liked motels, their disengaging aspect, the blank autonomy they offered, an exemption from some vague imperative, perhaps the need to verify one’s status’ (DeLillo 1991, pp. 196-7). The possibilities Lyle identifies within the motel room seem the opposite of club membership: it is the absence of witness verification that Lyle finds emancipatory. The narrative extends the hyper- identifiable site’s support of the unfamiliar when Lyle’s lover, Rosemary, emerges from the motel room’s bathroom with ‘a plastic phallus harnessed to her body’ (DeLillo 1991,

Diana Jenkins 70 December 2005 p. 197). Rosemary’s attire is deeply surprising to Lyle, and he later regards it as ‘that odd sardonic moment, so closely bordering on cruelty, a playlet of brute revelation’ (DeLillo 1991, p. 211). And yet Rosemary’s strap-on phallus is an example of what Lyle professes to enjoy about the room: Rosemary achieves both ‘blank autonomy’ and a release from any vague social imperative to engage in conventional heterosexual sex. Yet the moment’s revelatory capacity for Lyle suggests Rosemary interrupts his expectation of motel room sexual behaviour. The reader shares in Lyle’s sense of disturbance to the familiar scene of adulterous motel room sex because we are told Rosemary ‘went into the bathroom to undress’ (DeLillo 1991, p. 196), not that she went to dress up, and the dildo acts as a virtual mask for Rosemary, replacing her with a ‘blank’ not previously anticipated.

The text employs this disturbance to familiarity having already cultivated a kind of narrative knowingness. The aspect of uncanniness to the motel room Rosemary and Lyle share is part of a broader spatial trope through which the reader has already passed. Lyle and Rosemary’s motel is in a small Canadian town called Brantford that Lyle recognises telepathically, and his familiarity with Brantford presages Jack Gladney’s psychic knowledge of Babette’s motel room in White Noise:

Stores, a movie theater or two, a monument of some kind. The town was a near-classic, so naturally secure in its conventions…To Lyle…Brantford’s clean streets and white English-speaking population took on an eerie quality, an overlay of fantasy. It was more familiar than the street he lived on in New York. He’d come all this way, border-crossing, to encounter things he’d known at some collective level, always (DeLillo 1991, p. 192).

The reader likewise immediately identifies the every-town nature of Brantford. The town’s resemblance to countless other generic, proverbial small towns is overt, and its established known-ness emphasises Lyle’s surprise at Rosemary’s strap-on phallus in an otherwise conventional literary representation of the small town, motel room adulterous liaison. Rosemary disrupts the scene’s pronounced resemblance via her use of the hotel/motel space for revelatory dissoluteness, denying Lyle even the illusion of repose.

Late in Players, Lyle’s third person narration abruptly ends on the novel’s final page, shifting perspective to the reader’s collusion with the author in the sudden referencing of

Diana Jenkins 71 December 2005 an ‘us’ and an ‘our,’ observing whom one imagines must be Lyle and his lover Rosemary, ‘their’ bodies displayed on a motel bed. Amidst this sudden atmosphere of uncertainty comes the paragraph’s final line: ‘Spaces and what they contain no longer account for, mean, serve as examples of, or represent’ (DeLillo 1991, p. 212). Completing the penultimate paragraph of DeLillo’s fifth novel, this sentence is key to the deployment of the hotel/motel room and other, particularly clichéd, spaces across the novels of DeLillo’s career. There is no repose in the familiar space, no stability in identification, only the lawless freedom of repetition. This motel space at the close of Players is conceived as a Baudrillardian hyper-reality:

…entirely within simulation, in which the barriers of representation rotate crazily, an implosive madness which, far from being ex-centric, keeps its gaze fixed on the centre, on its own abyssal repetition (Baudrillard 2000, pp. 73-4).

These narratives of adultery in hotel/motel rooms are equally unrelenting. Rather than resisting the multiplication of the space, DeLillo’s fiction relies on the effect produced by this infinity, particularly as it careens toward the ‘priority of the chain of metaphors in which the object is constructed’ (Frow 1999, p. 176). Illustrating the construction of typicality, this chain articulates the effect on the narrative of DeLillo’s serial psychosexual representations of the hotel/motel room. This construction, as Frow notes, opens DeLillo’s fiction to a Deleuzian reading:

…the account that Deleuze gives of the simulacrum in Différence et repetition…cuts it off from its ties to a lost original…[I]dentity is simulated in the play of difference and repetition, but this simulation carries no sense of loss. Instead, freeing ourselves of the Platonic ontology means denying the priority of an original over the copy, the model over the image. It means glorifying the reign of simulacra, and affirming that any original is itself already a copy, divided in its very origin (Frow 1999, pp. 181-2).

DeLillo’s hotel/motel supports this reading, ‘affirming’ the narrative possibilities of the simulacra rather than symbolising the loss of the ‘any original’ home. When Frow further suggests that is ‘no longer possible to distinguish meaningfully between a generality embedded in life and a generality embedded in representations of life’ (Frow 1999, p. 178), he chooses Jack Gladney’s ‘typical’ imaginings of the scene of Babette’s

Diana Jenkins 72 December 2005 unfaithfulness to illustrate his point. The typicality of Jack’s reconstruction is achieved by the combined operation of reproductive models of space, sex, and consumption:

Reconstructing the scene of his wife’s adultery, Jack mentions objects like “the fire-retardant carpet” and “the rental keys on the dresser”; the definite article here marks these…not as concrete particulars but as generic indicators; they are not pieces of detail broken off from the contingent real but fragments of a mundane typicality…The complexity and intricacy of the type – whether it is a character, a scene or a landscape – is made possible by the constant repetition of its features…What most of these typifications have in common…is their 50 source in a chain of prior representations (Frow 1999, pp. 179-80)TPF FPT.

The abundance of this ‘chain of prior representations’ means that the space of the hotel/motel room creates the mode of typicality described by Deleuze and Baudrillard, among others, as the simulacrum, or a Platonic ‘copy of a copy’ (Frow 1999, p. 181). The simulacrum differs in meaning to earlier theories of doubling. From a Freudian point of view, Jack’s revelation of the site of the adultery is startling, or more precisely uncanny, because it is visible to him when it should have remained hidden (as in unseeable, a place Jack has never been). On this reading, Jack sees the mirrored double of the scene. What the Deleuzian and Baudrillardian model of the simulacra means for this chain of representation is that what should have remained secret and hidden in Freudian terms cannot. The site it represents is freed from the notion of an original space belonging to Babette and Mink. This breakdown at the level of difference enables Jack to speak the language of the hotel/motel room – he can articulate the space because he has replaced it with his own reproduction, erasing the need for knowledge of theirs.

The infinite chain of resemblance in DeLillo’s treatment of the hotel/motel operates as a decisive tension in his texts, making these identical rooms what Seltzer calls semi-alive spaces, discussed earlier in terms of the Freudian horror of the uncanny. When this phenomenon of resemblance causes psychosexual unease, or the sense of being absorbed into its space, it may be that ‘the sense of the inadequacy of representation comes not because of the transcendental or uncanny nature of the object but because of the

50 TP PT Baudrillard is an established reference in discussions of White Noise in particular, if not in name then in content. Frow is one of the better-known examples. Also see Butterfield and Eid online, Duvall (1998), and Saltzman (1998).

Diana Jenkins 73 December 2005 multiplicity of prior representations’ (Frow 1999, p. 176). DeLillo’s fiction asks questions of representation, specifically if its production ‘is basically only one episode in the line of simulacra, that episode of producing an infinite series of potentially identical beings’ (Baudrillard 2000, p. 55). Such questions are embedded in spatial rebellions seen in the behaviour of the hotel/motel room. Indeed, it is a potentially revolutionary characteristic of the hotel/motel space that it is a product that can ‘simply be reproduced…in an exemplary double’ (Baudrillard 2000, p. 56). Baudrillard puts this revelatory potential in terms of ‘the Black boy seeing two identical books for the first time’ (Baudrillard 2000, p. 56). In this case, the fact that ‘these two technical products are equivalent under the sign of necessary social labour’ is less important than ‘the serial repetition of the same object’ (Baudrillard 2000, p. 56), and this sentiment is reflected in DeLillo’s work.

The serialisation of the hotel/motel room explains why its peculiar brand of resemblance makes such a marked contribution to DeLillo’s spatially represented, sexually motivated interests. Like Baudrillard’s postulated ‘reversal of origin and end’ (Baudrillard 2000, p.56), DeLillo’s representations of the hotel/motel are ‘conceived according to their very reproducibility, their diffraction from a generative core called a “model”’ (Baudrillard 2000, p. 56). By embracing the aspect of replacement inherent in reproduction, DeLillo’s hotel/motel room recovers the possibility of artistic renewal that Walter Benjamin felt was lost in modern society. As Baudrillard argues:

There is no more counterfeiting of an original…and no more pure series[;] there are models from which all forms proceed according to modulated differences. Only affiliation to the model has any meaning, since nothing proceeds in accordance with its end any more, but issues instead from the model, the ‘signifier of reference’, functioning as a foregone, and the only credible, conclusion (Baudrillard 2000, p. 56).

This aspect of serial resemblance forms a crucial part of the hotel/motel room’s narrative behaviour and more generally relates to DeLillo’s representational methodology. Regardless of the object or phenomenon his texts represent, what ‘these typifications have in common…is their source in a chain of prior representations’ (Frow 1999, p. 180), as in Jack’s dying in White Noise. Murray projects Jack’s condition through the clichéd

Diana Jenkins 74 December 2005 movie characterolgy of the brave friend with the terminal illness, and the cliché ‘is a simulacrum, an ideal form that shapes and constrains both life and death’ (Frow 1999, p. 180). The equally clichéd simulacrum of the structurally serial, spatially generic hotel/motel room makes it an ideal site to represent Frow’s new mode of typicality, and to ‘shape and constrain’ the productive tension between Thanatos and Eros that helps define DeLillo’s model of language. The hotel/motel space conforms to the two defining features of the new mode: ‘it is constructed in representations which are then lived as real; and it is so detailed that it is not opposed to the particular’ (Frow 1999, p. 180). Frow’s reading of the scene between Murray and Jack emphasises the balancing act of the simulacrum, fundamentally engaged in the tug-o-war between the sexual forces of life and death. Through Babette’s Dylarama adultery narrative, this tension can be read explicitly as that between Eros and Thanatos, her transgression creating a space in between for the productive and sexual tension of the dualism.

The double is frightening because it others the subject from itself, introducing its own alternative – that is, the non-self, or death. However, the double is conversely erotic because it simultaneously represents the continuation of the subject as reproduced. This paradoxical tension is represented by the hotel/motel room, which compulsively generates narrative conditions ideal for the simultaneous operation of sexualised models of self-extinction and self-extension. Baudrillard recognises an excitement in the awareness of repetition, and the virtual template of adulterous sex in a hotel/motel is the realisation of an ecstatic, indeed orgasmic, self-imitation of the sexual subject in space.

Although Baudrillard emphasises the pleasure of self-imitation, and Seltzer a more violent self-extinction, they are, in relation to DeLillo’s evocations of the hotel/motel room, closely related erotic operations around the self in space. Indeed, the self-extension Seltzer characterises as part of the gothicisation of space is a conceptual prerequisite for self-imitation in an identical space. DeLillo’s most recent play, Valparaiso (1999), as well as his most recent novel, Cosmopolis (2003), demonstrate the sexual closeness of the self-extinction and self-imitation that Seltzer and Baudrillard separately identify. In the two-act Valparaiso, DeLillo’s ‘caustic meditation on the much-noted fifteen minutes of fame’ (Cowart 2003, p. 100), Michael Majeski has taken a flight to the wrong Valparaiso.

Diana Jenkins 75 December 2005 This mistake provokes a frenzy of media attention, and Michael and his wife Livia are forced to recount over and over again the details of his trip in a series of near-identical interviews. These interviews comprise the majority of the play, and create ‘a stagy ambience that combines authenticity and unreality’ (Osteen 2000, p. 262). The play’s structure and dialogue fetishize the double, as Cowart’s partial summary suggests:

As infinitely iterable as video or audio tape, Majesky’s [sic] story is buttressed by other images of recurrence in the play: Michael’s wife, for example, does “demon repetitions” [30] on her exercise bicycle, and Delfina Treadwell, the appalling talk-show hostess, “live[s] in a box in a state of endless replication” (Cowart 2003, p. 100; DeLillo 1999(c), p. 94).

In addition to these reproductive elements, the whole of Act Two takes place in the studio set of Delfina’s TV talk show, and stage directions include a spatial tell-tale of the play’s self-imitative impulse: ‘It is a living room set that bears some resemblance to the Majeski living room of Act One’ (DeLillo 1999(c), p. 61). During Act Two, before Livia confesses motel room adultery, she and Delfina have a brief exchange about Livia’s penchant for eating over-ripe bananas. Livia says, “They’re funky and sexy and make me think that pleasure is somehow connected – to what?” and Michael interrupts with the answer: “Perishability” (DeLillo 1999(c), p. 71). Michael’s first word of dialogue in the second act, and in over eight pages of printed text, connects the concept of sexual pleasure with extinction rather than imitation. Ten pages later, Livia confesses that the baby she is carrying, her second child, is not Michael’s, recalling Naomi Segal’s observation that in Fontane’s Effi Briest (1895), ‘[t]he genealogical tie too is just a series 51 of displaced repetitions, copies all too false and all too true’ (Segal 1997, p. 119)TPF FPT. Livia reveals the baby was conceived with “a documentary filmmaker” in a “cheapo motel” (DeLillo 1999(c), p. 82). In other words, the situation Livia relays is a sexually pleasurable (orgasmic, in fact, given the conception) imitation of both casting couch sleaze and adulterous motel room cliché, with a lover whose documentary style of filmmaking likewise purports to mirror, or repeat, reality.

51 TP PT Segal notes of Madame Bovary that ‘Emma Bovary must have a female child because she is capable only of copying,’ suggesting that Flaubert ‘viewed textual creativity as the “real thing,”’ not the ‘horror of self- reproduction in the body via the woman’ (pp. 120-1).

Diana Jenkins 76 December 2005 Where White Noise’s Jack Gladney unsuccessfully attempts to project his death fear by shooting his wife’s lover, Livia’s life-producing pregnancy projects the self-extinction of her orgasmic adulterous pleasure onto Michael, who is killed at the play’s conclusion when Delfina forces her microphone down his throat. Michael’s asphyxiation at play’s end structurally imitates the beginning, which ‘opens with the back-projected scene of Michael Majesky’s [sic] attempted self-asphyxiation aboard the airliner en route to Santiago, Chile’ (Cowart 2003, p. 100). In the end, Valparaiso brutally effaces the distinction between self-extinction and self-imitation. Michael’s death, an imitation of his earlier attempt at self-extinction, is also where a peculiar pleasure resides: were he to survive, Michael would ‘repeat more or less forever the single interview that itself replicates the journey to one Valparaiso after another’ (Cowart 2003, p. 100).

Valparaiso exposes the interchange between the conceptual and erotic proximity of the contradictory twins of Baudrillard’s self-imitation and Seltzer’s self-extinction, and 52 Cosmopolis mirrors the complicated pleasure their union promotesTPF FPT. The action of Cosmopolis (2003), DeLillo’s most unevenly received novel, takes place in the course of a single day in New York City. Eric Packer, the megalomaniacal protagonist, is a billionaire asset manager who has been married for twenty-two days to ‘Elise Shifrin, a poet who had right of blood to the fabulous Shifrin banking fortune of Europe and the world’ (DeLillo 2003, p.15). These characters, and this novel, mark a return to the parody of excess not seen in full flight since Amazons, a novel DeLillo routinely declines to acknowledge as his, and the critical reception to Cosmopolis includes John Updike’s review, in which he calls the novel a ‘farce of extravagant wealth and electronic mysticism’ that might ‘feel more authentic’ had it come from Kurt Vonnegut or Paul 53 Auster (Updike 2003, p. 102)TPF FPT. Farcical though Cosmopolis is, the dominant atmosphere

52 TP PT Cowart notes of Valparaiso’s Michael that being subjected to ‘the same interview over and over again…confers a highly spurious and strangely eroticized fame’ on him. Cowart’s observation combines the possibility of something sexual with the act of imitation, helping account for the suggested sexual pleasure of an imitated, this time successful, asphyxiation by choking (Cowart 2003, p. 100). 53 TP PT Updike makes the point that ‘DeLillo’s sympathies are so much with the poor that his rich man seems a madman’ (Updike 2003, p.103). It might be said of Amazons that DeLillo’s sympathies are so much with the male experience that his (only) first person female protagonist seems a stereotype of sports jock machismo. The blonde ‘Cleo’ gazing suggestively from the novel’s back dust jacket, for instance, potently

Diana Jenkins 77 December 2005 of the inauthentic betrays an ambivalence that Margaret Rose suggests, in Parody/Metafiction, is characteristic of parody (Rose 1979, pp. 21-6). Like Amazons and even Tolstoy’s classic adultery text Anna Karenina, in which John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869) is explicitly satirised (Gordon 1997), negative behaviours and attitudes – like promiscuity, subjugation, and misogyny – are bluntly traded and continuously repeated. Its jarring and ambivalent politics aside, Cosmopolis’s depiction of adulterous hotel/motel room sex evinces the further evolution of DeLillo’s tropological range.

Baudrillard’s theory of the pleasure of self-imitation and Seltzer’s of self-extinction find communion in Cosmopolis’s Packer. The opening of Part II finds Packer in a hotel room bed with one of his bodyguards, Kendra Hays. At Packer’s suggestion, ‘She wore her ZyloFlex body armor while they had sex’ (DeLillo 2003, p. 111). A short time later, they have sex again after Kendra pours ‘a few drops of vodka on his genitals.’ There is pleasure here – ‘She laughed when she did it…’ – and there is imitation – ‘and he wanted her to do it again’ (DeLillo 2003, p. 114). This sexual encounter is one of several Packer has that day, including an earlier episode with his art dealer, Didi Fancher, in her apartment. Beyond the adulterous sex, the latter situation imitates the former in Packer’s interest in watching both women dress before he leaves. Packer also keeps running into his wife Elise, who keeps smelling sex on her husband, a sensory telltale Packer takes extreme delight in repeatedly and ever-more-fantastically denying (DeLillo 2003, p. 68, pp. 118-9). But it is the episode with Kendra in the hotel room that suggests Packer’s proximity to the sexual self of Baudrillard and Seltzer’s combined vision; after the imitation of earlier sexual pleasure, Packer seeks violent erasure. Kendra is ‘fitting the waistband holster onto her hip when she [sees Packer] standing in his shorts’ (DeLillo 2003, p. 114):

recalls DeLillo’s own remarks on the famous Betty Grable pinup in Begley (1993). On Betty Grable, and the male gaze, see Green (1999) and Nadotti (2005).

Diana Jenkins 78 December 2005 He said, “Stun me. I mean it. Draw the gun and shoot. I want you to do it, Kendra. Show me what it feels like. I’m looking for more. Show me something I don’t know. Stun me to my DNA. Come on, do it. Click the switch. Aim and fire. I want all the volts the weapon holds. Do it. Shoot it. Now” (DeLillo 2003, pp. 114-5).

Kendra obliges, dropping Packer flat for up to fifteen minutes with her stun gun. The voltage leaves Packer ‘strangely elated, deprived of his faculties of reason’ (DeLillo 2003, p. 115), and his evident desire for self-extinction is later fully realised by its imitation: he is shot again at the end of the novel, and dies (DeLillo 2003, p. 209). Rose notes that parody has ‘been used for the ‘deconstruction’ of imitation’ (Rose 1979, p. 30), and Cosmopolis’s Packer exemplifies the narrative implosion of these contradictory sexual urges of the self, expanding and contracting, colliding in the serial space of the hotel/motel room.

This space in DeLillo’s adultery narratives operates as an agent of resistance. Resistance is the fundamental outcome of a deviant and contradictory space – transgressive sexual tension is created internally by the hotel/motel room’s designation as that which is always and already affiliated with the domestic model. The tension is reproductive, empowering the site via its revelations:

The hyperreal represents a much more advanced phase insofar as it effaces the contradiction of the real and the imaginary. Irreality no longer belongs to the dream or the phantasm, to a beyond or a hidden interiority, but to the hallucinatory resemblance of the real to itself (Baudrillard 2000, p. 72).

Baudrillard recognises the revelatory character of the hyperreal, and his characterisation encourages a reading of DeLillo’s representations of the hotel/motel room, from Americana through to Cosmopolis more than three decades later, as advancing the narrative via the uncertain site that both is and is not what it appears to be. The space of the hotel/motel room casts a sexual shadow on itself, both the object and its aura of unreliable origin. The texts leverage the operational haze that settles around the site, making the hotel/motel room a source of unpredictability, sexual surprise, and plot vitality. Richard Brown notes that there is a ‘mode of adultery in modern literature which…confronts obsessive and problematic repetitions and goes beyond [the pleasure] principle to something else’ (Brown 1989, p. 106). That ‘something else’ remains out of

Diana Jenkins 79 December 2005 sight, ungovernable and more replete with possibility for the inability to accurately anticipate it. Even though the hotel/motel room is notoriously ‘cellular, indefinitely generating the same signals like the lonely and repetitive habits of a stir-crazy prisoner’ (Baudrillard 2000, p. 58), its manic resemblances obscure the narrative’s way out. Aura, then, ‘[s]ustained by [the] reproduction and simulation’ that defines the hotel/motel site in DeLillo’s fiction, ‘presents both danger and possibility’ (Nel 2001, p. 6).

Despite its undeniable character of repetition, the hotel/motel room offers a vision of profound impurity, both operationally and semantically. The unstable narrative outcomes the space conceives, and the crisis of propriety circling the characters that check into its space, means that its reproductive order paradoxically encourages adulteration. Like Cleo Birdwell’s hastily abandoned lingerie gracing the floor of the men’s locker room on the cover of Amazons, contradiction is the fitting, inconclusive conclusion of DeLillo’s adultery narratives fiction that incorporate the hotel/motel room. Sexually straying into adultery is reflected spatially in these narratives by the semantic slipway of the inherently impure, always and already replicated site.

Diana Jenkins 80 December 2005 Chapter Two

Described Space and Sexual Transgression

World is supposed to mean something that’s self-contained. But nothing is self-contained. Everything enters something else (DeLillo 2003, p. 60).

“The important thing is location. It’s there, we’re here” (DeLillo 1986, p. 117).

Ambiguity in DeLillo’s work extends well beyond the uncanny hotel/motel room, and draws on motifs of duplication, opposition, reflection, and abjection to increase the range of DeLillo’s promiscuous relationship with meaning. Having examined the transgressive effects of spatial doubling via a phenomenology of the hotel/motel room, I now apply narratological frames of description, specifically oppositions and metaphors, to contextualize this model in terms of the language itself. Repetition and doubling provide a conceptual strategy for further analysing the spatial, sexual, and semantic mechanics of DeLillo’s linguistic triangle.

DeLillo’s spatial descriptions have a tendency to render places unintelligible. The texts engage certain measures to achieve this incoherence, including inverting or splintering descriptive oppositions like inside/outside and life/death, using dream sequences and television, manipulating metaphorical associations, and distorting sensory perception. The impact of these measures on the adultery narrative is the present focus of analysis, because they illustrate Ballard’s point that sex is always a model for something else. DeLillo’s texts employ transgressive sex to chart a model of language that has the same coordinates as the mythical adulterous triangle. DeLillo’s triangle, beyond the redefinitions of D. H. Lawrence and John Updike, is semantic as well as sexual, and insists that ‘three is the natural bond,’ that “[t]hings fall into threes,” and that “the equilateral triangle [is] the mother of structure” (Plath 1999, p. 214; Updike 1984, p. 5). My analysis specifically concerns the borderline of opposition in DeLillo’s spatial

Diana Jenkins 81 December 2005 descriptions. These descriptions resist and destabilise narrative structure at the very point at which they are supposed to create it, producing eruptions of meaning and association that, like the rhetoric of the triangle, have no end. The strength of the metaphor/object boundary, which also provides the enigmatic third side, is the combination of its contradictory permeability and its promise of multiple significations, the defining feature of what lies within its space. DeLillo’s texts reanimate and reassign dead metaphors, clichés and innuendo at the point of contiguity, this disruptive borderline operating as the third side of the triangle and breaking down oppositionality in meaning.

The rhetorical tool of the adulterous triangle is a spatial model. A psychological and philosophical preoccupation, Foucault attested in 1967 ‘that the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space, no doubt a great deal more than with time’ (Foucault 1986, p. 23). Reflecting the persistence of this cultural anxiety, space is a particular issue for contemporary writers including DeLillo. Space is therefore an interest of narratology, and proves no less troublesome within this discourse. Gerald Prince’s standard text, Narratology: The Form and Function of Narrative (1982), offers a summary of spatial catgegories that demonstrates the inherent difficulties of theorising its narrative character:

…as many as four (or more) spatial categories can be explicitly referred to and differentiated: the space of the narrated; the space around the narrator narrating; the space in which his narratee is to read the events recounted; and the space in which he inscribes these events (the sheets of paper on which he writes, for example). The relationship among the four categories can, of course, be both complex and significant (Prince 1982, p. 166).

This complexity continues to incite and confound discursive debate surrounding the operation of space in the text. Bal notes that, ‘[t]ogether with character, few concepts deriving from the theory of narrative texts are as self-evident and have yet remained so vague as the concept of space’ (Bal 1997, p. 132). Perhaps due to its often contradictory and enigmatic status, space is a place of conceptual discomfort; it is the place of a spatial identity crisis. It is, as Buchanan puts it, ‘a familiar paradox: a known place…is still a strange place’ (Buchanan 1999, p. 169).

Buchanan’s enquiry centres on the question of ‘whether or not this aspect of contemporary life is different enough to signal the advent of a new epoch, and prevalent

Diana Jenkins 82 December 2005 enough to actually characterise it’ (Buchanan 1999, p. 169). Augé suggests it is, calling the new epoch ‘supermodernity’ (AugéTP 1995,PT p. 78). In his conception, supermodernity ‘stems simultaneously from the three figures of excess: overabundance of events, spatial

overabundance and the individualization of places’ (AugéTP PT 1995, p. 109). In terms of a ‘charged surplus’ in the ‘cornerstones of philosophy, ‘time, space, and the individual’ (Buchanan 1999, p. 169), themselves forming a discursive triangle, postmodern theory is compatible with narrative theory. Bal takes up these three domains in her analysis of fabula, and links these ‘cornerstones’ through space via the occurrence of events. As she suggests, ‘events always occur somewhere, be it a place that actually exists…or an imaginary place…Events, actors, time and location together constitute the material of a fabula’ (Bal 1997, p. 7).

Description is enabling because it controls how space enters the narrative. Boundaries locate the disruption caused by certain descriptions, specifically disruptions caused by the sexual play of spatial oppositions and of that between space-based metaphors and their erotic objects. Peter Brooks notes that ‘a bundle of desires…need only be given a field for their exercise to set the narrative into motion’ (Brooks 1984, p. 313), linking language, sex, and space in a triangular configuration of mutual dependency. Spatial description often sets the narrative of adultery in motion, and the boundary space between descriptions is demonstrably compatible with Foucault’s vision of the space of displacement.

The connections generated by language are the province of the mechanics and maintenance of narrative space, and in particular occur in the use of opposition, metaphors and tropisms either using or referring to space, location, and geography. Bal discusses location or place as an element of a fabula. There, ‘the term refers to the topological position in which the actors are situated and the events take place’ (Bal 1997, p. 133). The following analysis demonstrates that the sequence of events, disrupted by description, can be impacted at the connective line that links opposites (inside/outside), and a metaphor and its object (white dress/purity). As Bachelard notes in The Poetics of Space (1958):

Diana Jenkins 83 December 2005 Outside and inside form a dialectic of division, the obvious geometry of which blinds us as soon as we bring it into play in metaphorical domains. It has the sharpness of the dialectics of yes and no, which decides everything. Unless one is careful, it is made into a basis of images that govern all thoughts of positive and negative (Bachelard 1994, p. 211).

The geometry of DeLillo’s model of language legitimates the dimensions of a three-sided that includes the boundary linking opposites. This boundary is a place in the narrative that destabilises dialectical oppositions, and is a place that can be mapped out ‘in the same way that the topological position of a city or a river can be indicated on a map’ (Bal 1997, p. 133). Bal defines the concept of place as being ‘related to the physical, mathematically measurable shape of spatial dimensions’ (Bal 1997, p. 133), and the concept stretches to encompass the shapeless. If our imaginative faculty dictates that measurable places be included in the fabula, then this faculty is also aware of the boundary as ‘place.’ The proper name of this location is ‘contiguity’: that is, ‘[t]he condition of touch or being in contact,’ and the ‘[p]roximity of ideas in place or time, as a principle of association’ (oed.com).

Semantic contiguity entails friction at the boundary between one description and another, since there is a meeting or difference of meaning at stake, literally and figuratively setting the scene for DeLillo’s promiscuous descriptions to take effect. Creating semantic friction at the boundary line, spatially oppositional and metaphorical elements produce the conditions for transgression. Transgression originates at the point of adulteration in the narrative line, and is later realised in the adulterous behaviour of characters. Boundaries unpack the trasngressive union between desire and language in DeLillo’s texts. Plot corruption is facilitated along descriptive boundary lines. The notion of corruption is twofold, referring both to the altered semantic composition of the narrative, and to the altered sexual pairings of the adulterers. As Brooks’ language suggests, desire and language are as intimately entwined as DeLillo’s lovers:

Diana Jenkins 84 December 2005 …desire comes to inhabit the language of narration. In Lacan’s interpretation of the Saussurian analysis of the sign, the bar separating signifier from signified (S/s) becomes the bar of repression, indicating the inaccessibility of the true signified (the object of unconscious desire). Discourse hence becomes the interconnection of signifiers one with another in a “signifying chain” in which meaning (in the sense of access to the meaning of unconscious desire) cannot be said to consist as attached to any link of the chain, but through which meaning rather insists…there is a perpetual sliding or slippage of the signified from under the signifier (Brooks 1984, p. 322).

On Brooks’s account, this erotic friction is a requisite aspect of any economy of meaning creation. The boundary line between one description and another encourages the transgressive urge of language, and semantic tension in DeLillo’s texts finds meta- expression in the transgressive consummation between characters. I suggest that the space of DeLillo’s language is as adulterated and untrustworthy as the activity it describes. His narrative space, then, can be understood as one of Bauman’s ‘things for which the “right place” has not been reserved in any fragment of man-made order’ (Bauman 1997, p. 6):

They are ‘out of place’ everywhere; that is, in all places for which the model of purity has been designed […] The trouble with such things is that they will cross boundaries whether invited to or not. They control their own location, and thus deride the purity seekers’ efforts to ‘put things in their place’, and in the end lay bare the incurable fragility and shakiness of all placements (Bauman 1997, p. 6).

Where spatial description generates boundary space, the impact on narrative action should be examined. The order of description most applicable to DeLillo’s texts is predominantly realist, and belongs to that category of description that refers to ‘a textual fragment in which features are attributed to objects’, whereby we ‘consider a fragment as descriptive when this function is dominant’ (Bal 1997, p. 36). This simple feature makes the identification of textual fragments as ‘descriptive’ accessible and distinct, yet Bal cautions against being persuaded that description is neatly contained:

Within the realistic tradition, description has always been regarded as problematic. In the Republic, Plato tried to rewrite fragments of Homer so that they would be ‘truly’ narrative. The first elements to be discarded were the descriptions. Even Homer himself attempted to avoid, or at least to disguise, descriptions by making them narrative (Bal 1997, p. 37).

Diana Jenkins 85 December 2005 Despite being acknowledged as ‘problematic,’ description is generally extensively deployed in realism (Furst 1995; Watt 1968), and DeLillo’s fiction is testament to this trend. On the other hand, it is possible to build on Bal’s sense that description in narrative has disruptive potential via a demonstration that spatial description may also be read as corruptive of the narrative (Bal 1997, p. 37).TP ForPT Bal the interruption is quite specific – it is an interruption to the fabula – and I draw on the same understanding. Bal offers a detailed definition of what constitutes fabula; key to her study are the distinctions between three layers she identifies in a narrative text, being the text, the story and the fabula:

A narrative text is a text in which an agent relates (‘tells’) a story in a particular medium, such as language, imagery, sound, buildings or a combination thereof. A story is a fabula that is presented in a certain manner. A fabula is a series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused or experienced by actors (Bal 1997, p. 5).

Description can also generate sequence, creating the possibility of certain (narratologically) unauthorised events rather than latterly characterising fabula-based events as ‘story.’ DeLillo’s spatial descriptions actively contrive certain narrative events, including adulterous sex between characters. His spatial descriptions facilitate semantic mobility, meaning the way spaces enable or impede negotiations of linguistic meaning. Mobility operates crucially at the level of narrative progression, and again at the level of story, where the language of spatial mobility is linked to desire, as in Brooks’s suggestion that Lucien de Rubempré, of Balzac’s Illusions perdues, is a ‘bundle of appetencies that will motivate and animate the plot of his novels,’ and that ‘the novel will set up a system of potentially unlimited energetic transformations and exchanges’ (Brooks 1984, p. 314). On this reading, narrative space, or what Brooks calls a ‘circuit of power and signification’ (Brooks 1984, p. 314), is created and animated by desire.

Desire in these terms is creative and mobile – it is ‘motivating,’ ‘animating’ – and the concept of mobilised desire is key to reading DeLillo’s spatial descriptions because they too are productive, involving concepts like change, action, movement, and propulsion. Both adulterous and adulterated narrative space can be productive, and in DeLillo these spaces are perversely reproductive. Taken together, these aspects of spatial description

Diana Jenkins 86 December 2005 activate DeLillo’s texts in a way that adulterates both the narrative and its actors, causing a semantic crisis that is mechanically enabling.

There are two boundaries of particular note in spatial operations around DeLillo’s adultery narratives. The first is the boundary between oppositions, as in inside/outside, and the second is the boundary between a metaphor and its object. These boundaries create an ‘agreeable mystification’ (Saltzman 1998, p. 491) of corrupted meaning that propels DeLillo’s narratives in alternative directions and supports Bachelard’s sense that ‘[f]ormal opposition is incapable of remaining calm’ (Bachelard 1994, p. 212). Like Galileo’s ‘constitution of an infinite, and infinitely open space’ (Foucault 1986, p. 23), the boundary is a haven of residual and resistant meaning, where ‘a thing’s place [is] no longer anything but a point in its movement, just as the stability of a thing [is] only its movement indefinitely slowed down’ (Foucault 1986, p. 23).

Late in Americana, David Bell notes of his adulterous encounter with Edwina Meers that he ‘had been inserted into the televised dream of motel, the pleasure of being other and none’ (DeLillo 1990, p. 261). David’s emphasis is tripartite – he stresses the aspect of reproducibility inherent in the double of the motel room, the double of the televised image, and the double of the dream. And yet the notion of doubling, as explored in the previous hotel/motel analysis, fails to entirely account for the emergent meaning of David’s observation of himself in an imagined world. Attempting to read David’s impression of himself in this moment simply as a double reveals the gap in meaning between the self and non-self of the imagined and nominally pleasurable ‘other and none.’ By David’s account, he is neither entirely self in this scene, nor entirely other, since whilst the so-called dream is undoubtedly his, he feels himself to be cast in the role of ‘beautiful boy plundered by the crumbling duchess’ (DeLillo 1990, p. 261). The effect of the convergence of self and other is that David finds himself ‘overburdened with parts – hers, mine, the dream’s’ and he laments that Edwina seems unable to distinguish ‘between what was authentic and what was ugly and brutal’ (DeLillo 1990, p. 261).

David’s reaction reflects Tanner’s sense that ‘there is no inborn human capacity to spin and weave that can naturally and spontaneously deal with these internal gaps in the way

Diana Jenkins 87 December 2005 that the spider can negotiate the fissures of his environment’ (Tanner 1979, p. 264). Though David seems ill-equipped or unwilling to interrogate it further, something erupts in this confusion. There is a spatial, sexual, and semantic rumbling between David, Edwina, and the televisual dream, whereby David acknowledges to himself that ‘It may be that the final partition had fallen’ (DeLillo, 1990, p. 261). What partition? Where? Separating what from what, and who from whom? What becomes visible is the specific boundary line implicit in the concept of opposites, a space in which additional meaning is negotiated and exchanged.

Exchanges of meaning in this gap between opposites in DeLillo’s spatial descriptions generate transgressive behaviour in the characters. In writing his 1977 novel Players, DeLillo originally intended to ‘fill the novel with the kind of intimate, casual, off-the-cuff speech between close friends or husbands and wives’ (DeCurtis 1999, p. 61). Instead, we find Lyle and Pammy Wynant, the novel’s main characters, ‘joylessly pursu[ing] their livelihoods at two of the great workplaces of late-twentieth-century America: the Stock Exchange and the World Trade Center’ (Cowart 2003, p. 45). Specifically deploying the tension between Thanatos and Eros is Pammy’s job at the Grief Management Firm, and the convergence of these competing forces is one way DeLillo creates his lexical 54 minefieldTPF FPT. Pammy’s one-off affair with Jack Laws briefly succeeds in reinscribing her into a landscape that holds Thanatos at bay. At least for the duration of their lovemaking, the encounter is reconstitutive, and for Pammy there is an existential crossing over:

The recomposition of random parts into something self-made. For a time it seemed the essential factors were placement, weight and balance. The meaning of left and right. The transpositions (DeLillo 1991, p. 168).

Unfortunately Pammy’s recomposition is an inversion of Jack’s – what is Eros for one represents Thanatos to the other. Whilst for Pammy the experience is a positive and forceful repudiation of the towers’ ability to infect her life with death’s grief, Jack encounters his own spatial crisis in the aftermath of their union. Where the towers are the

54 TP PT This is a reference to Cowart’s suggestion that DeLillo sends semantic shrapnel in all directions. The full quote appears in the Introduction to this thesis (Cowart 2003, p. 48).

Diana Jenkins 88 December 2005 infecting force for Pammy, and the precipitative element of the adulterous liaison that counters them, for Jack the remote location of the ‘serene event, easefully pleasant sex’ (DeLillo 1991, p. 165), is the site of death’s infection, and its corruptive power is as violent for him as it is sexual for Pammy. Jack is upset following their lovemaking, and Ethan, Pammy’s colleague and Jack’s partner, ignorant of the betrayal, offers Janet a telling insight into Jack’s responsiveness to space:

“He takes things as accusations, diminishments. Then he in turn accuses, often privately, going off to sulk. I think he condemns his surroundings as much as anything. People he sees within that frame. Some places are good, somehow. Others he feels reduced in. He gets no sense of himself, I suppose. I guess there were places all along the line, earlier. Relatives, so on. The people are blurs now” (DeLillo 1991, p. 173).

Jack is infected by death to a greater degree than either Pammy or the earlier David Bell of Americana, and his encounters with places good and bad simultaneously spread Thanatos’s reach, marking the place ‘all along the line’ that renders the people he encounters there as ‘blurs’ – ghosts. Jack experiences the corruption of the space he shares with Pammy and the unwitting Ethan as a more literal infection, and his now deathly surroundings bear down on him. Ethan’s words quickly achieve prescience as Pammy realises this place, so restorative of her life force, has been transformed for Jack into one he “feels reduced in”:

Over the next few days she noticed that Jack’s sentences never quite ended, the last word or words opening out into a sustained noise that combined elements of suspicion, resentment and protest (DeLillo 1991, p. 175).

Once Jack begins to experience the space as deviant and reducing, the affective stronghold of death’s infection is devastating and final, resulting in his suicide only days 55 after his and Pammy’s sexual encounterTPF FPT. Jack reassigns himself as waste, a waste of space, as it were, setting himself alight at a nearby rubbish tip before burning to death seated in a cross-legged position. Jack’s immolation gruesomely protests that Eros is

55 TP PT Koch (2000) suggests that Jack inexplicably suicides. Another option is that Jack suicides because he can no longer perceive the possibility of a ‘good’ place, which means he’s diminished to the point of non- existence.

Diana Jenkins 89 December 2005 duplicitous in nature, and this altered, Thanatos dominated landscape seizes from Pammy her briefly attained sense of rebirth. Space joins with sound to deafen her with its ‘steady pressuring subroar, oceanic space,’ leaving her stripped and ‘brain-deadened,’ left only with ‘her own coiled shell, her chalky encasement’ (DeLillo 1991, p. 199). The earth that reduces Jack to a stump, ‘shriveled and discolored, burned right through, down to muscles, down to tendons, down to nerves, blood vessels, bones’ (DeLillo 1991, p. 198), spreads the same infection as the Twin Towers. As a bereft Ethan walks from the body toward Pammy, she observes that ‘He seemed to be walking right into the ground, getting smaller as he approached, more dangerous somehow, as though he no longer possessed the binding force…that keeps people from splintering’ (DeLillo 1991, p. 198). Ethan’s figurative burial here destroys Pammy’s hope of restoring the precarious balance between the forces of life and death.

The productive tension between Thanatos and Eros, previously seen in its parodic form, cultivates more sombre and subtle meanings here than those overtly developed in Amazons, White Noise, and Cosmopolis. The brief reprieve from erasure Pammy finds in sexual transgression is cancelled by Jack’s annihilation, and yet the existence of a psychosexual site prevents Jack’s total erasure. Madness, or perhaps the fear of madness, is the binding force that prevents Pammy’s own splintering, and keeps Jack perpetually in her frame of reference: ‘It was driving in on her. It was massing. She felt if she untensed her body something irrevocable, something irrevocable and lunatic, something irrevocable, totally mad, would happen’ (DeLillo 1991, p. 199).TP PT When her husband Lyle calls and eventually restates the sequence of events back to her, it provides an intelligible answer to the creeping edge of madness, ‘It supplied a focus, a distinct point into which things might conceivably vanish…chaos and divergences, foes of God’ (DeLillo 1991, p. 200), and her memory of Jack’s remains.

Jack Laws, whose death is replicated by a protester in Cosmopolis, brings into sharp relief the conventional, but compelling, opposition between life and death. DeLillo’s fiction explores the connection between Eros and Thanatos across several texts, and theories of abjection reveal the sophisticated level of his engagement. In DeLillo’s first novel, Americana, Mary, protagonist David Bell’s sister, runs away with the adulterous

Diana Jenkins 90 December 2005 Arondella, a man in the mafia rackets with a wife and three children. Before she takes off with her lover, Mary insists to her brother, knowing Arondella is in all likelihood a killer, that “there are different kinds of death, David. And I prefer that kind, his kind, to the death I’ve been fighting all my life” (DeLillo 1990, p. 163). Their other sister, Jane, ‘embraces this death-in-life when she opts for Big Bob Davidson and suburbia,’ and their father ‘completes the pattern: like the man he was forced to inter in the Philippines, he is “buried alive”’ (Cowart 2000, p. 90; DeLillo 1990, p. 296, p. 285). Given this familial background, which can be traced to David’s mother and her own issues with the subject, Mary conceives death not only as a force entrenched in her life but as one capable of sexual shadings and nuances that belie its place in strict opposition to life. David, grown and a week from marriage, receives a letter from his college friend Ken Wild:

I’m writing because I want somebody to tell me whether I am alive or dead. I have been asked that question recently and I couldn’t think of an answer. So if you get this letter, write back as soon as you can. This way I’ll know I’m alive (DeLillo 1990, p. 164).

David’s one-line response is sublimely Poe-esque – ‘I didn’t get your letter’ (DeLillo 1990, p. 166). Highlighting the humour of DeLillo’s first novel, David’s answer suggests that the theory of abjection developed by French psychoanalyst and critic Julia Kristeva and others such as Mary Douglas is relevant to reading DeLillo’s texts. In ‘Powers of Horror,’ Kristeva suggests that the abject is not the grotesque or unclean, ‘rather it is what calls into question borders and threatens identity’ (Oliver 2002, p. 225). The abject, then, ‘is on the borderline’ (Oliver 2002, p. 225), which develops a conceptual space through which death touches or infects life. This notion of abjection maintains a recurrent presence in DeLillo’s work, betraying a mistrust of the concept of either life or death as self-contained. In the case of Ken and David’s letters in Americana, both reside in a space cultivated by the joint existence of supposed opposites, a boundary site of semantic exchange where both and neither are distinct.

Kristeva’s theory of abjection provides an additional vocabulary for reading DeLillo’s critique of the conventional life and death binary. Developing across his oeuvre, his texts insist on making visible the extent to which death infects life, figuratively coupling Thanatos and Eros in a penetrative embrace. In White Noise, the main characters display

Diana Jenkins 91 December 2005 an almost fanatical zeal for the death condition that infects life, and the novel’s adultery narrative is the means through which the infection spreads.

In White Noise, Jack Gladney and his wife Babette often discuss why each wants to die first, externalising and then projecting their mutual fear of death. During these conversations, the obsessive death narrative that underpins the primary line of fabula is articulated as spatially realisable. Jack and Babette bring dimensions to the concept of death, defining it as being an anti-space, a void. The Gladneys attempt to articulate the unknowability of death through spatial descriptions that form the basis of a semantic contest between them. Jack reflects on their conversations over breakfast after Babette informs him with ‘quiet intensity’ that “Life is good” (DeLillo 1986, p. 100):

No one there, a hole in space and time. She claims my death would leave a bigger hole in her life than her death would leave in mine. This is the level of our discourse. The relative size of holes, abysses and gaps…She says if her death is capable of leaving a large hole in my life, my death would leave an abyss in hers, a great yawning gulf. I counter with a profound gulf or void (DeLillo 1986, p. 101).

Much of White Noise concerns itself with Jack and Babette’s individual and collective attempts to fill this void, even as death continues its expansion via its omnipresent threat. Indeed, their constant anticipation and recognition of the death void propels the characters along several subplots. One is Babette’s affair with the unscrupulous drug researcher, Willie Mink, who enlists Babette in a secret trial to test the drug Dylar, specifically designed for treating the fear of death. The affair represents the tension of abjection, the fusion between Thanatos and Eros, because the drug proves addictive, and eventually Mink trades sex with Babette for a steady Dylar supply. Babette confesses her fear of death to her husband at the same time as she confesses her affair, insisting to Jack “I do want to die first,” “but that doesn’t mean I’m not afraid. I’m terribly afraid. I’m afraid all the time” (DeLillo 1986, p. 197-8). Confessing her infidelity to Jack, Babette spatially contextualises the affair in the terms of this fear, telling him “This is not the story of a wife’s deception. You can’t sidestep the true story, Jack. It is too big” (DeLillo 1986, p. 197). Babette characterises her fear as a mass, something filling a space that Jack cannot get around. Like Jack’s nebulous mass and the Airborne Toxic Event, both in

Diana Jenkins 92 December 2005 White Noise, as well as the graffiti in The Names and Underworld, the crowds in Mao II, and the proliferation of paper and waste across several DeLillo’s texts including Libra, Mao II, and Underworld, Babette sees this massing pathology as death’s growing encroachment on her life. The fear she suffers from in life, death, is the cause of her unfaithfulness – it is the ‘true story.’ Abjection brings a third side to the conventional binary of life and death, and transforms the finitude of their two-sided relation into a triangle, removing the beginning and end life and death ostensibly represent. Like Pammy Wynant in Players, Babette’s adultery is an attempted counter-measure against a diminishment that moves her ever closer toward demise. Neither woman dies within the pages of either novel, securing them both along the boundary in between, in a state of abjection where the compromised opposites of life and death collide.

Babette’s primary pathology expresses another opposition within the space of her death fear’s void, when she insists the affair “was the only way I could get Mr. Gray to let me use the drug. It was my last resort, my last hope. First I’d offered him my mind. Now I offered my body” (DeLillo 1986, p. 194). Appealing to Cartesian dualism allows Babette to regard her body as an empty space to be filled. Babette becomes a vessel that Mink fills during intercourse, literally via the deed, but also figuratively, since she is temporarily medicated into her fear’s suppression. Jack takes up similar spatial imagery as he describes to Babette the scene of her intercourse with Mink:

“He effected what is called entry. In other words he inserted himself. One minute he was fully dressed, putting the car rental keys on the dresser. The next minute he was inside you” (DeLillo 1986, p. 194).

Babette rejects Jack’s spatial recreation of her adultery, preferring instead to locate the event by employing another established space-based opposition, that of inside/outside:

“No one was inside anyone. That is stupid usage. I did what I had to do. I was remote. I was operating outside myself. It was a capitalist transaction” (DeLillo 1986, p. 194).

Babette says she is ‘remote’ and ‘outside,’ which suggests the Cartesian separation of mind and body. However, she also says no one was inside anyone, which corporeally is false, since Babette and Mink have sex over several months. In fact, her position goes

Diana Jenkins 93 December 2005 beyond the mind/body binary. Babette rejects the terms of Jack’s Cartesian discourse. Babette insists, like Ballard, that sex with Mink is a model for something else, in this case abjection. Babette’s comment demonstrates the coordinates of her body’s location and signification: she is in the boundary space, a mutation of environment that charts the space of death’s infection. This boundary operates in the manner of a ‘postmodern hyperspace’ that ‘transcend[s] the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world’ (Jameson 2001, p. 1971). The mass of Babette’s death fear is represented by the ‘postmodern hyperspace’ of the generic motel room, and Babette cannot perceive and locate the transgression as hers. Babette’s body is objectified and transacted, but its precise location is unmappable and external to her cognitive reality, since the key aspect of capital transaction is disrupted by Dylar’s failure to signify. Babette’s body is temporarily lost to this boundary space, displaced by the failed transfer of sex in exchange for removing her death-fear, and the space created by her absent body ironically represents the very thing she tries to escape: the concept of life without her.

The tension between Thanatos and Eros, realised as abjection in White Noise, results first in Babette’s adultery and then its perverse reproduction in the home. After the lengthy scene of her confession, and the competition over whose death-fear stretches infinitely, the physical intimacy between Babette and Jack is an act of space-filling desperation. In an effort to overcome ‘the emptiness, the sense of cosmic darkness’ (DeLillo 1986, p. 100), emotional affects compounded for Jack by Babette’s infidelity, the Gladneys rely on a construction of sex as closeness:

We held each other tightly for a long time, our bodies clenched in an embrace that included elements of love, grief, tenderness, sex and struggle. How subtly we shifted emotions, found shadings, using the scantest movement of our arms, our loins, the slightest intake of breath, to reach agreement on our fear, to advance our competition, to assert our root desires against the chaos in our souls (DeLillo 1986, p. 199).

Jack acknowledges that the point of contiguity between life and death is shared by sex and struggle. Spatially described oppositions, such as inside/outside and life/death, provide the impetus for adultery in this narrative by describing abjection in sexual terms.

Diana Jenkins 94 December 2005 This disruption to the fabula occurs at the boundary between these oppositions, a site DeLillo’s texts deploy to trouble absolutes in meaning and representation. Where corruption occurs first along the line of story in the sequence of description, this disturbance then impacts the fabula, altering the logic of events in the narrative’s construction. Boundaries are intrinsically unstable, contiguities between descriptive oppositions even more so, yet these semantic boundaries offer infinite shifts in narrative operations and, specifically, in reading meaning in DeLillo’s borders.

DeLillo’s fiction explores the shifts and gaps in language, continually interrogating its fault-line, the semantic opening that insists on the ‘something else’ between opposites. The language of opposites creates a particular kind of space in the narrative, recalling Foucault’s account of the history of space, when he offers a rough summation of space in the Middle Ages. Foucault’s characterisation is in terms of oppositions like ‘sacred places and profane places,’ ‘protected places’ and ‘exposed places,’ and he suggests it was ‘this intersection of places’ that constituted ‘the space of emplacement’ (Foucault 1986, p. 22). In narrative terms, this intersection creates semantic uncertainty that seeps into the space between a number of oppositions in DeLillo’s texts, such as we have seen in Players, Cosmopolis, Mao II, and White Noise. Foucault suggests that such oppositions ‘remain inviolable’ (Foucault 1986, p. 23):

These are oppositions that we regard as simple givens: for example between private space and public space, between family space and social space, between cultural space and useful space, between the space of leisure and that of work (Foucault 1986, p. 23).

In addition to the opposition between life and death, the supreme yet conventional ‘given,’ DeLillo’s texts across his oeuvre acknowledge and problematise precisely the kinds of oppositions Foucault identifies. DeLillo’s novels interrogate the operation of binaries and subvert the notion of distinctness in opposition. DeLillo’s texts flaunt evidence of the one position that seems reliable in his work: such oppositions are, in narratological terms, all but ungovernable, given the existence and profile of the heterogenous ‘/,’ making the maintenance of separation tenuous at best.

Diana Jenkins 95 December 2005 Ballard’s contention that sex is always a model for something else offers an important a discursive tool for reading the recurrence of adultery in DeLillo’s work, in which adulterous sex is a model for promiscuous meaning. By using the structure of the adulterous triangle to formulate a response to language’s promiscuity, DeLillo’s fiction critiques oppositions by flaunting the disruptive third element. White Noise, perhaps more than any other novel DeLillo has written to date, exposes a number of intersections and breakdowns of spaces real, imagined, and remembered. Beyond the life/death binary that represents abjection in Babette’s adultery, much of the plot is conducted through the structure of opposition, such as the inside/outside dichotomy. The occupants of the Gladney home determinedly attempt to experience domestic, or ‘inside,’ space as stabilising, repeatedly appealing to its reality-bearing affect. One of the core oppositions in DeLillo’s novels, the spatial binary of inside/outside is repeatedly subverted by television. Friday night television watching in White Noise is a ritualised and disconcerting portrait of the family’s zeal for death and disaster occurring elsewhere. The false promise of TV resides precisely in its displacement of death to an undisclosed outside. The Gladneys attempt to deny death’s abject proximity by maintaining the illusion that they are protected from its inevitability, via television’s relentless images of other people’s dying:

There were floods, earthquakes, mud slides, erupting volcanoes. We’d never before been so attentive to our duty, our Friday assembly…We were otherwise silent, watching houses slide into the ocean, whole villages crackle and ignite in a mass of advancing lava. Every disaster made us wish for more, for something bigger, grander, more sweeping (DeLillo 1986, p. 64).

The relentlessness of these images of disaster is matched only by the size of the family’s appetite, each additional horror or repeat newscast broadening the space between their safety inside and the raging carnage outside. Central to the Gladneys’ attempts to repress the fear of death is their practice of worshipping at the various altars of consumerism (Bauman 1997; Caton 1997; Duvall 1998; Maltby 1998; Saltzman 1998). This attempt to insure against death’s infection, via compulsive consumption of its location elsewhere, is uniquely suited to television viewing. Television is the novel’s chief mode of abjection, bringing death inside the Gladney home, and mirroring the adulterated ‘nowhere’ space of Babette’s affair. Toward the end of White Noise, analysed previously in relation to the

Diana Jenkins 96 December 2005 motel room, Jack confronts Willie Mink, Babette’s lover and drug supplier, at the motel where the affair takes place. When Jack enters Mink’s motel room and hears the faint white noise, we are not surprised to hear the voice of television because, as Duvall points out, ‘the voice of the television intrudes at odd moments,’ throughout the novel, ‘almost as if the television were a character’ (Duvall 1998, p. 449). What is disturbing is that ‘Mink is the voice of television,’ because it becomes clear that Jack’s sexual nemesis has always already been near to him’ (Duvall 1998, p. 449). The abjection of Babette’s affair has been infecting Jack’s marital home all along.

Shooting Mink delivers Jack from a spatial crisis occasioned by the too-close proximity of the metaphorical nemesis, television, to its sexual object, Mink. Duvall notes that ‘[e]ven Mink’s brief moments of quasi-lucidity are dialogized through the discourse of tv sports, weather, and late-night B movies’ (Duvall 1998, p. 448), and Jack is drawn into the unreal space created by the friction at the boundary between Mink and the TV. Jack finally resists the lull into this space by firing the gun after one of several ‘ad break’ style sound-bytes from Mink. Jack struggles to make sense of the environment created by this combination of metaphor and object, and Frow argues that his confusion is entirely appropriate:

Real moments and TV moments interpenetrate each other – and it is, in any case, another (novelistic) representation which offers us this reality and this distinction. The world is so saturated with representations that it becomes increasingly difficult to separate primary actions from imitations of actions (Frow 1999, p. 183).

Difficult, no doubt, but Babette manages to separate the ‘primary’ act of abjection from the ‘imitation’ act of adultery. Her earlier rejection of Jack’s physical account of the affair is based on her understanding of the act’s metasignificance. Sex between Babette and Mink is a TV moment from the Gladneys’ Friday night viewing: a representation of death penetrating life. The space of Mink’s motel room, like Murray Suskind’s supermarket, is also the boundary between Jack’s metaphorical nemesis and object made manifest, cultivating a space where the object, Mink, moves toward its metaphor, TV. Jack’s failure to execute the desired revenge on Mink is inextricably bound to the psychosexual disorientation that occurs when he stumbles into the space of emplacement

Diana Jenkins 97 December 2005 fashioned by his own desire. Confronting Mink, Jack realises that television has never kept death outside his domestic life. On the contrary, television is the primary mode of abjection’s enlargement.

The Gladneys’ compulsive consumption of televised death recurs in 1997’s Underworld when a little girl records a Texas Highway Killer murder. The child’s home-video of an innocent driver’s death is a placebo for the novel’s characters. The tape offers ‘unrelenting footage that rolls on and on’ with ‘a persistence that lives outside the subject matter’ (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 156), just as the characters persist in watching as a way of distancing themselves from death. In fact, the footage lives outside, and lives longer, than the subject or the viewer, as later acknowledged in Cosmopolis. Early in the novel, unpleasant protagonist and precocious billionaire Eric Packer watches, with a minute’s delay, the murder of business associate Arthur Rapp during a North Korean interview broadcast live on the Money Channel. Eric is transfixed:

Eric wanted them to show it again. Show it again. They did this, of course, and he knew they would do it repeatedly into the night, our night, until the sensation drained out of it or everyone in the world had seen it, whichever came first (DeLillo 2003, p. 34).

Eric himself is dead a few hours later, likewise murdered, a time-compressed fate that exposes the falsehood of distance in a televisual world, as well as that medium’s insidious capacity, not to mention ideal placement, to mock the commonplace belief that if it is on TV, then it is happening in a far-off ‘outside.’ Television is the medium that represents the tension between Eros and Thanatos. Although DeLillo’s texts repeatedly provide descriptions of the relationship between space and sound, television does not contain an aural component in its Greek etymology, although it contains a spatial one in ‘tele’: far off. Images from far away are the perfect complement to DeLillo’s spatial descriptions of the fraught area comprising inside/outside, the absence of sound in television’s ostensible meaning finding its complement in characters that watch a silent screen. White Noise’s TV without sound recalls Jules Vallès’s L’enfant – ‘space has always reduced me to silence’ (Bachelard 1994, p. 18) – and suggests a similar spatial phenomenon to that experienced by Mao II’s Scott as he silently observes hotel elevators that ‘moved soundlessly’ (DeLillo 1992, p. 24).

Diana Jenkins 98 December 2005 Scott thinks to himself that ‘he could easily sit all afternoon watching the elevators rise and drop, clear pods ringed with pinpoint lighting’ (DeLillo 1992, p. 24), and the addictive or hypnotic quality of his watching is directly related to the silent interaction between Scott and the people inside. The dimensions and movement of the clear pods separate Scott, but he is also drawn into their space from where he sits at the bar. His draw to this play between inside and outside recalls not only the television viewing of White Noise, Underworld, and Cosmopolis, but also the silent viewing of Lyle Wynant, who watches TV constantly in Players. As Cowart notes, the fact that Lyle watches without sound replicates the novel’s prologue, in which Lyle and fellow travelers ‘view the in-flight film without benefit of headsets’ (Cowart 2003, p. 50).

Lyle shares spatial, sexual, and aural narrative aspects with the later Karen of Mao II. Both Lyle and Karen stay in multiple motel rooms across America (and Canada, in Lyle’s case), both commit adultery with two different people, and both watch television with the sound turned down, Karen ‘touch, touch, touch[ing]’ the volume on the remote control ‘until it [is] totally off’ (DeLillo 1992, p. 32). Like the Gladneys in White Noise, the Shays in Underworld, and Eric Packer in Cosmopolis, Karen watches disaster occurring elsewhere. Karen watches the 1989 Hillsborough soccer disaster in Sheffield, and yet to the other members of the household, her two lovers Scott and Bill, she represents the outside, the erotic agent of abjection. As Bill explains to Brita:

“Scott says I invented her. But he’s the one who snatched her out of the air. She scares me sometimes. She can scare me and delight me in the space of five words. She’s smart about people. Looks right through us. Watches TV and knows what people are going to say next. Not only gets it right but does their voices” (DeLillo 1992, p. 65).

Like Mink, Karen is fused with the TV, channelling its voices and collapsing the distance between Bill Gray’s inner sanctum and the outside world, her ventriloquism in isolation next seen in the figure of Mr. Tuttle in DeLillo’s The Body Artist (2001). When the group meets that night for dinner, before Scott is due to drive Brita back to her apartment in New York, Bill makes a significant toast that emphasises the novel’s manipulation of the distinction between inside/outside, widening the narrative space for the heterogenous ‘/’:

Bill raised his glass.

Diana Jenkins 99 December 2005 “This place feels like home tonight. There’s a wholeness, isn’t there? A sense of extension and completion. And we all know why. Here’s to guests and what they mean to civilization.”

He drank and coughed.

He said, “It’s interesting how ‘guest’ and ‘host’ are words that intertwine. The etymologies are curious. Converging, mixing, reciprocating. Like the human groupings marked by the words. Guests bring ideas from outside” (DeLillo 1992, p. 67).

Bill’s etymological reflection demonstrates DeLillo’s triangular model of promiscuous meaning between language, sex, and space. The ‘converging, mixing, reciprocating’ meaning of ‘guest’ and ‘host’ occurs because of the fluctuating tension between the opposing categories of inside and outside. The tension is sexual in nature, and results in a web of transgressive sexual relationships between the four characters: Karen is married, but has sex with Scott, her de facto; Karen has sex with Bill; Bill wants to have sex with Brita; Scott has sex with Brita. The ‘converging’ and ‘extending’ is adulterous, and the space of these sexual crossings is marked by the paradox of intimate strangers. Bill’s home, his preciously guarded secret, only feels intimate and homelike to him now outsiders are seated around his table. Karen, the nexus of transgression, occupies this transforming space, and interprets Bill in terms of television. Where the TV stands in for Willie Mink in White Noise, Karen situates Bill’s references to ‘guest’ and ‘host’ within a televised setting. Karen says, “Let’s imagine Bill on TV. He is on the sofa talking,” and “No, wait, he is sitting in a chair facing a host in a chair, leaning real close, a bespectacled host with his chin in his fist” (DeLillo 1992, p. 71), anticipating the ill-fated Michael Majeski’s appearance on Delfina Treadwell’s show in Valparaiso. The extent to which Karen becomes the medium here is emphasised by the similarity between her own TV viewing and the group response to her imagined TV show: no one hears her. Karen is the TV’s replacement, and the group turns the volume all the way down.

The television is more than the medium of abjection, then, bringing death into domestic life; it is the spatial metaphor for transgressive characters. Television locates Karen within its own placeless coordinates. The adulterous sex she shares with Scott and Bill takes place in the same locale as TV: the point of fusion between inside and outside. This

Diana Jenkins 100 December 2005 sexual model of the failed demarcation of realms finds clear expression during Delfina’s TV talk show in Valparaiso, which inverts norms of spatial intimacy. Livia, Michael Majeski’s wife, is “flauntingly pregnant” (DeLillo 1999(c), p. 80) in the second act of the play. After Livia’s confession that Michael is not the father, and once Livia has detailed the clichéd banalities of her adulterous afternoon, Delfina warns Michael, “Do not disappear off camera. Michael. Or none of this will have happened. Off-camera lives are unverifiable” (DeLillo 1999(c), p. 83). Concepts of inside and outside, private and public, fail to signify as independent sites, and the image replaces the real, just as Livia’s lover displaces her husband Michael as the progenitor of the Majeski’s unborn child. The play ends with Delfina choking Michael to death with a phallic hand mike, ‘verifying’ his previous, off-screen suicide attempt by ending his life on-screen.

Michael Majeski’s murder in Valparaiso’s nowhere place of a TV talk show recurs in Cosmopolis, when Eric Packer watches the televised murder of Arthur Rapp. A man comes into the camera range of the studio and stabs Rapp repeatedly, drawing the female interviewer into ‘the terror’ as she and her hand mike become entangled with the bloody mess of the two men’s bodies (DeLillo 2003, p.33). Where Livia’s hand mike is a phallic metaphor for Michael’s cuckolding, in Cosmopolis the newly married Eric imagines the instrument as himself, ‘wanting to fuck her then and there in the bloodwhirl of knife and random limbs’ (DeLillo 2003, p. 34). Eric, like Jack Gladney in White Noise and Valparaiso’s Delfina, finds TV more verifiable than reality, deciding events he sees out his limousine window ‘made more sense on TV’ (DeLillo 2003, p. 89). As he and his chief of theory, Vija Kinski, sip vodka and watch a televised version of the anti- globalisation protest that is taking place outside their car window, Kinski notes:

“This is the free market itself. These people are a fantasy generated by the market. They don’t exist outside the market. There is nowhere they can go to be on the outside. There is no outside” (DeLillo 2003, p. 90).

Eric continually occupies the third line between inside and outside by bringing the outside in. Like Players’ Lyle and Mao II’s Karen, Eric constantly watches TV, and where Karen imagines her lover Bill on a talk show set, Eric conflates the sexual fantasy involving the North Korean TV interviewer with a face-to-face sexual interlude with Jane

Diana Jenkins 101 December 2005 Melman, his chief of finance. It is also after the profound breakdown of inside and outside, caused by the Airborne Toxic Event, that Babette’s infidelity comes to light in White Noise. Once the partition David Bell prophesies in Americana really does fall, the outside of White Noise invades, forcing its way in until Babette has “no more room to maneuver,” as Jack tells her, and she’s “backed…against the [bedroom] wall” (DeLillo 1986, p. 190). It is only after this spatial invasion from the outside that Babette is unable to sustain the hitherto discrete realms of her home and her affair, and she confesses, further rupturing their domestic space.

The third side linking the public and private is consistently realised in these novels as a nucleus of sexual and semantic exchange; this centre has no natural site, it is not a fixed locus but a function in which ‘an infinite number of sign-substitutions [come] into play’ (Derrida 1988(a), p. 109), Both conceptual sites are corrupted by the refugee imagery and meaning of its opposite. This third line of space invokes both Foucault’s space of emplacement, and Jameson’s space of displacement. Both theorists construct a vocabulary for dealing with the concept of intersection, which for Foucault concerns the intersection of places, and for Jameson of the body and the built environment. Adultery in these narratives creates the intersection between the language and location, forging a third site. This borderline place is a peculiarly postmodern space, since ‘[i]n its resistance to occupying modernism’s space, and in the idea of generating an opposite or alternate space – the space of displacement – is embedded both a trope and a kinetic expression of ‘a mutation in built space itself’ (Jameson 2001, p. 1967).

Already underway with Scott and especially Karen’s presence in the house, Brita’s visit in Mao II facilitates the final rupture of the fortified categories of inside and outside. She is there to photograph the reclusive author, capturing an inside image for distribution outside. As Brita muses later, bathing her naked body and eroticising the collapsed distance between them, ‘How could she keep a distance if she’d already taken his picture?’ (DeLillo 1992, p. 66). Earlier, Karen correctly predicts the meaning of what is about to take place between them all, and between the colluding forces of inside and outside, precisely in terms of the space in between:

Diana Jenkins 102 December 2005 “It’s just a feeling of there’s something wrong. We have a life here that’s carefully balanced. There’s a lot of planning and thinking behind the way Bill lives and now there’s a crack all of a sudden. What’s it called, a fissure” (DeLillo 1992, p. 57).

The spatial and sexual ramifications of the erupting fissure become apparent when Scott later stands appraising the Twin Towers of New York from inside Brita’s apartment. Scott says: “Now I finally feel I’ve seen New York inside and out, just standing here in this space and looking through the window.” When Brita responds, she further effaces the distinction between inside and outside: “When it rains out, it also rains in” (DeLillo 1992, p. 87). The slippage of demarcation they identify is the catalyst in refiguring the boundary between them as man and woman, Scott telling Brita:

“We’ve gone too far into space to insist on our differences. Like those people you talk about on the Great Wall, a man and woman walking toward each other across China…We see them from space, where gender and features don’t matter, where names don’t matter” (DeLillo 1992, p. 89).

In the space Scott imagines between them, their own Great Wall boundary, anything is permissible; he is visible, but unidentifiable, and there is no expectation of fidelity to Karen, his de facto, since he occupies a place where names and features fail to signify. By not admitting difference, Scott denies his status of outsider at Brita’s, and instead makes himself right at home, overriding her in small domestic details, such as how many lights are switched on, and silently succeeding in seducing her.

The spatial compromise of the ostensibly distinct spaces ‘inside’ and ‘out’ is chief among Mao II’s many speculations, speculations that canvass, among other things, similarities between the writer and the terrorist, and is an intrinsic element of the relationships between the four main characters. Appropriate to both the novel’s element of trangressive sexual activity is a sentiment expressed early in the narration: ‘When there is enough out- of-placeness in the world, nothing is out of place’ (DeLillo 1992, p. 22). This observation might easily have come from Cosmopolis, where sexually and spatially, it seems anything goes. Shortly after Arthur Rapp’s murder, Eric and Jane Melman, his chief of finance, have what can only be called oral, as in verbal, sex. They do not touch, Eric telling Jane, “He doesn’t have to do the unspeakable thing he wants to do. He has only to speak it”

Diana Jenkins 103 December 2005 (DeLillo 2003, p. 51). To this extent, Eric and Jane successfully consummate their encounter. Jane, glistening with sweat after a run, has a water bottle ‘in her crotch, knees flopped outward now,’ watching him, her mouth ‘open, showing large gapped teeth’ (DeLillo 2003, p. 48). Verbalising the unmistakable sexual subtext of this description, Eric says:

“Sex finds us out. Sex sees through us. That’s why it’s so shattering. It strips us of appearances. I see a near naked woman in her exhaustion and need, stroking a plastic bottle pressed between her thighs” (DeLillo 2003, p. 50).

Here, the water bottle is the phallic instrument earlier represented by the hand mike in Eric’s fantasy involving the North Korean TV interviewer, and both Eric and Jane reach climax, without touching themselves or each other, after Eric ‘says the words’: “I want to bottle-fuck you slowly with my sunglasses on” (DeLillo 2003, p. 51). Eric and Jane have inside-out sexual intercourse, occupying a sexually transgressive site accessed through the semantic space between inside and out, also known as the space of emplacement. Foucault explains this space of emplacement, the place of intersection between opposites, in relation to heterotopias. ‘Heterotopic’ helps define the nature of DeLillo’s hotel/motel rooms in the previous analysis, and his fiction also demonstrates that beyond physical constructions, heterotopias exist in linguistic as well as spatial exchanges. Thus these lines between inside and outside are ‘something like counter-sites…in which the real sites…are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’, and they operate in the manner of Derrida’s centre, ‘outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality’ (Foucault 1986, p. 24). Inside this counter site, semantic oppositions contest and enact their meaning, issuing ultimately in a place consisting of two sites, such as inside/outside. The site’s location in reality is indicated by the symbolic and promiscuous ‘/,’ but the place itself is somewhere outside the gesture of it, not within. Foucault also suggests that between utopias and heterotopias there is the conflated experience of the mirror. The mirror is both utopic, ‘a placeless place,’ and heterotopic, since it ‘does exist in reality’ (Foucault 1986, p. 24):

The mirror…makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there (Foucault 1986, p. 24).

Diana Jenkins 104 December 2005 For Mao II’s Brita, looking in a publicly located mirror takes “total control of the person’s responses, like a consumer prison” (DeLillo 1992, p. 88), but Scott counters with a more nuanced, and indeed Foucauldian, interpretation of the mirror’s profusion of spatial conflations, reversals, and radical possibilities:

“The mirror is for safety, for protection. You use it to hide. You’re totally alone in the foreground but you’re also part of the swarm, the shifting jelly of heads looming over your little face. Bill doesn’t understand how people need to blend in, lose themselves in something larger…Every revolutionary idea involves danger and reversal” (DeLillo 1992, p. 89).

Like Foucault, Scott recognises this interior site, paradoxically outside its place, as laden with semantic and spatial value. The line between inside/outside is located both within and without the two sides of opposition on which it relies for its meaning. Similarly, these oppositions rely on each other. It is logically impossible to define the concept of inside without matching it to that of outside. They inhere structurally, and ‘the notion of a structure lacking any center represents the unthinkable itself’ (Derrida 1988(a), p. 108). One always crosses the threshold, whether actual or intellectual, between one space and the other. As a semantic negotiation, this process is the same as the moment Foucault regards himself in the mirror (Dâllenbach 1989). In one of DeLillo’s ‘more explicit metafictional gestures’ (Cowart 2003, p. 45), Players represents precisely this kind of spatially driven narratological negotiation and experimentation in its prologue, which:

…exemplifies the special kind of mise en abîme described by Linda Hutcheon as a “mode of reflexion,” in which a text replicates itself as in a small mirror. Lucien Dâllenbach calls such a mise en abîme “transcendental” when the mirror text reflects the aesthetic theory or “code” of the larger, matrix text (Cowart 2003, p. 45; Hutcheon 1984, p. 55; Dâllenbach 1989, pp. 98-101).

This mode of reflection occurs at the centre which is ‘at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality…the totality has its center elsewhere’ (Derrida 1988(a), p. 108). When negotiating the meaning of DeLillo’s descriptions of these promiscuous spaces in his adultery narratives, ‘transcendence’ entails recognising contiguity, connecting the concepts that surround it, and passing through a virtual point elsewhere.

Diana Jenkins 105 December 2005 These descriptions help illustrate that DeLillo’s narratives of adulterous sex do indeed model something else: the triangular structure of his constructions of meaning. In addition to binaries like life/death and inside/outside, conventional metaphors are also exploited in both narrative description and character dialogue. Critics such as Bruce Bawer dismiss dialogic exchanges between DeLillo’s characters as epistemological grandstanding (Bawer 1985, pp. 41-2), charging that ‘when their mouths open, they produce clipped, ironic, self-consciously clever sentences full of offbeat metaphors and quaint descriptive details’ (Bawer 1985, p. 37). However, as Arthur Saltzman argues, his fiction testifies to the alternative view that DeLillo is ‘actually exceptionally attuned to the rhythms and nuances of [conversation]’ (Saltzman 1998, p. 492). Part of DeLillo’s strategy for refining what his writing ear hears is the use of repetition. Repetition is an essential feature of his writing given its pronounced place in people’s talk, and allows the narrative to establish the centrality of certain themes and metaphors. A number of metaphors are recurrent because they ‘[range] over the institutions that define life in contemporary America,’ and because the repetition of certain metaphorical elements – hotel/motels, planes, cars, the Twin Towers – ‘become the building blocks or mythemes of his expression (Cowart 2003, p. 213).

One of these defining institutions of contemporary America, the hotel/motel, is discussed in the previous chapter in terms of aspects of doubling, including repetition, specifically with reference to DeLillo’s adultery narratives. Regarding the hotel/motel simply as a metaphor, certain associations are immediate: the figure of the adulterer, the outsider, the fugitive; highways, outskirts, small towns; cars, trucks, motorbikes. Not only is the hotel/motel an exemplary in-between place, it also produces a narratological space that exists between the metaphor and its object. Foucault’s conceptualisation of the space of emplacement applies to this space, and DeLillo’s adultery narratives employ a range of metaphors that suggest meta- and residual meaning in this third line.

The combination of metaphor and adultery in his texts is unsurprising; the literature of adultery is traditionally replete with metaphor. This reliance on metaphor in fictionalising infidelity has a range of reasons, including comic effect, such as in William Wycherley’s Restoration play The Country Wife (1675), and its famous china plate scene, where china

Diana Jenkins 106 December 2005 is a euphemism for sex. The spectre of censorship has also hovered uncomfortably close to the novel of adultery, breathing heavily down the neck of Flaubert and (the now iconic) Madame Bovary, though the author was eventually acquitted of charges of ‘outrage to public morals and religion’ (Russell 1957, p. 10). Closer to DeLillo’s American home, the Chicago publication of Chopin’s metaphor-laden The Awakening in 1899 ‘met with widespread hostile criticism,’ the book ‘removed from the library shelves in St. Louis,’ and Chopin ‘refused membership in the St. Louis Fine Arts Club because of the novel’ (Culley 1976, vii). The extensive use of metaphor in novels of adultery sometimes intends to parody the form, such as in DeLillo’s own (admittedly pseudonymous) parody Amazons.

Beyond the metafictional nod to its conventional and historical relationship with the novel of adultery within his own adultery plots, DeLillo frequently employs metaphor as a mode of resignification. The structure of Players, for instance, commences with a prologue that ‘classically illustrates what Barthes calls the scriptible text, the text in . which meaning remains enigmatic, suspended, unclear’ (Cowart 2003, p. 44)TP PT It is only after reading the novel that one recognises the prologue as ‘a dumbshow that introduces 56 the “players”TP ofPT the drama presently to unfold’ (Cowart 2003, p. 44)TPF FPT. The meaning of ‘players’ spirals (Cowart 2003, p. 53), and other hidden meanings abound in Players, as in all DeLillo’s work, to such a degree that the novel frequently threatens to cause a semantic avalanche. Like DeLillo’s multifarious application of a seemingly innocuous term like ‘crowd’ in Mao II, Pammy as a ‘player’ is just the beginning, with the repeated use of the word ‘complex’ referring to, among other things, the Wynant marriage, which includes three adulterous relationships (Cowart 2003, p. 53). DeLillo’s texts develop what becomes a signature interest in this kind of metaphorical webbing from his first novel, Americana, as David Bell is about to begin his first affair with willing colleague Jennifer Fine. Before narrating the start of the affair, David acknowledges:

56 TP PT Cowart acknowledges that Eugene Goodeheart (1991) suggests DeLillo might object to the theatrical metaphor because Lyle like television and movies but is bored by theatre (Cowart 2003, p. 229).

Diana Jenkins 107 December 2005 I realize there is nothing more dull than another man’s chronicle of infidelity and in many ways that first affair of mine was a dullard’s dream; it differed from most only because I was not a commuter and did not have to adapt my orgasms to the disciplines of a train schedule (DeLillo 1990, p. 37).

The disclaimer aside, David proceeds to recount it, and includes the admission that ‘[Jennifer] was the one, I decided, who would guide me into the vortex of the cliché’ (DeLillo 1990, p. 38). Inside Jennifer’s apartment together for the first time, they ‘talked across the room, balancing the celebrated dangers of the West Side against its lower rents,’ and David thinks to himself, ‘So this is the extramarital life’ (DeLillo 1990, p. 39). Shortly thereafter, David and Jennifer have the following exchange:

“Nice apartment,” I said.

“Do you think it’s too conventional?”

“It’s so conventional it transcends convention. It’s like a premature artform. A room in a museum a hundred years from now. The American Wing” (DeLillo 1990, p. 39).

Although the pair continue to discuss such domestic banalities as air conditioning, stuck windows, and rent-control, it is by now obvious that when David refers to the conventional, he is not referring to Jennifer’s apartment at all. Where Edna Pontellier’s repeated use of the expression coup d’état complicates her meaning in The Awakening’s birthday party scene, the pedestrian décor of Jennifer’s apartment is for David a too-easy metaphor for the pair’s utterly conventional affair. As he predicts, Jennifer leads him into the cliché, and their affair is, like her apartment’s lack of distinction, any affair ‘a hundred years from now.’ Once the relationship is conventionally underway, David plays it as from a script, grouping them both with ‘all filmgoers and dabblers in adultery, all students of the cliché’ (DeLillo 1990, p. 40). The exchange of description around the space of Jennifer’s apartment opens up a play of meaning that dictates the terms of their affair – they are consigned to the metaphorical description, locked in literary and filmic conventions of the apartment and the extramarital affair. A third location opens up in the meeting of the metaphor with its object; their description of the apartment sets the affair in the space of emplacement.

Diana Jenkins 108 December 2005 DeLillo continues to use place descriptions to create this meta-semantic space in his later novels, such as in his repeated use of the Twin Towers as a flexible metaphor. The action of Cosmopolis takes place in New York one day in April in the year 2000, when the towers still stand. Written and published after the events of September 2001, ‘DeLillo depicts a city over which, as he and the reader know, a terrible event looms’ (Cowart 2003, p. 210). Though the atmosphere of foreboding is omnipresent, the World Trade Centre itself is described so hauntingly by the narrator/protagonist that one momentarily forgets to dislike the repugnant Eric Packer:

They were made to be the last tall things, made empty, designed to hasten the future. They were the end of the outside world. They weren’t here, exactly. They were in the future, a time beyond geography (DeLillo 2003, p. 36).

Here, the ephemeral Twin Towers are a metaphor for the real towers, structures that are gone, and all the layers of loss that their erasure entails. DeLillo is an appropriate custodian of the towers in their metaphorical and now fictional life, as their 1977 57 appearance in Players and 1991 showing in Mao II attestTPF FPT. In Mao II, when Brita is at Bill Gray’s isolated home for their photo session, she goes into great visual detail about her apartment and surrounds in New York. Brita does not want any more towers to be built, and the conversation that follows is uncannily prescient. When Bill suggests to Brita it would be much worse “If there was only one tower instead of two”, she concedes the towers “interact,” but complains that “having two of them is like a comment, it’s like a dialogue,” only she doesn’t know what they’re saying (DeLillo 1992, p. 40). Later, back inside the neighbouring space of her apartment, the Twin Towers have a metaphorical complexion that Brita does comprehend. Scott, looking at the towers, notes, “ One has an antenna.” Brita shoots back, “The male” (DeLillo 1992, p. 87), and the sexual innuendo contained within this phallic metaphor dominates their next act to such a degree that the scene ends with the (human) pair having sex.

Where Brita doesn’t want to “have to look at the million-storey towers” (DeLillo 1992, p. 87) in Mao II, in Players the towers house Pammy Wynant’s firm, the Grief Management

57 TP PT The towers also grace the cover of (at least) the 1999 paperback edition of Underworld.

Diana Jenkins 109 December 2005 Council. In both texts, the towers are a psychosexually affective metaphor. In Players, the two central characters, Pammy and Lyle Wynant, both conduct adulterous affairs over the course of the narrative. Pammy’s office at the Grief Management Council is on the eighty-third floor in the north tower of the World Trade Centre, which, anticipating Eric Packer in Cosmopolis, Pammy does not believe is a permanent place occupying a knowable space:

They remained concepts, no less transient for all their bulk than some routine distortion of light. Making things seem even more fleeting was the fact that office space at Grief Management was constantly being reapportioned (DeLillo 1991, p. 19).

Pammy’s reconfiguration of space is radical and complex, since she denies her workplace a physical reality. For Pammy it is not a determined space at all, and this shape-shifting place impacts on her activities, first with her repeated entry to the wrong tower (DeLillo 1991, p. 14), and second with her affair, involving another kind of entry but with the wrong man. Analysed earlier in terms of the opposition between Eros and Thanatos, Pammy is psychologically affected by the World Trade Centre’s metaphorical strength:

If the elevators were places, the lobbies were “spaces.” She felt abstract terms were called for in the face of such tyrannic grandeur. Four times a day she was dwarfed, progressively midgeted, walking across that purplish-blue rug (DeLillo 1991, p. 24).

Pammy’s metaphorical relationship with the towers’ effect recalls Michel de Certeau’s sense that ‘[t]o be lifted to the summit of the World Trade Centre is to be lifted out of the city’s grasp’ (de Certeau 1988, p. 92). De Certeau suggests this elevation ‘transfigures him into a voyeur’ and ‘puts him at a distance,’ and the distance affords him a freedom from the ‘mass’ that he clearly celebrates. Unlike de Certeau, who laments the ‘fall back into the dark space where crowds move back and forth’ (de Certeau 1988, p. 92), Pammy wants to escape the towers’ metaphorical transformation, and her adulterous encounter with Jack Laws is an attempt to reclaim a reality based on “sink[ing] in, be[ing] one, merg[ing]” (DeLillo 1991, p. 164) with the open earth, in the open air. The vast, external, and natural space of their holiday retreat becomes Pammy’s antidote to the towers, a combatant response to the minimising effect of the ‘tyrannical grandeur’ of the towers’

Diana Jenkins 110 December 2005 metaphorical might. The sexual encounter with Jack is her attempt to establish that she is occupying a space rather than an idea, opposing the abstraction of self she experiences in the towers, which she perceives as conceptual, not actual. The narrative’s descriptions, however, continually reject Pammy’s efforts to moor herself in something and someone – Jack dissolves as he experiences ‘the radical disconnection’ of his sexual identity (Cowart 2003, p. 51).

After seeing Jack’s burnt remains, Pammy returns to the holiday house the trio has been sharing in Maine, and in her space of emplacement, grief registers spatially, not emotionally: ‘She put things in their original places. She wanted everything to be the way it was when she arrived’ (DeLillo 1991, p. 200). On the long bus ride home, dead elms along the road bring her pause:

She’d never seen them in such numbers, silenced by blight, dark rangy things, their branches arched. It was startling, all this bareness, and the white frame houses, sometimes turreted or capped by a widow’s walk, and the people who lived there, how different the dead elms made them seem, more resonant, deepened by experience (DeLillo 1991, pp. 203-4).

Pammy’s emplacement generates from within the symbolism she inscribes in the countryside’s spatial fluctuations, and her associative descriptions operate at the level of resignification. The dead elms metaphorically recall Jack’s blackened and stumped corpse, and the widows’ walks atop the houses spatially reflect her loss, though she is a grieving adulteress rather than a grieving widow. Tanner identifies a similar example in his discussion of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. He dissects the metaphor-laden import of Emma Bovary’s carriage, and his exposition resonates with DeLillo’s example in Pammy’s long bus ride back to New York:

Thus the bewildered, compulsive, erratic and finally circular movement of the carriage may be said both to reenact Emma’s own mode of motion and also to implant a mode of movement in her confused being, so that…in one sense she never leaves that carriage, since she follows out its mode of motion throughout the rest of her life (Tanner 1979, p. 348).

This ‘mode of motion’ is Emma’s space of emplacement. The carriage is a metaphor for Emma’s behavioural spiral, and Flaubert’s evocation of the carriage is linked to Emma via the mode of motion Tanner identifies. This clasp, a figurative hairpin between the

Diana Jenkins 111 December 2005 metaphor and its object, generates a third site, the site in which Emma replicates the carriage’s mode of movement until her death. Pammy’s metaphorical descriptions likewise generate and drive her emotional responses, forging critical chasms in the novel’s line of fabula by her unpredictable reactions to space, like electing not to fly back to New York after Jack’s suicide, preferring to travel with the ‘true lives [that] lie below’ (DeLillo 1991, p. 10). Pammy’s responses to space, in the tension between Thanatos and Eros, and in the metaphorical towers and dead elms, illustrate that her various spatial encounters with the towers dominate the reader’s experience of Pammy and exert a profound influence on Pammy’s experience of the world. The first time we see Pammy, she’s in the lift of the wrong tower, talking with a girl from high school she has no memory of, and this confusion – social and spatial – not only defines but in no small measure produces the ill-fated tryst with Jack, a man with complex social, spatial and sexual confusions of his own.

Analysing DeLillo’s metaphorical descriptions ‘involve[s] some continuation of Tom LeClair’s project of gauging [the] postmodern or “systems” reflexivity’ in his work, as well as a consideration of the author’s attempts ‘to conceptualize language in terms other than those implicit in [DeLillo’s] own deft mimicry of cliché, jargon, and media-speak’ (Cowart 2003, p. 72). Conceptually, the space for these alternate terms is constructed at least partially in DeLillo’s metaphorical landscapes, which create transgressive spaces in the third line linking a metaphor and its object. This transgressive element occurs because DeLillo’s model consistently ‘subsumes every metaphorical economy,’ and collapses ‘the differentiation that characterizes language’ (Cowart 2003, p. 72). The title Players itself troubles any attempt to definitively mark out the narrative’s terrain, revealing a number of metaphorical associations within the text, significantly including ‘”play around” (“to have promiscuous or illicit sexual relations”)’ (Cowart 2003, p. 49). Although Saltzman notes that ‘metaphor depends upon uniqueness and verbal defamiliarization to earn attention’ (Saltzman 1998, p. 481), DeLillo’s reflections on ‘the proliferation of language’ establishes rather than ‘submerges difference’ (Saltzman 1998, p. 481) via his paradoxical deployment of established and even tired sexual metaphors.

Diana Jenkins 112 December 2005 In 1988’s fictionalisation of the Kennedy assassination, Libra, Lee Harvey Oswald is the object of a car metaphor devised by the predatory David Ferrie. The car is one of the motifs DeLillo utilises to reflect focal obsessions of American culture. Its deployment as a sexual metaphor in Libra, and other novels including Mao II, Underworld, and Cosmopolis, provides an additional optic through which to read the broader narrative. Although the car as a sexual metaphor is established to the point of cliché, DeLillo’s descriptions ensure that the metaphorical language engages with its sex object to create the critical third line in his triangular constructions of meaning: the space of emplacement. In Libra, Oswald and Ferrie pick up Linda Frenchette whilst out drinking, and Ferrie says of Oswald,“We want to be nice to him.” After Linda assures Ferrie that she’ll be “Nice for a price,” Ferrie says, “You get the front end. I get the back end. Like bumper cars” (DeLillo 1991(b), p. 331). Although Linda takes the back seat when they get into Ferrie’s actual car, the metaphor’s meaning becomes clear once they park near Oswald’s house, in which his wife Marina presumably lies sleeping:

Lee looked straight ahead…He realized Linda was reaching over the seat back. She groped, is the only word, at his belt buckle and fly.

Lee let Ferrie open his pants. Then Linda had his cock jumping in her fist and was hanging way over the seat back with her mouth open wide, sounding a comic growl.

Lee looked straight ahead. He heard Linda breathing through her nose. She changed her position, hitting her head on the jutting ashtray. He tried to recall the name of a girl he wanted to date once, plaid-skirted, when he was dating age.

Then Ferrie’s voice began to reach him […] “There’s always more to it. Something we don’t know about. Truth isn’t what we know or feel. It’s the thing that waits just beyond…What Linda says is true. You’re at home, in bed now, remembering.”

Then he reached across the dangling woman to straighten Lee’s bow tie (DeLillo 1991(b), pp. 332-3).

Staring ahead throughout, Oswald inhabits the place ‘just beyond.’ His consent is not sought or given, and Oswald comprehends himself as more object than self-determined

Diana Jenkins 113 December 2005 man in the space of emplacement generated by the metaphor of sexual desire. Half of Ferrie’s metaphor is realised when Linda ‘gets the front end’ of Oswald, as it were; Oswald’s silent passivity is appropriate to the objectification to which Ferrie consigns him, and to the image of a vehicle operated and controlled. Indeed, Oswald’s larger transgression in Libra’s primary tragedy of the assassination is one that is driven by others.

Ferrie’s bumper car metaphor meets the other end of its erotic desire shortly after the episode with Linda, when, repeating the ‘nice’ refrain of that night with “People have to be nice to each other,” “People be nice,” and “People be nice, be nice, be nice” (DeLillo 1991(b), p. 341), Ferrie tries to seduce Oswald on a sofa. After ‘easing his body lengthwise onto the sofa, arranging himself behind Lee, the hand circling a central area, moving slowly over Lee’s pants,’ Ferrie tries to undo Oswald’s belt, and the two grapple, Oswald keeping his eyes closed and putting ‘his legs tight together’ (DeLillo 1991(b), p.

341).TP OswaldPT puts up enough resistance that Ferrie soon contents himself with ejaculating onto a fully clothed Oswald from behind (DeLillo 1991(b), p. 341). As with David Bell’s conventional apartment metaphor in Americana, Oswald’s seducers approach their conquest of him in the terms of the metaphor directing them to their object. Oswald’s lack of homosexual desire makes little impression on Ferrie’s efforts to engage him in adulterous sex – as with bumper cars, no one said it would be a smooth ride – but Ferrie’s failure to engage Oswald physically does not prevent the fusion of the metaphor with its sexual object. As with Linda, Oswald is completely silent throughout, and this time also keeps his eyes tightly shut, even though he can’t possibly see Ferrie, in the dark, behind him. To the extent that he can, Oswald, like Babette Gladney in White Noise, removes himself from his (in this case non-consensual) adulterous transgressions, leaving only the object of Ferrie’s desire.

Judging from his climax, the physical proximity to his desire is enough for Ferrie’s metaphor to find fruition, and it is no accident that he chooses a bumper car. Oswald verges on childlike, thinking about Indian burns and grade school whilst fighting Ferrie off, and there are unmistakable paedophilic overtones in Ferrie’s self-allocated ‘Cap’n Dave’ nickname and the cringe-worthy ‘be nice’ refrain. The reference to bumper cars,

Diana Jenkins 114 December 2005 the stuff of fairgrounds and childhood, is a deliberately juvenile metaphor to reflect its painfully juvenile object. This incident with Ferrie adds a layer of complexity – and sympathy – to DeLillo’s already controversial portrait of Oswald, and the metaphor assists the reader’s capacity to unpack it.

In Cosmopolis, Eric Packer is also figured metaphorically: ‘traditional emblems of corruption, heralds of civilized collapse, and, more prosaically, food of last resort,’ the rat in Cosmopolis ‘becomes motivic’ (Cowart 2003, p. 219). There are dead rats, live rats, dressed rats, Styrofoam rats, and ‘battalions of rats in restaurants and hotel lobbies’ (DeLillo 2003, p. 89). These rats, as metaphorically engorged as Eric’s limousine, ‘announce and decry the pestilence of ratlike tycoons battening on the world’s green future…The surname of DeLillo’s endlessly acquisitive protagonist, of course, identifies him as something of a pack rat himself’ (Cowart 2003, p. 219). Pack rat, no doubt, and, in his casual pursuit of adulterous sex, followed by ever-more-fantastic denials to his wife Elise, Eric Packer is also DeLillo’s most caddish ‘love rat.’ These mutations of signification – including ‘player’ in Players, ‘crowd’ in Mao II and ‘rat’ in Cosmopolis – are characteristic of DeLillo’s on-going experiment with language. His metaphors implicate a proliferating range of objects. These mutations have a massing quality – they take up space in the text between what is said and what is meant, what is described and what is seen. Frow quotes Peter Wollon when he suggests that in an age marked by an ever-increasing and ever-accelerating proliferation of signs, of all types, the ‘realm of signs becomes not simply a “second nature” but a primary “reality”’ that effaces ‘the traditional distinction between reality and representation’ (Frow 1999, p. 182). If metaphors are examples of these proliferating signs, then this ‘realm’ constitutes the third place, a primary space that marks the point of the effaced distinction between reality and representation. As noted by Cowart, DeLillo’s ‘parallels and interconnections, largely unnoticed by the characters, mock the reader’s desire for the kind of meaning that normally emerges in pattern’ (Cowart 2003, p. 51):

Diana Jenkins 115 December 2005 Rather, they model the mechanics of language, the concatenation of complementary signifiers. The one-to-one correspondences here “represent” that which supposedly obtains between the thing and its sign. Here one sees only shadows and images mirroring each other, a play of simulacra in which there is no privileged plane or reality, no secondary or subordinate plane that is mere representation. The text frustrates expectation that one of its registers will be substance, the other signification (Cowart 2003, p. 51).

Capturing this quality of simulation, the interaction between the metaphor and its proliferating object constructs a third line of meaning that is paradoxically dependent and promiscuous. The strength of the ‘metaphor/object’ triangular structure is also its contradiction: it is permeable, and yet promises signification without end. To borrow expression from Saltzman, the promiscuity of the heterogeneous ‘/’ restores ‘the possibilities inherent in the ordinary by stoking its latencies,’ and extends ‘the range of the strange’ (Saltzman 1998, p. 491).

This adulterous narrative triangle forged by DeLillo’s descriptions of spatial oppositions and sexual metaphors produce narrative affects in relation to the adultery sub-plots. Where ‘descriptions interrupt the line of the fabula’ (Bal 1997, p. 37), this interruptive ability cultivates promiscuous conditions for the emergence of DeLillo’s adultery narratives. Fabula is defined as a series of logically and chronologically related events, and Bal explains the relation between space and event in deliberately stereotypical combinations including ‘declarations of love by moonlight on a balcony’ (Bal 1997, pp. 137-8). We recognise certain settings for certain events, and ‘[s]uch a fixed combination is called a topos’ (Bal 1997, p. 138).TP BalPT suggests that the story is a fabula presented in a certain way (Bal 1997, p. 7), and DeLillo’s texts develop an interpretation of ‘story’ so that the fabula may be altered in the presentation of events, displacing or buckling the sequential line. In Bal’s example, the privilege is given to the declaration of love, later ably accompanied by the moonlight and balcony. Depending on the specifics of a given narrative, the privilege may also reside with the moonlight and the balcony, together fixing a place that compels the declaration of love. This latter order means the space actively constructs the event, an order DeLillo’s texts seem to favour. Bal acknowledges that descriptions interrupt fabula, and descriptions can also create events, potentially altering the story and, retroactively, the fabula.

Diana Jenkins 116 December 2005 Narrative events in DeLillo do not issue solely from a fabula sequence. Events can also occur in the story, which additionally negotiates sequence in his narratives. Taking up Bal’s idea of an interruption to the sequence, where she discusses the interruption to the fabula, I contend that DeLillo’s narratives also explore interruptions to the logic of description, and therefore to the story. Description is capable of generating a sequence, and elements of description – elements affecting whether the representation of the fabula is particularly ghoulish, violent, prudish and so on – actively enable the narrative line of DeLillo’s adultery sub-plots.

The primacy of description in the production of DeLillo’s adultery narratives is memorably etched by 1982’s The Names. This novel includes one of the most disturbing sexual passages of any of his texts, and it is one that is dominated by spatial imagery. The Names is set in Greece, with an American protagonist, and the spatial subtext is thick with latent suggestions of isolation, detachment, imprisonment, and alienation. James Axton is the American, married but separated from his wife following his infidelity, and after an alcohol-fuelled dinner watching novice expatriate belly dancers with his international group of friends, James closes in on one of the dancers, Janet Ruffing. James corners Janet, wife of the absent operations head of the Mainland Bank and known to several of James’s companions, pursuing a conversation that is more akin to a verbal ambush in a scene dominated by images of sound and space. When Janet decides to leave, James accompanies her, and they emerge from the club into a night where ‘There wasn’t space to hold the sound’ (DeLillo 1999(a), p. 229):

It crowded the night, dense waves of it, heavy with electrified force. It came out of the walls and pavement and wooden doors, the pulse of some undefined event, and we walked up the stepped street, into it (DeLillo 1999(a), p. 229).

Anticipating Jack Gladney’s aural torment in White Noise, and ‘the stone odor of demolition’ when Eric and Elise have sex in a NewYork street in Cosmopolis, as well as inheriting the condition from Players’ Pammy, these descriptions of space and sound combine to generate a sexual disequilibrium in the story. Janet and James are infected by the seething space. Both characters are crowded and electrified by the noise ‘coming out of the walls,’ DeLillo’s description of the space extending and absorbing the bodies

Diana Jenkins 117 December 2005 within it. The spatial and aural corruption is such that the reader is left unsure as to whether Janet is consensual in the act of infidelity that consequently follows:

She broke away, running down some steps past a scaffold set against an old building…She turned a corner and went uphill now, into an empty street. When I reached her and put my arms around her from behind she stood motionless. I moved my hands down her belly over the skirt and placed my knees behind hers, making her bend slightly, dip into me. She said something, then shook away and walked out of the dim light toward the wall. I pressed her against the wall (DeLillo 1999(a), p. 230).

This description is, in the first instance, a highly conventional metaphorical indicator for the moral turpitude plaguing James, at least, and possibly both characters (Nel 2001, p. 3). Spatial, sexual, and aural equivocation at the level of description is another explanation, whereby the rush of metaphorical associations corrupts the characters’ reactions at the level of story. The text specifically has Janet and James walk ‘into’ something; these actors are affected by the space, and it is unclear once it absorbs them whether or not they are the agents of their own behaviour. There is a scaffold, the building is specifically old, the light is dim – there is an atmosphere of if not quite decay then moody disarray, like the incriminating wrinkled skirt and unkempt hair of a spontaneous liaison. The narrated features – the darkness, the crumbling facades, and the steep, lonely streets – act decisively upon the course of events. These story aspects of spatial description control and progress this particular narrative line. The space is aided and abetted in its perverse designs by James’s own desire, no doubt, but just as clearly this space that he and Janet occupy incites the desire to riot. This space is one without the moral judgement of the Acropolis, it is a place where ‘There are [no] obligations attached’ (DeLillo 1999(a), p. 3). Both characters to some extent absent themselves from the scene via allusions to the logic of a dream state (Hume 1984):

I worked at her clothes, my mind racing blankly. I felt the warmth in her buttocks and thighs and I moved her toward me. She seemed to be thinking past this moment, finished with it, watching herself in a taxi heading home (DeLillo 1999(a), p. 230).

The described space dissolves the characters’ capacity to inscribe themselves into the scene, creating a self-objectification in both. James’s mind is racing blankly, denying a witting, Cartesian self. He regards Janet as occupying another space altogether, the idea

Diana Jenkins 118 December 2005 of her ‘watching herself’ effecting Janet’s double displacement from this deviant place and foretelling the waking dreams of Brita’s ‘two near strangers’ in Mao II (DeLillo 1992, p. 27) and Marian Shay’s hotel fantasy in Underworld (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 165). Overwhelmingly, though, Janet’s thinking past this moment presages Lee Harvey Oswald’s straight-ahead gaze in Libra during the two sexual deeds orchestrated by David Ferrie. Like the silent and passive Oswald, Janet and James resemble puppets, drawn into a sex act disturbingly lacking in passion. James imagines that Janet sees herself in a taxi, and DeLillo develops this imagined taxi’s potential as an intimate, private place by juxtaposing it with the detached, public sex on the street, simultaneously arresting spatial norms of post-coital closeness.

Brooks argues that a narrative is set in motion once desire, or a bundle of desires, is given the space to roam (Brooks 1984, p. 313). As a result, the language of spatial mobility is linked to desire, and characterises what Bal refers to as a ‘dynamically functioning space’ (Bal 1997, p. 136). This kind of space ‘allows for the movement of characters,’ like a path for walking, and a moving character in narrative ‘is in a sense always an allegory of the travel that narrative is’ (Bal 1997, pp. 136-7). Narrative, on this account, is a form of travel, moving from one point, be it A, or any other conceivable starting location, to another, say B or C, or even in a circle back to A. The important thing is that the travel occurs, and DeLillo’s spatial descriptions encourage the narrative’s progress, functioning dynamically in the way Bal suggests. These spatial descriptions, such as the Grecian laneway in The Names and the towers in Players, do not just allow the traveller to move but determine the way in which the traveller moves. Bal encourages this formulation when she says that it is possible for space to become ‘an acting place’ rather than the place of action’ (Bal 1997, p. 136):

It influences the fabula, and the fabula becomes subordinate to the presentation of space. The fact that ‘this is happening here’ is just as important as ‘the way it is here,’ which allows these events to happen (Bal 1997, p. 136).

Where Bal suggests ‘this (event) is happening [particularly] here (space)’ as the instance of fabula-influencing space, DeLillo’s acting places offer another possibility. Adapting Bal’s logic to the adulterous events canvassed, the way it is here (the space as described)

Diana Jenkins 119 December 2005 means this (adulterous event) happens here. This sequence formulation also impacts the fabula, in terms of the events that occur (this is happening here), and it does so at the level of story (the way it is), being the way a place is characterised such that it is cold, welcoming, decrepit, dark, enormous, or frightening.

This sequence originating at the level of story is important to the function of DeLillo’s adultery narratives, not just because of the way the character moves in space but because of the way meaning is radicalised in narrative space itself. Where the engineer of corruption is the space of narrative construction, rather than a constructed space in the narrative, the adultery narrative emerges from the breakdown, a breakdown that occurs at the line between descriptions of oppositions and between metaphorical descriptions and their object. Hence, ‘[a]lthough DeLillo does fashion startling metaphors in his novels, his vision of the abiding, empowering mystery of language does not solely rely on traditional metaphorical constructions’ (Saltzman 1998, p. 491). DeLillo’s descriptions repeatedly suggest ‘that individual words have a kind of lambency at the core that goes beyond their referential employment’ (Saltzman 1998, p. 491). The slow burn of adultery sub-narratives is one of the ways this descriptive lambency asserts itself in DeLillo’s fiction, adulterating semantic relations so that meaning flirts with transgression as freely as any of his characters.

The third line that erects the adulterous triangle of proliferating meaning between sex, space, and language in DeLillo’s adultery narratives remains a beguiling and mysterious, shape-shifting place, and its promiscuous operation reflects the uncertainty – spatial, existential, cultural – of the present day. In his discussion of the advent of ‘supermodernity,’ Buchanan considers what is truly new about the present epoch is the intense compulsion to give the world meaning. Quoting Augé, Buchanan stresses that it is ‘not the fact that the “world lacks meaning, or has little meaning, or less than it used to have; it is that we feel an explicit and intense daily need to give it meaning”’ (Buchanan 1999, p. 170; Augé 1995, p. 29). This need results in a vast proliferation of messages, symbols, exchanges, and dynamic systems. In turn, this proliferation contributes to my argument that DeLillo’s three-sided linguistic model marks out a promiscuous space, because the material out of which it is constructed is always and already unfaithful.

Diana Jenkins 120 December 2005 Despite the ‘looseness’ of its borders, it is paradoxically a permanent place in DeLillo narrative’s space, since ‘language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique’ (Derrida 1988(a), pp. 112-3), such as the permanent possibility of the unspoken or misspoken, the question mark that hangs damply after a pivotal denial, and in the reduced distance between opposites.

As demonstrated during the analysis of the recurrent hotel/motel motif in DeLillo’s work, imitation cultivates difference, and through difference there is a perpetuation of semantic freedom. Disjunctions and aberrations are generative, and essential to understanding that this third line, rather than lodging like a stubborn tumour between opposites and between metaphor and object, facilitates and incubates a narrative’s progression. Oppositional and metaphorical descriptions of sexualised space expose some of these aberrations and extensions of meaning, as does analysis of description’s capacity to direct the narrative from its position as an aspect of story. These narratological operations combine to suggest DeLillo’s treatment of space confers a reproductive mobility on the narrative that relies on interruptive elements. The mobility resides in the place where semantic distinctions especially fail to establish firm and protected borders. In the dynamic operation Saltzman identifies (Saltzman 1998, p. 495), there is no point at which the dust settles and a pure referent emerges.

These gaps of meaning paradoxically create a meaningful space in DeLillo’s texts that is compatible with Anne Freadman’s hope ‘that heterogeneity itself will be the argument’, and that a ‘non-trivial construal of irreducible differences will be the sense [made]…of the chaos of failed, or partial, patterns (Freadman 1988, p. 125). As Cowart notes, ‘[c]haracteristically, DeLillo takes as much interest in displacements of language as in the things displaced by new advances’ (Cowart 2003, p. 215), so the failure of language patterns Freadman identifies is also their semantic success, ensuring their survival and infinite continuation in a limitless, heterogeneous space.

Characteristic of this agitated, heterogeneous space, DeLillo’s narratives refuse to confer any sense of blithe contentment: characters betray each other; language betrays itself. Still, DeLillo’s spatial descriptions repeatedly suggest that ‘living language is not

Diana Jenkins 121 December 2005 diminished,’ and is ‘inseparable from the world that provokes it’ (DeLillo 1997, p. 39). The destabilisation of meaning is the effect of the narrative’s negotiation of adulterous and adulterated spaces. These promiscuous characters and spaces encourage the expansion and transformation of signification. DeLillo’s errant people and places are bulging with interpretative potential; he flings the gates wide. DeLillo’s adultery narratives demonstrate that his model of language is compatible with the Lacanian notion of the ‘indestructibility of unconscious desire,’ in which, as Brooks suggests, desire continues to live, in a ‘displaced and unrecognised form,’ in a place where desire ‘cannot speak its right name’ (Brooks 1984, p. 324):

…yet for this very reason continues as a force in the present…extending the desiring subject forward on those “rails” which figure the necessary dynamic of desire, a motor insisting – as narrative ever does – toward the unnamed meaning (Brooks 1984, p. 324).

From this paradoxical formulation of the ‘dead desire’ that continues to live, Jack Gladney is the desiring subject of White Noise, insisting toward unnamed meaning through the narrative’s descriptions of space and sound. His ‘aural torment’ (DeLillo 1986, p. 241) accompanies the scene he conjures of his wife, Babette, having sex with Willie Mink. Jack achieves surround sound, hearing all ‘the sloppings and smackings’ before it finally issues in a single word: ‘Panasonic’ (DeLillo 1986, p. 241). The name is the dead desire, and, ‘[l]ike the syllables of the Proustian name, the…word is multiply motivated’ (Frow 1999, p. 188):

“Pana-“ is the circle slowly closing, “sonic” is Jack’s aural torment, and there are overdetermined traces of “panoramic” and, of course, television. But as with the name in Proust, the point is the excess of the poetic signifier over its component parts, its transcendental character, its plenitude (Frow 1999, p. 188).

This excess of the poetic signifier in a virtual funhouse of mirrors is the final gesture of DeLillo’s narratives of space, since it is the idea of ‘something bigger, grander, more sweeping’ (DeLillo 1986, p. 64) that forms his Lacanian ‘rails’ (Brooks 1984, p. 324). DeLillo extends the space and meaning of adulterous desire by bearing ‘this news about the loss of the referent, the dissolving of the object into its representations, [and

Diana Jenkins 122 December 2005 delivering it] not with nostalgia for a lost world of the real but in joy’ (Lentricchia 1998, p. 416).

Derrida’s theory on structure accesses and explains why DeLillo’s fiction’s negotiation of space is both perverse and reproductive. There is a perversity in the loss, or rather the lack, of this notion of origin, which has to do with the belated awareness that ‘there is no transcendental or privileged signified’ (Derrida 1988(a), p. 110). It seems a gross trickery, and it is partly in the moment of comprehension that the perversity resides. In the absence of a pure, transcendent signified, perversity is necessity – everything is a perversion. And yet this is simultaneously the way in which meaning issues forth, reproducing in resignification. Patterns of meaning ‘can be split up ad infinitum,’ and ‘[j]ust when you think you have disentangled and separated them, you realize that they are knitting together again in response to the operation of unexpected affinities’ (Derrida 1988(a), p. 120). Even the language Derrida employs captures the operation in terms of reproduction, referring to the question of différance in terms of conception, formation, gestation and labor, all of which more than ‘glance toward the operations of childbearing’ (Derrida 1988(a), p. 121). Derrida affirms ‘a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin,’ so that the non-centre is not lost, but elsewhere, its location ‘the seminal adventure of the trace’ (Derrida 1988(a), p. 120). DeLillo’s fiction takes up the challenge of affirmation, leading his adultery narratives into multiple adventures of the trace.

DeLillo’s treatment of narrative and character space is without security, since the borders of interpretation are insistently open. DeLillo’s concern with adulterated spatiality in his narratives of adultery has at its non-centre a reverberation of displaced space that reflects his thinking about language, thinking that is ‘resolutely eclectic and creative’ (Cowart 2003, p. 226). One does not wonder that his fiction, then, sometimes ‘represents the word as strangely eroticized and even divine, for language and sex share with deity the capacity to create’ (Cowart 2003, p. 226). Updike has written that ‘[t]he heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the soul’s very life’ (Updike 1965, p. 229), and DeLillo’s adultery narratives repeatedly create the space for a model of language that insists on following the promiscuous heart into perversity.

Diana Jenkins 123 December 2005 Chapter Three

The Reciprocal Space of the Journey and the Image

“We took off. We flew. I was more or less” (DeLillo 1999(c), p. 20).

It is paradoxical to argue a space cannot be measured, but paradox is an essential strategy of DeLillo’s semantic promiscuity, and the manoeuvre is valuable in relation to the narrative space DeLillo devotes to the journey and the image. Despite fundamental differences in the way each is spatially conceived, such that one is mobile and the other static, each simultaneously advances a floating perimeter that denies their ostensible distinctions. Both implicate a temporal ‘elsewhere’ that fails to be a definitive ‘somewhere,’ and this absent location produces a semantic itinerancy in the narrative deployment of the image and the journey space. These otherwise un-mappable sites in DeLillo’s adultery narratives evince a reciprocal topography that repeatedly exposes and exploits the paradoxical simultaneity of capture and release in narrative constructions of both. This contradictory operation demonstrates further displacements of meaning in DeLillo’s adultery narratives; a semantic homelessness expands the meaning of these narrative spaces. Both journeys and images represent an ‘elsewhere’ that is always and already beyond an originating ‘somewhere’ which is simultaneously ‘nowhere.’

The floating perimeter shared by the image and the journey in DeLillo’s fiction pertains to the author’s own function as apparatus. Cowart calls DeLillo ‘an instrument measuring what it means to live in the American present,’ suggesting his fiction ‘mirrors the strange fluidity and rootlessness’ (Cowart 2003, p. 12) of the age. This rootlessness is the paradox of DeLillo’s fiction’s connective compulsion, whereby everything is rooted in connection. Matt Shay, the protagonist’s brother in Underworld, at one point thinks to himself, paraphrasing Prentice’s famous revelation in Gravity’s Rainbow, ‘Because everything connects in the end, or only seems to, or seems to only because it does’ (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 465). This quote is repeatedly taken up in critical discussions of both that novel and DeLillo’s others by critics including Cowart, Steven G. Kellman, Peter

Diana Jenkins 124 December 2005 58 Knight, and SaltzmanTPF FPT. Whatever else it betrays in DeLillo’s work, ‘everything is connected’ is a spatial schema, and DeLillo’s novels apply this kinetic spatial maxim to active constructions of meaning, until etymological roots paradoxically uproot meaning in the manner of the semantic transgression of ‘homelessness,’ when home itself “is a failed idea” (DeLillo 1992, p. 92).

Spatial behaviour in DeLillo’s fiction does not conform to expectations in terms of categories such as ‘immobile’ and ‘mobile.’ In their theoretical connection, the journey and the image exchange a semantic fluidity. As Scott thinks to himself in Mao II, ‘We travel into or away from our photographs’ (DeLillo 1992, p. 141), establishing a kinetic aura around the supposedly static image. Although DeLillo struggles with the depthlessness of the contemporary mind, ‘modified by film, by music, and,

overwhelmingly, by television,’TP thePT author’s ‘seeming surrender to the image bears [only]

a superficial resemblance to “going over to the object”’ (Cowart 2003, p. 12).TP CowartPT emphasises that where ‘Baudrillard actually endorses the turn against the subject, DeLillo merely feigns “going over”’ (Cowart 2003, pp. 12-13), and in either event, the image represents a propulsive gesture that resembles the journey’s “going over” from point A to point B.

While Cowart suggests there is a risk of ‘overstating DeLillo’s involvement with – as opposed to criticism of – the image’, he also notes that ‘Americans live in an image culture,…not just a culture in which images proliferate, but a culture in which one recognizes no reality deeper than the image’ (Cowart 2003, pp. 3-4). DeLillo’s texts offer various critiques of this rampant image culture, in novels as diverse as Great Jones Street (1973), White Noise (1985), Mao II (1991), and Cosmopolis (2003), but they also inhabit that culture to the extent that DeLillo’s involvement with the image is, paradoxically, anything but superficial. Like David Bell in Americana, DeLillo appears deeply ‘stirred by the power of the image’ (DeLillo 1990, p. 31). John Johnston has noted that film ‘occupies a privileged place’ in DeLillo’s fiction, and that ‘the image is the essential term

58 TP PT Variations of the phrase ‘everything is connected’ recur throughout Underworld (see p. 251, p. 825, p. 826) and Libra.

Diana Jenkins 125 December 2005 in the relationship between the two media’ (Johnston 1989, p. 268). Both the aspect of proliferation Cowart identifies as well as the essentialness suggested by Johnston expose a reproductive character to the image that is kinetic in the same way a film, in essence moving pictures, may be replayed, and as a train journey captures paradoxically fleeting and continuous images out of windows.

My analysis deploys several theories of space that have particular application to modernism and realist fiction, part of the territory occupied by DeLillo’s writing. The very unmappability of sites such as the journey and the image encourages theoretical dialogue dedicated to the attempt, providing an essential vocabulary for undertaking a similar exercise in narrative terms. Part of this theoretical foundation includes a return to Foucault’s concept of heterotopias, since the honeymoon train he discusses in ‘Of Other Spaces’ is particularly relevant for interpreting the space of the fictional journey as conceived by DeLillo. I have earlier interrogated spatial demarcations such as ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ in terms of gaps in spatially determined sexual oppositions and metaphors. LeClair, like Freud, identifies the operational space between these categories as a ‘system’ that provides a means of approaching categories in narrative topoi like the journey and the image. Theorists of post-modern space like Augé and Buchanan similarly provide a methodology for reading particular sites as apparatus, affording a conceptual literacy for analysing such space as it occurs in narrative, already seen in DeLillo’s application of the spatial apparatus of the hotel/motel room.

These theories apply to the specifics of narrative space; philosophical and psychoanalytical observations help advance narratological analyses. In turn, narratology exposes the contradiction of such thinking as an attempt to overcome and theoretically account for the basic spatial paradox of ‘nowhere places.’ Freud’s identification of the death instinct, and Kristeva’s theory of abjection, both cohere with Brooks’s identification of narrative’s paradoxical movement toward its own end. This movement in turn reflects the kinesis of DeLillo’s narratives that results in the text paradoxically ‘enact[ing] this theme relentlessly’ (Cowart 2003, p. 193); that is, failing to ultimately connect, resolve, or, indeed, arrive.

Diana Jenkins 126 December 2005 Historically, the journey and narrative are closely and complexly related, the novel form itself interrogated in terms evoking both linear and non-linear travel by, to borrow the category from McKeon, grand narrative theorists including Lukács in The Theory of the Novel (1920), Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel (1957), René Girard in Deceit, Desire and the Novel (1961), and Mikhail Bakhtin in The Dialogic Imagination (1981). The work of Russian narrative theorist Bakhtin (1895 – 1975), like DeLillo’s fiction, displays ‘extraordinary sensitivity to the plurality of experience,’ distinguishing him ‘from other moderns who have been obsessed with language’ (Holquist 1981, xx). In The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin gives the name ‘chronotope (literally, “time space”) to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature’ (Bakhtin 1981, p. 84). For him, this time-space is ‘an intersection of axes and fusion of indicators [that] characterizes the artistic chronotope’ (Bakhtin 1981, p. 84).

This chiastic association between the journey and narrative comes to renewed prominence with the emergence of two cultural phenomena, the commuter and popular fiction, and Melman suggests that ‘the simultaneous growth of the suburbs and the expansion of commuter transport influenced the history of popular fiction as significantly as the rise of the railways’ (Melman 1988, p. 48). In terms of its American engagements, this connection is personified in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature by the figure of the expatriate American as ‘the ultimate metaphor of escapism’ (Melman 1988, p. 146). This displaced subject also figures repeatedly in DeLillo’s novels including Ratner’s Star (1976), The Names (1982), Libra (1988), and Mao II (1991).

Although expressed largely in the ‘form of an obsession with sexuality’ (Melman 1988, p. 146), desire may also identify its object as escape. Escape engages the reciprocal topography of the image and the journey, the history of which is suggested by Barrett’s identification of their similar framing with reference to Henry Adams’s The Education of Henry Adams (1907), in which ‘riders of railways and viewers of daguerreotypes experienced an “annihilation of time and space”’ (Barrett 1999, p. 806). According to Barrett, the resulting ‘[p]hysical and psychological displacement has been a continuous phenomenon in America since at least the nineteenth century’ (Barrett 1999, p. 806), and she connects the railways and daguerreotypes in terms of spatial disorientation. This

Diana Jenkins 127 December 2005 notion of displacement is crucial to reading the topos of the journey and the image in the novel of adultery as a device exemplifying the combined narrative elements of time, desire and mobility. These elements assist the reading of DeLillo’s adultery narratives. I suggest that the journey space operates as a focal point of consciousness on the part of the adulterer, marking the place in the narrative where transgressive awareness is conceded.

Journey space reveals its imagistic character in the imitation conceded by this awareness. The site’s embedded metanarrative across modes and texts indicates the adulterer’s representation of a prior representation of adultery. Seltzer’s study of serial killers lends itself well to this aspect of adultery narratives in his investment in the idea that space has an affective relationship to the subject. David Bell in DeLillo’s Americana, Scott in Mao II, and Nick and Marian Shay in Underworld all identify the narrative frame of the journey or the image site as a pre-adulterous mode. The mimetic drive occasioned by this space results in what Seltzer, recalling Roger Caillois, locates in terms of a ‘hyperidentification with others (being “like” everyone else)’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 50):

…this takes the form…of a hyperidentification with physical ground or context. What this involves is “the generalization of space at the expense of the individual” […] The tendency toward imitation…extends beyond the protective mimicries of camouflage to a tendency toward simulation…[More] exactly, the [tropic] character of the attraction by milieu means that “life takes a step backward” (Seltzer 1998, p. 50).

This aspect of serialisation identifies the topos of the journey as functionally compatible with the narrated image. The imitative urge at the core of the function of journey and image space in adultery narratives reveals a site that is always and already narratologically embedded in its own construction of typicality, to use Frow’s term. The apparatus connecting a narrative’s beginning and its perpetually constructing end is identified by recent narrative theorists like Bal and Brooks in terms including mobility, temporality and desire, elements also explicitly employed in adultery narratives. Such narrative theory relates to the specific topos of the journey and the image not only as a theoretical construct, then, but also as it operates within a given narrative, operations explored by Tanner in Adultery in the Novel. Tanner’s presupposition of ‘two discrete realms that can be absolutely differentiated – the city and the field’ (Tanner 1979, p. 19),

Diana Jenkins 128 December 2005 earlier related to DeLillo’s use of the hotel/motel, is a useful conceptual demarcation. Where Bal and Brooks discuss aspects of narrative construction, identifying a propulsive movement in narration that involves the theoretical mechanics of image-making and journey-taking, Tanner focuses on the contents of a given narrative, which in realist fiction concerns literal journeys undertaken by characters. Tanner’s distinction identifies the preponderance of a particular convention in the literature of adultery: two distinct realms are employed to remove adulterers from the site of normal life to the site of transgression elsewhere.

Although Tanner’s work focuses on late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European realist novels of adultery, his observations are pertinent to the current discussion. The convention he identifies develops within the American novel tradition, often incorporating movement from the (literal and nominal) city to the field in its adultery fabula, even evoking Europe as the ‘field’ to the American ‘city.’ This movement across the Atlantic is realised repeatedly in the novels of Henry James, who struggled with the concept that a ‘Nice American Girl could…be guilty of adultery, which remained for him the European, the Mediterranean sin’ (Fiedler 1970, p. 287). Although James ‘flirted with or actually faced the forbidden American theme, which he himself spoke of squeamishly as “the adulterine element in the subject”’ (Fiedler 1970, p. 287), novels such as Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Golden Bowl (1904) removed adultery to Europeans, or at the very least to Europe. More contemporary American fiction shows less inclination to transfer infidelity abroad, developing a prurient fiction distinctly American in flavour. Iconic characters including Daisy Fay Buchanan of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), and William Faulkner’s Addie Bundren of As I Lay Dying (1930), as well as Pynchon’s Oedipa Maas of The Crying of Lot 49, and Updike’s Sarah Worth of S., conduct affairs outside their home. A host of characters across DeLillo’s oeuvre do the same, including David Bell of Americana, Pammy and Lyle Wynant of Players, Cleo Birdwell of Amazons, James Axton of The Names, Babette Gladney of White Noise, Karen and Scott of Mao II, Marian and Nick Shay of Underworld, Livia Majeski of Valparaiso and Eric Packer of Cosmopolis.

Diana Jenkins 129 December 2005 The indiscrete realm of the journey is presupposed by Tanner’s distinction, its topographical position in narrative not unlike the third line analysed previously as an example of Foucault’s space of emplacement, the link in this case referring to the topos connecting a journey’s beginning and end (Foucault 1986, p. 22). The journey helps control the narrative’s advancement by, for example, delaying the adulterous transgression until after the subject has left one realm and reached another. The suggested reciprocity in the topography of the journey and the image is likewise formally unmappable to the extent that it is mobile, but it is nonetheless a narrative apparatus, with specific machinations developing narratological imperatives, such as animating the connection between desire and mobility. DeLillo’s use of the city/field journey dichotomy, and adulterers who represent prior representations, acknowledges the conventions of adultery narrative. His self-conscious repetitions are the image of Emma Bovary’s ‘lyrical legion,’ and stress that ‘[t]here is always something statistical in our loves, and something belonging to the law of large numbers’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, p. 294).

The operations of the journey and the image in DeLillo’s adultery narratives have consequences of process and meaning. The final analysis in this chapter concerns the affective potential of such operations, determining that the image and the journey space in DeLillo’s adultery narratives reveal further gaps in his constructions of meaning, gaps and slippages that are productive and reproductive in terms of generation, renewal and departure. Complementary to Barrett’s reading of images in Mao II, Elizabeth McMahon suggests that perversion is productive in the sonata form as reproduced by Tolstoy in his famous 1889 novella of adultery and paranoia, The Kreutzer Sonata. Of the narrator Pozdynshev’s misplacement, McMahon’s article ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’ makes the point that ‘the long, one-way train journey in Tolstoy’s story, which is the formal premise and structure of the narrative, can be seen to imitate the sonata form of music, replete with its exposition, development and recapitulation’ (McMahon 2000, p. 11). McMahon’s focus on the element of imitation in the train journey’s narrative operation reveals an instance of perverse dysfunction in Tolstoy’s use of the frame that illuminates such perversions in DeLillo’s work. In its contradictory double-code of capture and release, the topography of the image and the journey is another point of semantic transgression in DeLillo’s

Diana Jenkins 130 December 2005 adultery narratives. Seen earlier in the space between oppositions and the metaphor and its object, and that between replicant models including the televised image, these gaps have a narrative life that refuses stasis, recalling DeLillo’s suggestion that ‘[f]ollowing a plot to its mythical point of origin offers the hope of a birth, or rebirth, that replaces the original one’ (Parrish 1999, p. 702). Sexual mobility in this spatial and reproductive condition is in terms of the intimate stranger who both passes for and passes through, further advancing DeLillo’s use of the eruption of such spaces to monitor the movement that occurs between paradoxical and multivalent linguistic engagements.

DeLillo’s representation of journey and image space is conceptual and relative, not fixed and knowable. A key attribute of this conceptual space is that it ‘is an apparatus, or concept, not a given’ (Buchanan 1999, pp. 171-2; Augé 1995, p. 52). Specifically, the journey is a spatial site that serves ‘either as a principle of intelligibility for an observer, or a principle of meaning for an inhabitant’ (Buchanan 1999, pp. 172; Augé 1995, p. 52). This level of intelligibility also makes clear the limitation of such conceptions, since seeking to categorise that which is by definition mobile is an oxymoronic gesture. Nonetheless, theoretical apparatus exists that develops a coherent language of floating space. The journey is a Foucauldian space of emplacement, given its status as a point of intersection between places (Foucault 1986, p. 22). The reader can grasp the existence of this space, and is able to recognise its operation, but it is simultaneously a kinetic phenomenon, and the reader is unable to pin down, measure or capture what divides its limits.

Journey space is also a heterotopia; floating, without place, and existing by itself, it is ‘outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate [its] location in reality’ (Foucault 1986, p. 24). Topography is the ‘detailed description or delineation of the features of a locality’ (oed.com), and the features of the journey’s position are more intelligible than its coordinates. A number of features emerge when considering the topography of journey space. First, it is a heterotopic place in the narrative, since it is outside of all spaces but still located in reality. This is particularly the case in realist fiction, where characters take journeys that readers apprehend as a plot function of reality-bearing feasibility. Conjuring a complex network of tracks cross-country,

Diana Jenkins 131 December 2005 Foucault uses the example of the moving train to suggest that the heterotopic nature of journey space is defined by the intersection of a number of axes. The train represents the complex operation of this kind of space as ‘something through which one goes; it is also something by means of which one can go from one point to another, and then it is also something that goes by’ (Foucault 1986, pp. 23-4). It is possible to track the movements of journey space via these instances of intersection, but it is not possible to locate the space itself in any one of them. Foucault develops the features of this unlocatable place, connecting desire with mobility as its active constituents:

For girls, there was, until the middle of the twentieth century, a tradition called the “honeymoon trip” which was an ancestral theme. The young woman’s deflowering could take place “nowhere” and, at the moment of its occurrence the train…was indeed the place of this nowhere, this heterotopia without geographical markers (Foucault 1986, pp. 24-5).

The traditional insistence on a deflowering that occurs ‘nowhere’ is reflected in adultery narrative by Tanner’s ‘field’ typology, and asserts the topography of transgression as linked inextricably to female sexuality, the site of simultaneous consummation and denial. This kinetic relation between heterotopic space and female sexuality is represented by Umberto Eco’s memorable example from the New York School of Holography:

Two very beautiful naked girls are crouched facing each other. They touch each other sensually, they kiss each other’s breasts lightly, with the tip of the tongue. They are enclosed in a kind of cylinder of transparent plastic. Even someone who is not a professional voyeur is tempted to circle the cylinder in order to see the girls from behind, in profile, from the other side. The next temptation is to approach the cylinder, which stands on a little column and is only a few images in diameter, in order to look down from above: But the girls are no longer there (Eco 1987, p. 3).

This holograph creates a kinetic sexual triangle between the two girls and the observer. Their erotic movement occurs ‘nowhere,’ and the optical illusion of their appearance in the ‘somewhere’ of the School has its promiscuous double in their disappearance when viewed from an alternative position. Like the shifting holograph, Foucault’s image of the sexualised virgin captures the borderline as well as the heterotopic aspect of the uncertain space. The point of the loss of virginity marks a space between two existential positions,

Diana Jenkins 132 December 2005 being the virgin maiden and the conjugal woman. The ‘deflowering’ place exists in neither location. Just as Eco’s beautiful girls both are and are not on display, the sexual ritual is heterotopic; despite the uncertain location, the transitional event, like the holographic display, does occur ‘somewhere.’

Embedded in this interaction between desire, mobility and the subject in space is the journey’s spatial operation as a trajectory linking beginning and end, one in which ‘[t]he rapid transfers of inside and outside, distance and fusion, in the transferential relation…make it impossible to disentwine bodies and machines’ (Seltzer 1998, pp.100- 1). This site of indeterminacy is as unstable as what Seltzer calls the ‘attempt to “mediate”…between outside and inside’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 99). As previously noted, Freud refers to the separation between the inside and the outside as a ‘system’ (Freud 1955, p. 32). Seltzer’s model suggests this spatial system is inherently transgressive in the subject’s experience. It is not a matter of ‘equating inside and outside,’ or a ‘matter of choosing between them,’ since the subject’s movement ensures that it is ‘precisely the boundaries between inside and outside that are violently transgressed, renegotiated, reaffirmed’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 100).

One of David Bell’s enigmatic friends, Brand’s ‘mass’ corporeality in Americana (DeLillo 1990, p. 252) anticipates the mass subject in Mao II: one reproduced body, a subject that is ‘corporeally “mimetic-ised” into being’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 50). For the subject occupying a mechanised space, in which both the journey and the image are located, the trauma brings the outside in, ‘in the mimetic identification [of subject consciousness] with the machine process’ (Ballard 1990, p. 12). Seltzer’s theory of the subject in space illuminates the circumstances of Bill’s affair with the married Karen in Mao II, which precedes Brita’s photographs of Bill as a serialisation of his subjecthood. Bill’s sexual encounters with Karen not only form the links in a chain of repetition, such that Bill refers to Karen’s undressing, ‘Every time she did this’ as an image, a ‘painted moment’ (DeLillo 1992, p. 85), but their affair is also a reproduction of Karen’s affair with Scott. The imitation contagion that characterises Bill’s spatial framing throughout the novel suggests that his body ‘becomes visible as a model for something else’ (Ballard 1990; Seltzer 1998, pp. 34-5).

Diana Jenkins 133 December 2005 Bill’s increased visibility commences with Scott and Karen’s ensconcing in his home and the sexual relationship he begins with Karen. Brita’s photographs then heighten the onset of his public exposure. This gradual process of identification from the outside sends Bill out into it. He increasingly becomes part of the outside the further he journeys into it, just as Rilke expresses in Lettres à une musicienne a desire to be out-of-doors of his imagined ‘lonely house in the country’ to meet the hurricane bearing up the path (Bachelard 1994, 59 p. 42; Rilke, p. 112)TPF FPT. Brita and her photographs are Mao II’s metaphorical hurricane in their combined affect on Bill’s eccentric household – its balance is destroyed – and Bill’s consequently externalised body. Bill increasingly, paradoxically, becomes a model for the ‘public sphere, and not merely because the proliferating histories of bodies and sexualities amount to the thrilled exhibition of private bodies and private desires in public’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 35). Where Bachelard suggests that ‘we feel calmer and more confident when in the old home’ than we do ‘on streets where we have only lived as transients’ (Bachelard 1994, p. 43), Mao II depicts an isolated, dislocated subject in Karen. Her lover missing, ‘Karen’s life had no center with Bill on the lam. She was all drift and spin’ (DeLillo 1992, p. 142). Thus, as Derrida insists it must be, Karen’s centre is ‘outside,’ and she aimlessly wanders the streets of New York instead of returning home when she is unable to find Bill.

Journey space ‘makes plot move forward to its end’ as one of the narrative’s ‘emblematic novelistic motors and engines’ (Brooks 1984, p. 316). The site operates in adultery narratives as the distance between the ‘city’ and the ‘field,’ and its existence signifies the occupying subject’s awareness of the advance toward transgression. The space establishes narrative expectations via its familiar operation, but these expectations contribute to the radicalisation of the site’s function when it fails to meet them. The space can be ‘presented as a labyrinth, as unsafety, as confinement’ (Bal 1997, p. 137), and the

59 TP PT Bachelard notes that photographically speaking, these lines of Rilke seem to be ‘a “negative” of the house, the reverse of the function of inhabiting.’ Further, he notes that the negative is revealing because ‘it gives evidence of a dynamism in combat that is cosmic in its proportions…At whatever dialectical pole the dreamer stands, whether in the house or the universe, the dialectics become dynamic. House and space are not merely two juxtaposed elements of space. In the reign of the imagination, they awaken day dreams in each other, that are opposed’ (pp. 42-3).

Diana Jenkins 134 December 2005 inherent unknowability of journey space disrupts even its established operations, including a subject’s movement from the ‘city’ to the ‘field’ in Tanner’s formulation.

In adultery texts, desire is not simply a teleological energy driving the narrative toward the erotics of transgressive sexual satiety. Desire is imbued with affective potential as a narrative operation, just as space is deployed as an apparatus within the narrative’s construction. Brooks focuses on the form taken by the operation of desire, and he suggests that ‘[i]f the motor of narrative is desire, totalizing, building ever larger units of meaning, the ultimate determinants of meaning lie at the end, and narrative desire is ultimately, inexorably, desire for the end’ (Brooks 1984, p. 319). On this appraisal of narrative progression, the space affords technical support, encouraging this desire for the end via certain spaces, like the journey, and their capacity for reaching it.

There is a connective relation between this desire for the end and the concept of death that manifests itself in a number of adultery texts, whereby the ‘death instinct’ of desire is realised in the narrative via the death of a character. Brooks relates the Freudian death instinct to its paradoxical role as origin: that is, a precondition of narrative construction. He provides an additional vocabulary for addressing the narrative tension between the conflicting drives of Thanatos and Eros, tension DeLillo’s narratives specifically cultivate. Brooks’s theoretical framework concentrates on ‘the connection between the desire of narrative, the dynamic of its plot, and the desire for narrative, the dynamic of its narrating’ (Brooks 1984, p. 321), and the end is the death that must always be in sight, the moment either of desire’s satiation or its final disappointment. As David’s unrequited love-interest (and unwitting abjection theorist) Carol Deming says in Americana, reciting lines based on the character of David’s dead mother in his home-movie, “I needed death in order to believe I was living” (DeLillo 1990, p. 279). Narrative also presupposes its own death in order to function, since ‘[t]he telling is always in terms of the impending end’ (Brooks 1984, p. 320).

Narrative must also have a point of commencement in order to function, and in the conceptual space between the narrative’s commencement and its inevitable termination is the journey, the vehicle of desire. The mode of travel is not what is at stake; the interim

Diana Jenkins 135 December 2005 journey propels the subject toward his or her desire. A stalled journey operates from a heterotopic location that resembles Barrett’s formulation of image space in DeLillo’s Mao II:

Because they are static, photographs, like other visual artefacts, are associated with space rather than time, but because they record actual moments and events, photographs are inevitably temporal. Their inherent dichotomy enables them to encapsulate the problems of postmodern space (Barrett 1999, p. 795).

The shared topos of the journey and the image is inevitably temporal, conceptualising a beginning and, at some later point, an end. Its primary narrative operation entails a subject’s movement through space. Barrett notes that the inherent dichotomy of photographs encapsulates the problems of postmodern space, and both the journey and the photograph reflect the problems of the postmodern subject in this space. These various formulations of space, the journey, and kinesis, open Mao II and other DeLillo novels to new readings, specifically that the journey and the image transfer a sexually corruptive space in the narrative that affects characters via the erotic paradox of reproductive fragmentation.

Time is a determining feature in the topographical exchanges of journey and image space in Mao II. The novel’s characterisations of Bill as an author and Brita as a photographer add resonance to Bakhtin’s sense that, ‘[i]n literature and art itself, temporal and spatial determinations are inseparable from one another, and always colored by emotions and values’ (Bakhtin 1981, p. 243). This chronotopic emotional attachment is seen in Scott and Karen’s desire to delay analysing the negatives of Brita’s photographic series of Bill, as though taking more time to see his image extends Bill’s journey, his life, and their triangular love affair with him. Bal argues that the connection is fundamental, since ‘[t]he relationship between time and space is of importance for the narrative rhythm’ (Bal 1997, p. 139):

When a space is presented extensively, an interruption of the time sequence is unavoidable…Spatial indications are always durative (an extreme case of iteration)…[and] the chronology is always disrupted by spatial indications (Bal 1997, pp. 139-40).

Diana Jenkins 136 December 2005 The temporal event of the subject’s movement through space affords the narratological means of perceiving the joint topography of the journey and the image in DeLillo’s texts. When Eric Packer, Cosmopolis’s serial adulterer, gets into his limousine, DeLillo’s description of the car’s interior indicates the duration of a stall in the journey via the detail of Eric’s observation of spatial minutiae. The car is stuck in traffic, temporarily contracting the narrative’s movement. The novel presents Eric’s physical environment in order to convey the journey space’s narrative suspension as it simultaneously participates in the image space’s visible propulsion:

The car ran into stalled traffic before it reached Second Avenue. He sat in the club chair at the rear end of the cabin looking into the array of visual display units. There were medleys of data on every screen, all the flowing symbols and alpine charts, the polychrome numbers pulsing. He absorbed this material in a couple of long, still seconds, ignoring the speech sounds that issued from lacquered heads. There was a microwave and a heart monitor. He looked at the spycam on a swivel and it looked back at him. He used to sit here in hand-held space but that was finished now. The context was nearly touchless. He could talk most systems into operation or wave a hand at a screen and make it go blank (DeLillo 2003, p. 13).

Both the image and the journey space are utilised as temporal narrative apparatus in this traffic jam sequence, where the screen displays are ‘flowing’ and ‘pulsing’ but time stands as ‘still’ as the traffic. This exchange of function between the journey and the image manipulates the temporal pace so that the narrative accelerates and slows in tandem with both the vehicle’s progress and Eric’s perception of the screen image’s movement whilst the view outside is static. Nothing happens in the narrative whilst the car is not in motion that does not involve imagery – even Eric’s capacity to wave the screen blank emphasises the active response capacity of the image site, its capacity for dormancy represented instead by the stalled journey.

Eric’s movement through the narrative represents ‘the over-socialized individual, […] in terms of a radical failure of distance with respect to context,’ Seltzer further suggesting that such a failure of distance ‘is realised in the subject’s absorption into “background”’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 48). In Eric’s case, the exchange between the journey and the image is produced by his desires – the interchange mobilises and enables the desire’s transportation and effect, and the narrative presses forward to Eric’s several adulterous

Diana Jenkins 137 December 2005 encounters. Eric is essential to the operation of the shared topographical moment. From the point of view of subject ‘origination,’ the site provides narrative support for the subject’s movement. Because this space entails Eric’s mobility, there is an element of repetition to the site’s narrative function. The narrative harnesses a consequent expectation that the space will operate in a certain way, such as in Eric’s repeated delivery to a sexual event. Adultery narratives take advantage of the aspect of re- enactment that characterises the topographical interplay, fetishising the site’s signification such that the subject is corporeally ‘mimetic-ised’ into being ‘similar, not similar to something, but just similar’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 50).

The shared topographical position originates with the subject, but the site paradoxically denies the subject’s primacy. Eric, for instance, is reduced to ‘a process of identification that takes the form, above all, of a melting or fading or vanishing into place’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 38). This process results in a lack of narrative governance over ‘the little tactics of the habitat’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 38; Foucault 1980, pp. 146-9; Spain 1992). The ‘tactic’ of journey space in Cosmopolis is to corrupt, mobilising Eric’s desire and then, once he is ensnared within its space, inscribing that desire as mimetic and revealing his position as mere copy. The journey’s inevitable function, as an independent narrative agent conversely dependent on Eric for its animation, supports Melley’s paradoxical logic of recognition: ‘the more one demands recognition as an agent, the more one is dependent on another for that recognition’ (Melley 2000, p. 97).

The subject’s mimetic movement through this topos in adultery narratives is well characterised by Tanner’s city/field breakdown, when the adulterer-in-waiting leaves the site of married life (represented by the city in Tanner’s formulation) and journeys to the site of transgression (represented by the field). The topography of this space operates as a site division between realms and as an enabling area – an essential checkpoint between fidelity and infidelity in narratives of sexual transgression. The eponymous Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary in Madame Bovary, and Edna Pontellier in The Awakening all demonstrate knowledge of the ‘field’ as the site of adulterous acquiescence. In this

Diana Jenkins 138 December 2005 narrative space, these characters exhibit the mode of interaction that Sartre described as 60 seriality, and that Seltzer discusses in relation to serial killersTPF FPT:

It involves…mechanisms of reduplication, a mimetic contagion or contagious modeling. “All the while I am modeling myself and my behavior on the being of other people outside me, all the rest of them are doing exactly the same thing; in fact, there is no Other, only an infinite regression” (Seltzer 1998, p. 236).

The path to transgression marks the ‘infinite regression’ of the adulteress into a sorority of ‘profound uniformity’ that is a model of Sartrian seriality (Seltzer 1998, p. 236). Their adultery narratives merge with a tradition marking journey space as a site of self- reflexivity, Emma in particular ‘remember[ing] the heroines of the books she had read, and that lyrical legion of adulteresses’ sings in her memory until she becomes ‘a part of her own imaginings’ (Flaubert 1957, p. 175). These serially narrated journeys involve conceptual travel, which is kinetic, unfixed, and is therefore articulated in terms of its topography. The fluidity of the space in adultery narrative has to do with its status as the liminal site connecting the discrete realms of the ‘city’ and the ‘field.’ In terms of the movement of the narrative’s fabula, the journey can animate the plot’s movement forward to its end, even where that journey is a return to the point of departure.

Despite the promiscuity of the space and its unseen, unknowable trajectory through the narrative, it is a system that functions within the limits of narrative space. A journey is temporally contained by its commencement and conclusion in the narrative, mirroring the temporal capture of an image still like Brita’s photographs of Bill in Mao II. The shared topos of the journey and the image in DeLillo’s adultery narratives recalls Freidrich Kittler’s identification of the tautology that ‘men and women, who are linked together by media, come together in media’ (Kittler 1990, p. 357). This same tautology applies to space in the construction of adultery narrative, and Bill’s journey resembles the visual media of Brita’s photographs beyond simply ‘understand[ing] sexual relation as inseparable from technologies of reproduction and communication’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 95).

60 TP PT On Sartre’s description of seriality, see Jameson (1971), pp. 247-52.

Diana Jenkins 139 December 2005 Spatial repetitions of journey space in Mao II make up one of Seltzer’s ‘imitative species,’ enabling certain narrative movements whilst breaking with conventions of the site’s use in adultery narrative. Karen, the novel’s young Moonie bride, travels across America to escape the programming efforts of her Moonie husband and cult authorities, as well as the deprogramming efforts of her family, both of which take place in indistinguishable motel rooms. DeLillo disrupts the motel room’s ‘field’ potential by marking the space as a site of familial trauma rather than one of adulterous pleasure. The text further agitates the floating perimeters of the journey and the motel room when Karen eventually meets Scott, Bill Gray’s assistant. The journey commonly operates in well-known adultery texts across continents and centuries as a way of reaching an already-identified potential lover, as in the noted classic nineteenth-century novels of adultery Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, and The Awakening, as well as 1920s bestsellers including The Sheik and The Green Hat; or of facilitating the meeting of the eventual lover at journey’s end, such as in the Restoration play The Country Wife, and in American novels such as The Scarlet Letter, S., Couples, and The Crying of Lot 49. The unusual aspect of Scott and Karen’s meeting in Mao II is not that they are simultaneously journeying subjects, although that too is a departure, but that their merged journey operates as the frame of their meeting at all. The novel further manipulates the conventional ‘field’ of Tanner’s study by placing Karen and Scott in a series of identical motel rooms, the rented room functioning not as the site of consummation at journey’s end, but as an interval in their journey’s narrative space. The narrative recasts their topographical position into several fragments, employing a linked series of smaller, locatable sites (the car, the motel room, and the diner). The text further resists the motel room space’s semantic potential as a ‘field’ of adultery by withholding the commencement of Scott and Karen’s affair until they are, inversely, ‘home,’ home being the house of Bill Gray where all three then reside. Mao II thus inverts not just the signification but also the temporal sequence of Tanner’s city/field model.

Mao II defiantly inscribes the home as a site of deviance, as a ‘field,’ not just by altering its placement in the temporal sequence of Karen and Scott’s journey but also by Karen’s adulterous sex with both Scott and Bill. Scott and Karen meet in the ‘field’ of a town called White Cloud when Scott, driving back to Bill, finds Karen walking down the street

Diana Jenkins 140 December 2005 that ‘was broad and sandy gray with weeds coming out of the curbstone’ (DeLillo 1992, p. 76). They are displaced subjects, in the middle of a nowhere suggested by the transitory character of the town’s name. The ‘field,’ in this case, is at the commencement of the narrative sequence, not at its conclusion. In an illustration of Freud’s ambivalent home finally coinciding with its opposite, the text also inverts the home’s conventional function as a nominal ‘city’ by making Bill’s home the destination. When Scott relates the story of meeting Karen in White Cloud to Brita, whilst they are undertaking their own journey, he includes the realisation that:

Then he knew what was familiar here. It was like something out of Bill Gray and he should have seen it earlier. The funny girl on the tumbledown street with an undecidable threat in the air, stormlit skies or just some alienating word that opens up a sentence to baleful influence (DeLillo 1992, p. 77).

Karen and Scott’s meeting is mimetic, an image from one of Bill’s novels. Their topographical position is mobile, to the extent that they journey back to Bill’s, and static, to the extent that their journey already is Bill’s. The implication of the affair that eventually follows between Karen and Scott is that it too is the image of Bill’s fiction, commencing only after Karen reads all of Bill’s novels (DeLillo 1992, p. 84).

Just as the aspect of replication revealed in Karen and Scott’s meeting leads the two characters and the narrative to their adulterous affair, journey space is similarly positioned as a narrative agent constructing adultery in the text, even contributing to Scott’s sense of its and his own construction. The journey site’s agency in constructing a character is iconically rehearsed by the train journey in Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata. The space of the train journey is the narrative frame within which the novella is formally premised. The perpetuation of this journey reveals both Pozdynshev’s pathological character and his state of narrative imprisonment within the site. In Pozdynshev’s case as well as Scott and Karen’s, what comes into view is a ‘rapport consist[ing] [of] an affinity between person and habitat such that degrees of aliveness are distributed across living, or semi-alive, spaces’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 49).

In The Kreutzer Sonata, Pozdynshev has an ‘uncannily intimate or transferential relation to the machine’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 100). Pozdynshev’s proximity to the machine

Diana Jenkins 141 December 2005 contributes to the radically mimetic function of journey space in the novella’s reproduction of an adultery narrative, since it includes a direct subject/machine relation via his perpetual train journey. This proximity between subject and machine explains the mutual dependency of desire and mobility that exists between the subject and journey space, an amorphic site where ‘[w]e have to transfer what lies inside us onto the machines,’ including ‘the distance and ice-cold mind that transforms the moving lightning stroke of blood into a conscious and logical performance’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 100).

Pozdynshev’s unnervingly ‘conscious and logical performance’ results in his murdering his wife in cold blood, and the ‘“gothic” rapport between persons and places’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 49) is realised in The Kreutzer Sonata, as well as in other classic adultery narratives like Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, and The Awakening in their different use of journey space, since all support the rapport between person and place via the potent interaction between desire and mobility. As Brooks argues, ‘[d]esire should stretch, extend, and project the self’ (Brooks 1984, p. 319), and this extension and projection of the subject is figured in the tradition of adultery narratives by journey space. This space facilitates the consummation of the character’s desire at journey’s end, retracting and shrinking in tandem with the realization of desire, ‘in a kind of post coital quiescence which Freud, too, adduces as an example of the relation between the pleasure principle and the death instinct’ (Brooks 1984, p. 319).

Whilst journey space is the realisation of space as the extended self, the journey’s conclusion can commence the operation in reverse, immobilising the self in the absence of unrealised desire just as a photograph freezes the subject in a moment in time. This narratologically based adulterous triangle between the journey, desire and mobility self- destructs when the journey space has served its primary function of propelling the narrative of desire forward to its conclusion. Without this drive in the narrative, the atrophied desire can be realised in the narrative by the suicide of the subject: Emma Bovary, Edna Pontellier and Anna Karenina all succumb to the Freudian death instinct. The narrative function of this topographical area in DeLillo’s texts seems to emphasise

Diana Jenkins 142 December 2005 the ‘absence of a “Real Text” or metanarrative that would stabilize signification and control the endless play of language’ (Melley 2000, p. 86).

Several of DeLillo’s texts, including Ratner’s Star (1976), Running Dog (1978), The Names (1982), Libra (1988), Mao II (1991), Underworld (1997), the play Valparaiso (1999), and Cosmopolis (2003), reflect Brooks’s formulation of narrative desire for the end realised not just as an ending but also death at or approaching this end point, and the mutual topography of the journey and the image provides the drive toward death in Valparaiso. The formal premise of the play is predicated on a journey having been taken, and the protagonist is murdered on television at the narrative’s end. Michael Majeski, the journeying subject and would-be suicide, is not the adulterer; it is Michael’s wife, Livia, who is unfaithful. Rather than taking her own life as a consequence of her adultery, Livia’s transgression produces an unexpected alternative to the death instinct via the pregnancy that results from her affair.

In the two-act play, Michael and Livia’s sudden celebrity is due to his having caught a flight to the wrong Valparaiso. There are three cities so named, one in Indiana, another in Florida, and a third in Chile, the destination to which Michael erroneously travels. Chronologically, the play commences after this misadventure, and Michael’s experience of flying to the wrong Valparaiso is compulsively re-articulated in rounds of interviews with journalists. Michael tells the same story over and over again, virtually word for word, imitating not only his own storytelling, but his own story as well. The narrative drive toward his death is framed by the step-by-step recreation of his false flight, re- imagining it for public consumption. The repetition of the same response to his crisis of orientation builds a space in the narrative for what he does not tell of his repeatedly imagined journey. Omitted from Michael’s hyper-account is the primary experience of the flight: his attempted suicide, an absence that repeatedly stalls the journey at this point in his retelling.

Although TV hostess Delfina, who interviews Michael about his journey to the Chilean Valparaiso, tells Michael his escape “had found its second level. Its public life” (DeLillo 1999(c), p. 88), that public level is precisely what prohibits Michael’s successful

Diana Jenkins 143 December 2005 displacement to the desired nowhere of death. Locked in the aeroplane’s toilet, attempting to suffocate to death by fastening a plastic bag around his head with dental floss, Michael is interrupted by turbulence, the pilot’s voice on the intercom and a flashing light Michael can “see only blurry through the shroud” (DeLillo 1999(c), p. 102). Michael forfeits his moment of displacement to the system, electing to unwind the floss, lift the shroud and read the sign:

“And I became a docile traveler once again. I had to submit to the systems. They were designed to save my life. And I complied gratefully. Returned to my seat. Fastened my seatbelt” (DeLillo 1999(c), p. 103).

Michael’s submission indicates the spatial paradox of his plane trip, a deep passivity and inertia inhabiting the same territory as the journey’s requisite mobility. Michael’s suicide gesture marks him as a subject resembling one of Kathy Acker’s ‘many masochistic characters [who] observes, razor blade in hand, “Since I’m now making blood come out of my own arm, I can’t be nothing”’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 96; Acker p. 71). If such gestures are about ‘the need for recognition as an autonomous agent’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 96), then the subject in this transferable space experiences a crisis of desire when, like Valparaiso’s Michael, their will is subverted to the system in the paradoxical non- movement of the mobile. In fact, as noted by both Seltzer and Sedgwick, attempting to locate the problems of the generalised and pathologised subject reveals ‘that machine culture and the body-machine complex solicit, from the start, what has recently been described as “epidemics of the will”’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 90; Sedgwick 1992, pp. 582-95).

Topographically, Michael’s epidemic of will fatally spreads in another exchange during the play’s second act, all of which takes place as the set of the TV show, the kinetic live taping beaming Michael’s image to the world, just as the aeroplane previously took him across it. Michael, now transformed into “An image aloft in the flashing air,” “A set of image-forming units…spun of lightwaves and repetitious sounds” (DeLillo 1999(c), pp. 108-9), transfers the narrative’s death drive from his journey’s attempted suicide to his televised image. During the show, Michael publicly discloses his earlier suicidal intent, at which point the narrative space violently contracts. There is, literally, nothing more to tell, and Delfina strangles Michael to death with the now-useless microphone. Essential

Diana Jenkins 144 December 2005 to its successful and practical operation, the play’s narrative must at some point end, and it is here that the principle of satisfaction tends inevitably toward death. Michael’s death and the abrupt end of Valparaiso emphasise the fundamental contradiction of the attainment of satisfaction premised on annihilation. Brooks questions the narration of Raphaël de Valentin, of Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin, in terms of this problematic:

The story of the insistence of a desire as persistent as it is incoherent, whose insatisfaction gives death as the only alternative, but whose satisfaction would be death. Here we have figured the contradictory desire of narrative, driving toward the end which would be its destruction as its meaning, suspended on the metonymic rails which tend toward that end without ever being able quite to say the terminus (Brooks 1984, p. 323).

Although Raphaël’s narrative is tawdry, the promise of sexual gratification does not motivate the telling so much as the desire to have the tale told, even though, as for Michael, this point of final disclosure in the narrative marks the moment of Raphaël’s certain death. In considering the state of the journeying subject in adultery narrative, it is likewise apparent that the promise of sexual gratification need not be the engine of travel. What Brooks does not contest is the narrative force of desire itself, whatever its object:

The ambitious heroes of the nineteenth-century novel…may regularly be conceived as “desiring machines” whose presence in the text creates and sustains narrative movement through the forward march of desire, projecting the self onto the world through scenarios of desire imagined and then acted upon (Brooks 1984, p. 312).

The adulterous subject ‘creates and sustains narrative movement through the forward march of desire.’ Embarked on a journey toward desire’s satisfaction, the character may desire any number of things beyond the adulterous liaison toward which they move or in some cases from which they retreat. Getting away from one location and reaching another can be the end in itself, adultery acting as the motivating catalyst. Madame Bovary’s Emma repeatedly tells her first lover, Rodolphe, that ‘she [feels] bored, that her husband [is] odious and life intolerable’ (Flaubert 1957, p. 198), and Emma’s proposed solution is to “go away and live…somewhere else” (Flaubert 1957, p. 199). Rodolphe reasons to himself that Emma ‘must have a motive, a reason, a driving force behind her affection’ (Flaubert 1957, p. 199), and indeed she does: a desire to remove herself from her detested life with her husband, substituting Charles for Rodolphe and displacing herself from

Diana Jenkins 145 December 2005 home. Rodolphe is not the object of Emma’s desire; he is merely a substitute figure in Emma’s fantasy of escape into an abstract spatial replacement, a process Emma replicates, equally unsuccessfully, with Léon and the Hotel de Boulogne later in the novel. Underworld’s Marian Shay resembles Emma Bovary in the motivation driving her adultery narrative with Brian Glassic. During an afternoon with Brian in her assistant’s apartment, Marian thinks of Nick as ‘a demon husband’ and considers her affair with Brian ‘the dare she had to take’ (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 256):

…a way into some essential streak of self, some possibility that felt otherwise sandy and scanted and unturned. These times were hers, however brief and infrequent (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 256).

Marian attempts to access this ‘streak of self’ in her mirrored image, thinking ‘She never looked at herself so closely at home’ and that ‘It was easier to see herself out here, inside strange walls’ (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 254). Marian’s perception of her spatial coordinates reveals the profound contraction of her subject position, a site in which she is out as well as simultaneously in, and in which she is known to herself in this strange place but unknown to herself at home. Marian’s psychosexual condition indicates the paradox of 61 her affair’s topographyTPF FPT.

Sexual desire engages these epidemics of will, between the journeying subject and the 62 system in which they move, by exposing the paradox of passivity in a kinetic spaceTPF FPT. In Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata, it is only once the husband, Pozdynshev, is journeying from home that he comes to believe his wife is being unfaithful to him. The text deploys the site’s conventional operation to support Pozdynshev’s exposure to a journey space that is particularly attached to narratives of adultery. Pozdynshev is propelled along the trajectory of adulterous consciousness, inhabiting the boundary space between the ‘city’

61 TP PT Marian’s Foucauldian moment in the mirror recalls the displaced subjectivity of David Bell in Americana when he films Austin Wakely in character as David, and ‘[Austin] was standing with his back to the full- length mirror, facing directly into the camera’ (DeLillo 1990, p. 241). Austin is David’s mirror image- upon-image, since it is David who is actually facing the mirror, simultaneously training the camera he holds on Austin, who is playing a character in David’s image. Elsewhere, David inverts this play of reflected identity, constantly seeing himself in terms of images. See Dâllenbach on the function of the mirror in narrative (1989). 62 TP PT Eco examines this paradox of passive mobility in detail in Travels in Hyperreality in terms of visiting America’s Disneyland (Eco 1987, p. 48).

Diana Jenkins 146 December 2005 and the ‘field.’ In his occupation of the pre-adultery journey space, he inhabits the mindset of an adulterer. Pozdynshev is held hostage to the significations of the space, accessing the adulterous version of the journey and projecting his spatial experience by imagining his wife unfaithful. The consciousness of adultery, one that conventionally comes with traversing the site, is not of his unfaithfulness, and Pozdynshev fatally attributes the adulterous intent to his wife.

The mechanised system triumphs over the tormented Pozdynshev, who experiences a loss of reason as he journeys by train. The train’s representation of mobilised desire cultivates Pozdynshev’s conviction of his wife’s infidelity, and the journey site paradoxically inscribes Pozdynshev’s receptacle-like ‘will’ with the desire to murder her. In this system of train travel, adulterous sexual relations ‘become the focus of diverse tactics applied to both individual bodies and whole populations’ (Melley 2000, p. 91). Melley applies the notion of such diverse tactics to Gravity’s Rainbow, finding they ‘may be applied to a single person, whose most private acts, or private parts, already appear to be tied to the life of a vast population’ (Melley 2000, p. 91). As Jill, a young Jersey girl living in a commune on an Apache reserve, tells David Bell in Americana:

“Anything’s better than working for the death machine. We all try to dress the same way here. Simple and beautiful. But it’s not like uniforms. It’s just part of the single consciousness of the community. It’s like everybody’s you and you are everybody. Sex is mostly auto. You can watch someone doing something with himself or herself and then they can watch you do it. It’s better that way because it’s really purer and it’s all one thing and you can do it with different people without anybody running for their shotgun like in the death factory out there” (DeLillo 1990, p. 356).

Thus using ‘sex as a central site of discipline and regulation,’ both Gravity’s Rainbow and Americana suggest a binary scheme that ‘bears an uncanny resemblance to the “great bi-polar technology” that Foucault claims reinvented the subject’ (Melley 2000, pp. 91- 2). Pozdynshev’s mechanised journey, for instance, expresses the dual topography of Michael Majeski’s double bind in Valparaiso. The contradiction of Pozdynshev’s fatally directed-will reflects Michael’s passive reaction to the plane’s flashing sign. In both cases, the ‘erotic and aggressive drives’ of these characters ‘become invested in the

Diana Jenkins 147 December 2005 industrial engine that subsumes and represents them,’ and which lays bare ‘the dynamic of the narrative text as pure motor force’ (Brooks 1984, p. 315).

This radically reconceived conception of personhood induces narrative episodes of agency panic, and the drive of erotic desire contradicts the subject’s ability to express or experience it autonomously. Michael and Livia’s serial sexual confessions during Valparaiso progressively relay a uniformity that suggests their sexual episodes and disclosures are manufactured by and for the various media they attract. Livia’s affair with a documentary filmmaker in a motel is explicitly parodied in the play as an image-culture cliché, and replicates Edwina Meers’s adulterous sex with documentary filmmaker David Bell in Americana. This episode itself anticipates David’s long-anticipated sexual union with Sullivan, who, perversely, resists his advances until she is attached to another lover, David’s friend, Brand. The contradiction of serial reproduction in their erotic appetites recalls Pynchon’s Dodson-Truck, Prentice, Pokler, Erdmann, Slothrop, and many of Pynchon’s other characters, who ‘become so anxious about their autonomy in moments of erotic desire’:

Desires that should be the “stamp of their individuality” turn out to be precisely the opposite. Indeed, when Alpdruken was first released, the narrator tells us, countless men (Pokler included) “carried the same image” home and impersonated Schlepzig, reenacting the film’s violent intercourse with their wives” (Melley 2000, p. 205; Pynchon p. 396).

The Kreutzer Sonata’s Pozdynshev ‘carries the image’ of wifely infidelity home, and his violent response to the image suggests the stamp of a type more than an individual. This typified response appears in The Names, since protagonist James Axton’s wife, Kathryn, “took a run at [him] once with a kitchen thing” (DeLillo 1999(a), p. 67) when presented with the image of James’s (confirmed) infidelity. Now separated from his wife, but having followed Kathryn and their son Tap in their relocation to Greece, James tells his friend David, another expatriate, the story. David asks James to “Paint a picture” (DeLillo 1999(a), p. 68). Along with the train journey’s influence on Pozdynshev, this instruction recalls the reimagined relation between persons and discursive structures in The Kreutzer Sonata, revealed by McMahon’s analysis of the affectivity of Beethoven’s sonata. As

Diana Jenkins 148 December 2005 McMahon suggests, Pozdynshev aurally devours his wife’s piano performance of the piece and is dramatically devoured by it:

[Pozdnyshev] is so moved by the music…that it threatens the integrity of his identity. He is transported outside himself and experiences an intensity of emotion that, he argues, is irrational and dangerously chaotic (McMahon 2000, p. 8).

After a week on the road, David Bell in Americana experiences a similar intensity of feeling. He observes ‘the stunned land feeding the convulsive radio, every acre of the night bursting with a kinetic unity, the logic beyond delirium’ (DeLillo 1990, p. 204), and David’s sexually affective sympathy with space and sound during his road trip reflects the psychosexual delirium generated by the Pozdynshev’s train journey in The Kreutzer Sonata.

In Amazons, Cleo Birdwell is seduced by her married coach, Jeep, on the sole basis of his speaking French in her hotel room during a hockey tour. Cleo does not speak French, but she ‘didn’t want to know what he was saying, [she] didn’t care, it made no difference’ (Birdwell 1980, p. 186) to the sound’s capacity to generate an eroticised space. Cleo says she ‘wanted only the flow, the pure French’ (Birdwell 1980, p. 186), her language increasingly eroticised and kinetic. Three chapters later and still journeying around America on tour, the roles are exchanged when Cleo provides the aural erotica, driving Murray Suskind, incarnated prior to White Noise, wild with images of Christmas in Badger, her small hometown. Murray asks for “A place. A real place. A small, innocent, corn-on-the-cob, American place.” Cleo repeates “You want a real place?” and Murray responds, “Yes, somewhere in the heartland. I love that a lot. The heartland” (Birdwell 1980, p. 286). As Cleo delivers, taking him through her family’s ritual preparations for Christmas, Murray becomes aroused. Like Cleo’s psychosexual response to the sound of Jeep’s French, Murray is transported by Cleo’s imagery to a place of sexual desire, so much so that ‘At the sound of “flying red horse”’ (Birdwell 1980, p. 290), Cleo feels Murray’s penis stiffen. The climax of Cleo’s tale, church on Christmas Day, coincides with the arrival of Murray’s own: ‘At the sound of the words “candlelight service,” Murray had his orgasm’ (Birdwell 1980, p. 295). The transfer between Cleo’s sounds and

Diana Jenkins 149 December 2005 the image they provide to Murray transports them sexually and spatially, recalling de Certeau’s identification of the connection between aurality and mobility:

There would thus be a homology between verbal figures and the figures of walking…insofar as both consist in “treatments” or operations bearing on isolatable units, and in “ambiguous dispositions” that divert and displace meaning in the direction of equivocalness in the way a tremulous image confuses and multiplies the photographed object (de Certeau 1988, p. 101).

The verbal flow of ‘tremulous images,’ producing first Cleo’s ‘soft writhing’ (Birdwell 1980, p. 186) and then Murray’s ‘trembling’ (Birdwell 1980, p. 297), operates in the text by ‘open[ing] gaps in the spatial continuum’ (de Certeau 1988, p. 101) that relocate the sexual event to an image that is like a hologram of sound. More traumatically, Pozdynshev experiences the ‘aural torment’ (DeLillo 1986, p. 241) visited upon White Noise’s Jack Gladney, in the aftermath of Babette’s confession of adultery, and by Sanders Meade in Amazons when Cleo makes the Watergate blunder previously analysed in terms of the hotel room’s affect. In White Noise, Jack’s response to his sensory imagination, to seeing the ‘half image’ of Willie Mink and hearing ‘their purling foreplay, the love babble and buzzing flesh,’ ‘the sloppings and smackings, the swash of wet mouths’ (DeLillo 1986, p. 241), is to try to kill Mink in his motel room. Pozdynshev is also so affected by sound – the sound of music – that he eventually succeeds in murdering his wife. Pozdynshev’s compromised, indeed subsumed identity reflects the intensity of the music, instead of any intensity of emotion he would otherwise display.

Cleo’s, Murray’s, Jack Gladney’s, and Pozdynshev’s psychosexual absorption illustrates historian Angus McLaren’s reading of serial killers, when he says that their actions are ‘determined largely by the society that produced them’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 44). Seltzer repeats McLaren’s suggestion that the serial murderer is ‘likely best understood not so much as an “outlaw” as an “oversocialized” individual’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 44). DeLillo’s characters are similarly ‘oversocialized,’ sexually affected by clichéd aural images of the romance of the French language, the nostalgic appeal of the small town, and the urgency of adulterous sex, and Tolstoy’s Pozdynshev is literally overcome both by the sonata’s movement and then by the train’s. Seltzer’s response to McLaren is qualified; he suggests ‘it is possible to understand the notion of the determination or production of the

Diana Jenkins 150 December 2005 individual by “society” as involving a more complex relation of the subject to his situation or being-in-context’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 44). Still, the allegorical frame of Pozdynshev’s public disclosure in The Kreutzer Sonata recalls Michael Majeski’s confession of attempted suicide in front of a never-ending TV audience in Valparaiso. Both bear out McLaren’s idea of social sentencing, via Pozdynshev’s monologues of indictment against the nature of women and marriage, even as he is alternately imprisoned by the frame of the perpetual train journey, and via Michael’s murder as a contradictory indictment against his earlier attempt to take his own life.

Although Delillo’s texts repeatedly reflect Freud’s, as well as Brooks’s, formulation of narrative’s death drive – characters in White Noise and Libra betraying an inherent hysteron-proteron structure by remarking “all plots lead to death” – White Noise fundamentally contradicts this urge since the novel is simultaneously a dialogue with 63 Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death (LeClair 1987, p. 213)TPF FPT. DeLillo’s interest in the denial of death pre-dates the publication of Becker’s text. During the filming of David’s autobiographical film in Americana, Austin Wakely, in character as David, is asked “Do you have any particular ambition in life?” and he responds “To get out of it alive” (DeLillo 1990, p. 286). LeClair suggests this same contradiction when he argues that in White Noise, DeLillo diverges from Becker’s conclusion, that ‘repression of the death fear is necessary to live,’ since Jack Gladney’s ‘repression and heroic attempts to overcome death place [him] in life-threatening situations’ (LeClair 1987, p. 213):

Like Pynchon’s rocket builders, Gaddis’s empire builders, and Coover’s high- wire performers, the Gladneys are victims of a self-inflicted double-bind: fearing death and desiring transcendence, they engage in evasive artifices and mastering devices that turn back upon them, bringing them closer to the death they fear, even inspiring a longing for disaster, “supreme destruction, a night that swallows existence so completely,” as Jack fantasizes, “that I am cured of my own lonely dying” (273) (LeClair 1987, p. 213).

63 TP PT Becker’s book is one of the few influences DeLillo will confirm, in this case in a letter to LeClair, dated 8 November 1985. Public and academic interest in DeLillo’s influences remains high – in recent years, Q and A sessions following readings by the author have included questions about Baudrillard in particular, without gleaning more than name recognition from DeLillo. On the other hand, he has repeatedly mentioned Joyce, Ulysses specifically, as an influence. See Curt Gardner’s frequently updated website, , as well as DePietro (2005).

Diana Jenkins 151 December 2005 Nel addresses the double bind LeClair identifies in White Noise’s contradictory drive toward death by analysing the character of Murray Suskind, who coaches Jack Gladney’s response to Babette’s infidelity. Murray’s argument that Jack must plot to take the life of Babette’s lover, Mink, equates with the peculiar problematic of narrative, whereby its plot must both live and die:

Murray argues that “To plot is to live” (291) because “violence is a form of rebirth. The dier passively succumbs. The killer lives on” (290). So, Murray implies, if Jack acts on his revenge fantasy, he can, at the same time, counteract his fear of death. “Are you a dier or a killer, Jack?” he asks (Nel 2001, p. 7).

The double bind facing Jack in White Noise emphasises the metafunction of the journey space as part of the dynamic of plot development. Jack’s desire for revenge against Mink is inextricably bound, as Freud suggests, to an instinct toward death. Murray’s hypothesis intersects the narrative of Jack’s death fear, offering Jack an alternative journey tending toward perpetual rebirth through violence. Until this point, Jack’s narrative journey insists on its progress toward death, but the conversation with Murray unearths an alternative plot route in the interaction between Jack’s desire (to live) and his mobility (he tracks Mink down and shoots him). This alternate narrative line takes Jack on a literal journey to Mink’s motel room, and it functions spatially in the narrative by animating a point of plot departure. The dynamics of the topographical interchange between the journey and the image are revealed when Mink proves to be little more than a projected reel of TV images and sound bytes, a two-dimensional no one in a meta-dimensional nowhere. Already compared with Americana’s David Bell, Mink’s similarity to DeLillo’s first protagonist does not end with the fact that both conduct interviews from their motel rooms. Early in Americana, David is also fused with the TV in his apartment:

Sitting that close all I could perceive was that meshed effect, those stormy motes, but it drew me in and held me as if I were an integral part of the set, my molecules mating with those millions of dots. I sat that way for half an hour or so. Then a commercial came on, one I had seen and heard dozens of times, and I got up quickly and walked around the room, feeling numb and sleazy (DeLillo 1990, p. 43).

Diana Jenkins 152 December 2005 Beyond anticipating Mink’s motel room ‘sleaziness,’ David repeatedly experiences 64 himself and his sense impressions in terms of this kinetic engagement with the imageTPF FPT. Walking through his office opening doors on unsuspecting colleagues, David thinks he is ‘like a movie camera catching documentary glimpses of everyday life in a prison, on an aircraft carrier, in a home for the criminally insane’ (DeLillo 1990, p. 101), none of which would be out of place once David is on the road and actually making a documentary. After watching the same movie twice and deciding ‘It was even better the second time,’ David imagines its star, Burt Lancaster, ‘forever caught in that peculiar gray silveriness of the movie screen, his body radiating a slight visual static’ (DeLillo 1990, p. 135), just as in White Noise, Jack imagines Mink as ‘Gray-bodied, staticky, unfinished’ (DeLillo 1986, p. 241).

The topography of this shimmering space designates in these narratives a point of universality and repetition such that the supposed static is implicated in what Seltzer, again in the context of serial killers, calls a ‘mimetic drive or compulsion’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 49). The narrative interplay of journey and image space is really invested in this mimetic drive. The journey space of adultery narrative recurs and inheres for the adulterous subject so that one ‘detects in the tendency toward resemblance a basic nondistinction’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 49). This resemblance locates its topographical imperatives within the same semantic territory as the reproductive image, fundamentally relating this space to the sexually regenerative dynamics of hotel/motel and the contiguous third line of earlier analyses. Seltzer describes this reciprocal topography as a ‘generalized failure of distinction between subject and space’ that causes a ‘fading into

64 TP PT Lyle Wynant of Players has several shades of David Bell. Lyle constantly watches television, and he does so ‘sitting up close, his hand on the channel selector.’ David imagines himself as a movie camera as he goes through his office, and Lyle also imagines a level of detachment from his work environment, both characters perversely narcissistic about the imagined self: ‘Lyle cultivated a quality of self-command…he built a space between himself and most of the people he was likely to deal with in the course of daily events. He was aware of his studied passage down the corridors of his firm’s offices. Happily he parodied his own manner, swivelling toward a face and beaming an anemic look right past it…some people subtly exhibited their relative closeness to him while others, sensing his apartness or knowing it for a fact, were diligent in keeping ritual distances’ (DeLillo 1991, p. 114, p. 72). David also anticipates Teddy Hodell, the announcer to Delfina’s TV show in Valparaiso.

Diana Jenkins 153 December 2005 place that is experienced at once as the lure of anonymity…and as the threat of anonymity’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 49).

White Noise represents this reciprocity in the figure of Babette’s lover Mink, who, like David Bell, is a weightless agent whose identity is constrained and enabled by the frame of television images. Mink exists both within and without the border of the television as static. Babette only refers to him as ‘Mr. Gray’ during her confession of adultery (DeLillo 1986, p. 192-202), and Jack refers to the motel scene of the affair as the ‘Grayview’ instead of the ‘Roadway’ Motel’ (DeLillo 1986, p. 259). Mink’s dialogue echoes advertisements and community service announcements from TV, like “Are you heartsick or soulsick?” and “The pet under stress may need a prescription diet” (DeLillo 1986, pp. 305-7). Jack’s imagined ‘Mr. Gray’ is not an individual but a malfunctioning television screen:

I sat up late thinking of Mr. Gray…The picture wobbled and rolled, the edges of his body flared with random distortion (DeLillo 1986, p. 241).

Mink’s resemblance to the equally televisual David Bell persists, David suggesting overwhelmingly that the image world precedes his real world. David notes that his ‘seductions often took their inspiration from cinema,’ and that ‘movies were giving difficult meanings to some of the private moments’ of his life (DeLillo 1990, p. 35). Both David’s wife of the time, Meredith, and his mistress Jennifer Fine exist in ‘some fantasy sequence,’ ‘all there but the soundtrack,’ ‘a blend of jump cuts and soft-focus tenderness,’ and a ‘movie set atmosphere’ (DeLillo 1990, pp. 35-8). When asked “What caused the divorce?”, Austin, again standing in as David in the film version of David’s filmic life, says “My image began to blur. This became a problem for both of us” (DeLillo 1990, p. 284). Like the actively blurring David, White Noise’s Mink, contained within the heterotopia of the television, is in some sense not really there. Barrett suggests that ‘“gray space”… is the cult term for death’ (Barrett 1999, p. 798), so, rather than an instinct toward death, Mink intimates ‘a rapport between death and representation, between the body and mechanisms of reproduction and reduplication’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 37).

Diana Jenkins 154 December 2005 The effect of Jack’s vigilante journey to the motel room of Mink’s static corporeality is to envelop Jack in Mink’s grey image space, a spatial arrest reflected in the narrative’s failure to coherently signify until Jack escapes Mink’s affect. The topography of this showdown in White Noise is heterotopic, and as Barrett suggests of Mao II, ‘[t]his waning sense of geographical fixity finds its parallel in the space-time disjunction of photographs’ (Barrett 1999, p. 795). Barrett’s spatial engagement with DeLillo’s texts pivotally identifies the interplay of the journey and the image space in ways that inhere in his adultery narratives. Barrett’s parallelling of geographical unfixity with photography suggests that images in DeLillo’s texts perform narrative operations also represented by the journey frame, including a similar involution of subjects and representations such as we have seen in Americana and White Noise. In Mao II, the novel’s title page is dominated by ‘an indistinct image of a massive crowd’ (Barrett 1999, p. 798). The indistinct crowd landscape of this image transfers the site of entanglement from the subject on the journey to the subject in the photograph. Using this image, the text reproduces the indistinct landscape of the space of the journey – the distorted fields out the train window in The Kreutzer Sonata, for example, or the fleeting patchwork countryside Michael Majeski remembers out the plane window in Valparaiso – via the indistinct mass of subjects. As Barrett notes, ‘[l]ike the rest of the reproductions in the novel, the picture is blurred, producing one amorphous form from thousands of individuals’ (Barrett 1999, p. 798). The photograph spatially exchanges the journey’s narrative function, serially replicating the subject’s movement in a specific but unspecified place and time, and anticipating the amorphous journeys toward sexual transgression that lie within. In the photograph, the ‘lack of contrast among the sky, the trees, the buildings, and the throng again emphasizes a decentering of the subject’ (Barrett 1999, p. 798) that resembles the journeying subject’s mimeticised promiscuous urge.

The image of the serial subject of the adulterous journey appears in two of the adultery narratives in DeLillo’s Underworld. Before Marian Shay and Brian Glassic have sex a second time during their tryst at Marian’s assistant’s apartment, hence serialising the event, Marian ‘listened to the traffic and wondered what she would say in the movie version’ (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 260). Marian’s moment of adulterous consciousness is

Diana Jenkins 155 December 2005 encountered as both celluloid and kinetic, framing her in an image space that is serial and sexually regenerative. Marian’s image of herself propels the adultery narrative forward to Brian and Marian’s replica intercourse, just as she propels her psychic topography to a place where ‘She was feeling faintly L.A.ish,’ with ‘L.A.-type eyes,’ where ‘She thought anything L. A. seemed right today’ (DeLillo 1999(b), pp. 260-1). Having literally journeyed across the country on business, Marian’s husband Nick is also adulterous, elsewhere in Underworld sleeping with the swinger Donna whilst they are staying in the same hotel. Nick frames the scene of the pick-up as though shooting a film:

These were movie scenes, slightly elliptical in tone, with the shots maybe a little offhand, slurred by incidental action. First the wordless moment in the exhibit space, where the characters trade looks amid the truck bodies. Then the poolside exchange with close-ups and pauses, the people a bit detached from their own dialogue, and a sense throughout of morning languor in the standard birdsong, in the rhythmic motion of men with hedge clippers and the shimmer of perfect turquoise in the background (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 292).

As in David Bell’s summary of his cross-country adulterous encounter with Edwina Meers as a televised dream in Americana (DeLillo 1990, p. 261), Nick’s consciousness of adulterous intent in Underworld redefines his earlier journey as an image of pre- adulterous flirtation that he mentally commits to film, the celluloid image emphasising the serial nature of the exchange. The filmic frame affords Nick the opportunity to step outside and watch himself, as though the scene is reproduced and repeated somewhere else, located in the space of emplacement of Foucault’s self-regarding moment in the mirror (Foucault 1986, p. 24; Dâllenbach 1989). During their precipitative poolside exchange, Donna tells Nick she and her husband decided Nick was the “ice-blue Aqua Velva man” (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 292), referring to a male persona in an advertising campaign for a brand of men’s aftershave. Donna’s image of Nick as an advertisement effects a double displacement that further encourages the idea that Nick is elsewhere, occupying the ‘here but also there’ shared by Mao II’s replicant transgressors. Karen’s mass Moonie wedding anticipates this serialisation of the sexual, its imagistic nature summarised by Barrett:

Diana Jenkins 156 December 2005 Ironically, the snapshots taken by parents to preserve their children’s identities are themselves a source of personality erosion…because, as Barthes has suggested, “the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity” (Camera 12). Similarly, Mao II’s replicated couples are described as “here but also there, already in the albums and slide projectors, filling picture frames with their microcosmic bodies, the minikin selves they are trying to become”(10) (Barrett 1999, p. 800).

The alternative source of ‘replicated couples,’ the journey space’s removal of would-be adulterers to the site of transgression is compounded by the image space claimed by Americana’s David Bell, Mao II’s Karen, Scott, and Bill, and Underworld’s Marian, Nick, and Donna. These image spaces allow for profound subject relocations without further travel. The adultery narratives consequently enabled by image space capture within their frame the decentred subject of the journey’s shared topography.

Topography in these works functions as a narrative engine as well as a spatial setting. Whilst the mutual topography of the journey and the image takes up space in the narrative, it has an infinite functional reserve. In the case of Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata, McMahon argues that the train journey’s imitation of the movement of Beethoven’s sonata is replicated in reproductions both texts continue to generate:

Surfing the net reveals recent multimedia projects that have taken up its interdisciplinary potential. Whether by historical accident or by meaningful progression, it continues to represent a point of origin and hence productivity in modern artistic practice which, in turn, stresses the active construction involved in all engagements with art and text (McMahon 2000, p. 11).

Such on-going constructions of alternative narratives lead to a phenomenon of perverse succession and generation that confounds any attempt to fix the topographical coordinates of either image or journey in adultery narrative. Regardless of the continuing enigma of an absolute location, this evidence of kinetic activity recognises not only the site’s reproductivity, but also emphasises that the topographical characteristic of the journey’s perpetual motion is unexpectedly reflected in its image life.

The instability of this shifting site reveals a fundamentally propulsive aspect to conceptualising the subject, irrespective of whether one argues the subject is determined from within or without. The shared topography of the image and the journey is the modal

Diana Jenkins 157 December 2005 support of a subject’s indeterminate acceleration and redirection. Seltzer identifies ‘forms of self-production in machine culture [that are] tied to…compulsive repetition’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 91). The perpetuating subject traversing its locale exposes the impossibility of separating the subject from ‘the matter of locating, or producing, the differences between same and other and (thus) between self and other’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 91). This conception of the subject’s entanglement is not the same as its annihilation. The character, inextricably bound to the mechanics of the journey, continues to assert itself in the ‘emergence of the serial or statistical person’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 237). This mimesis, premised on sexual reproduction, ‘represents not exactly the vanishing of individuality but rather its remodeling’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 237). This remodelled, as opposed to destroyed, character parallels Barrett’s theorisation of the function of the image, itself a product of a machine, in Mao II. The novel’s image system involves a loop from photography as an innocuous ‘preserver of memories…through its manipulative and destructive power to level difference and efface subjectivity, to its unexpected power to redeem identity’ (Barrett 1999, pp. 801-2).

Barrett identifies a potentially disturbing recurrence of character reinscription that imagines a spatial circumstance of erasure where the character is deinscribed from 65 withoutTPF FPT. Descriptions of transport systems in Mao II produce a related feeling of intense dissatisfaction, in this case during interactions between the character and the mechanically reproduced environment of travel. These alienating spaces ‘give rise to meaningless conversations,’ as in the case of ‘“intense and shallow” airplane dialogues’ (Barrett 1999, p. 790; DeLillo 1992, p. 29). The perversely reproductive capacity of

65 TP PT Madame Bovary’s Emma experiences a state of unbecoming having journeyed to meet her lover in Rouen. Tanner identifies a semantic tension in Flaubert’s description of Emma’s hair being untied or dishevelled by ‘les hasards de l’adultère.’ According to this interpretation, ‘Emma moves first into the knot of marriage and then into the unknotting of adultery, for the more she tries to make something solid and real and whole out of these adulterous illusory bonds, the more she is unbound, her whole being becoming as disentangled as was her hair’ (Tanner 1979, p. 343). Despite her evident unbecoming, Emma displays the perverse drive toward reproduction that reflects Freud’s identification of the compulsion to repeat. In Emma’s case, she consumes novels of adultery and then acts out on the basis of the prescribed image of the ‘adulteress’ formula. Emma is a type deliberately imitating her type, despite having ‘rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage’ (Flaubert 1957, p. 301). The perverse aspect of Emma’s studied reproduction of her type lies in her emergence not as an adulteress so much as the image of one, continuing to write Léon love-letters, ‘in accordance with the view that a woman should always write to her lover’ (Flaubert 1957, p. 301).

Diana Jenkins 158 December 2005 language lies in this abundance of shallow exchanges, which echo Emma Bovary’s empty declarations of love in Madame Bovary. The omnipresence of these transportation modes means that this is the real talk – the primary means through which conversations are exchanged. The hyper-transit space becomes the centre of meaning exchanges in the binary relation between the journeying subject and the journey mode, representing a loss 66 of individual identity that is ‘travel itself’TPF FPT.

The reinscribed character of the compulsive journey becomes dependent on material objects. When Players’ Lyle shares Pammy’s going away ‘completely,’ he knows her absence of several weeks, during which both will commit adultery, means that ‘the simplest kitchen implement’ will become ‘brighter, more distinct, an object of immediate experience’ (DeLillo 1991, p. 89). Infidelity does not offer Lyle autonomous identity. Instead, these compulsively reproduced household items best represent him and his serial affairs. Serial objects of domestic space like cups and spoons also reconstitute the travel- dissolved Brita in Mao II, until she ‘feel[s] intact again, reclaim[ed] from the jet trails, the physics of being in transit’ (DeLillo 1992, p. 87). In The Theory of the Novel, Lukács imagines a ‘home in the beyond’ that has come from a ‘world of distances’ which ‘lies sprawling and chaotic beneath the celestial rose of sense made sensuous’ (Lukács 1971, p. 59). Brita recognises this home of both ‘fragility and heaviness,’ she has ‘travelled to the end of [her] path thereby made meaningful’ (Lukács 1971, p. 60). But Mao II’s strategy of reinscription involves the journey’s topographical interaction with other sites in the narrative, in particular the associative power of Brita’s ‘being home.’ Brita, despite her ‘temporary rescue from travel,’ soon experiences ‘a feeling of homelessness even though she is home’ (Barrett 1999, p. 790). Serial materialities paradoxically extend the transitory position rather than grant Brita a stationary retreat. Barrett regards the postmodern society the novel describes as one of permanent dislocation:

66 TP PT Barrett uses the expression ‘identity is lost travel itself,’ so I have changed her intended meaning in this instance, but owe my expression to her (p. 790).

Diana Jenkins 159 December 2005 Indeed, the pervasive “spacelessness” of the late twentieth century has been internalized, creating “a new kind of loneliness”. As Bill says, an “answering machine makes everything a message, which narrows the range of discourse and destroys the poetry of nobody home. Home is a failed idea. People are no longer home or not home. They’re either picking up or not picking up” (Barrett 1999, pp. 790-1; DeLillo 1992, pp. 91-2).

The ‘pervasive spacelessness’ in DeLillo’s narratives is also a site’s semantic potential; what Barrett calls spacelessness inheres as a concept of spatial meaninglessness. This is not to say these sites have no meaning, simply that their semantic signification reflects a state of perpetual and fundamental unfixity. There is no stability to a site’s function as a reserve of meaning and association, no matter how cherished, author Bill Gray’s dismissal of ‘home’ as a failed idea in Mao II later realised in Brita’s spatial paradox. DeLillo’s adultery narratives disable the semantics of spatial avowal. Homelessness is psychosexually comprehended instead of home, as in Valparaiso, when Michael’s cuckolding is anticipated in terms of his airborne coordinates: “Out of place, I guess. Displaced or misplaced. Somewhere else” (DeLillo 1999(c), p.15). Michael’s displacement emphasises the site’s heterotopic status, his spatial unhinging effecting a psychic double of sexual dislodgement to a suicidal degree. The original ‘home,’ the womb, vindicates Michael’s prescient reading of his homeless status via the product of Livia’s adultery: that is, her pregnancy to another man. Michael’s sexual home is destroyed, and his premonitory suicide attempt bears out Lukács’s sense that ‘crime and madness are objectivations of transcendental homelessness’ (Lukács 1971, pp. 61-2). Livia’s adulterous actions determine Michael’s transcendental homelessness. Her sexual betrayal is the retrospective action that makes his removal from home permanent. Michael’s trip to the wrong Valparaiso simply determines the coordinates of Livia’s trajectory toward the wrong man.

If the compulsively reproduced subject of public transit systems in Americana, Mao II, Underworld, and Valparaiso makes visible the crowd of Caillois’s corporeally mimeticised consuming subject, then journey space is ‘the place of an inevitable regression,’ not expending the subject but confirming instead ‘the conflicted condition of the mass subject’s emergence’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 236). The resulting redefinition of agency reconstitutes the character’s possibilities from its position of ambivalent

Diana Jenkins 160 December 2005 autonomy. Returning to an older sense of agency does not return the agent itself to Walter Benjamin’s lost original – instead, it highlights the enabling aspect of Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum. Whilst no longer recognising the agent in the sense of ‘endless, and thrilled, possibilities of self-construction’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 205), this conception suggests that a characterr endures in its perversely reproductive simulation of self. This motion toward endurance is the endless imperative of the ‘indissociable…double-logic of prosthesis’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 205). The prosthetic subject thus attains a perpetuation in ambivalent reproduction. The perpetuating character invokes the idea of Seltzer’s serial killer as a perpetrator, since in the committal of the like crime, in the crime’s repeat performance, the serial killer’s identity is perpetually re- established. As Americana’s David Bell suggests to Carol Deming, it becomes possible in this repeat performance to “Keep the acting invisible” (DeLillo 1990, p. 277).

The perpetual character, thus prostheticised and mimeticised, represents in its necessarily displaced occupation of public journey space the ‘emodiment of an uncanny spatial relation, [since] the stranger’s “strangeness means that he, who also is far, is actually near”’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 42). The existence of this stranger, witnessed by the narrating subject and represented by Pozdynshev in The Kreutzer Sonata’s perpetual train journey, ‘begins to make visible the uncanny stranger-intimacy […]: the “deliberate stranger” or “the stranger beside me”’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 42). The ultimate persuasion of the subject’s perversely reproductive existence lies in the figure of this intimate stranger, the prosthetic reproduction of the adulterous subject’s autonomous will. Strangeness defines the serial adulterous subject, since the lover’s essential status as the intimately known stranger is marked as a transgressive reproduction of conjugal closeness in the same way a serial 67 killer regards “a person as a blank” (Seltzer 1998, p. 41)TPF FPT.

David Bell, the typified lover figure to Edwina Meers’s adulteress, personifies the intimate stranger in a looping topography that returns the narrative of Americana to its beginning, literally and geographically transferring David to a previous location and

67 TP PT In Americana, David says of his friend Pike’s young female companion: ‘Her blankness intrigued me…I felt a need to know more about her, to fill out that incomplete image’ (DeLillo 1990, p. 49).

Diana Jenkins 161 December 2005 image of himself. On the streets of New York with a colleague in the early pages of the novel, David is approached by a girl who says, “I don’t know who you are, but I’m sure you must be somebody” (DeLillo 1990, p. 13), requesting his autograph. David obliges, presenting himself, and passing, as the ‘known stranger,’ presaging the mirrored sexual fling with Edwina later in the text. Unlike the autograph seeker, Edwina knows his name, which she uses too frequently, and virtually nothing else about him. In the final narrative frame of Americana, David’s coordinates are routed back to New York, and the last line of the novel is ‘Ten minutes after we were airborne a woman asked for my autograph’ (DeLillo 1990, p. 377). The serial incident of intimate strangeness with Edwina consigns David to further image-based transfers that keep floating his position in narrative space, literally represented by the plane that never lands. Inevitably, the subject ‘David Bell’ is depleted in this relation, levelled into a simulation of himself as the intimate stranger.

Brita’s series of photographs of writers in Mao II transfers Bill’s image in the same way David’s is traded in Americana. A writer framed by the space of the photograph that similarly frames other writers, Bill’s resemblance among writing strangers ‘makes self- identity indistinguishable from identification with others, and inseparable from media- facilitated processes of imitation, simulation, and identity-contagion’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 43). In this process of imitation and simulation, the photos ensure that Bill is no longer strange; not only is Bill not the first representation of a subject in space, he is not the first familiar stranger of Karen’s adulterous entanglements. Bill’s paradoxical sexual proximity to Karen as ‘the stranger beside me’ is the position also nominally held by Scott, who simultaneously casts Karen in this role when he impulsively brings her back to Bill’s in the first place. In fact, ‘intimate strangers’ precisely describes the operative model of the trio’s adulterous triangle.

David Bell and Bill Gray’s transferrals of identity in Americana and Mao II reflect the ‘storied anonymity’ Seltzer identifies in the centring absence of an effigy of Jack the Ripper in Madame Tussaud’s in London, the missing figure complementing a conception of both characters and Seltzer’s serial killer as ‘“a type of nonperson”’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 41). This absence emphasises the spatial conditions supporting the perpetuity of that anonymity, since ‘[w]hat makes up the exhibit…is the locale of the crime’ (Seltzer 1998,

Diana Jenkins 162 December 2005 p. 48). In the locale of David’s journey and Bill’s image, the perpetuating subject’s anonymity marks the limitless relation of typicality and repetition, just as David ‘manage[s] to deceive [himself] into believing that people would be deceived into believing’ (DeLillo 1990, p.25) that he is an autonomous somebody.

This perpetually adulterating subject is reproduced in the unmappable, imaged topography of the journey, a lack of determination that marks the site as an open-ended system of replication. The character’s unstable signification in this position reflects the inherent potential of the journey space to alter its functionality, and therefore its semantic associations, just as an aeroplane alters course. The character becomes an effect of the combined space it occupies just as Pozdynshev’s train ride in The Kreutzer Sonata reproduces his tale of murder in tandem with the movement of the train. The effect of a ferry ride in Mao II is Bill Gray perpetuation. In three important senses, the ferry trip does not end with Bill’s disembarkation. Bill dies on the ferry, and his body is stripped of his identification. Bill’s ‘identity’ continues in the anonymity of his corporeal shell, in the adulterated form of illegal reappropriations of his ID, and in Brita’s sheets of negatives from their photo session. Bill’s married lover Karen, meanwhile, explicitly regards her body and her name ‘as unfamiliar extensions of an alien personality’ (Barrett 1999, pp. 789-90):

She began to develop a sense that she was only passing through. She couldn’t figure out exactly who it was that lived in this body. Her name had broken down to units of sound and it struck her as totally strange (DeLillo 1992, pp. 79-80).

Karen’s detached sense of herself, a sempiternal subject who is only ever ‘passing through,’ recalls David Bell’s passing as the unidentified, mutating personality repeatedly sought out by autograph hunters. Their separate experiences of ‘passing’ alter both the nature of their mobility and the mobility of the language they use to describe it. The semantic promiscuity afforded by this transferable character in shifting space is an example of what Bauman regards as an emerging postmodern phenomenon:

Diana Jenkins 163 December 2005 An evergrowing number of postmodern men and women, while by no means immune to the fear of being lost and ever so often carried away by the recurring waves of ‘homesickness’, find the open-endedness of their situation attractive enough to outweigh the anguish of uncertainty. They revel in the pursuit of new and untested experience, are willingly seduced by offers of adventure, and on the whole prefer keeping options open to all fixity of commitment (Bauman 1997, p. 13).

The ‘pursuit of new experience,’ along with a resistance to commitment, countermeasures the agency panic Melley identifies, since the open-ended insistence of reproduction exists in the conflicted relation between the subject and kinetic systems. The resistance of Bauman’s ‘postmodern men and women’ also personifies the seductive quality underpinning DeLillo’s model of meaning seeking. Pleasure in the denial of closed systems approaches reproductive meaning in terms other than the demise of originality lamented by Walter Benjamin (Osteen 1999, p. 651). Instead, there is a regenerative freedom in submitting to a concept of semantic adulteration. This concept resembles the Baudrillardian mode of typicality, the simulacrum or a Platonic ‘copy of a copy’ (Frow 1999, p. 420). Frow importantly distinguishes between Baudrillard’s treatment of the simulacrum and that of Gilles Deleuze, whose less ‘melancholy vision’ suggests that severing the attachment to notions of a lost original, in this case a primary signified, frees the sign by ‘denying the priority of an original over the copy, of a model over an image…and affirming that any original is itself already a copy’ (Frow 1999, p. 423). For the perpetuating narrative contained within DeLillo’s systems of image and travel, its mimetic meaning-generation means that the infinitely reproduced motion of the narrative journey is its own seduction. The reader is capable of ‘being seduced by the infinite possibility and constant renewal’ promoted by the narrative’s movement, and of ‘rejoicing in the chance of putting on and taking off identities, of spending one’s life in the never ending chase after ever more intense sensations and even more exhilarating experience’ (Bauman 1997, p. 15).

In Tolstoy’s story, the faithful husband Pozdynshev is misapplied to the journey’s narrative operation of presaging the journeying subject’s adultery, and the reader apprehends his experience as having more catastrophic than exhilarated consequences for the narrative’s progression. Pozdynshev’s occupation constitutes a perverse dysfunction of the narrative operation of journey space in an adultery text. The narrative courts all the

Diana Jenkins 164 December 2005 significance of the site without the conventional adulterously inclined subject, creating a situation that contains all of the features of an adultery text without any actual adultery. The wrongfully enraged husband is a perversely displaced subject. The dysfunctional use of the space Pozdynshev occupies is evinced by the narrative’s turn not toward adultery – the conventional ‘end of the line’ – but murder, the ultimate deviant terminus.

Still, as McMahon notes, Tolstoy’s story ‘denies conventional resolution’ because murder is disallowed ‘as a surrogate mode of conclusion’ (McMahon 2000, p. 11). What makes Pozdynshev’s example especially potent, aside from the fact that he murders his (apparently faithful) wife, is that he comes to be imprisoned in a static ‘holding pattern’ via the perpetual train journey on which the novella is formally premised. ‘[D]eath is not given the power of conclusion’, since the novella ends by returning the reader ‘to the scene of the present, the train carriage’ (McMahon 2000, p. 11). The perpetual motion of the journey site’s perverse reproductivity is secured by the space’s narrative dysfunction.

The perverse dysfunction of the space’s affectivity in The Kreutzer Sonata reflects the topographical exchanges in Valparaiso. Although Michael’s mobilised desire is motivated by an instinct toward death, since he imagines “there [is] nowhere else to take [his] sorry life” (DeLillo 1999(c), p. 98), Michael’s movement disrupts the drive toward the narrative’s final construction. He fails to reach his desired destination of Valparaiso, Indiana, and fails to occupy a state of transgressive awareness. Michael says at one point “I realized I was improvising a journey that had its own stone logic” which was “Meant to end one way only” (DeLillo 1999(c), p. 98), but its logic is never realised. Although he briefly reinscribes the accidental journey as the narrative motor of a Freudian death instinct, his failure to commit suicide paralyses this alternative narrative journey. The play denies the site its agency, but its suppressed purpose erupts elsewhere in the narrative. Just as Tolstoy’s manipulation of the site results in the adultery plot’s aberration, the stall in the capacity of Michael’s journey space to perform a specific fabula operation results in a narrative surge elsewhere. The journey’s function transfers via a perverse implosion, and it is Michael’s wife, Livia, who is unfaithful after Michael’s journey ends. Both Tolstoy and DeLillo employ the narrative expectation of adultery signified by the journey, but the paradoxical arrest of its kinesis perversely

Diana Jenkins 165 December 2005 relocates the narrative of transgression. Its function is not erased from the narrative, but mutates. This mutation arises elsewhere as replication, and the adultery narrative of its primary operation continues to insist.

This idea of narrative mutation supports the exchange of function between the journey and the image, and in some manner compels it. In the misbehaviour of shared topography is the promissory foundation of adulterated mimesis, and its essentially representative nature bears out McMahon’s identification of a prior disruption to convention:

Feminist musicologist Helen English has said of Beethoven’s sonata that it disrupts the convention wherein one theme, conceived as masculine, assumes dominance over the second theme, conceived as feminine. In the Kreutzer, instead, there is an ongoing tension that resists a union of dominance and subservience (McMahon 2000, p. 11).

Adultery ‘disrupts the convention’ by perversely reproducing the sexual bonds of marriage, recalling again the Freudian compulsion to repeat (Freud 2001, pp. 942-3). The moment of a subject’s consciousness of adulterous intent in the narrative is evidence of the compulsive repositioning of the subject in order to repeat both prior norms and prior disruptions. Barrett makes a similar point when she observes that ‘[t]he duplication of prosaic hotel rooms experienced by Scott [in Mao II] is itself a repetition of Humbert Humbert’s experiences traveling across country with Lolita’ (Barrett 1999, p. 806). Where Barrett imagines that Nabokov’s 1955 novel ‘epitomizes the sorrowful paucity of originality illustrated so dramatically in that decade’ (Barrett 1999, p. 806), DeLillo’s mimetic version of Nabokov’s journey space underscores the impossibility of an original narrative of the site. The narrative journey instead resembles Seltzer’s formulation of the structure of tabloid space, which he sees as ‘typically structured by a ramifying series of analogies’ (Seltzer 1998, p. 45). An analogous series is indeed suggested by the transitory space Karen and Scott share in Mao II, and the ‘double-coded condition that both constrains and enables the postmodern subject’ (Carmichael 1991, p. 248) is repeatedly represented by the figure of Scott. It is through him that the novel establishes journey space’s tabloid potential, via Scott’s various equivalences in occupying the site:

Diana Jenkins 166 December 2005 [On Scott’s] second trip, driving east with Karen, he “return[s] with a character out of Bill’s fiction” (80) in the “doubled landscape of his original journey in search of Bill” where the “same room repeats itself in a cross-country chain” (81) (Barrett 1999, p. 805).

Scott is the subject whose topographical position is ‘particularly susceptible to postmodern signals’ (Barrett 1999, p. 794), and the repetition of the journey he makes to Bill’s, first without and then with Karen, is represented a third time via the ‘deceptive transparency’ of the space of the Manhattan hotel from which he collects the photographer Brita Nilsson:

Scott and Brita themselves spin in a large, glass-enclosed cylinder. However, the transparency obfuscates rather than illuminates, and the continual motion mesmerizes Scott, who…has also been hypnotized on his cross-country hitchhike in search of Bill Gray, a “venture so chancy it made him feel weightless” (Barrett 1999, p. 794).

The movement of the lift is the kinetic double to Scott’s car journey, a transparent image of himself in travel that is replicated when Scott again makes his way to Bill’s house, this time with Brita, rather than Karen, in tow. The hypnotic movement effaces the distinction between the primary event and its image. Scott encounters the coordinates of his first journey, when he goes in search of Bill Gray, not as a primary site but as a spatial repetition. His sense of weightlessness is attributable to the temporal vacuum between the replicant journeys, each site framing a likeness that reciprocally and perpetually indicates other journeys (Seltzer 1998, p. 45).

This imitative contagion, infecting the journey and other spaces in DeLillo’s texts, does not lead to an emptying of the signification of narrative sites. Rather, journey space creatively reproduces in perversions of narrative kinesis. McMahon discusses perversions of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata in terms of a ‘chain of creativity,’ arguing that its movement ‘across art forms and generations also constructs a [perverse] mode of reproduction’ (McMahon 2000, p. 8). On this formulation, ‘the sonata is constantly mutating, as if perennially inchoate, and the chain of its progeny is an artistic or artificial lineage’ (McMahon 2000, p. 8). Her reading of the sonata’s perpetual rebirth invokes both Freud’s model of the repetition of a primary experience of satisfaction (Brooks 1984, p. 321), and DeLillo’s own sense that there is no point of origin that is not

Diana Jenkins 167 December 2005 replaceable with rebirth (Parrish, p. 702). DeLillo’s use of space recalls for Barrett visual artists also engaged in perverse reproduction:

…literally reusing preexisting space, Levine’s appropriations of famous photographs, including works by Walker Evans and Edward Weston, and Prince’s recycling of magazine and other mass media images in what he terms “rephotopography,” challenge notions of originality and authorship. In much the same manner, Kruger’s montages of re-used images in dialogue with epigrammatic statements, such as “I shop therefore I am” and “Your money talks,” boldly printed on the pictures, employ and question platitudes that force the reader to consider his/her relation to the images and the aphorisms (Barrett 1999, p. 803).

This altered image space of respective artists is an active, conceptual challenge to any fancied legitimate progeny in creativity. This collective challenge rejects the mythology of artistic origination, celebrating perversity as heir apparent. Like The Kreutzer Sonata, Tolstoy’s appropriation of Beethoven’s sonata into an eponymous story of adultery, DeLillo’s delinquent topography is only one example of a perverse narrative species. As McMahon argues of Tolstoy’s narrative:

…the perverse reproduction of the Kreutzer Sonata is that the succession of texts it initiates does not only originate with Beethoven’s sonata but from other, subsequent texts, as with a branch of the family. Specifically, as [Andrea] Dworkin’s deployment of Tolstoy’s novel shows, the fictional version of the sonata has its own line of successors (McMahon 2000, p. 9).

McMahon’s identification of a line of successors to Tolstoy, rather than Beethoven, speaks to the enabling aspect of such perverse reproductions in DeLillo’s own work. In their collaboration, ‘The Image World of Mao II,’ Jody McAuliffe and William Noland conceptually and artistically develop the kinetic life of images. Their collaboration recalls McMahon’s observation of the interdisciplinary and multimedia practices developing around Beethoven’s sonata, of which Tolstoy’s novella is itself a product. Their work also acknowledges a perverse line of succession, since Mao II itself appropriates a number of photographic images that are reproduced within the published text. Mainly a photographic interpretation of the novel, Noland’s piece includes McAuliffe’s comment on her contribution, stressing the interactive element of appropriative process in which mobility flows from image reproduction:

Diana Jenkins 168 December 2005 What started out as a list of images directly culled from Don DeLillo’s Mao II evolved in production of my theatrical adaptation of the novel into a continuously playing triptych of interrelated digital video streams (Noland 2004, p. 5).

Just as McAuliffe’s stage adaptation of Mao II benefits rather than hinders Noland’s appropriation of the novel as a digital installation, the fact that DeLillo’s fiction favours adulterated topographies is not to say that he employs them in order to destroy the narrative’s ability to function. On the contrary, his novels and plays oppose the notion of ‘self-annihilating postmodern visions,’ Carmichael noting that certain narrative sites ‘also serve as figural image[s] of the scene of replenishment, not of…desertification…but of the double-coded condition that both constrains and enables the postmodern subject’ (Carmichael 1991, p. 248). The tension Carmichael identifies as a double-coded condition aptly expresses DeLillo’s reinscriptions of space in his adultery narratives. The space connecting the contradictory impulses of mobility and stasis is semantically weightless, held in a heterotopia where meaning both is and is not, Foucault’s ‘place of this nowhere, this heterotopia without geographical markers’ (Foucault 1986, p. 25). The adulterous character’s mimetic consciousness of transgression mutates in alternative action sites in the proxy resurgence of its heterotopic transfer. DeLillo’s resignified image space does not stifle the adultery narrative function of the journey site, but relocates it within the image’s frame, expanding the narrative semantics of both sites in their capacity to exchange.

The element of repetition in Scott’s journey, therefore, inheres in Bill’s mimetic affair with Karen, which in turn frames the seriality of Brita’s photographs of Bill. Just as Scott precedes Bill as Karen’s lover, and Karen precedes Brita as Scott’s, Bill is not the first of Brita’s author subjects. The series Brita produces of writers reveals its own compulsion to repeat in Brita’s comment to Scott:

“I will just keep on photographing writers, every one I can reach, novelists, poets, playwrights. I am on the prowl, so to speak. I never stop traveling and taking pictures. This is what I do now. Writers” (DeLillo 1992, p. 25).

The topographical site of this exchange in narrative function operates as a chrysalis from within which the adulterous character effaces identification with fidelity and personal

Diana Jenkins 169 December 2005 identity itself, since self-identity is indistinguishable from identification with others in the process of simulation (Seltzer 1998, p. 43). Barrett argues that ‘[t]he vastly divergent uses of photographic images depicted in Mao II testify to the medium’s malleability’ (Barrett 1999, p. 802). Like DeLillo’s use of journey space, this malleability means the image functions in the narrative as a site of promiscuous behaviour. Mao II demonstrates that photography, like the journey, is inherently contradictory. Neither hiding nor divulging identity, photography forces us ‘to see ourselves ubiquitously replicated,’ and postmodern space, of which ‘photography is both progenitor and product, is merely a heightened variation on an older composition: the perils and pitfalls of representation’ (Barrett 1999, p. 802).

The ubiquitous replication Barrett identifies in the image is a tenet of journey space in adultery narrative, as well as an alternative postmodern vision of narrative space like Carmichael’s ‘scene of replenishment’ (Carmichael 1991, p. 248). The enabling aspect of such spaces, identified by theorists including Barrett, de Certeau, Carmichael, Frow, Lukács, and McMahon, suggests that since our sexual, spatial, and linguistic ‘experience has always been replicated, even before photography’ (Barrett 1999, p. 806), neither the journey nor the image site is disabled by their fundamentally transgressive exchanges of signification. On the contrary, the operative potential of both centres around their shared topography as both ‘the stimulus for [and] the embodiment of a disorienting postmodern space, a space filled with reflections and replicas, a space that constantly confronts its inhabitants with their instability and fragmentation’ (Barrett 1999, p. 806). Indeed, Bachelard’s vision of the progenitive poetics of space, a place where ‘everything comes alive when contradictions accumulate’ (Bachelard 1994, p. 39), finds literary fulfilment in DeLillo’s perennially floating and eroticised semantic space.

Diana Jenkins 170 December 2005 Chapter Four

The Space of the Secret

“Sex is not so secret anymore. The secret is out” (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 297).

“Let’s call a meeting to analyze the blur” (DeLillo 1991(b), p. 15).

DeLillo’s adultery narratives emphasise the irresolvable nature of signification by empowering ignorance and constructing metanarratives of the unsaid. This chapter addresses adulterous secrecy, confession, omission, denial and witness in order to argue that DeLillo’s texts interrogate the meaning of language in various ways, via repeated gestures toward a Derridian semantic remainder. These claims draw upon numerous readings of DeLillo, in particular Cowart’s position that DeLillo’s thinking about language is extra-dimensional, such that ‘[t]he named thing escapes’ (Cowart 2003, p. 2), Knight’s examination of connection and secrecy in Underworld, José Liste Noya’s work on naming the secret in Libra, and Maltby’s interpretation of DeLillo’s language as 68 visionaryTPF FPT. The present engagement is additionally informed by Eve Kosofsky

68 TP PT Maltby’s argument that DeLillo’s novels support a redemptive order of meaning invokes Walter Benjamin’s cautionary essay on the degeneration of language into ‘mere signs,’ but Derrida’s remainder notionally entails the regeneration of language as indefinitely signifying. The event of the letter’s non- arrival at its proper place need not be semantically catastrophic. The Names resists both the concrete and the abyss; straddling the semantic indeterminacy in-between via the writing of James Axton’s son, Tap. Tap’s short story ends The Names and is littered with misspelt and misapplied words; it’s a text alive with semantic uncertainty, achieved with such memorable examples as ‘realing in a corner,’ ‘He felt retched,’ ‘crept over him like gang green’ and ‘Pure as the drivelin snow.’ (DeLillo 1999(a), p. 335-6) In concluding with this self-conscious demonstration of inconclusive signifier ‘misuse,’ the novel undermines the suggestion of precision in signification. Tap’s story cannot be dismissed as what Benjamin calls ‘mere prattle.’ Perhaps Maltby’s visionary moment occurs in the act of naming itself. The signs are not empty, then, but sifting, and in the moment of naming comes the vision of one possibility selected from among many. Parrish notes that DeLillo has a ‘modernist conception of the artist’ that ‘reclaims the mystery of naming for the author,’ drawing a parallel between DeLillo and Pynchon’s signifying attitudes by recalling Gravity’s Rainbow’s narrator’s comment ‘that “Names by themselves may be empty, but the act of naming” is a version of the sacred’ (Parrish 2002, pp. 87-8). Naming, then, does not tell but rather keeps the secret of language. Paula Bryant suggests the addition of Tap’s words at the end are an ‘openended,

Diana Jenkins 171 December 2005 Sedgwick’s critique of definitional categories of sexuality via an epistemological interrogation of the space of the closet. Sedgwick provides the means of spatialising transfers of knowledge around adulterous practices in DeLillo’s work. Accordingly, the chapter identifies and discusses the narrative dimensions of this space in his fiction, and offers an account of its semantic impact.

In DeLillo’s 1978 novel Running Dog, journalist Moll Robbins says to protagonist Glen Selvy, briefly her lover: “What is it like, secrecy? The secret life. I know it’s sexual. I 69 want to know this. Is it homosexual?” (DeLillo 1999(d), p. 110)TPF FPT. Secrecy is a recurring theme across DeLillo’s oeuvre, to the extent that DeLillo has been called a ‘conspiracy addict’ (Will 2000, p. 57), and is often developed in terms of representations of conspiracy and paranoia. Moll Robbins’s example in Running Dog indicates a fundamentally sexualised understanding of secrecy, which she relates to operations of homosexuality. Lee Edelman refers to such operations as the salience of homosexuality, and its status as a marked and simultaneously invisible sexuality highlights the importance of paradox, essential to reading DeLillo’s promiscuous semantic attitude, in signifying the conditions of homosexual exchange.

Spatialising the relation Moll draws between sexual secrecy and the question of homosexuality engages such contradictions via the space known in queer theory as the closet. Within this discourse, homosexual identity is commonly theorised as operating indefinitely within and without the closet’s frame; aspects of on-going performance, disclosure, and concealment are complexly and even simultaneously common to both locations. In the context of this contested area of queer theory, Sedgwick’s radical redistribution of power relations around closet space relinquishes assumptions of advantage around knowing and unknowing. Her interpretation of Diderot’s The Nun problematises subjection so that sexual ignorance can be understood as cultivating power.

exuberant, unorthodox coda’ that ‘implies continuance and reaffirmation rather than stasis and closure’ (Bryant 2000, p. 165). 69 TP PT Cowart suggests that ‘[t]he promise of the prurient image [from a rumoured film capturing episodes of Hitler’s sex life, the object at stake in the novel,] is effective shorthand for a world of desire – in both the common and Lacanian senses of the word’ ( Cowart 2003, p. 56). This thesis argues complexity in DeLillo’s representations of adultery, and Cowart suggests the same of pornography in Running Dog (Cowart 2003, p. 56).

Diana Jenkins 172 December 2005 The lack of certainty in signification in Sedgwick’s recasting acknowledges the power- generating potential of unknowing. This insight is significant to my argument that DeLillo’s use of adulterous sexual secrecy furthers a program of semantic homelessness, 70 whereby knowing perpetually entails aspects of unknowingTPF FPT. Where Knight suggests that ‘[t]he obsession with secrets is an indication that the restricted access to knowledge…is less a matter of pure epistemological scepticism than it is a question of power’ (Knight 2000, p. 289), Sedgwick positions the narrative’s potential around the 71 concept that power can be generated by a lack of knowledgeTPF FPT. This power may be productively combative, as in the Freudian account of the violence of castration implied by the lack, where unknowing is paradoxically restorative of meaning.

The closet allows Sedgwick to spatialise various conditions of being, and it is a key metaphor of containment and release from within the framework of the narrativised sexual subject. This spatialisation of theories of the homosexual condition suggests other sexual conditions can be spatialised, including those that deal with the adulterous subject. As it supports discussion of the complexities of homosexuality, so too does this spatial metaphor offer a valuable means of discussing the different categories of adulterous secrecy taken up in DeLillo’s novels. The closet is a domestic, interior space, like the bedroom, and it also functions in public enactments of sexuality, recalling the un- bedroom of the adulterous hotel/motel room. Various contradictions result from its character as a space that can both hide and enclose, further complicating knowledge transfers between inside and outside, transfers that, as previously suggested,

70 TP PT Simmel suggests that perhaps ‘the secret known by two is no longer a secret’ (Simmel 1950, p. 346). By its nature at least two people know when adultery is the secret, but this secret, intrinsically shared, seems more to illuminate rather than cancel operations of secrecy. Simmel concedes the transformative abilities of the secret, and Noya argues that ‘[s]ecrets, like identity, require public revelation, they must be shared, even if not fully known, or even if fully unknown’ (Noya 2004, p. 245). Osteen argues that DeLillo’s texts ‘withhold their own secrets, at once critiquing the secrecy system and embodying it in their own economy of reading’ (Osteen 2000, p. 144), highlighting the continuing profile of unknowing in DeLillo’s fiction. Noya distinguishes his more recent analysis from Osteen’s via a more ‘explicitly theoretical approach’ that ‘link[s] the secret with narrative and representation, the self and the status of the name, and the paradoxical dynamic of concealment and revelation that underlies them all’ (Noya 2004, p. 241). Both studies are essential reckonings of the operation of secrecy in DeLillo’s fiction. 71 TP PT Knight’s position is supported by Noya’s sense that ‘[p]ower is secret, and the secret confers power,’ though, as Sedgwick might also suggest, ‘the agential site of power remains maddeningly unlocatable’ (Noya 2004, p. 248).

Diana Jenkins 173 December 2005 fundamentally fail to sustain the emphatic spatial opposition suggested by their categorisation.

So, while the closet space popularly refers to specific exchanges of homosexual identity, Moll’s question mark in Running Dog, over the quality of the sexual element in secrecy, suggests that the closet can be a spatial harness for exploring other sexual secrets, like those in play in DeLillo’s adultery narratives. Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet supports such application; her theorisation of homosexuality speaks beyond its ostensible sex precisely because her ‘universalizing view’ regards the issue of definition as one of ‘continuing, determinative importance in the lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities’ (Sedgwick, 1990, p. 1). In addition, queer theory’s anchorage in the dialectic of the closet emphasises a spatial character that measures the semantic remainder of Derrida’s concept of the non-arriving letter. As such, the closet offers the means by which to theorise the irresolvable exchanges between what is known and unknown where the narrativised sexual condition is adultery. DeLillo’s use of secrecy, conflated in Moll’s Foucauldian vision with the sexual, produces gaps that displace narrative meaning in 72 ways that broaden the scope of semantic transgression at work in his textsTPF FPT. The semantic possibility of the category of the secret is predicated on a conceptual distance from both the known and the unknown, and despite the revelation of its existence, the secret of the adulterous affair is never a ‘final, fast-frozen truth’ (Maltby 1998, p. 499).

Recalling the contiguous line in oppositions such as inside/outside, the closet extends the problematic of spatial categories to include the chaotic narratological character of adulterous secrecy. The spatial status of (even) the disclosed secret is still never ‘beyond the perpetually unstable relationship of signifier to signified’ (Noya 2004, p. 241); there 73 exists still the remainder of what is not or cannot be revealed in narrative’s lettersTPF FPT. The insistence of this secret remainder, the shifting line along the continuum between the

72 TP PT Norman Mailer suggested something of the possibilities of this game-like mischief when he wrote ‘Mistruths tilt the given and create openings – one can dart through them’ (Mailer 1995, p. 499). 73 TP PT Noya echoes the terms of Derrida and Lacan’s debate on The Purloined Letter when he notes that ‘the status of the secret within DeLillo’s fiction is unabashedly nonsecretive. It remains ambivalently unconcealed in its open concealment. It is a purloined letter staring one in the face yet stubbornly resisting decipherment through its blatant nature’ (Noya 2004, p. 241).

Diana Jenkins 174 December 2005 unknown and the known, is established in DeLillo’s treatment of linguistic meaning just as the narrativised journey is reminiscent of narrative’s own drive. In its failure to arrive at the (illusory) destination of a final truth, the narrative revelation of adultery in DeLillo’s texts is shown to be merely imitative of that truth. Maltby refers to the ‘visionary moment’ in DeLillo’s texts, and revelation, specifically of the adulterous secret, will here be shown to veil meaning and maintain secrecy in the paradox of semantic truth Maltby identifies:

…images of the Real have usurped the authority of the Real, whence the subject is engulfed in simulacra. In the space of simulation, the difference between “true” and “false,” “actual” and “imaginary,” has imploded. Hence Romantic and modernist conceptions of visionary moments – typically premised on metaphysical assumptions of supernal truth – are rendered obsolete (Maltby 1998, p. 499).

In this imploded space, the adulterous secret is compulsively located in unfixed manifestations of its transference, operating within the text as a closet through which the secret’s status is indeterminately in and out. As Brooks suggests, ‘[t]elling and listening and their transactive relation can perhaps lay no real claim to knowledge,…but perhaps they discover in narrative desire the repetitive, self-generative text of pleasure’ (Brooks 1984, p. 326). This pleasure is a result of the desiring ‘dynamic of the narrative text as pure motor force’ (Brooks 1984, p. 315), an erotic longing for complete disclosure, which perpetuates the narrative drive via the impossibility of its fulfilment. Like Sedgwick’s definition of the homosexual, the non-arrival at pure meaning, knowledge, and understanding, established by the secret’s failure to finally traverse, indicates the extensive degree to which such narrative exchanges resemble operations of sexual secrecy via the space of the closet. Sedgwick identifies the power of unknowing, and DeLillo’s narratives of adultery not only acknowledge but rely on the lack occasioned by the secret. The narrative of the affair functions indefinitely because the secret never discloses ‘the possibility of total fulfilment [in] what lies beyond the pleasure principle, beyond the realization of orgiastic desire…the drive toward extinction’ (Brooks 1984, p. 318).

Diana Jenkins 175 December 2005 Despite ‘the transient “meaning effects”’ (Maltby 1998, p. 499) made possible by revelation, such effects of language adjust the space of the secret but do not fix it in a site of ‘immutable meaning’ (Maltby 1998, p. 499). This triangular model of meaning between language, sex, and secrecy is explored in Cowart’s discussion of Running Dog, and his observations, already used to partially frame the Introduction to this thesis, pertain to the context of DeLillo’s adulterine narratives:

The sexual thematics…represents a further development of DeLillo’s sustained meditation on language and its attributes…[O]ne knows from the musings of Edna Lown in Ratner’s Star that DeLillo takes an interest in the idea that all language has what Moll, in Running Dog, calls “sexual sources and coordinates” (111). In earliest infancy there is a relationship between language – immersion in the Symbolic Order as major component of the Oedipal Phase – and psychosexual development (Cowart 2003, pp. 56-7).

These “sexual sources and coordinates” of the language of secrecy are spatially realisable via the closet. The closet articulates performances of sexuality, such as the performance of marital fidelity, in its combative relation to knowledge when it simultaneously conceals infidelity. DeLillo’s adultery narratives exhibit different types of sexual secrecy, including, to employ a number of categories Foucauldian in character (Foucault 1985), marital infidelity (Americana, Players, Amazons, The Names, White Noise, Libra, Mao II, Underworld, Valparaiso, Cosmopolis) de facto infidelity (Amazons, Mao II), sexually assaultive infidelity (The Names and Libra, both texts deploying, along with Amazons, non-consensual sex acts; Cosmopolis includes sado-masochistic adulterous sex), bisexual infidelity (Players), suspected infidelity (The Names, White Noise, The Body Artist), promiscuity (Cosmopolis, previously developed in Amazons as a paradox of feckless nymphomania), and prostitution (White Noise). These sexual practices operate variously around the closet of adulterous secrecy, and are conducted via the use of spaces such as the previously discussed hotel/motel room, descriptive devices like oppositions and metaphors, the journey, the image, the ‘city,’ and the ‘field.’ Having considered where and to what narrative effect operations of infidelity occur in DeLillo’s texts, the analysis progresses to the question of how adultery is practiced in relation to the knowledge category of secrecy. Extant critical dialogue concerning DeLillo’s profound investment in

Diana Jenkins 176 December 2005 secrecy, including others such as LeClair, Osteen, and John McClure, is expanded by 74 categories of secrecy emergent in his adulterous sexualitiesTPF FPT. Like the productive dilemma of definition Sedgwick expounds via the closet, the impossibility of semantic ‘truth’ emerges from DeLillo’s texts in a metaphorical relation to narrative infidelity. The chaotic transfers of sexual secrecy in DeLillo’s fiction reflect the promiscuous nature of meaning generation through language that his texts repeatedly advance.

As suggested previously, DeLillo’s linguistic promiscuity is in part relayed via his treatment of aurality. In ‘Don DeLillo’s Return to Form: the Modernist Poetics of The Body Artist,’ Nel notes the ‘labial’ quality of the ‘f’s in “faithfully” and the p in “lips,”’ unearthing The Body Artist’s (2001)‘[indulgence] in the pleasures of language’ in passages that ‘encourage loitering’ over the sound of words and letters (Nel 2002, p. 754). I suggest this pleasure is sexual in nature, the ‘labial’ quality referring both to pronunciation and to its erotic relation to protagonist Lauren Hartke’s sex. As a countermeasure to ‘feeling sexually and abysmally alone’ (DeLillo 2001, p. 49) after her husband’s suicide, Lauren experiences the spoken word as Rey’s sexual replacement, ‘an 75 erotic of see and touch’ and sound (DeLillo 2001, p. 49)TPF FPT.

Lauren never discovers why Rey kills himself, the narrative will not confess, and phonetics always and already implies what is left unsaid. There is a narratological contradiction, in narration as a form of confession, where the spoken confession is privileged (Hardy 1975). There is a gap in the spoken confession of adultery by the subject in written narration, and the gap is signified by the use of the inverted comma to mark “speech” in the written text. Derrida locates the trouble, in Edgar Allen Poe’s The Purloined Letter (1884), of Dupin signing his name with inverted commas, and the secret

74 TP AfterPT the publication of Libra, DeLillo told an interviewer that each of his novels “is unresolvable, absolutely, and could probably not have been in the world that existed before the [Kennedy] assassination” (Goldstein, 2005, p. 49). For DeLillo and others, the death of President Kennedy, a man whose infidelities form an intrinsic part of his American mythology, ‘becomes the symbolic cause of what might be termed a postmodern hermeneutic of suspicion’ (Knight 2000, p. 284). DeLillo has repeatedly suggested his work is informed by different types of secrecy, including the ‘secrets within systems,’ a category LeClair extensively discusses as part of In the Loop, and ‘the secrets of consciousness’ (DeCurtis 1999, p. 61). 75 TP PT Weinstein discusses DeLillo precisely in terms of ‘freedom of speech,’ saying that ‘DeLillo is out to guide his readers into verbal precincts they have never entered before, but in his hands that guided tour becomes an explosive and dangerous affair’ (Weinstein 1993, p. 289).

Diana Jenkins 177 December 2005 confessed by “speech” in a text signifies the secret’s remainder via the inverted comma sign, whose signification fundamentally fails to speak. As Brooks suggests, ‘[i]f narrative desire keeps moving us forward it is because narrative metonymy can never quite speak its name’ (Brooks 1984, p. 322). Although Brooks’ concern is that narrative is ‘condemned to saying other than what it would mean, spinning out its movement toward a meaning that would be the end of its movement’ (Brooks 1984, p. 322), the narrative’s inability to speak is a lack that is paradoxically enabling. Norman Mailer wrote that ‘[a]n echo is less defined than the note that created it, but our ear can be enriched by its reverberation’ (Noya 2004, p. 250; Mailer 1995, p. 539), and the reverberations of the perpetually unspoken are a continuation of the narrative’s meaningful potential.

The ‘closet’ of adulterous secrecy operates in narrative as ‘the hidden and sealed interior’ (Derrida 1988, p. 186) of its own telling. Negotiating between locations that are alternately open and closed implicates a third site, the remainder, in DeLillo’s adulterous fictions. This site of closeted divisibility, abreast the semantic vagrancies of the known and unknown, transfers the untold, the told but unheard, the unknown, and the known but untold secret. This transient aspect of disclosure in secrecy’s operation advances its interplay between subjects. Knowing and unknowing are exchanged and suspended but never fully realised, and call into question ‘the manner in which the subjects relay each other in their displacement during the intersubjective repetition’ (Lacan 1988, p. 32). Both the confessor and the witness to the confession are narratively displaced from the point of denouement in negotiations that perpetuate manifestations of secret space.

Confession is the adulterous orgasm’s alternative ‘little death.’ Confession of the affair translates narratologically as le petit mort, identifying the desire to confess an affair as a Freudian urge toward death. The structure of confession in DeLillo’s adultery narratives shows that the confessor’s urge toward detachment from the secret, via its telling, resembles a desire to move beyond the secret pleasure of the affair toward the affair’s end. The narrative of the secret affair represents the pleasure principle of narrative’s drive, where confession of the adulterous secret is what lies beyond ‘the realization of desire’ as ‘a kind of post coital quiescence’ (Brooks 1984, p. 319). There is a suggestion of rest in the concept of confession that stays the narrative’s motor in the way that the

Diana Jenkins 178 December 2005 moment of orgasm stays the act of intercourse. Attempted narrative transparency, insofar as confession is an attempt to tell the secret of the affair, is the consummate desire, but it also guarantees desire’s finitude in the death of both the secret and of the narrative marking its movement. This lack of finitude, as seen in the “spoken word” of the said confession in DeLillo’s narratives, as well as in the privilege of the unsaid, is paradoxically enabling. The ‘little death’ of confession replaces the adulterous orgasm in an exchange that ensures the unspoken continues a narrative life as the perpetually unknown.

Adulterous secrecy always involves an exchange of meaning between knowing and 76 unknowingTPF FPT. Spatially conceiving the three-sided trajectory of this two-way transfer involves an elaboration of the idea that linguistic meaning is indeterminate in DeLillo’s fiction. This starting point of semantic uncertainty implicates a site that supports contestations of knowingness in his adultery narratives. I have suggested that DeLillo’s language constructions contain the preconditions of secrecy, but in itself this does little to account for the movement of the adulterous secret in DeLillo’s novels. This activity registers in a way that applies Derrida’s space of speculation more clearly to DeLillo’s texts. For narrative theorist Frank Kermode, ‘“narrativity” always entails a measure of opacity’ (Kermode 1979, p. 25), and Sedgwick says that ignorance and opacity ‘collude or compete with [knowledge] in mobilizing the flows of energy, desire, goods, meanings, persons’ (Sedgwick 1993, p. 23). The battleground of this competition in narrative is conceptualised by Sedgwick’s theorisation of the closet. This closet best suggests the space of the narrativised adulterous secret, and the term is adopted with an abiding debt 77 to its complicated specificities in queer theoryTPF FPT.

76 TP PT I follow Noya’s consonance with Simmel here, and align ‘nonknowledge’ and secrecy for the purposes of this discussion, ‘given that, within our cultural and sociological conceptions of knowledge, knowledge’s provenance from the chartless domains of ignorance takes on the trappings of an unveiling of what had remained, even if unintentionally, secret’ (Noya 2004, p. 243). 77 TP PT The term ‘the closet’ has achieved wide currency in the western world, specifically in relation to ways of realising issues of homosexual identity. Its place in the broad-sweep of cultural literacy is such that, as Sedgwick notes, ‘the phrase “the closet” [is the] publicly intelligible signifier for gay-related epistemological issues’ (Sedgwick 1990, p. 14). This is due, as Sedgwick puts it, to ‘the difference made by the post-Stonewall gay politics oriented around coming out of the closet’ (Sedgwick 1990, p. 14). The events known as ‘Stonewall’ concern New York City riots in June 1969. This protest of police harassment of the patrons of a gay bar is the event from which the modern gay liberation movement in America dates

Diana Jenkins 179 December 2005 Applying both the terminology ‘the closet’ and its dimensions, this discussion concerns the site’s enabling of various exchanges of knowledge that relate specifically to adultery narratives in DeLillo’s work. Sedgwick makes the case for the power potential of unknowing, so that ‘[r]ather than sacrific[ing] the notion of “ignorance,”’ it becomes possible to ‘pluralize and specify it’ (Sedgwick 1990, p. 8) against its associations of powerlessness. Her argument challenges perceived boundaries of power and accepted regimes of truth in ways that are instructive to reading the specifics of knowledge in DeLillo’s texts, and the lack of it, in terms of the cultivation of narrative power.

The closet does not frame only homosexual identity; along with Sedgwick’s ‘universalizing view,’ Freadman notes that the nineteenth-century cross-dressing French author and activist George Sand used a literal closet in order to frame her character. Sand claimed the contents of a traditionally male closet, ‘divest[ing] herself not only of her dresses, hats, and little shoes, but of the whole training of the feminine body, the gestures and postures of the jeune fille rangée who had learnt the rules of coquetry’ (Freadman 1988, p. 129). This closeting extended beyond the literal, and anticipated some of the metafunctions of the site that came to prominence in the latter half of the twentieth century. In addition to altering her appearance via her ‘his’ apparel, Sand also divested herself ‘of the feminine management of the organs of speech and vision’ (Freadman 1988, p. 129), and radically restructured the gendered terms of her literary personality. The importance of Sand’s contribution to the politics of the closet is that, from Freadman’s point of view, none of these choices ‘amount to a denial of [Sand’s] femininity’ (Freadman 1988, p. 129). In other words, Sand’s redress lies not in the clothes but in the permissibility of redefinition on which they insist (Freadman 1988, p. 129).

Freadman employs the term ‘the rhetoric of gender’ (Freadman 1988, p. 130) to explain her focus, and although her article discusses the way this rhetoric is particularly mediated by clothing, the term is relevant to reading the closet as narrativised and, as it proved for

its inauguration. The closet, then, is a site of epistemological concern, of what is known and unknown, as much as it is a site whose contested knowledge has been of a quite specific nature for the better part of four decades.

Diana Jenkins 180 December 2005 Sand, as a literary naming device. This closet is not simply the container of clothes that signify a static point through which meaning passes as different clothes go in or come out, but is instead the very animated site of manifestations, mediations, and deviations of 78 sexual identityTPF FPT. Meaning passing through the closet becomes a point of teleology in the vocabulary of the site, since ‘passing’ is both in terms of the closet and the ultimate expression of its existence. One who passes is both in and out of the closet; George Sand’s femaleness, her sex rather than her gender, is in the closet, but she successfully passes as male outside of it. As demonstrated by Del Bravo’s appreciative glances at the transvestite in the opening scene of Running Dog (1978), passing is an operation that particularly pertains to the functions of the closet, and an important aspect of its literary behaviour is the element of ignorance on which it absolutely relies. Ignorance relating to the narrative dimensions of the closet is equally fundamental, since being ‘closeted’ implies something that is shut up in it, something ‘secret, hidden, private’ (oed.com). The narrative of the closet posits a counter site to the notion of open, exposed, publicly practiced sexualities, practices traditionally instanced by, for example, heterosexuality and marital fidelity. The closet makes alternative practices visible via equations of sexualities that are either in or out of its space. Negotiating the space of the closet therefore necessitates interactions of ignorances, and for Sedgwick, ‘[t]hat a particular ignorance is a product of, implies, and itself structures and enforces a particular knowledge is easy to show…in the realm of sexuality’ (Sedgwick 1993, p. 25).

Structurally necessitated by a complex strategy of exclusion (Bauman 1997; Hardie 2005), the closet, whilst affording some respite and measure of safety in the protection of a sexual secret, is also a cell, manacling the secret inextricably and indissolubly to both its basic character of concealment and the paradox of liberty through speculation and/or disclosure. The resulting ‘incoherence of definition’ speaks to the narrativised

78 TP PT As Sedgwick’s universalising approach suggests, such mediations include bisexuality, transexuality, and transvestism. The proliferation of sexualities is explored in Jennie Livingston’s award-winning documentary film Paris is Burning (1990), which traces the trauma and tribulations of quasi-underground drag shows in New York City. The film engages with the dynamic semanticism of ‘passing’ and includes a harrowing acknowledgement of the trauma of performing sexual identity when one of the film’s subjects, Venus Xtravaganza, is murdered during filming. According to the website www.imdb.com, it was later revealed that another star of the film, Dorian Corey, kept a mummified corpse in ‘her’ literal closet for a period of three years.

Diana Jenkins 181 December 2005 dimensions of the site, and Sedgwick rightly identifies that ‘contests for discursive power can be specified as competitions for the material or rhetorical leverage required to set the terms of, and to profit in some way from, the operations of such an incoherence’ (Sedgwick 1990, p. 11). Hence, both the prevalence and importance of extant discourses surrounding the closet is acknowledged, and this discussion leverages the non-fixity of the closet’s definition in order to apply its structure to another type of sexual secret, namely the adulterous affair in DeLillo’s fiction.

A requisite feature of the closet is ignorance, and ignorance is a powerful narrative motor because ‘there are psychological operations of shame, denial, [and] projection around “ignorance” that [make] it an especially propulsive category in the individual reader’ (Sedgwick 1993, p. 25). Fictional narrative might be understood as always constructing a closet within ideas of truth, since, for Derrida at least, ‘the truth inhabits fiction as the master of the house, as the law of the house, as the economy of fiction’ (Derrida 1988, p. 178). Within this house is the closet erected by a particular ‘regime of truth,’ a truth that ‘executes the economy of fiction, directs, organizes, and makes possible fiction’ (Derrida 1988, p. 178) in an economy that resembles exchanges of secrecy around the closet.

In the specific case of the narrative closet of adulterous secrecy, speculations of adultery may meet with denial, as happens in Cosmopolis. Eric Packer’s obfuscating parody of denial in the novel demonstrates the way in which denial can operate to enlarge the space of speculation. With each new line of questioning from his wife, Elise, Eric’s repeated denial, ostensibly keeping Elise ignorant, functions as a perverse confirmation of his sexual deceit in a knowledge transfer recalling Noya’s analysis of Libra’s speculative trajectory:

Plot promises, through its word chartings, to reveal that which wounds, but its articulation of the secret ‘has the status of an anticipation, something known yet not as a direct object; something known as if always already forgotten, and therefore present only preconsciously, absentmindedly’ (Hartman, p. 143). That is, something known only as a wound, a text, a story and, hence, something that must be reworded, retextualized, told again, perhaps endlessly, in order to be ‘known’ (Noya 2004, p. 252; Hartman 1981).

Diana Jenkins 182 December 2005 Infidelity is ‘that which wounds,’ and Eric’s repeated denial of infidelity equips Elise with the knowledge if not of his infidelity then of her own ‘preconscious’ desire to end their marriage, echoing Sedgwick’s dismantling of ignorance as a powerless position. Sedgwick notes the privileging capacity of ‘ingenious and patiently instructive orchestration[s] of ignorance’ (Sedgwick 1990, p. 8), and Elise sees through Eric’s ‘most willful blindness’ (Sedgwick 1990, p. 6). The aspects of deliberation and calculation implicit in Eric’s orchestration deny ignorance its defining state of unawareness. Eric’s feint ignorance about the source of his sex odour is all the information Elise receives about his infidelities. His closet of the adulterous secret spatially enacts Derrida’s remainder, ensuring the perennial divide between what is known and what is unknown, via the exchange of what is in and what is out. In Eric’s case, ‘the secret is out,’ which, due to his practice of non-disclosure, remains a secret that ‘breeds secrecy, which in turn multiplies secrets within its sheltering structure’ (Noya 2004, p. 266), ensuring the frame of his secret’s exchange holds firm.

LeClair particularly isolates secret keeping in DeLillo’s work as a system-destroying phenomenon, and, as in the case of the rapid disintegration of Eric and Elise’s marriage in Cosmopolis, marital systems experience potentially destructive tension when the secret is adultery. This tension has to do with the push and pull between what is unknown and unstated, or not speaking the language of the affair, and what is known and disclosed, or the language of conceded transgression. However, the open system characterising closeted negotiations of secrecy, with secrecy moving in and out indefinitely, suggests that secret keeping is also part of an on-going exchange that guarantees the survival of the system instead of eroding or destroying it. As Noya argues, the ‘irreducible opacity, derived from the unbridgeable gap between the narrative and the events it interprets and shapes, finds its corollary in the self-generating, disseminative nature of narrative itself, always, “[t]here are stories inside stories”’ (Noya 2004, p. 261; DeLillo 1991(b), p. 450). The space of the closet maintains the secret in an economy that cannot isolate secret keeping as an operation of independent means; rather, the site works to leave the narrative system in a state resembling perpetual motion, where systemic uncertainty is narratologically enduring.

Diana Jenkins 183 December 2005 DeLillo refers to the ultimate proliferating narrative of speculation, the Warren Commission Report, as ‘an incredible haul of human muttering’ (DeLillo 1983, p. 28), and speculation is often verbal in nature; certainly in Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick deals ‘with the speech-act relations around the closet’ (Sedgwick 1990, p. 13). These relations can take the form of gossip, something she esteems as refining ‘necessary skills for making, testing, and using unrationalized and provisional hypotheses about 79 what kinds of people there are to be found in one’s world’ (Sedgwick 1990, p. 23)TPF FPT. This aspect of speculation impacts and indeed in some cases decides the secret of adultery in DeLillo’s narratives, and operations around gossip help define the form such conjecture takes. James Axton, himself an adulterer in The Names, becomes a confidante to both Ann and Charles Maitland, the first a serial adulteress and the second an apparently faithful career-cuckold, as Ann’s latest infidelity is variously exchanged. James is firmly in the closet with Ann, speculating from the inside out when he asks her “Is it possible, love affairs as functions of geography?” (DeLillo 1999(a), p. 161). The effect of James’s question is to expose the dimensions of Ann’s closet. His speculations makes visible the closet space by insisting the site of her transgression conceals a secret even if the affair itself is known:

“The loss of Kenya. The loss of Cyprus. You want to keep something for yourself that isn’t a tribal mask or figurine. A private Cyprus, a meditation. How does a woman make these places hers as well as her husband’s when after all it’s his job that determines where they go, and when they go, and when they leave” (DeLillo 1999(a), p. 161).

79 TP PT Gossip acquires a visibility in some narratives of adultery that suggests it turns its focus toward closet adulterers in a speculation recalling that visited upon closet homosexuals. Updike wrote of The Witches of Eastwick that he wanted to ‘to give gossip a body and to conjure up human voices as they hungrily feed on the lives of others’ (Plath 1999, p. 5; Updike 1983, p. 856). The second lover of Madame Bovary’s Emma, Lèon determines to end the affair in anticipation of ‘all the trouble and the gossip that that woman might still draw down upon him; not to mention the banter he had to endure from his colleagues round the stove every morning’ (Flaubert 1957, p. 301.) Awaiting the release of adulteress Hester Prynne, a group of women in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter are galvanised by the words of one ‘hard featured dame’: “I’ll tell ye a piece of my mind. It would be greatly for the public behoof, if we women, being of mature age and church-members in good repute, should have the handling of such malefactresses as this Hester Prynne. What think ye, gossips? If the hussy stood up for judgement before us five, that are now here in a knot together, would she come off with such a sentence as the worshipful magistrates have awarded? Marry, I trow not!” (Hawthorne 1986, p. 79). Unlike Sedgwick, who speaks of the ‘precious, devalued arts of gossip,’ the tenor of Hawthorne’s characterisation of the matrons is unequivocally one of indictment.

Diana Jenkins 184 December 2005 Ann responds first with “That hasn’t occurred to me” and then with the rhetorical “Do I have such obscure motives?” (DeLillo 1999(a), p. 161). Neither the reader nor James knows Ann’s reasons, so the geography of her closet space centres not on whether Ann is having the affair, but on the motivations for the one that she undoubtedly conducts. The dimensions of Ann’s closeted secret are reinforced by her husband’s wilful blindness, to further extend the term’s application, a condition his son Peter calls Charles’s “special provenance”:

“He loves to return to it. Of course he knows how deeply he misconstrues. This is part of the joy of the thing. The whole point is to pretend not to know. As some people protect their inexperience or fear, this man protects his knowledge of the true situation. It’s a way of spreading guilt. His innocence, other people’s guilt. There’s a proportional relation. This is the theme of his life, pretending not to know. Keeps him going, absolutely” (DeLillo 1999(a), p. 165).

The speculation that defines Charles’s position outside the closet resists gossip rather than generates it. The effect is the same, since by indulging speculation or rejecting it, the closet is furnished with its essential component of ignorance. In fact, this ignorance threads between the two witnesses to the closeted exchanges between husband and wife, when Peter asks of James, “Who are you anyway…that I should tell you our secrets?” (DeLillo 1999(a), p. 165). Peter’s question belies James’s feeling that Peter ‘was the apex, the revelation of full effect’ (DeLillo 1999(a), p. 165), since for Peter the point of speculation is displaced from Ann’s affair to James’s part in monitoring it. When James asks Charles later, “Who is it, do you think?” and “Is it the Greek? Eliades?” (DeLillo 1999(a), p. 177), he contravenes the boundary of Charles’s spatial relation to his wife’s closet. There is a remonstrance in Charles looking at James ‘sharply’ before Charles’s explicit maintenance of the structural dimensions of the closet that slams its door in his own face: “You noticed nothing. She would never give anyone cause to notice. Whatever she’s doing, I promise you it’s not being noticed” (DeLillo 1999(a), p. 177).

Charles’s refusal to acknowledge that Ann’s affair is out is part of a combined strategy between the Maitlands to maintain their marital system. As Ann informs James, her current affair operates from the point of view that her past infidelities have developed a system of repair within the marriage; this system ensures her husband Charles is

Diana Jenkins 185 December 2005 sensitive, though paradoxically blind, to the recurrent nature of her extramarital proclivities:

“We’ll repair it. We have in the past. It requires sequences that have to be completed, one after the other. Distinct stages of development. The funny thing is I haven’t learned the drill as well as he has. I do badly at it. I make things difficult for all concerned” (DeLillo 1999(a), p. 101).

The narratological advantage of such open-ended systems of meaning exchange around the adulterous closet is that the text harnesses the narrative momentum occasioned by 80 transgressive desire, whilst resisting the narrative’s drive toward its own endTPF FPT. The space of speculation insists as what Noya calls ‘a voiced secret’ (Noya 2004, p. 241). This space guarantees the closet of adulterous secrecy a directive power within the text, since, ‘[p]aradoxically but necessarily, unveiling is what secrets seek, and this hermeneutic bait is what lies at the generative core of literary structure, especially as it pertains to narrative fiction’ (Noya 2004, p. 241). For James himself, transgressive secrecy comes to overpower the normative site of his marriage to Kathryn, and yet the truth is held aloft by his ignorance of the manner of the secret’s transferal. Although Kathryn finds out that James “went to bed with a friend of hers” (DeLillo 1999(a), p. 67), the narrative residue of the secret’s outing is evinced by James’s ignorance of the particulars, saying only of Antoinette, the friend in question, that “She let on somehow. She sent signals” (DeLillo 1999(a), p. 67).

The doubt in James’s record is the key feature of the affair that destroys his marriage. Not even his desire to sexually know Antoinette is complete, and James instead finds himself in a closet of adulterous secrecy where the uncertainty is not only who knows what, but whether he wants to sexually transgress at all. Indeed, James’s hesitation to enter into this closet space with Antoinette in the first place seals his eventual expulsion from it:

80 TP PT Recalling Freud and Brooks, Noya argues that ‘[p]lots move toward death by annulling the secrets of meaning, reining in its disseminative properties. But the death such deterministic structures favor, the closural “The End” that conventionally puts a stop to incessant meaning-production, is not the same as the figurative death of unconstrainable meaningfulness’ (Noya 2004, p. 25). Noya’s position is precisely the one I mean to suggest of the systemically ‘unconstrainable’ semantics of adulterous secrecy in DeLillo’s work.

Diana Jenkins 186 December 2005 “Anyway I gave the impression of wavering. I must have drawn back. This was inexcusable, of course. I hesitated, I showed uncertainty. We did the thing finally. We couldn’t end our friendship, commit our crime, without finishing what we’d started. So we did the thing. We eked out a fuck. What an idiot I was. Antoinette got her sweet revenge” (DeLillo 1999(a), pp. 68-9).

Replicating the apathy with which David Bell conducts extramarital affairs in Americana, James refers to himself repeatedly as the ‘reluctant adulterer’ (DeLillo 1999(a), p. 17, p. 29), and the narrative’s question mark, or the gap to use Brown’s term, is the incongruity between his apparent, lingering attachment to his wife Kathryn, and the apathetic affair that ends their marriage. Reflecting the pattern of the novel’s wider narrative, defined by the contradictory arbitrariness of the open-ended system, James’s ‘half-hearted’ desire is more suited to “feelings that get acted on when man and wife split up” (DeLillo 1999(a), p. 69, p. 68). Rather than acknowledging his culpability in his marriage’s demise, James believes instead that another adulterous closet conceals the truth of Kathryn’s friendship with their mutual friend, Frank Volterra. James attempts to project onto his estranged wife both the dimensions of transgressive secrecy and, by association, the responsibility for their marriage’s breakdown:

“But what about Frank? We haven’t had that argument in a while, have we? How is it he just happened to drop by? Did he want to talk over old times?”

“What a pair, you two. The ragged self-regarding artist, the secretly well-to-do young woman. How many intimate little lunches did you and Frank have while I was doing my booklets and pamphlets? ...What sexy currents passed in the air? Buddy-buddy. Did he ask you up to one of those dreary flats he was always holed up in? He spent half his life looking for bottle openers in other people’s kitchens. Did that make it sleazier, sexier? Did you talk about your father’s money? No, that would have made him hate you. That would have made him want to fuck you in all the wrong ways, so to speak” (DeLillo 1999(a), p. 125).

James suggests a revelation about Kathryn and Frank trembles just beyond what scant evidence lies before him. Like Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, The Names mocks the reader’s expectation that a revelation will bring closure to the narrative. The question of Kathryn’s own fidelity is never answered, and the reader never discovers in precisely what terms James’s lover Antoinette delivers the deathblow to his marriage. Despite its proliferating operations in terms of adulterous secrecy, the novel acknowledges only that

Diana Jenkins 187 December 2005 the system of exchange between knowing and unknowing helps chart certain character relations, leaving open the lingering doubts that exist between them.

As in The Names, lingering doubts about past events help structure the broader narrative of Underworld. Protagonist Nick Shay’s narrative is premised on the secret of his father’s disappearance, a permanent closeting caused by his father’s physical vanishing. Nick imagines a dark space in which James Nicholas Costanza is buried:

The earth opened up and he stepped inside. I think it felt that way not only to us but to Jimmy as well. I think he went under. I don’t think he wanted a fresh start or a new life or even an escape. I think he wanted to go under (DeLillo 1999(b), pp. 808-9).

Underworld never divulges the secrets of Jimmy’s disappearance, and both Nick and the novel are framed and activated by this space of the unknown, paternal on the one hand and narratological on the other. Nick’s characterisation of his father’s disappearance resembles Nick’s own desire for the end, culminating at various points in an urge to at least partially divest himself of his secrets. Despite his father’s closet structuring Nick’s own negotiations of knowing and unknowing, ‘[i]t remains that a certain type of statement on the truth has been made, and enlarged…in the form of a system’ (Derrida 1988, p. 192) by the end of Nick’s narrative in Underworld. That system is open-ended, relying as much on what Nick does not know as what he does, and as much on what people know of him as what they do not. He operates as a personified secret space, and is characterised as such by his mother-in-law-to-be when she says to Marian, after finding out she is dating Nick, “So you’ve been keeping secrets” (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 596). Marian tells her mother that “he’s not a secret. There hasn’t been much to say, that’s all” (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 597), which predicates Nick’s marital space on the unsaid. Nick’s closeting is embellished by Marian’s silence, but chronologically precedes their meeting, predated by Klara Sax when she briefly takes Nick as her lover when he is a young man. Klara’s adulterous episodes with Nick are conducted in a more literal closet, her paint room, and Klara determines to keep him unseen. The paint room is ‘the spare room,’ and Klara thinks that ‘as long as she [keeps] him in this one room, no one could say there was something crazy going on’ (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 732). Klara’s paint room operates as an adulterous closet not only because it is where she and Nick conduct their physical affair,

Diana Jenkins 188 December 2005 but also because they verbally exchange secrets only when they are in the room. When Nick, having divulged a personal detail, says, “Now you have to tell me one of your secrets. Could be big, could be small” (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 751), Klara responds by asking, “What’s your name?” (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 752). Nick is Klara’s secret, as he is later Marian’s, and when he gives her his name, he is telling her a secret – her own, to be precise.

The orientation of adulterous secrecy in Underworld operates like a sexualised game of hide-and-seek that takes place in and out of the closet. When Nick’s wife Marian is leaving the scene of a liaison with Brian Glassic, her inspection of the room measures her invisibility within her adulterous closet:

These were the things that opened the world to secret arrangements, the borrowed flats and memorized phone number and coded notation on the calendar. Childish spy games really that made her feel guiltier than the sex did, a sheepish kind of self-reproach. She patted down a pillow to remove the indentation (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 261).

Marian’s determination to erase both herself and the evidence of her transgression connects her closet unexpectedly to her husband Nick, who suggests to his own lover, Donna, that swingers should find each other ‘Silently, clandestinely’ (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 298). Donna rejects Nick’s proposal to stay discretely in the closet in favour of bursting visibly out:

“Like criminals. But we’re not criminals. We want our own conference, with hors d’oeuvres and little napkins. There’s too much loneliness in America? Too many secrets? Let them out, open them up. And don’t look at me so closely. You’re looking too closely” (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 298)

Donna’s contradictory refusal to be scrutinised undermines her acceptance of the conditions outside the closet, revealing the problematic co-dependency of the site. The closet is a narrative space that indicates an ongoing transfer between in and out, and Donna’s ‘outed’ status is mediated by the obverse desire to reclaim aspects of being in. Her statement recalls Ann and Charles Maitland’s marital closet in The Names that both makes public Ann’s affair and simultaneously hides it from view.

Diana Jenkins 189 December 2005 Donna’s ambivalent articulation of her position harnesses the site of the adulterous secret, her language recalling the closet’s established frame of referenced homosexuality. Donna quizzes Nick about his attitude to the swingers’ convention, saying to him “Actually you sort of hate us, don’t you?” (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 292), succinctly isolating the operation of fear relations around the closet that concern not only her status as a stranger but undoubtedly her proclivities as the ‘strange.’ After a brief exchange Donna concludes, “Yes, it’s true, you hate us,” before insisting to Nick that he “hate[s] the fact that it’s public” and that he “can’t stand [swingers] coming out here and saying it and doing it and acting it out” (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 293).

Nick incisively captures Donna’s closeted ‘double-bind’ by concluding that Donna is a “Private person who fucks strangers” (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 292). In other words, the dimensions of her adultery construct a closet through which all her sexual transactions are referred. Donna is defined in relation to the adulterous closet in the same way issues of homosexual identity have been debated and decided in relation to the relative merits of being either in or out of the closet. When Donna ironically asks, “Where’s the contradiction?” (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 292), she concedes the fundamental nature of the closet predisposes her sexual practices to the permanent tension of doing two antithetical things at once.

Nick’s basic suspicion of the swingers’ ethos does not amount to a parallel of the violence that has been legally defended as the result of ‘homosexual panic’ (Freiberg 1988; Norcini 1989; Sedgwick 1990). Still, Nick concedes to Donna once they are ensconced in his hotel room, itself the ultimate uncanny closet, that perhaps she is “not completely wrong” about him, and that he has “a theory about the damage people do when they bring certain things into the open” (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 294). Nick’s anxiety about brazenly ‘outing’ the secret of adultery, as in Donna’s swingers’ convention, relates to the cultural phenomenon of homosexual panic to the extent that Donna’s sexual preferences and practices psychosexually affect him.

Nick’s fear of these “certain things” is telling: he emphasises Donna’s status as a stranger in his very general, oblique reference to ‘people,’ and he demonstrates his ignorance of

Diana Jenkins 190 December 2005 their activities in his inability to name the apparently damaging phenomenon of such goings-on being ‘out.’ Donna’s strangeness represents both the queer and the outsider, which in relations around the closet have commonly been positioned as fused. Yet Nick is also attracted to Donna, and is about to have sex with her. Nick’s magnetised attraction to the closet site is paradoxical, offering a point of conceptual overlap with queer theory, where the paradox might be figured as a (homosexually charged) homophobic attachment to a heterosexual norm. The paradox extends to the comparison, since the features of this literary encounter reinforce heterosexual norms, but Nick’s desire for Donna does serve to make deviant his supposed attachment to norms of marital privacy and fidelity. Bauman’s theorisation of the stranger applies to Nick’s narrated pathology, to the phenomenon of ‘homosexual panic,’ and to the expanded appropriation of closet space:

[If strangers,] by their sheer presence, make obscure what ought to be transparent…if they pollute the joy with anxiety while making the forbidden fruit alluring; if, in other words, they befog and eclipse the boundary lines which ought to be clearly seen, if, having done all this, they gestate uncertainty, which in its turn breeds the discomfort of feeling lost – then each society produces such strangers. While drawing its borders and charting its cognitive, aesthetic and moral maps, it cannot but gestate people who conceal borderlines deemed crucial to its orderly and/or meaningful life (Bauman 1997, p. 17).

This ‘discomfort of feeling lost’ reflects Nick’s contradictory attempt to define his bearings both in and out of the closet of adulterous secrecy. In Donna’s open closet of legitimated transgression, Nick’s desire for their adulterous episode is outed, despite his attempts to frame himself inside the closet of a more ‘clandestine’ encounter. Donna and her husband Barry identify early Nick’s aroused interest, and Donna exposes Nick by telling him “Barry saw you watching me yesterday…[a]nd last night at dinner he pointed you out” (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 292). Nick’s visibility eclipses, like Bauman’s stranger, the boundary between the closet of discretion Nick attempts to fashion, and Donna’s vigilant appraisal outside it. Donna troubles the borders further by reorienting the operation of naming, telling Nick “We decided we know who you are” (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 292), denying Nick speech-act control of his own negotiation of closet space.

During this adulterous afternoon with Donna, Nick relates to her the influence of having read, a long time prior, The Cloud of Unknowing (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 295). The book

Diana Jenkins 191 December 2005 provides Nick with a crucial insight into the power of exchanges between knowing and unknowing, and his spatialisation relates the narratological dimensions of their closet:

“And I read this book and began to think of God as a secret, a long unlighted tunnel, on and on…This is what I respected about God. He keeps his secret. And I tried to approach God through his secret, his unknowability…And so I learned to respect the power of secrets” (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 295).

Nick, in the act of revealing something personal to Donna, finally succeeds in articulating the space around and through which his own secret narrative’s meaning is situated. Nick recognises as ‘alive’ (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 296) a phrase in The Cloud of Unknowing that precisely indicates the powerful vitality of the closet. He tells Donna “this phrase was [his] naked edge, [his] edging into darkness, into the secret of God”, and that he “repeated it, repeated it, repeated it”: Todo y nada (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 297). All and nothing, in other words, suggests the kind of truth that is posited by the open-ended system of disclosures around the closet. Nick knows both everything and nothing about Donna, and he later transfers the oscillating truth of that secret adulterous liaison into a doctored confession for his wife Marian. Nick in particular is able to articulate the dialectical tension of the adulterous closet space:

No last names, no echoing second thoughts. This is the pact of casual sex. But I told her my last name and it wasn’t casual, was it? That’s the odd dominant of the piece, that I wanted to reach her, still her breathing, to make her breathless, yes. There was something about Donna that untongue-tied me. Guilt later, feeling Marian next to me, asleep in the dark (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 344).

The expression ‘all and nothing’ offers a verbal instance of the open-ended system of DeLillo’s narrative exchanges of adulterous secrets, a dimension where, again, ‘everything connects in the end, or only seems to, or seems to only because it does’ (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 465). Unknowing is as structurally decisive in the narrative as knowing, the secret ‘delineated through the literary “genesis of secrecy” that aims at converting “unknowing” itself into a secret form of knowledge, a way of thinking or “knowing” the secret’ (Noya 2004, pp. 240-1) (Bradbury 1979; Kermode 1979). Underworld’s ‘bewildering connectedness’ (Knight 2000, p. 295) delineates the infinite divisibility of operations around the closet:

Diana Jenkins 192 December 2005 There are strange parallels, some of which are appropriately thematic[,] [including]…Nick’s betrayal of Klara’s marriage in the 1950s…repeated with a difference when it is Nick as a married man who engages in infidelity with the woman at the swingers’ convention, and reversed when Nick’s wife has an affair with his friend Brian Glassic (Knight 2000, p. 295).

Connections between the affairs Knight cites extend beyond the fact of infidelity alone. Nick’s affair with Donna, and the story he tells her about The Cloud of Unknowing, which chronologically precedes his wife Marian’s affair with Brian Glassic, appears later in Underworld’s non-linear narrative. Still, Nick apprehends Marian’s secret, and attempts to negotiate passage through a ‘cloud of unknowing’ that keeps – to borrow from The Names as Saltzman does – the ‘hovering sum of things’ (DeLillo 1999(a), p. 123) just beyond him, ‘tantalizingly aloft’ (Saltzman 1998, p. 493):

He stepped back slightly and looked at her. “Why is that?” he said.

“What are we talking about?”

“And why is it that when I get back, the whole thing’s gone and lost and forgotten?”

“What thing?”

He took off her sunglasses and handed them to her (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 253).

Nick’s cloud of unknowing influences the terms of Marian’s affair, advancing Sedgwick’s argument of the privilege of unknowing. Nick’s unknowing powerfully impacts Marian’s adulterous secret, reinscribing her position so that her adultery is symbolically outed by her uncertainty of Nick’s ignorance. It is only a few hours later that Marian arrives for another adulterous tryst with Brian, but the shift in power relations around the closet of adulterous secrecy, only emphasised by Nick’s absence, reveals the subtle influence of unknowing in determining narrative outcomes:

“I think he knows,” [Marian] said.

“What?”

Diana Jenkins 193 December 2005 “I think he knows.”

“He doesn’t know.”

“I think he knows” (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 255).

This exchange between Brian and Marian is repeated twice more during their lunchtime meeting in a borrowed apartment. The hovering sum of things Nick may or may not know proves empowering to Nick’s unspecified position, and translates Marian and Brian’s closet of adulterous secrecy into the site of unknowing. The doubts Brian expresses about continuing the affair are made directly in terms of Nick’s crucially uncertain ignorance. Over the course of this scene, Brian says to Marian: “It’s stupid and it’s reckless and we shouldn’t do it anymore. Because if he finds out” (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 257); “Let’s make this one last happy farewell fuck”; and “But we ought to think about ending it. We ought to make this the end” (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 259). Marian responds with an attempt to reclaim authority over what and who is in the closet, resulting in another interplay between all and nothing:

“And he doesn’t have to find out. He already knows.”

“He doesn’t know.”

“I think he knows” (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 257).

This sequence is repeated once more, but the scene concludes with an inversion of their different ignorances. Brian, for the first time, asks “But what if he knows?” and Marian responds with “He doesn’t know” (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 260); only two more short lines of unrelated dialogue are exchanged before they part. We never again see Marian and Brian together beyond this scene, and confirmation that Nick does know comes 529 pages later (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 789). The narrative continues to generate a cloud of unknowing as part of its systemic unwillingness and even inability to reconcile the exchanges of knowledge around the closet of adulterous secrecy. Nick does, ‘unmistakably now,’ finally know about the affair. He is ‘completely certain that Brian and Marian…[are]

Diana Jenkins 194 December 2005 partners in a deep betrayal’ (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 791), but the narrative excludes the account that Marian provides to Nick. The omission of Marian’s confession recalls the remote and partial account Nick gives Marian of his own adultery, and fails to indicate how long the affair endures between the two narrative occasions of Nick’s debated ignorance and his much later knowingness. Like Brian, the reader is left uncertain as to just what Nick knows, and the narrative space of unknowing continues to proliferate, befitting Underworld’s overall structure of open connection.

The closet of adulterous secrecy is not a secure site. Nick’s closet operates in ways that significantly distinguish it from Donna’s, and from his wife Marian’s. In The Names, Charles Maitland’s insistence that his wife Ann’s affair is in the closet clashes with her casually inflicted acknowledgement that it is out. None of these characters experience the closet in the same way, and yet all negotiate levels of ignorance and knowingness on its terms. This multiplicity of modes in and out of the closet makes sense when interpreted from within Sedgwick’s reading of ignorance, which she stresses is not ‘a single Manichaean, aboriginal maw of darkness from which the heroics of human cognition can occasionally wrestle facts, insights, freedoms, [and] progress’ (Sedgwick 1990, p. 8):

…perhaps there exists instead a plethora of ignorances…Insofar as ignorance is ignorance of a knowledge – a knowledge that may itself, it goes without saying, be seen as either true or false under some other regime of truth – these ignorances, far from being pieces of the originary dark, are produced by and correspond to particular knowledges and circulate as part of particular regimes of truth (Sedgwick 1990, p. 8).

This plethora of ignorances conceptually supports the spatial counterpart of a plethora of closets. These negotiations of adulterous secrecy create a particular kind of closet space that offers a coherent map of their circulation within it. Sedgwick emphasises ‘the performative relations of double and conflicted definition’ (Sedgwick 1990, p. 13), and the closet apparatus concerns what these different adulterous encounters mean within a theoretically devised, measurable space. Adulterous secrecy within DeLillo’s narratives incubates an animated system of relations, a system of exchange that is reflected by the structure of the closet. Some of these exchanges coincide with the relations around the homosexual closet – guilt, shame, and denial, for example – but the proliferative aspect

Diana Jenkins 195 December 2005 of ignorances resists a limit case of closet behaviours. The adulterous closet performs in response to different interactions of knowing and unknowing, impacting the narrative as ‘Some soft-bodied mood, some tone that half insist[s] on being noticed’ (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 253). This ‘shy secret, afraid of disturbing the air’ (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 253) paradoxically constructs the conditions for disturbance within its frame.

The closet of DeLillo’s adultery narratives is a spatial device, then, operating as a structural apparatus that controls the navigation through different sites of both reader and character awareness. This spatial approach to various transportations of knowledge has particular application to the narrative of adultery, due to the potentially explosive combination of sex and secrecy that manifests various narrative tensions. In DeLillo’s play Valparaiso, farce relies primarily on barefaced disclosure for comic effect. In a play like the Restoration comedy The Country Wife, the humour is derived by the successful avoidance of the scandal of discovery, and the adulterous deception is coordinated so that demarcations of the closet are not crossed by anyone outside the parties already ‘in’ on the secret. In Valparaiso, comic success relies instead on Livia’s pride in her adulterous scandal. Horner’s manipulations of the closet in The Country Wife require and test his ability to stay in it, whereas Livia’s concerns a brazen outing on a talk show, during which she compulsively discloses the details of the adulterous tryst that leaves her pregnant. Delfina, the talk-show hostess, says to her:

“Why else would you be here? Would you be so flauntingly pregnant if the child were your husband’s? What’s the point of that? You are here to unfurl your crime across the satellite skies” (DeLillo 1999(c), p. 81).

Livia responds by describing the event in lurid detail over two pages of dialogue, sharing candid, graphic highlights with her husband Michael, the camera, the studio audience, Delfina, and the show’s co-host, Teddy. The scene parodies both the talkshow format and the double entendres of stage productions like The Country Wife, the subtle concealments of which Valparaiso wittingly foregoes (DeLillo 1999(c), p. 81). Thus the play’s absurdity is not that Livia’s husband believes her innocent and chaste, as is the case in the comic figure of The Country Wife’s misguided Mr. Pinchwife, but that Michael is shocked by his wife’s revelation and that he does not have an adulterous scandal of his

Diana Jenkins 196 December 2005 own to confess. In response to asking how much time he gets to adjust to the news, Michael is told “It’s an hour show” (DeLillo 1999(c), p. 83). The paradigm of the closet’s in and out mechanism is inverted in DeLillo’s play, where Livia’s status as an outed adulteress results in none of the guilt, shame or denial that often defines the narrative of an adulterous secret’s exposure. Instead, Michael is presumed to be hiding something. Delfina announces “He says one thing but hides another in his heart” (DeLillo 1999(c), p. 89), before insisting to Michael, “We need to know everything. We need to show everything” (DeLillo 1999(c), p. 90). Michael, like Underworld’s Nick Shay, represents a personification of the closet space, acknowledging within himself “Something so unknowable. Unwordable” (DeLillo 1999(c), p. 91). The confession of his failed suicide attempt emphasises his inability to cross the threshold of his corporeal closet, the site’s structure only finally compressed by his death. By killing Michael at the play’s end, Delfina is released from the terms of the closet, no longer referencing Michael in terms of a space of secrecy but of the narrative’s drive toward its end. For her, death operates precisely in “the sense that nothing is left unseen. Nothing is left unsaid” (DeLillo 1999(c), p. 107).

The structural sturdiness of the closet of adulterous secrecy is illustrated by the gap that remains in the narrative between what is and is not known of these affairs. This sturdiness, as Noya suggests, is informed in part by a paradoxical ambivalence toward the secret, since ‘[n]arrative and interpretive closure are jeopardized by the stubborn resistance to narrativity of the secret’ (Noya 2004, p. 251). Any attempt to try to read in DeLillo’s adultery narratives a truth that is all or nothing, rather than the semantically irresolvable all and nothing, returns to the problem Sedgwick identifies in The Nun’s Suzanne:

…describing her as pure knowing…reproduces some of the problems that Tancock and his predecessors had encountered in trying to preserve her as a space of pure unknowing (Sedgwick 1990, p. 31).

Sedgwick’s critical suspicion toward a concept of knowledge that does not contain a measure of ignorance, and vice versa, illustrates that the narrative operations of the adulterous closet space perpetuate transactions that are inconclusive by nature. Although

Diana Jenkins 197 December 2005 Nick says during his confrontation with Brian that Marian has “told [him] everything” (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 797), there remains in the narrative a significant space of uncertainty about what that ‘everything’ might conceivably entail. Degrees of knowledge and ignorance concerning the fictional affair are predicated on transferring a secret characterised by sexual desire, concealment, exclusion, transgression, and denial. As Brown suggests of Gabriel in the closing passage of Joyce’s ‘The Dead,’ neither Nick nor the reader will ever know the full truth of the affair:

There is a gap, a bottomless residue of doubt in the record, a doubt which Gabriel communicates in the rhetorical figure of assumed dubiety that the Renaissance rhetoricians named with Aristotle’s term for the question on which a rational discourse is based: the figure of aporia: “Perhaps she had not told him all the story” (Brown 1989, p. 103).

The ‘bottomless residue of doubt’ is an essential component in the successful operation of systems-maintenance in the open-ended economy of DeLillo’s adultery narratives, a residue I also characterise as a sexualised semantic haze. Saltzman suggests that ‘[t]he question remains as to how we can counteract the haze when the haze is so inviting’ (Saltzman 1998, p. 492), and the haze is inviting enough in DeLillo’s narratives of adultery that the need for counteraction is unclear. The haze cultivates DeLillo’s open- ended system, transferring sexual ignorance and knowledge through a closet of adulterous and adulterating secrecy. The truth is obscured, and the narrative power of the resulting tension between unknowing and knowing gives DeLillo’s adultery narratives their propulsive and semantic significance. In Mao II, for instance, when Bill Gray asks Karen “Does Scott know you come up here?”, Karen’s answer is cryptic: “Is there anything in this house Scott doesn’t know?” (DeLillo 1992, p. 86). Bill accepts her rhetoric with the equally oblique “That’s what I thought,” and the space of speculation expands in two verbal exchanges whose meaning is still shrouded. Could the answer to Karen’s rhetorical question be yes, and would Bill believe her? The gap between whether or not they have satisfactorily established Scott’s knowledge or ignorance is the one thing that emerges from their exchange, which concentrates around uncertainty:

“And it’s okay with him,” Bill said.

Diana Jenkins 198 December 2005 “I don’t see what choice. I mean he hasn’t shot us yet.”

“No, he hasn’t.”

“And he wouldn’t.”

“No, he wouldn’t, would he?”

“And anyway and anyway and anyway. Didn’t he bring me here for you?” (DeLillo 1992, p. 86).

Neither one attempts to answer the other’s question, and Scott never makes his knowledge or ignorance of Bill and Karen’s affair known. The disjointed structure of Mao II ‘orchestrates a narrative space that reflects the complexity of the issues,’ especially in the degree to which ‘the reader is missing many of the connectives’ (Barrett 1999, p. 805). The novel’s economical chapters are also ‘filled with unembellished language and cryptic, often illogical dialogue,’ and ‘the frames do not suggest a progression or even any clear connection’ (Barrett 1999, p. 805). These structural disruptions to transparency in Mao II, including the development of the adultery narrative, recall Joyce’s ‘manipulation of form in Exiles and Ulysses [that] ensures…adultery is perceived as a kind of gap in the consciousness of a central character and as an absent or displaced centre in the awareness of the audience’ (Brown 1989, p. 103). Duvall identifies the gap and subsequent displacement in White Noise when Murray Suskind asks Jack Gladney, in response to Jack’s festering rage about his wife Babette’s adultery, “Isn’t there a deep field, a sort of crude oil deposit that one might tap if and when the occasion warrants? A great dark lake of male rage?” (DeLillo 1986, p. 292):

Jack notes that Murray sounds like Babette and indeed she refuses to identify the man she had sex with on precisely those grounds (225). If Murray sounds so much like Babette, the possibility arises that Murray has succeeded in his intentions with Babette, pillow talk breeding the similar expression. Whether Murray has already bedded Babette, an intent of Murray’s seduction would seem to be the following: if he can get Jack to commit a murder, Jack, if caught, would eliminate himself from the college and from Babette’s bed (Duvall 1998, p. 447).

Diana Jenkins 199 December 2005 Duvall’s identification of a possible affair between Babette and her husband’s colleague and friend, Murray, besides recalling the mirrored triangle in The Names between Kathryn and James Axton and their own charismatic friend Frank Volterra, connects the blueprint of this adultery narrative with that of Brian Glassic, Marian, and Nick Shay in Underworld, whose adulterous triangle takes the same form. These narratives are most similar in what they omit. The unconfirmed, additional infidelity in both The Names and White Noise, and Underworld’s undisclosed content of the remainder of Marian and Brian’s affair, represent the open-ended system of DeLillo’s approach to adultery. In all three narratives, the haze cannot be counteracted since from the outset ‘[e]verything “begins”…by obscuring this beginning in the “silence,” “smoke,” and “dark”’ (Derrida 1988, p. 198). The system of adulterous secrecy continues to indefinitely speculate beyond whatever ignorances and knowledges are transferred during exchanges of the closet.

Duvall’s suggestion of an affair between Babette and Murray in White Noise is a reminder that signification operates as an open-ended system of its own. Duvall’s language furnishes the space of closeted speculation by his use of terms like ‘bedded,’ ‘seduction,’ and ‘intent.’ Duvall’s argument that White Noise contains additional adulterous content is suggestive, and reflects what Brown and Denis Donoghue observe of Joyce criticism, from Exiles through to his magnum opus, Ulysses, which is ‘the oddity of calling these situations ‘adulterous’ ones’ when no actual adultery takes place’ (Brown 1989, p. 102). Instead, ‘suspected, imagined, remembered or avoided adultery’ (Brown 1989, p. 102-3) continues to be analysed in texts in which adultery is not described, and Duvall’s observation of possible adultery between Babette and Murray in White Noise further compounds the narrative’s pronounced resistance to full disclosure.

The lack of narrative closure resulting from evocations of uncertain adulterous spaces in DeLillo’s fiction leads to the possibility that his open-ended narrative systems produce, as Brown suggests of other authors, ‘[m]oments of incomprehension [that] may be tied up in modern features of narrative structure and effect’ (Brown 1989, p. 108):

Diana Jenkins 200 December 2005 Examples are the naïve perspective of James’s Maisie on the manoeuvres of the adults in What Maisie Knew, and the limitedness of Ford Maddox Ford’s personalized narrator in The Good Soldier who only gradually begins to perceive that he is telling the story of his own cuckolding. In these cases Modernistic narrative device and the adultery topos are the one same thing. One work which takes the idea to a kind of logical extreme is Alain Robbe- Grillet’s Jealousy, where the jealous husband’s obsessive desire to see and to know can be taken as a metaphor for the act of writing itself (Brown 1989, pp. 108-9).

Such structural and self-reflexive devices help demonstrate that the closet of adulterous secrecy consists of indefinite transfers of degrees of knowing and unknowing, and does not provide the much-sought-after resolution of the adultery narrative. On the contrary, these and DeLillo’s open-ended systems of exchange around adulterous secrecy emphasise that it is in the nature of adulterous deceit ‘that the deceived party can never really know what has taken place’ because ‘[t]here is a gap in the perceiving, narrating consciousness’ (Brown 1989, p. 109) that is necessarily incomplete:

…riddled with gaps and mistaken connections…In the process of reworking it, the analyst and the analysand together tell another story – that of the dynamics of the transference itself, medium for the exchange of stories and their interpretation, a dialogic transactive relation that creates, though never in final form, the more powerful and thus more therapeutic narrative fiction (Brooks 1984, p. 324).

Concerned precisely with the semantic dynamism of such language transfers, DeLillo’s narratives of adultery systematically bear out Brooks’s theory of narrative as mobilised desire. His adultery narratives allow for Derrida’s remainder, which adheres to the infinite divisibility of the closet site. The adulterous secret contains within its semantic potential both a mobilised sexual desire and a desire to narrate, uniquely situating its closeted potential as ‘a story to tell’. And yet it will always be, must always be, erotically charged by the further narrative possibilities of being ‘an inadequate story’ (Brooks 1984, p. 324).

The connection between adulterous secrecy and the space of the closet disturbs the structure of DeLillo’s adultery narratives. The structure of this literary closet precludes the possibility of its frame’s total collapse, since the content and mobility of the adulterous secret is read expressly in its terms. The space of the closet enables the

Diana Jenkins 201 December 2005 adulterous secret to operate within a system of exchange whose movement, though indefinite, is spatially constrained, subduing the narrative potency of adulterous secrecy and distinguishing it from the system-destroying potential of secrecy that LeClair identifies in In the Loop. LeClair concedes that secrets can impact the narrative structure in various ways, and Cowart suggests In the Loop ‘succeeds precisely because it transcends its thesis’ (Cowart 2003, p. 9):

LeClair…does not make the mistake of trying to out every DeLillo fiction into the conceptual straightjacket of systems theory…LeClair realizes that too doctrinaire an application of his thesis will afford little latitude to gauge the profoundly anarchic qualities that, as DeLillo reveals, constantly disrupt the feedback loop (Cowart 2003, pp. 9-10).

Cowart’s reference to ‘outing’ DeLillo’s fiction overtly instances the closet in terms of narrative systems, and the narrative secret’s persistence in different manifestations of being in or out of the closet prevents any claim to a final knowledge, recalling the structure of narrative mapped by Brooks, Kermode, and Hartman. If the adulterous closet supports sex-act relations around desire – be it the desire to secretly transgress, the desire to know whether marital fidelity has been compromised, or the desire to absolve oneself of adulterous shame – then that closet parallels narrative’s spatial staging of ‘the motors of desire that drive and consume its plot’ (Brooks 1984, p. 326). Narratives of adultery are further implicated by Brooks’s identification of narrative’s structural resemblance to seduction, particularly resonate given fiction’s adulteration of fact. This semantic doubling is seen in Phillip Roth’s Deception (1990), where ‘[t]he artist-hero of the text is guilty of deception in both practicing adultery and in adulterating reality by his blatant fictions’ (Neelakantan 2000, p. 40):

If adultery is the theme, it also serves to structure the narrative in ways that make it possible to see the Rothian artist as an incorrigible adulterer. To commit adultery and to write fiction, both, in effect, mean a sanction for deception. There is nothing pristine or sacred, according to Roth, about the artistic process: it is a game where the artist constantly betrays others, stealing their words and deceiving them (Neelakantan 2000, p. 41).

Roth’s Deception also unmistakably evokes the atmosphere of carnality inherent in Brooks’s characterisation of the drive to narrate, something he emphasises as a ‘primary human drive that seeks to seduce and to subjugate the listener, to implicate him in the

Diana Jenkins 202 December 2005 thrust of a desire’ (Brooks 1984, p. 326). This sexually charged image of narrative’s appetites invokes the closet of the perpetually unresolvable adulterous secret, a space that fashions an operating system ‘that never can quite speak its name…but that insists on speaking over and over again its restless movement toward that name’ (Brooks 1984, p. 326). Silence preceding confession conceals a transgression that defines its telling particularly as confession (Bradbury 1979). This protective silence is inextricably bound to its own breakage, a reminder that that ‘there is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say’ (Foucault 1985, p. 27), since the site of the closet effaces such borders. Foucault suggests ‘[t]here is not one but many silences,’ and that such silences ‘are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourse’ (Foucault 1985, p. 27), a theoretical approach that supports Sedgwick’s assertion of a plethora of ignorances.

Sedgwick isolates the potential narrative power of silence by its relation to a closet space that is appropriated here as the concealing space of adultery. Silence is intrinsic to the closet’s formation because, as Sedgwick identifies it, ‘“Closetedness” itself is a performance initiated as such by the speech act of a silence… a silence that accrues particularity by fits and starts, in relation to the discourse that surrounds and differentially constitutes it’ (Sedgwick 1990, p. 3). The proliferative silences of DeLillo’s adultery narratives are actively engaged in the construction of such critical particulars as the nature and purpose of each conceptual closet; something going unsaid cultivates mutations of silence that extend and transform eruptions of meaning. Noya suggests of Libra that in this ‘world of secrets, truth and untruth are often interchangeable, often leveled indistinctly to the status of mistruths or missed truths that may eventually hit the mark or not’ (Noya 2004, p. 254), and his suggestion of semantic chaos also applies to the effect of silence in DeLillo’s adultery narratives. Silence in such narratives is structurally similar to the closet, since silence actively constructs the narrative possibility of deception. The theme of deception Roth explicitly foregrounds in the title Deception, for instance, derives for Neelakantan from ‘the adulterous relationship of the lovers as well as the versions of reality that ensue when fictions constantly invade reality,’ resulting both in the adulteration of reality and in reproducing fictions (Neelakantan 2000, p. 46).

Diana Jenkins 203 December 2005 The character of Pammy Wynant in Players is less arch in her deceptions than Roth, her vacillation constructing an adulterous closet that tempers the narrative’s capacity to ‘assault reality’ in its more evenly weighted bind. In Jack’s and her own failure to confess their adulterous afternoon, their secret is ambivalently enacted as ‘that about which one cannot speak, but which one can no longer silence’ (Derrida 1992, p. 147):

A place was being hollowed out, an isolated site, and into it would go the shifting allegiances of the past week, the resentments surfacing daily, all the remarks tossed off, minor slights she couldn’t seem to forget, and the way they tested each other’s vulnerability…It occurred to her that this was the secret life of their involvement…Disloyalty, spitefulness, petulance (DeLillo 1991, p. 177).

Unlike Pammy, Jack Laws does not seem to recognise the shifting measurements of the closet space that silence affords, despite taking up a variety of silences and physical absences that Pammy observes and tries to mitigate. She notices in the days following their adulterous sex that ‘Jack’s sentences never quite ended, the last word or words opening out into a sustained noise that combined elements of suspicion, resentment and protest’ (DeLillo 1991, p. 175), and Jack’s phonetic incoherence creates and exaggerates the space of the unsaid. Although Pammy aurally attempts to ‘fill this gap [by finding] something to laugh at everywhere, handling flint glass with barely suppressed hysteria’ (DeLillo 1991, p. 175), their different engagement with silence complicates and enflames the adultery site’s narrative position. Pammy fails to bridge the gap into Jack’s closet, his gruesome and excruciating suicide preferable to breaking the silence by confessing to his gay de facto Ethan.

Jack’s fatal silence in Players emphasises that narratives of adultery render the unsaid as being ‘as pointed and performative as speech’ (Sedgwick 1990, p. 4). In relations around the closet of adulterous secrecy, Jack’s silence cultivates a semantic space where ‘ignorance is as potent and as multiple a thing…[as] knowledge’ (Sedgwick 1990, p. 4). Indeed, the extremity of Jack’s silent withdrawal presages DeLillo’s 2001 novella The Body Artist, in which the narrative is structurally reliant on the potency of ignorances gestated by silence. The silences and gaps in The Body Artist begin immediately the narrative is underway, with Lauren Hartke and her newish husband Rey Robles sharing a

Diana Jenkins 204 December 2005 breakfast that, as the dust jacket informs us, consists of ‘half-complete thoughts and words’ (DeLillo 2001). They are a study in the unsaid, Rey’s and the novella’s first line of dialogue building the space of silence from the outset: “I want to say something but what” (DeLillo 2001, p. 8). During the meal, the question “What?” passes between them a total of eleven times, the dimensions of the unsaid expanding with each failure to have the question answered or, at points, even acknowledged. The disjointed conversation builds a silence so charged that Rey’s leaving the room operates as a spatial representation of their joint narrative’s dynamic of closetedness:

When he walked out of the room, she realized there was something she wanted to tell him…Sometimes she doesn’t think of what she wants to say to him until he walks out of whatever room they’re in. Then she thinks of it. Then she either calls after him or doesn’t and he responds or doesn’t (DeLillo 2001, p. 24).

With breakfast over, Rey goes for a drive after apparently recovering the keys he is still looking for when the reader last encounters him alive – the narrative builds silence into what transpires and the reader is left to surmise what happens next. The narrative effects a double closeting, interrupting the story’s third person perfect narration in favour of a newspaper obituary announcing some of the particulars of Rey’s suicide. One of numerous silences in the obituary space is the absent mention of a suicide note, a written form of confession that might have served to reduce the subsequent narrative’s pivotal agitation of Lauren and the reader’s total ignorance of what Rey might have confessed as a suicide motive. However, the obituary’s space of speculation does harness a detail that engages the narrative power of the unsaid: Rey is found dead ‘in the Manhattan apartment of his first wife, the fashion consultant Isabel Corrales’ (DeLillo 2001, p. 27).

The site of Rey’s suicide constructs an area of silence between Lauren and her dead husband that closets his interactions with both his current and his ex-wife. What Rey was doing with Isabel Corrales is never ascertained. Because Rey’s suicide follows his visit to Isabel’s apartment, the space of speculation is embellished by the possibility of a concealed narrative of adultery of the kind Duvall suggests exists in White Noise. Rey’s failure to break his silence means that the narrative of adulterous confession never eventuates beyond latent suggestion, and the narration after Rey’s death performs from

Diana Jenkins 205 December 2005 an aspect of closetedness. When Rey’s first wife Isabel calls Lauren, she does not fill in the blanks. Instead, Isabel cultivates the operations of silence around her closeted narrative with Rey, insisting to Lauren in an anti-confession, “Don’t think I am not sparing you. I am sparing you everything…Frankly you didn’t have time to find out” (DeLillo 2001, p. 59). Lauren’s own narrative with Rey is so deeply entrenched in the space of the unsaid that she rejects the information Isabel does offer, telling her, “No. Don’t you understand? I don’t want to hear this” (DeLillo 2001, p. 59). Like Rey and Lauren’s breakfast conversation, the telephonic exchange between Lauren and Isabel is characterised by a chasm of uncertain meaning:

“Because how long do I know this man and how long do you know him? I never left. Did I ever leave? Were we ever really separated? I knew him in his sleep” (DeLillo 2001, pp. 59-60).

The import of Isabel’s call is never properly established, since its meaning is implied rather than stated, and the operation of the unsaid is the speech-act that dominates narrative progression in The Body Artist generally (Bradbury 1979). The peculiar stranger who materialises once Lauren is alone in the house best represents this narratological affect. This man-child evokes the figure of the idiot savant, an enigma Lauren names ‘Mr. Tuttle’ (DeLillo 2001, p. 48) after she discovers him ensconced in an isolated anteroom on the third floor. Mr. Tuttle performs as a personification of closeted silence, with Lauren envisaging a space in relation to him that consists of ‘an imaginary point, a nonplace where language intersects with our perceptions of time and space’ (DeLillo 2001, p. 48), a space where Mr. Tuttle ‘is a stranger at this crossing, without words or bearings’ (DeLillo 2001, p. 48). Lauren tries to ‘out’ Mr. Tuttle by bringing him downstairs into the lived portion of the house, by giving him lessons in phonetic grammar forms, and finally by taking him out of the house on a disastrous trip to the mall where she buys blank tapes with which to record their conversation (DeLillo 2001, p. 64).

The voice recorder Lauren begins to carry everywhere she goes is the initial means through which she tries to resolve the unsaid, through the repeated playing of the (already

incomplete) phonetic record of what has been said in the past (DeLillo 2001, p. 63).TP Mr.PT Tuttle functions as the (possibly phantasmic) vessel of Rey’s lost speech in his unsettling

Diana Jenkins 206 December 2005 81 ability to adopt Rey’s voice from the saved recordingsTPF FPT. Through Mr. Tuttle’s appropriation of Rey’s phonetic structure, Lauren tries to hear the unsaid within Mr. Tuttle’s articulations of Rey’s speech. Lauren has the uncanny sensation that it is Rey’s voice she hears, ‘the intimate differences, the articulations produced in one vocal apparatus and not another, things she’d known in Rey’s voice, and only Rey’s’ (DeLillo 2001, pp. 61-2). The voice recorder and Mr. Tuttle combine to provide the apparatus that encourages Lauren’s return to a said narrative to trawl for the closeted unsaid of why Rey killed himself:

This was not some communication with the dead. It was Rey alive in the course of a talk he’d had with her…She was sure of this, recalling how they’d gone upstairs and dropped into a night of tossing sensation, drifts of sex, confession and pale sleep, and it was confession as belief in each other, not unburdenings of guilt but avowals of belief, mostly his and stricken by need, and then drowsy sex again, two people passing through each other, easy and airy as sea spray (DeLillo 2001, p. 61).

Despite Lauren’s grasp of the sexual and productive potential of confession, this ‘belief in each other’ wanes as first Rey and then Mr. Tuttle ‘passes through.’ Indeed, Cowart compares Mr. Tuttle to the fool in King Lear, since toward the end both figures simply disappear (Cowart 2003, p. 204). Still, Lauren’s eerie visitor ‘vanishes in part because he has fulfilled his function as heteroclite muse’ (Cowart 2003, p. 204), and in part because Lauren identifies the bodywork Mr. Tuttle inspires as what ‘made everything transparent’ (DeLillo 2001, p. 57). Although the ‘Pinteresque exchanges’ between Mr. Tuttle and Lauren initially ‘suggest a failure of language’ (Nel 2002, p. 744), Lauren ceases to require an external character to narrate silence to her once she embraces the unresolvability of acting out the unsaid. The narrative is controlled and measured by these speech-act relations around the closet of what Rey fails to say. Lauren realises through bodywork that there might be ‘little that needed seeing and not a lot to think about’ (DeLillo 2001, p. 57), where Mr. Tuttle’s utility is bound up in the opposite ideas of wanting to see, hear and think again her time with her dead husband.

81 TP PT Cowart suggests that like ‘the neurasthenic governess of James’s Turn of the Screw or the troubled housewife of Rachel Ingalls’s Mrs. Caliban, Lauren merely projects a fantasy out of a traumatized unconscious. Like “Larry,” the bizarre reptilian lover in the Ingalls novel, Mr. Tuttle can be read as the projection of a troubled mind, at once pet, child and spouse’ (Cowart 2003, p. 204).

Diana Jenkins 207 December 2005 Lauren originally experiences time as a series of closeted spaces. She thinks of her return to the house after Rey’s New York funeral in the paradoxical category of ‘the first days back’ (DeLillo 2001, p. 31), and Mr. Tuttle’s psychic disregard for the limiting transfers between temporally discrete sites helps her to ‘overcome her own resistance to the idea of a narrative sans past, present, and future’ (Cowart 2003, p. 204). Because Lauren comes to regard time as ‘the only narrative that matters’ (DeLillo 2001, p. 92), the narrative of the unsaid that propels Lauren to this point, via the conversations of her past with Rey, gradually and necessarily recedes. In a print interview near the novella’s end, mirroring Ray’s newspaper obituary early in the text, Lauren is quoted as saying:

“How simple it would be if I could say this is a piece that comes directly out of what happened to Rey. But I can’t. Be nice if I could say this is the drama of men and women versus death. I want to say that but I can’t. It’s too small and secluded and complicated and I can’t and I can’t and I can’t” (DeLillo 2001, pp. 108-9).

The narrative of The Body Artist, like Lauren, ultimately privileges the unsaid. The space of Rey’s potential confession, the speech-act that doesn’t transpire, is the closeted premise of the entire narrative’s capacity to function. The Body Artist explores the meaning of secrecy through its plot, which ‘both tenders the “formal assumption” of the secret…and also gives shape to “that which is (not) to be heard”’ (Hartman 1981, pp. 142-3; Noya 2004, p. 252). The absence of a confession of unburdened guilt, an absence

Lauren earlier cherishes (DeLillo 2001, p. 61),TP isPT the enabling operation of two inextricable narratives: Lauren’s bodywork performance and DeLillo’s novella. Although Lauren initially adopts Mr. Tuttle as ‘a half-fantasized surrogate for the dead husband,’ at one point lying on top of him and putting her hand in his shorts, ‘as with a lover’ (Cowart 2003, p. 205), he is finally redundant and accordingly disappears. Lauren transfers her point of reference from the closet of Rey’s unsaid confession to the alternative site of her own silent narrative. This operation around the closet facilitates Lauren’s occupation by narrative’s end of a space where she is ‘exposed, open, something you could call

Diana Jenkins 208 December 2005 unlayered maybe, if that means anything’ (DeLillo 2001, p. 121), a space beyond the 82 temporal narrative that might be understood as time itselfTPF FPT.

The violent suicide deaths of The Body Artist’s Rey and Players’ Jack highlight DeLillo’s narrative attitude to the unsaid within the adultery frame, in Rey’s case a frame that is significantly speculative. However, it is not the case that DeLillo’s closet of adulterous secrecy compels a said narrative in order for a transgressor’s death to be averted. Underworld’s Klara Sax says nothing of her affair with the young Nick Shay, and far outlives Albert Bronzini, her husband at the time of her liaison, going on to enjoy a level of fame as a celebrated New York artist. Later in Underworld, Brian Glassic, duplicitous to both his wife and Nick Shay, this time the cuckold, receives only a couple of open- handed clips around the ear for having the affair and failing to confess it. Cosmopolis’s Eric Packer is murdered at the end of the text, but it is avenging a failed financial career that motivates his killer, not Eric’s sexual transgressions, of which Richard Sheets has no knowledge or care. Such examples highlight the ambivalent and transforming functionality of the unsaid in DeLillo’s fiction. In Rey’s case in The Body Artist, for instance, the speculation of an adulterous transgression is enough to unfurl the entire novella’s erratic course.

Such silences construct in DeLillo’s narratives closets that support various transfers of secret, sexual semantic activity. When White Noise’s Murrary Suskind tells Jack Gladney “I like simple men and complicated women” (DeLillo 1986, p. 11), Jack tries to divert Murray from his open desire to seduce Jack’s own wife by attempting early in the narrative to portray Babette as a simple woman (Duvall 1998, p. 445). This simplicity is

82 TP PT Like Nel (2002), Kavadlo notes that in addition to time, The Body Artist is ‘about time’s metonym, loss.’ Kavadlo discusses DeLillo’s use of the definite article ‘the’ to suggest DeLillo ‘prefers the concrete, the specific, and the immediate to the abstract or ideal implication of, say, “a” body artist. For all of the novel’s implicit and explicit discussion of time, language, and memory, it remains at bottom about the particular; in that sense, it is only about Lauren Hartke, and her body.’ To the extent that both Rey and Mr. Tuttle are disappearance artists in the text, Lauren’s body might be read as performing as a replicant vessel, and Kavadlo might have underestimated the extent to which DeLillo uses the definite article to precisely un- define it. Kavadlo concedes this possibility in the case of Mr. Tuttle, who ‘may be a – or the – body artist, as well’ but ultimately he privileges the relative safety of ‘the’ as grammatically determining, rather than exploring the possibility of its having been specifically disengaged from the particular by the author (Kavadlo 2004, pp. 149-51).

Diana Jenkins 209 December 2005 evinced for Jack by his claim “Babette and I tell each other everything” (DeLillo 1986, p. 29), but the narrative of the unsaid eventually proves otherwise (Duvall 1998, p. 445), unmooring “tell” and “everything” from signification. Without Jack’s belief in Babette’s guileless simplicity, a misreading of his wife that propels both Jack and the reader through two-thirds of the Gladney’s domestic narrative, the effect of Babette’s eventual confession would be lost. Instead, the narrative weaves the unsaid through and around the closet of adulterous secrecy, and the resulting cross-pollination between the said and the unsaid guarantees the structural reinforcement of the semantic remainder. DeLillo’s fiction refuses to confer a universal awareness of and response to adultery, and, where no confession is forthcoming, the secret’s unsaid remainder perpetually, unreliably occupies a closet of changing meaning, agitating the narrative desire to tell what is no longer ‘the’ one story.

This narrative desire to tell results in a pressure that in Sedgwick’s terms ‘makes a continuous legibility called sexual knowledge emerge’ (Sedgwick 1993, p. 46). The reader of Diderot’s The Nun supports the structure of protagonist Suzanne’s extended narrative of confession via the process of reading, which circulates four different sexual energies: ‘sexual desire, sexual ignorance, ignorance that is not in the first place sexual, or some relation that can only uneasily be condensed either as “sexual” or as “ignorance”’ (Sedgwick 1993, p. 46). From Sedgwick’s sexualisation of the readerly project, adulterous confession is bound to meaning as ‘a form of human desire’ (Brooks 1984, p. 326). Narration brings dimension to the need to tell one’s own story (Brooks 1984; Hardy 1975) in a world that is ‘a complexity of chaos and secret orders, plottedness and plotlessness, beyond deterministic human control yet unceasingly susceptible to the manipulations of human interest’ (Noya 2004, p. 253). Witness-based expansions of meaning circulating in narrative build the illusion of ‘clubbiness’ that for Updike means ‘one’s life is thoroughly witnessed and therefore not wasted’ (Updike 1989, p. 55). Confession is thus a core speech-act relation of the adulterous closet, the narrative affectivity of writing a “spoken” confession highlighting the irresolvability of signification. Plath, arguing that Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick (1984), one of his several appropriations of The Scarlet Letter (1850), ‘poses a Freudian alternative to Hawthorne’s dilemma regarding the spirit and the flesh, suggests that ‘guilt is an

Diana Jenkins 210 December 2005 internalized projection of external values transmitted…through language’ (Plath 1999, p. 226). Plath’s identification of an apparently one-way and finite transmission of guilt inwards begs the inverse relation for reading confession, projecting – also through language – internalised guilt outward. The possibility emerges that phonetic confession is uniquely equipped to challenge the adulterous secret’s semantic containment in the closet.

DeLillo’s interest in the privileges conferred on secrecy by silence and the unsaid do nothing to diminish his detailed studies of the spoken language of confession. The phonetic investments of his texts generally offer an alternative semantic affectivity to that caused by the gaps, pauses, and omissions characteristic of the unsaid secret (Bradbury 83 1979)TPF FPT. Impacting the closet of adulterous secrecy, via the aspect of spoken confession, is a program of outing that alters the operation of the closet in the after-effect of the secret’s transformation. Confession is a deed that may operate external to its semantic content, positioned outside the closeted secret from which it is derived. Brooks suggests that the desire of narrating is ‘an autonomous instance of desire,’ and in confession’s resemblance to narration comes the question of whether confession is ‘dependent on the story it recapitulates’ (Brooks 1984, p. 320), or if, like narrative, confession exhibits desires of its own.

The affective potency of the said confession needs to be approached partly from the point of view of its notional fit with narrative structure, a desire ‘seeking realization essentially in its demand to be heard, to be listened to’ (Brooks 1984, p. 320). That said, the impact of the aural component of a secret’s transmission in confession must also be stressed, as both DeLillo and his characters experience poetic rhythm – ‘aural time’ – as a fundamental feature of language (Cowart 2003, p. 208; Nel 2002, p. 754). In the ‘living rhythm’ (Cowart 2003, p. 208) evinced by spoken confession’s character of ‘uttering, the act of telling’ (Brooks 1984, p. 321), it is necessary to examine the theoretical emphases

83 TP PT DeLillo’s textual acknowledgement of the signifier’s semantic indeterminacy is suggested by his employment of fictional secrecy generally. As Knight suggests, ‘conspiracy theories become not so much items of irrefragable faith as tentative gestures toward understanding the unknown, provisional forms of representation that can only approximate’ (Knight 2000, p. 291). On the effect of contradiction on narrative closure, see DuPlessis (2002).

Diana Jenkins 211 December 2005 ‘on the authentic excellence of the spoken, of speech, and of the word: of logos as phoné’ (Derrida 1988, p. 193). Derrida’s analysis concerns Lacan’s linking of ‘the theory of the signifier, the letter, and the truth.’ His observation that Lacan ‘ceaselessly subordinates the letter, writing, and the text’ (Derrida 1988, p. 193) has implications for the truth-value of the signified “spoken” confession in the written narrative of DeLillo’s form. Lacan qualifies his position regarding this conceptual bind by arguing that writing is ‘in fact phonetic, as soon as it may be read’ (Lacan 1966, p. 470). Still, phonetics deals particularly in ‘[t]hat department of linguistic science which treats the sounds of speech’ (oed.com), and Derrida’s sense that ‘there are non-phonetic elements in such systems’ (Derrida 1988, p. 193) is persuasive. Suspending Lacan’s ‘implied equivalence (“that is”) between symbolic articulation and phonematicity’ (Derrida 1988, p. 193), discontinuity between the two offers the closet of adulterous secrecy a prevailing narrative space despite the spoken confession. Derrida’s endlessly signifying remainder enforces a gap between the narrative’s symbolic “speech” and speaking out loud. Narratives of spoken confession, then, interrupt the closet operations of confession, such narratives offering only limited access to the confession’s conceit, being its ability to transfer the deceit of the adulterous secret into a value of meaning concerned with truth.

Cleo Birdwell, the promiscuous heroine and so-called author of DeLillo’s pseudonymous novel Amazons, confesses numerous sexual transgressions, and Amazons to this extent relates to the similarly autobiographical narrative of Raphaël de Valentin in Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin. Cleo’s narrative immediately makes appeals to an invisible ‘you,’ as in ‘That’s all you have to know about him,’ and ‘I can’t tell you why I wanted Sanders’ (Birdwell 1980, p. 1), placing the reader in the position occupied by Raphaël’s sleeping 84 friend EmileTPF FPT. Amazons positions the reader as witness to Cleo’s bounteous confessions, bearing out Brooks’s argument that narration represents and generates a desire to tell, even where no actual listener is present. The witness function is performed by the semantic content signified by ‘you,’ filling in for a listener in the way that Winnie in

84 TP PT The reader’s experience of these direct addresses resembles the psychic jolt that results from what Sedgwick calls ‘the disintegrative presence’ of the second first person narrator at the end of Diderot’s The Nun who appears nowhere else in the book: ‘ “I am about to transcribe”? Who?’ (Sedgwick 1993, p. 45).

Diana Jenkins 212 December 2005 Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape ‘creates companionship for herself through her voice’ (Catanzaro 1991, p. 146) in order that her need to be witnessed still functions. The tape in Krapp’s Last Tape ‘seems to play the role of the absent other, and the voice on that tape attempts to reconstruct presence with that other’ (Catanzaro 1991, p. 146). Amazons, Cleo’s written recording of her intimate memoir, functions in the same role, allowing her to write ‘you’ into a narrative that itself signifies the ‘you.’

Cleo’s memoir is full of titillation and conversational asides that generate both a conspiratorial and confessional narrative atmosphere. There is almost no evidence of nominalisation, and the novel is dialogue reliant. The sentence structure, including punctuation points that convincingly evoke staccato speech, supports the hovering presence of spoken conversation in a written narrative. The idiom, tenor, and erratic field of Cleo’s talk is sensitive to aural aspects of language, as in ‘Fun loving fellow. And there was a Victorian woman who liked to be served up naked in anchovy sauce at her own dinner parties’ (Birdwell 1980, p. 276); ‘Anyway, with my legs tight, tight together’ (Birdwell 1980, p. 337); and ‘It made me seem the grossest thing in North America, talking about friction. I guess Manley thought I was some kind of sex maniac’ (Birdwell 1980, p. 341).

Cleo’s narrative pathologises confession within its ‘memoir’ frame via the potboiler recounting of serial sexual episodes in graphic, if often hilarious detail. The final paragraph of the first chapter includes mention of a ‘longish thing probing between [Cleo’s] thighs’ (Birdwell 1980, p. 19). The last page of the second chapter notes that (Cleo’s next lover and immediate de-facto) ‘Shaver was rock hard top to bottom,’ and that ‘In the midst of [their] heavy breathing, Shaver took the gum out of his mouth and stuck it on the wall near his head’ (Birdwell 1980, p. 36). Where Raphaël’s life story in La Peau de chagrin lulls his character witness, Emile, into what is still a temporary deep sleep, Cleo’s hyper-confession of sexual proclivities has only the perpetually uncertain witness of a disintegrative, to use Sedgwick’s term, reader. A parodied Emile, Shaver never awakes from the induced, coma-like state inside the Kramer to hear Cleo’s confessions.

Diana Jenkins 213 December 2005 It is not the different witness position that distinguishes Cleo’s narrative from Raphaël’s. In terms of the desire to narrate, to enunciate a significant version of her life story (Brooks 1984, p. 321; Hardy 1975), Cleo is self-consciously aware that the narrative project of telling structurally determines her confession in one of the decidedly non- phonetic systems Derrida observes of the written narrative. Consider the fact that Cleo’s parodic self-reflexivity situates her text’s construction in an external narrative tradition:

I groped for a three-way bulb. This is the second straight chapter that ends with sex and intimate lighting. There is a huge tradition behind this, but I’m not sure I want to be part of it. There are other ways to end chapters and I’m determined to find some of them before too long. Not that there isn’t something right about a chapter that ends with sex. There is something right. Sex is the thing that nothing can follow. It asks for blank space. We wish for a silence that will last at least for the turning of a page (Birdwell 1980, p. 36).

The plaintive expression of desire in the last line, betraying Cleo’s hyper-awareness of her fictional subject position, emphasises the element of ambivalence in parody, recalling plays such as Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1964). The agitation of the narrative’s structure is a reminder that narrative confession is a speech act of the closet that guarantees the paradox of the visible secret. Roth’s Deception further obscures the categories of who did what and with whom within the structural device of the novel- within-the-novel (Halio 1992). As Neelakantan notes of Deception:

Philip’s declaration that his wife thinks Rosalie Nichols is the woman who is depicted in the book incites Maria into saying: “Not only do you steal my words, you’ve given them to someone else”…She is confused by Philip’s loud way of depicting their affair in the book, while earlier he seemed paranoid about keeping the whole thing a secret (Neelakantan 2000, p. 43; Roth 1990, p. 194).

Cleo’s analytic perception of her medium in Amazons, as she charts the progress of her narrative, and Philip’s similarly canny modal deceits in Deception, both recall Livia’s confession in Valparaiso, which takes place in front of a live studio audience in a merciless satire of the talk show format. DeLillo’s talk show is a place where the hostess Delfina comments to the pregnant Livia “We don’t have unborn babies on the show normally,” the announcer Teddy confirming, “They’re not consumers. They take up

Diana Jenkins 214 December 2005 space but do not spend” (DeLillo 1999(c), p. 72). The talk show more generally is perhaps the best, if uncanny, realisation of desire becoming ‘reinvested in tellings of and listenings to stories; it is reconstituted as metonymy’ (Brooks 1984, p. 325). One metonymic aspect of the talk show is confession, which dominates the field and tenor of American talks show like Oprah, Doctor Phil, and Rikki Lake enough that one could classify each of those shows as ‘a confessional’ and cultural literacy operating around TV would guess its precise nature.

The talk show setting in Valparaiso comprises the second and final act, and hostess Delfina warms up before introducing Livia and Michael Majeski, who are on the show to discuss Michael’s trip to the wrong Valparaiso. Delfina whips herself into something of a frenzy anticipating that her guests will be “so live,” and that they will prove to “have real lives” and “Old longings, unbreathable secrets” (DeLillo 1999(c), pp. 66-7). Conceptually, confession has an independent semantic life from what is confessed. Delfina isolates the act of confession alone as valuable, the content of that confession being beside the point of her show’s and the play’s progression. Part of the function of parody is to effect ‘comic discrepancy between the original work and its “imitation”’ (Rose 1979, p. 25). The original in this case is the TV talk show, and ‘the complicated structure of parody’ means that ‘the target text may not only be satirised but also “refunctioned”’ (Rose 1979, p. 21). Confession here resembles Brooks’ model of the desire to narrate as ‘an autonomous instance of desire’ (Brooks 1984, p. 320), and the confessional structure of the talk show is reconceived in line with the refunctioning of the target text type.

Livia’s desire to tell her sexual secrets operates in Valparaiso independently of her consummated adulterous desires, the secret narrative she cultivates elsewhere. DeLillo resignifies Livia’s desire for the talk show confession of her adulterous secret as a failure to narrate, emptying confession of its established ability to narrate a desire to transgress and to have that narration signify a rehabilitative shame. The play strips confession of its redemptive signification, Delfina telling Livia, “But we’re not running a redemption racket. And we’re not interested in why you did it or with whom” (DeLillo 1999(c), p. 82). Livia continues to confess details of her adultery to the parodically resistant talk

Diana Jenkins 215 December 2005 show witnesses who refuse to validate the confessional content of her narration. Delfina punctuates Livia’s recount with dismissive comments such as “This is so deeply tedious,” and “We don’t want to know what happened next” (DeLillo 1999(c), pp. 82-3), the content of Livia’s confession progressively designifying.

Instead, Delfina desires a confession from Michael, relocating the significance of the speech act of confession away from its semantic content. Traditionally constituting a scandalous confession in an adultery narrative, Livia’s compulsive disclosure operates as a parodic tool of inverted signification. Despite Michael protesting transparency, saying “There’s nothing I haven’t openly spoken about”, “I’ve answered every question”, and “I’ve answered some questions seventy, eighty, ninety times” (DeLillo 1999(c), p. 75), the play interrupts the function of confession by continuing to demand a narrative of confession from Michael, a character whose wife has much more to confess.

Delfina probes Michael for a confession whose meaning he struggles to inscribe. Delfina ignores Livia’s salacious story of wifely infidelity only to greet Michael’s narrative of being on the wrong plane with repeated incredulity, dismissing his so-called confession with variations of the phrase “I don’t believe you” (DeLillo 1999(c), p. 87). Teddy, the show’s announcer, says, “We need to know everything. We need to show everything” (DeLillo 1999(c), p. 90), and Delfina and Teddy’s reaction when Michael says “I’ve been candid from the first moment and the first microphone” (DeLillo 1999(c), p. 91) illustrates confession’s operation independent of its content. Delfina controls the act from without, suggesting Michael’s confession to him. The authority of her insistence that he is withholding his “naked shitmost self” (DeLillo 1999(c), p. 91) culminates in Michael’s confession of a suicide attempt during his flight. Her own confession invalidated, Livia’s response to her husband’s admission is to insist that “He is lying through his teeth and eyes” and “It never happened” (DeLillo 1999(c), p. 103), evincing the play’s reinscription of the site of denial in tandem with confession’s own shifting ventriloquism.

The incongruities of the transfer of secrets in Valparaiso suggest that spoken confession has an affective character beyond a device representing phonetic admissions of secret narratives of transgression. Both Valparaiso and Amazons complicate the signification of

Diana Jenkins 216 December 2005 confession in adultery narratives through parody, the first in a parody of TV talk show sensationalism and the second in a parodic fusion of the sports novel, the kiss-and-tell potboiler, and the celebrity memoir. Incongruity is central to the whole premise of Amazons, subtitled ‘An intimate memoir of the first woman ever to play in the National Hockey League’ (Birdwell 1980). The incongruities of Cleo’s narrative of confession are prefaced by the novel’s cover, which claims non-fiction status, a pseudonym, and an impossible title, since without exception America’s National Hockey League is comprised of male players. Amazons does not only imitate these other text types, then, it disturbs them, and ‘while imitation may be used as a technique in parody, the use of incongruity distinguishes parody ‘from other forms of quotation and literary imitation’ (Rose 1979, p. 22).

Amazons’ demonstration of the affective potential of writing the spoken confession is connected to DeLillo’s treatment of phonetics generally. The spoken confession is an example of what Maltby identifies in The Names as an ‘overall insistence on the spoken word – especially on talk at the familiar, everyday, pre-abstract level of communication’ (Maltby 1998, p. 503). The favoured, high profile of the spoken in DeLillo’s written narratives offers a reminder that ‘[t]he voice occasions such an interpretation in and of itself: it has the phenomenal characteristics of spontaneity, of self-presence, of the circular return to itself’ (Derrida 1988, p. 194). Such characteristics have historically ‘identified speech, as opposed to writing, as the natural condition of language because it “owes its form to natural causes alone”’ (Maltby 1998, p. 503; Rousseau 1966, p. 5). Just as Lacan identifies truth values in the spoken, so too does Maltby’s interpretation of DeLillo make a similar appeal through Rousseau, who argues that ‘[l]anguages are made to be spoken, [whereas] writing serves only as a supplement to speech’ that merely ‘substitut[es] exactitude for expressiveness’ (Maltby 1998, p. 503; Rousseau, p. 21).

However, although ‘it is believed that the voice remains more than do writings’ (Derrida 1988, p. 195), Wordsworth suggesting in his ‘Preface’ to The Lyrical Ballads that the ‘elemental language of rustics’ is ‘a far more philosophical language’ than the conventions of poetic writing (Maltby 1998, p. 504; Wordsworth 1978, p. 735), Derrida counters that ‘writing within the voice’ in fiction reproduces the same problems as

Diana Jenkins 217 December 2005 written narrative (Derrida 1988, p. 195). He interrogates Lacan’s interpretation of The Purloined Letter by identifying ‘the massive co-implication, in Lacanian discourse, of truth and speech, “present,” “full,” and “authentic” speech’ (Derrida 1988, p. 196), a co- implication that gathers within its reach Maltby’s figuring of “talk” in The Names:

The affirmation of a primal, visionary level of language which, moreover, finds its purest expression in “talk” (glossolalia, conversation) is vulnerable to postmodern critique on the grounds that is premised on a belief in original and pure meanings (Maltby 1998, p. 503).

A rejection of ‘original and pure meanings’ informs Derrida’s cautionary response to Lacan’s reading of Poe. For Lacan, the endeavour for truth situates fiction as ‘permeated by truth as something spoken,’ which Derrida argues refuses to reckon, ‘in the text, with everything that remains irreducible to speech, the spoken and meaning’ (Derrida 1988, pp. 196-7). The spoken confession is a potent example of such limiting permeations. On Lacan’s truth model, confession changes a narrative’s register to that of ‘the unveiling of the truth as of its contract of properness[:] presence, speech, testimony’ (Derrida 1988, p. 197). Whilst Lacan theoretically upholds the historical privileging of the spoken, the narrative unveiling of an adulterous secret must be apprehended in terms of its speech-act relation to the closet.

The closet space of the adulterous secret is renegotiated when the secret is outed by confession, whereby ‘some secrets only become more secret upon revelation, or the revelation reveals a structure of secrecy that seems to spiral endlessly’ (Noya 2004, p. 245). In its telling, the content of the secret is evacuated, as it were, from the closet site, but the narrative space of the secret’s import is its persisting remainder, an ambivalent truth value ‘as a sort of language, a pre- or proto-discursive stratum underlying the linguistic articulation that makes it perceptible and interpretable’ (Noya 2004, p. 266). The fictional narrative produces certain conditions for the realisation of phonetics that suggests a secret remainder exists when signifying the adulterous confession. In this case, DeLillo’s interest in phonetics recalls one of the underlying assumptions of Sedgwick’s interest in the performative aspects of text ‘as sites of definitional creation, violence, and rupture’ (Sedgwick 1990, p. 3):

Diana Jenkins 218 December 2005 …relations of the closet – the relations of the known and the unknown, the explicit and the inexplicit…– have the potential for being peculiarly revealing…about speech acts more generally (Sedgwick 1990, p. 3).

Similarly, narrativised speech acts have the potential to reveal the relations of the closet in the text. Spoken confession reconstructs the closet space via its signified telling, which in fiction does not predominantly constitute a speech act at all. Given its status as a play, Valparaiso is one of three DeLillo texts performing from within an imperative to actually 85 speak, paradoxically written as a speech actTPF FPT. The written version of Valparaiso implicates the residual effects of “speaking” in written form, the absence of speech-marks in a text composed almost entirely of “spoken” dialogue stressing the fundamental closeting of its own phonetic character in the read version of Valparaiso. The transfer of Livia’s secret into a “spoken” confession is realised in the printed narrative as follows:

DELFINA Who was the person? Whose baby is it? Michael’s?

Pause

LIVIA No, it isn’t. Why do you ask? (DeLillo 1999(c), p. 91)

The direction to pause establishes the space in which Livia’s closet of adultery secrecy transfers from in to out, forcing a momentary delay in the reading. This temporal operation in the written narrative resembles its phonetic occasion: a silence in spoken conversation preceding the scandalous revelation. The signifier Pause reduces the remainder between signified and signifier with far greater success than the text’s CAPITALISED identification of the “speakers” throughout. The space of the secret re- establishes the closet site during this exchange in phonetic as well as semantic terms. The meaning itself is ostensibly clear – Livia is pregnant with another man’s child – but achieves a secondary pause: whose? The secret’s space persists, then, despite the secret having been told, in the distance between the time taken to read Livia’s admission after

85 TP PT The others are The Engineer of Moonlight, a short play which appeared in the Cornell Review in 1979, and DeLillo’s first published play, The Day Room, which was first presented by the American Repertory Theatre in April 1986, the year before it was first published.

Diana Jenkins 219 December 2005 the signifying Pause and the time the pause takes out loud. The reader of the play cannot measure the sound of the Pause; they are limited to the awareness that it is symbolically, and therefore partially, there.

This aspect of partitioning enacts Derrida’s remainder and Sedgwick’s closet, and it suggests that in fictional narrative, “spoken” confession of the adulterous secret redistributes rather than resolves the space of the secret. The novel form also supports the on-going emplacement of the transgressive secret, being a text type that breeds silent spaces even where it attempts to signify a phonetic semantic exchange. In Underworld, Nick confesses his adulterous transgression with the swinger Donna when he returns home to Marian. This confession is represented in the text as follows:

I told Marian the next night about the thing I’d done, or the night after that, the thing with Donna at Mojave Springs. I thought I had to tell her. I owed it to her. I told her for our sake, for the good of the marriage. She was in bed reading when I told her. I’d anguished about the right time to tell her and then I told her suddenly, without immediate forethought. I didn’t tell her what I’d said to Donna, or why Donna was at the hotel, and she didn’t ask. I stood near the armchair with my shirt in my hand and I thought she took it well. She understood it was an isolated thing with a stranger in a hotel, a brief episode, finished forever. I told her I felt compelled to speak. I told her it was hard to speak about the matter but not as hard as withholding the truth and she nodded when I said this. I thought she took it fairly well. She didn’t ask me to tell her anything more than I’d told her (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 342).

Despite the first person narrative’s repeated references to symbolic signifiers of phonetics, such as ‘told,’ ‘tell,’ and ‘said,’ this passage of adulterous confession reconstructs the space of the secret in its greater detachment from already phonetically remote narrativised conversation. Although the narrative indicates Nick’s spoken confession – ‘I told her I felt compelled to speak’ – the reader is locked outside the indefinitely closeted possibilities of what is said. The absence of speech-marks in this context recalls their absence in Valparaiso; in both instances, the text’s resistance to signifying the spoken emphasises the narrative’s refusal to “speak” its meaning. In the account of Nick’s confession, the space of the secret is further entrenched in a reconfigured closet since there is an unspecified temporal delay and a complete absence of even the most poorly signified dialogue. Nick also stresses the extent to which he tailors his confession, omitting many of the encounter’s defining details, like Donna’s

Diana Jenkins 220 December 2005 adulterous promiscuity as a swinger, and his confiding the secrets of his past to her. Nick creates a deeply closeted space in this narrative for the secrecy of the “spoken” confession from which the reader is barred, reinscribing his desire to tell as the reader’s desire to be told.

Brooks notes that the ‘attempt to capture and to pin down the object of desire…meets with frustration’ (Brooks 1984, p. 326), and wanting Nick to speak his confession helps define the dimensions of the post-confession closet. This space acknowledges the transfer of the secret as a ‘contamination’ of meaning between who is telling and who is listening

(Brooks 1984, p. 326).TP DislodgedPT by Nick’s confession to Marian, the secret is relocated by a simultaneous operation of reinscription brought about by the written narrative’s refusal to witness the reader. The textual manipulation of Nick’s confession of adultery marks ‘“coming out” as a speech act rife with possible error’ (Hardie 2005, p. 16). If the textual truth relation of a confession hinges on its being “said,” then this reinscribed space infects the reader’s relation to the adultery narrative enough that it remains unconfessed.

Marian’s own confession of adultery later compounds the already uncertain status of alternative narrative indications of the afore-spoken. The narrative’s otherwise total detachment from the phonetic imperative of Marian’s confession is tempered by its signification in the text as the semantic content of a speech act of Nick’s when he confronts Brian Glassic:

“She told me everything. We talked for a long time. The talk we had lasted a couple of days, on and off. She said a lot. She told me everything. Then I got in the company car and went to the airport and there you were” (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 797).

Like Nick’s, Marian’s “spoken” confession is suggested by the signifiers “told,” “talked,” “talk,” and “said.” Identical too is the intriguing omission of the precise deed being confessed – on neither occasion does Nick “speak” of adultery, referring first to ‘the thing [he’d] done,’ ‘the thing with Donna’ (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 342), and here only to the indefinitely signifying “everything.” In what Derrida calls a ‘phonocentric interpretation of the letter,’ the ‘logic of the signifier is articulated’ in terms of ‘[t]he two values of the

Diana Jenkins 221 December 2005 truth (adequation and movement of the veil) [that] henceforth cannot be dissociated from the word, from present, living, authentic speech’ (Derrida 1988, p. 196). On this analysis, the lack of a phonetically relayed confession marks both Nick’s narration of his confession and his substitutive speech act around the closet of Marian’s adulterous secrecy as necessarily inauthentic. This theory suggests that “speech” indicators enable a narrative language that ‘is not feigned,’ but through which meaning, ‘through all imaginable fictional complications, does not trick, or which at that point tricks truly, against teaching us the truth of the lure’ (Derrida 1988, p. 196).

Beyond this phonocentrism is the unresolvable space of the narrative’s clearly symbolic referencing of the spoken confessions of Marian and Nick. It is a ‘fictional complication’ indeed to suggest that only a “spoken” textual confession has a truth-value; these other narrative articulations also evince some kind of truth relation around the closet of adulterous secrecy. The partial character of these admissions ‘trick truly’ to the extent that the reader knows unequivocally that the narrative language of their confessions is incomplete. DeLillo’s texts rely instead on what Noya regards as ‘the essential literary status of the secret’ (Noya 2004, p. 240): to broach unheard the “things that are truer than true” (DeLillo 1991(b), p. 266). The conceptual space of Derrida’s remainder allows for the secret of adultery to be ‘out’ of its closet in both instances, and constitutes as authentic the non-phonetic confession. On the same model, these confessions do not erase the closet of adulterous secrecy, since fictional narratives always and already create spaces of lost, hidden and residual meaning (Derrida 1988).

If truth means a ‘reappropriation as the desire to stop up the hole’ (Derrida 1988, p. 188), then the nature of adulterous confession begs the question of what is reappropriated, and in order to stop up which hole? I suggest that there is a partial truth-value to the symbolically sketched narrative of confession, even where that confession is not signified as “said,” and it is Derrida’s idea of a reappropriated desire, more than a “spoken” confession’s claim to truth, that proves most transgressively seductive. The confession of adultery is partially defined by the desire for narrative, but there is another desire that has

Diana Jenkins 222 December 2005 86 its own propulsive affect within the text: the sexual desire during the affair itselfTPF FPT. There is a causal relationship between the affair and the confession that offers a reading of the confession as a sexualised narrative event. Confession contains transgressive potential in its fibre, since although it is possible to confess something positive, like a secret love for someone, confession first means ‘[t]he disclosing of something the knowledge of which by others is considered humiliating or prejudicial to the person confessing; a making known or acknowledging of one’s fault, wrong, crime, weakness’ (oed.com). Confession, then, is partly defined by the transgressive character of the deed, and where that deed is adultery, confession contains a sexual element. In the movement of the secret from inside the closet to outside in the form of confession, a narrative transfer occurs that reinscribes the desire’s narratological expression. According to Brooks, confession is the realisation of a desire to narrate and tell one’s story, and in the case of Raphaël in La Peau de chagrin, the realisation of his desire ‘appears to be total, the obstacles to fulfilment, including the law of the father, completely overcome’ (Brooks 1984, p. 318). If confession represents the realisation of the desire to have the secret ‘out,’ then Raphaël’s satisfaction suggests that both the secret and the closet might finally be overcome. However, this apparently total gratification is revealed in the narrative of La Peau de chagrin to be a façade, and what Raphaël fails to overcome, in the end, is the satisfaction of the desire itself. As Brooks notes:

…in the manner of so many fairytales, the realization of desire comes in sinister forms, destructive of the self. What Raphaël indeed discovers at the moment when his desire opens onto its full realization is death (Brooks 1984, p. 318).

Brooks acknowledges that part of the propulsive force of narrative is a desire for the end, since ‘the telling is always in terms of the impending end’ (Brooks 1984, p. 320), and in this respect the narrative’s drive toward the end resembles the passage of the adulterous

86 TP PT Diane Johnson, referring to Libra, makes the metaphorical connection between the narrative’s movement and illicit desire: ‘As we read fiction, we are always aware of the operative formal principle – it’s either “life” (meandering, inconclusive) or “plot,” as in [Libra], where the fortune or fate of an individual is opposed to a conspiracy, to a plot within the plot, which serves as a metaphor for the world itself, organized against you, clever, wickedly determined on its own usually illegal ends, and in this mirroring the illicit desires of our own hearts’ (Johnson 2000, p. 52).

Diana Jenkins 223 December 2005 affair. In Underworld, Brian Glassic tells Marian midway through their affair that “It’s stupid and it’s reckless and we shouldn’t do it anymore,” “Let’s make this one last happy farewell fuck,” and “we ought to think about ending it. We ought to make this the end” (DeLillo 1999(b), pp. 257-9). Brian repeatedly characterises the act of adultery in terms of the end, his desire to have the affair equally measured by a desire to finish it. The bind of adulterous secrecy operates in the text from within the narrative’s own tension between the inseparable desires to both start and stop. Also in Underworld, Nick Shay and Klara Sax’s second and last sexual episode, when he is a young man and she a married older woman, is entirely controlled by Klara’s desire both for the adulterous sex and its despatch:

She didn’t finish her kisses. This was interesting and a little puzzling, unlike last time when they kissed nearly into old age. The way she broke off now and looked away just when he thought a kiss was getting her warm and soft, and the way she looked when she did this, ripping away hurt, almost, and he was surprised at how different she looked, not what he remembered from last time but paler maybe, hands weightless and drained, these white things floating past, and eyes that bugged out a little and seemed to see things he didn’t know were there (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 749).

Further evidence of the abject tension between Eros and Thanatos in DeLillo’s narratives, Nick’s description of Klara’s appearance evokes a deathly apparition, a sense that Klara is fading from the affair even as she is in the act of conducting it. Klara’s altered appearance is a physiognomical double to La Peau de chagrin’s Raphaël, who discovers after disclosing his life story that ‘what lies beyond the pleasure principle, beyond the realization of orgiastic desire’ is the ‘death instinct, the drive toward extinction (Brooks 1984, p. 318). Klara’s desire for the affair is almost sated before the ‘realization of orgiastic desire’ when Nick regards her in foreplay, and the impermanent quality Nick detects in her form is a physical manifestation of the ephemeral and abject nature of their already-dying affair.

After sex, Nick tells Klara she has to tell him one of her secrets, and she responds by saying: “Nick, you can’t come here anymore. It’s too completely crazy. No more, okay? We did it and now we have to stop doing it” (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 752). In the moment of climax, when she sticks to Nick ‘like a thing fighting for light’ (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 750),

Diana Jenkins 224 December 2005 Klara’s desire for the secret of Nick and their affair is realised. Light is often characterised as a life-giving force, and Klara’s clinging to Nick’s body is her abject desire’s contiguous narrative between life and death, Eros and Thanatos, since the concluded intercourse in this passage is simultaneously the affair’s termination point. Although Klara does not confess her affair to her husband, Albert Bronzini, the scene remains constructive of narrative meaning because it is Klara’s inextricably bound desires that constitute the endpoint of her marriage.

The narratological behaviour of desire when confession occurs reflects an assumption that all narrative progresses in terms of the impending end. The affair realises a transgressive sexual desire, and confession of the affair commonly ends the narrative of adulterous secrecy. To this extent, confession within the narrative exhibits characteristics that position its operation of telling as similar to narration overall. Brooks’ suggestion that narrative maps a desire toward the Freudian death instinct therefore has implications for how this desire manifests itself in a narrative of adulterous confession. Confessing the secret of adultery is the transformative moment in the narrative that exchanges both the transgressive sexual desire and the narrative’s death drive into a space that measures a ‘little death,’ the popular euphemism for orgasm (notwithstanding Softly’s ‘Zorgasm’ in Ratner’s Star). Out of the closet, the adulterous secret in DeLillo’s narratives is a narratological instance of le petit mort. The spoken confession replaces the orgasm of the transgressive act, and moves the narrative of the affair into the realised space of Freudian death. Confession acknowledges a transgressive debt, and the phonetic intercourse marking the site of said confession replaces the physical intercourse between the adulterers. The secret’s transference in confession transforms its semantic space in the narrative from the corporeal (adulterous bodies) to the symbolic (adulterous vocabulary).

Neelakantan suggests this transformative relation when she notes of Roth’s Deception that ‘Maria is quick to understand that [Philip’s] libidinal urges translate into the act of listening. She says, “It is erotic, you just sitting there listening”’ (Neelakantan 2000, p. 42; Roth 1990, p. 43). The confession of adultery is sexualised both because it verbally recounts the sexual act and because it now represents the death of narrative’s transgressive desire, previously represented by the adulterous drive toward orgasmic

Diana Jenkins 225 December 2005 fulfilment. When Valparaiso’s Livia confesses her adultery, she verbally recreates the space of her affair, telling her husband and the assembled talk show crowd explicit, recreative details:

“It was hard, bright, brutal daylight. We disrobed each other slowly until we were in matching states of respective undress. I unzipped him with my teeth” (DeLillo 1999(c), p. 83).

At the same time, Livia’s confession functions as the little death of her secret adultery narrative, the verbal climax appearing in the text as, “I don’t want to become a gaunt woman with a shattering secret. He’s the father of our child. Michael’s and mine” (DeLillo 1999(c), p. 83). Livia acknowledges the outing her secret and guarantees the death of the adultery narrative via her disavowal of her lover’s paternal rights. Livia’s confession functions as a ‘little death’ in her sated desire to confess, and the play’s 87 broader narrative never returns to her transgressionTPF FPT.

The case of Diderot’s The Nun is an instructive example of the structural application of Brook’s narratological interpretation of Freud’s death instinct. The relationship between the drive to prolong and the desire for the end is instanced in the fabula of Suzanne’s story. The point at which the narrative starts to accelerate toward its demise is the point at which Suzanne hears the Superior’s confession, in which account of sexual transgression Suzanne is unmistakably implicated. Suzanne’s empowered management of the space separating confession from death collapses when ‘the veil which until then has obscured [her] peril…[is] torn asunder’ (Sedgwick 1993, p. 45; Diderot 1974, p. 179).

87 TP PT The conceptual connection between confession and death is sometimes realised in narrative as an aspect of a story’s fabula, such as in The Scarlet Letter, when Dimmesdale’s confession of adultery is the event that allows the story its logical progression toward Dimmesdale’s death. The dynamic between the confession and the death is based on their ‘arrangement in relation to one another…such that they can produce the effect desired’ (Bal 1997, p. 7). See Plath’s discussion on the “leeching” of his confession (Plath 1999, pp. 217-8). A similar structural impetus affects the relation between confession and death in Diderot’s The Nun. Suzanne’s mother’s adultery serves as an ordering principle for the novella as a whole, being the transgression she fails to erase despite telling Suzanne “I hope I shall have nothing on my conscience when I die”’(Sedgwick 1993, pp. 40-1).

Diana Jenkins 226 December 2005 Like DeLillo’s adulterous Livia in Valparaiso, the confession that finally succeeds in transferring the secret, in Suzanne’s case from a closet of studied unknowing, also registers the end of her narrative of orgasmic pleasure. However, the narratives differ in their treatment of the fabula. Livia’s confession does not precipitate her death, or the end of the play, but marks the space in the narrative where the adultery narrative expires. The Superior’s confession, on the other hand, is catastrophic for Suzanne. Suzanne immediately flees the convent, her ‘subsequent ruin follow[s] at once,’ and the novella itself ‘explodes into narrative shrapnel exactly here and ends very soon [after]’ (Sedgwick 1993, p. 45). For Sedgwick, these narrative effects are ‘all irresistible testimonials to the power of sexual knowledge’ (Sedgwick 1993, p. 45), and they highlight the narrative volatility of spatially representing sexual secrecy’s transfer into confession. Suzanne’s hard-won space, the narrative itself, violently outs her. The novella marks her expulsion with a ‘fragmentary, incoherent,’ ‘disintegrative presence of [a] second first person’ that abruptly replaces ‘what had been a continuous narrative by a single first-person informant’ (Sedgwick 1993, p. 45). The narrative makes Suzanne disappear:

(Here the memoirs of Sister Suzanne become disconnected, and what follows is only notes for what apparently she meant to use in the rest of her tale. It seems that the Superior went mad, and the fragments I am about to transcribe must refer to her unhappy state.) (Sedgwick 1993, p. 45; Diderot 1974, p. 179).

Diderot, like Nathaniel Hawthorne, concedes narrative’s drive toward its end, and both authors make explicit in The Nun and The Scarlet Letter that the narrative of adultery’s instinct toward death is propelled by the confession of the adulterous secret. Drawing on similar narrative operations, DeLillo extends this instinct to include the figurative sexual death’s impact on the narrative of confession, the ‘little death’ of adulterous orgasm implicitly transferred into the space of verbal confession. Valparaiso’s Livia is pregnant as a result of her dalliance with the filmmaker; an orgasm was definitely exchanged as part of her negotiation of an adulterous closet. In the narrative of her confession, this little death no longer represents the physical orgasm accompanying the sex act. Whilst the fabula offers a point of integration for the relation between confession and death, as seen in the deaths of characters following confession, this site operates in the narrative as a

Diana Jenkins 227 December 2005 framing device, external to the logical advancement of events. The frame of this little death offers confession as a replacement narrative site for the transgressive orgasm. The narrative relief of telling the sexual secret is the verbal equivalent to the physical climax of the secret act. This notion of narrative relief is specifically intended to evoke the physical release of orgasm; as a narrative operation, the confession of adultery frees the confessor from their affair.

The site of conjugal sex is commonly narrativised as the married couple’s own bed, and Tanner’s identification of adultery operations around the ‘city’ and the ‘field’ help suggest that the domestic bed and bedroom are not common spatial representations of the 88 transgressive occasionTPF FPT. The release of the secret in confession offers a return to the normative sexual fidelity between husband and wife, and two of DeLillo’s most extensively drawn adultery narratives bear out the suggested little death concept in the site of confession. In Underworld, Nick Shay confesses his affair to his wife Marian whilst she is ‘in bed reading’ (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 342). After the confession, Nick ‘[stands] by the chair and wait[s] for her to turn the page’ (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 342), demarcating his position from the norms of conjugal fidelity by positioning himself outside the bed he shares with Marian until the affair is confessed. For Nick, Marian’s page turning is a symbolic gesture that returns them to the norms of their bedtime rhythm and routine. Nick waits for this signal from his wife before he can ‘get undressed and go to bed’ (DeLillo 1999(a), p. 342), aware that his confession has displaced the little death of marital orgasm to a site of emplacement next to rather than in their bed.

In White Noise, Babette and Jack Gladney are both in bed when Babette “reveals and confides” (DeLillo 1986, p. 193) her affair with Willie Mink, in this scene referred to only as the opaque “Mr. Gray.” During her confession, Babette lies prone in bed, and keeps her gaze fixed ‘straight up,’ imitating the sexual position she assumes during her motel room liaisons with Mink, of which all she repeatedly claims to remember is ‘the

88 TP PT Updike’s Couples is a notable exception, although characters exchange various sentiments of incredulity, dismay, and anger about the domestic bedroom being used for the sexual purposes of the text’s (many) adulterous affairs. Couples also includes several sites that represent the field, but characters break down Tanner’s suggested distance between normal life and transgressive life by engaging in adulterous sex just about wherever and with just about whomever they can.

Diana Jenkins 228 December 2005 TV up near the ceiling’ (DeLillo 1986, pp. 194-5). Although Jack feels ‘an impulse to get dressed and leave, take a room somewhere’ (DeLillo 1986, p. 196), he does not move from this site of sexual domesticity. Rather than imitating Babette’s removal to the transgressive field of a motel room, Jack inhabits the affair’s little death, eventually transforming Babette’s adulterous confession into an occasion of conjugal intercourse. After asking Babette “Is this why I married Babette? So she would conceal the truth from me…[and] join in a sexual conspiracy at my expense?”, Jack grimly tells his wife that “All plots move in one direction” (DeLillo 1986, p. 199). Like Brooks’ interpretation of narrative desire from Freud’s theory of the death instinct, Babette’s adulterous confession tends the narrative of White Noise towards the little death of Jack’s orgasm. The narrative of Babette’s confession thus ends with the pair lying ‘naked after love, wet and gleaming’ (DeLillo 1986, p. 199), the little death of her confession exchanged for the little death of conjugal orgasm.

Confession as a little death replacing the adulterous orgasm is a release from the affair and the adultery narrative as a whole. There is an element of transcendence in the different narratives of the Shays and the Gladneys that suggests this little death is precipitative of the fulfilled desire at narrative’s ostensible end. Nick’s narrative in Underworld ends after Marian’s confession of her affair, and Nick reflects on the combined affective power of their confessions as forging a communion between he and his wife akin to the mythology of simultaneous orgasm:

When I tell her things she listens with a high clear alertness, so vigilant and still, and she seems to know what I’m going to say before I say it. I tell her about the time I spent in correction and why they put me there and she seems to know it, at some level, already…All the hints and intimations, all the things she spied in me at the beginning of our time together – come to some completion now (DeLillo 1999(b), p. 807).

Jack and Babette, as White Noise nears its conclusion, also represent a united front, the narrative ending with a reflection on nuclear sunsets that contains a similar note of marital concord:

Diana Jenkins 229 December 2005 Certainly there is awe, it is all awe, it transcends previous categories of awe, but we don’t know whether we are watching in wonder or dread, we don’t know what we are watching or what it means, we don’t know whether it is permanent…What is there to say? The sunsets linger and so do we (DeLillo 1986, p. 325).

Like the skies over the town of Blacksmith in the aftermath of the Airborne Toxic Event, DeLillo’s texts ‘[take] on content, feeling, an exalted narrative life’ (DeLillo 1986, p. 324) in the spaces created by transfers of adulterous secrecy. The ambivalence of the narrative closet erected by infidelity suggests a semantic remainder after Derrida, a space that even the secret’s confession does not textually resolve. Adultery in DeLillo’s narratives prevails like White Noise’s sunset remainder of the Airborne Toxic Event, adulterous secrecy as narrative desire repeatedly cast as ‘a spell, powerful and storied’ (DeLillo 1986, p. 325). Despite its established tropological applications in fiction, DeLillo’s representation of adulterous secrecy negotiates a space of adulterated functions that reinscribes the narratological utility of the secret in various manifestations of being in and out. In this unresolvable site, what remains is ‘anticipation’ without ‘a history of secure response’ (DeLillo 1986, p. 324). DeLillo’s treatment of the space of the secret brings at narrative’s endpoint a final awareness that aspects of his adulterous fictions remain unsaid. This awareness concentrates in a theoretical vigil at the closet’s door. Waiting for the closure of a semantic space that is paradoxically, perpetually, ‘introverted, uneven, almost backward and shy, tending toward silence’ (DeLillo 1986, p. 324), underscores the frailty of claims invested in knowledge and transfers of meaning:

…nothing can be finally known that involves human motive and need. There is always another level, another secret, a way in which the heart breeds a deception so mysterious and complex it can only be taken for a deeper kind of truth (DeLillo 1991(b), p. 260).

Larry Parmenter’s reflections on knowing in Libra speak directly to the structure of DeLillo’s narratives of adulterous secrecy. Representations of the particular ‘relational realm of personal and social interaction’ (Noya 2004, p. 244), depicted by sexual transgression, semantically represents ‘something ever more ultimate behind every ultimateness revealed’ (Noya 2004, p. 244; Simmel 1950, p. 329). These narratives collectively suggest that DeLillo’s sexually charged transfers of linguistic meaning offer

Diana Jenkins 230 December 2005 semantic fidelity only in the perpetually adulerating, three part union, signified by todo y nada: that is, all and nothing.

Diana Jenkins 231 December 2005 Conclusion

For years she’d heard people saying, all sorts, really, here and there: “Do whatever you want as long as nobody gets hurt.” They said: “As long as both parties agree, do it, whatever.” They said: “Whatever feels right, as long as you both want to do it and nobody gets hurt, there’s no reason not to.” They said: “As long as there’s mutual agreement and the right feeling, no matter who or what.” “Whatever feels right,” they said. They said: “Follow your instincts, be yourself, act out your fantasies” (DeLillo 1991, p. 143).

At the end of chapter five in Players, Pammy lies awake during her holiday in Maine fantasising about the adultery she is about to embark upon with her gay friend Jack Laws, de facto lover of Pammy’s colleague Ethan. The chapter ends with the musings quoted above, the inchoate urgings and whisperings of an imagined ‘They’ articulating and validating Pammy’s intentions to herself. ‘They’ succeed: the next time Pammy appears in the narrative, she and Jack become lovers. This epigraph expresses why I suggest DeLillo’s adultery narratives warrant lengthy analysis, as well as why my contribution problematises classifications of DeLillo, and resituates the reader in theoretical approaches to his work. I frame my closing observations in part by unpacking Pammy’s erotic phantasmagoria.

The element of repetition in these sexual solicitations recalls the uncanny character of the hotel/motel room, the site’s compulsive familiarity contradicting its defining strangeness just as this intimate advice is nameless. ‘Their’ namelessness is crucial to reading their inducements. DeLillo’s avowed project of renaming includes progressively unnaming, and complicates the effects of reproduction so that the exchange is sexualised and promiscuous. The reader recognises their words, but does not know who ‘They’ are, and the effect is as unsettling as the uncanny encounter of entering the hotel/motel room.

Cowart’s observation that ‘one sees only shadows and images mirroring each other’ (Cowart 2003, p. 51) applies well beyond Players, to the shadowy, imagistic, mirrored effects of the adultery narratives analysed here. DeLillo’s metaphorical and oppositional mechanics enable and demand this kinetic flow of meaning. Because his fiction ‘relishes the paradoxes of metaphor’ (Nel 2002, p. 748), meaning constantly adulterates and

Diana Jenkins 232 December 2005 reproduces in endlessly mirrored crossings of a highly sexualised linguistic bridge. DeLillo’s writing invokes reality, and it is a reality paradoxically designed to reflect the fact that ‘even the most literal language is always mediated’ (Nel 2002, p. 742). This mediation casts a sexual shadow across DeLillo’s fiction that makes reality ‘hazy’ and ‘veiled,’ as in Michael Majeski’s mistaken journey to the wrong Valparaiso that ‘acquaints us…with the “veil” that obscures our sense of identity’ (Cowart 2003, p. 100). Across DeLillo’s oeuvre, repeated allusions to a haze, cloak or veil are unsurprising; such verbal apparel makes visible the otherwise naked ghost of Thanatos haunting the edges of DeLillo’s fundamentally sexual model of meaning. The metaphor of the suicide hood Michael fashions in the toilet on the plane in Valparaiso stretches in meaning from Thanatos toward Eros, flirting with them both. The hood mirrors the veil that might have covered Livia’s face on their wedding day, concealing the ‘thin, false, veiled self’ of the woman who secretly cuckolds him.

Players’ Pammy reveals a false and veiled self in her polyphonic instructions, her attempt to distance herself from the self-administration of transgressive permission offering the only transparency of the scene. The repeated proviso ‘As long as’ sets the terms of Pammy’s waking dream within a propulsive trajectory like the adulterous journey, and the qualification projects the possibility of ‘whatever’ into the space of emplacement. The image space is represented by variations of the call to ‘act out your fantasies,’ which she does, the image again preceding the real. The phrase ‘as long as nobody gets hurt’ reflects the shared topographical model, temporally projecting the adulterous event and imagining its consequences ahead of time. The qualification fails to protect against the affair’s effect. Quite the opposite – Jack ends up dead, after all, which is DeLillo’s point. Pammy’s echolalia is not empty of meaning; its semantic corruption is mirrored by her sexual corruption, and produces alternative outcomes and narrative trapdoors.

Each time ‘They’ say something in Pammy’s fevered and receptive recollection, there is a subtle change in meaning that transfers the ostensible pattern of ‘do it’ into an unsettling caution not to. Like Rey and Lauren in The Body Artist, ‘They’ are a study in the unsaid: ‘They’ never say what ‘it’ is Pammy is free to ‘do,’ but construct the closet of adulterous secrecy in the transfer between what is said and what is meant, what goes unsaid, and

Diana Jenkins 233 December 2005 who is saying what, remembering that Pammy coaches herself. DeLillo’s model of meaning exchange is inseparable from the mechanics of sexual knowledge. In his fiction, this kind of language play is everything, its sexual character straddling the space between linguistic signification and the signified, yet unfaithful to both. As Cowart notes of Players, ‘parallels and interconnections, largely unnoticed by the characters, mock the reader’s desire for the kind of meaning that normally emerges in pattern’ (Cowart 2003, p. 51). These repetitions lay a sexual haze across the reading so that meaning hovers as suggestively as Pammy’s sleep. DeLillo’s model of language has been characterised as having ‘extraordinary semantic and thematic riches’ that holds ‘a promise of larger things’ (Cowart 2003, p. 48). His model also promises less grand and in particular ignoble things, the perversities of language reflected in texts that delight in the seductive trance of meaning in the way Murray Suskind delights in the trance of matter in White Noise.

As seen in Pammy’s sexual reverie, more arresting than the recurrence of the motif of adultery in DeLillo’s work is the extent to which the trope itself adulterates, representing much more than a realist treatment of marital infidelity. DeLillo use the ancient trope of the adulterous triangle to underscore larger fictional strategies, strategies that involve ‘radical thinking’ (Cowart 2003, pp. 11-12) that defies the categories his fiction means to challenge. Attempts to label DeLillo miss his strategy in the gesture. His writing is always directed toward ‘chart[ing] new territory for literary art’ by ‘constantly prob[ing] language’ (Cowart 2003, p. 12), not by seeking its final resting place. DeLillo’s fiction cultivates a specific titillation that reflects an erotic world in which language lives.

Alive, then, and more than a little naughty, DeLillo’s conception of language encourages the reader’s desire for transgressive meaning. The reflected desires of his adulterous characters point to a vision of language that plumbs the depths of semantic polygamy, and his linguistic model adopts the paradoxes and irreconciliabities of the adulterous triangle. DeLillo’s strategy of meaning-making exercises a semanticism that represents the America he perceives without abandoning the mysterious, enduring sexual promise of the imperceptible, unsayable, and unknowable. To this extent, DeLillo’s enterprise resists the false lure of that most postmodern culture:

Diana Jenkins 234 December 2005 Thus DeLillo does not defer to the poststructuralist view of language as a system of signifiers that refer only to other signifiers in infinite regression. DeLillo’s texts in fact undermine this postmodernist gospel. Fully aware that language is maddeningly circular, maddeningly subversive of its own supposed referentiality, the author nonetheless affirms something numinous in its mysterious properties (Cowart 2003, p. 5).

Such subversion recalls the aspect of contradiction underlying DeLillo’s narratological structures. His fiction embraces the semantic ramifications and destabilizations of paradox by employing ‘competing novelistic paradigms, of successive postmodernisms on the one hand – and of fresh realisms on the other’ (Cowart 2003, p. 5). This strategy distinguishes DeLillo among contemporary American writers; he offers a specific example of writing about postmodernity that refutes the postmodern impulse toward the placeless, the substanceless, and the meaningless. As Saltzman suggests, DeLillo’s approach has specific linguistic consequences, since he ‘is peculiarly conscious among contemporary American writers of predicating his fictions in environments hostile to the individual’s capacity to use words that have not been irrevocably sworn to prior manipulations’ (Saltzman 1998, p. 490). DeLillo’s ‘creed of resistance’ (Saltzman 1998, p. 490) reflects a scepticism that for Saltzman and Richard Poirier is ‘the legacy of our greatest poets, artists, and intellectuals’:

…it inhabits the words they use to interrogate the words we use, and it results in “a liberating and creative suspicion as to the dependability of words and syntax, especially as it relates to matters of belief in the drift of one’s feelings and impressions” (Saltzman 1998, p. 494; Poirier 1992, p. 5).

DeLillo’s fictional model is indeed liberal, repeatedly emancipating language, space, and sex from models that either totalise meaning or totally efface its possibility. As Cowart notes, ‘DeLillo has created a lexical minefield in which a host of submerged meanings threaten, as it were, to explode, flinging semantic shrapnel in all directions’ (Cowart 2003, p. 48). My project examines the trajectory of one piece of that shrapnel: the semantic profile of adultery in his texts. Knowing other pieces have landed elsewhere, what persists at the end of my consideration of DeLillo’s sexualised meditations on verbal meaning is the knowledge of further questions, not a capacity to provide answers. By analysing his adultery narratives, my achievement is clarifying the existence of a range of other pressing questions concerning DeLillo’s triumviral model of language,

Diana Jenkins 235 December 2005 sex, and space in his constructions of meaning. If I have at all fulfilled my remit, this reading of DeLillo will ‘make certain specific kinds of readings and interrogations, perhaps new, available in a heuristically powerful, productive, and significant form for other readers to perform’ (Sedgwick 1990, p. 14), with the widest scope for different results. The fact that questions remain recalls Jack and Babette Gladney’s consolation at the end of White Noise:

…the ambiguous sky left in the wake of the Airborne Toxic Event encourages “an exalted narrative life,” which seems to render preconditioned responses obsolete – “it transcends previous categories of awe” – but has the advantage of inspiring new attitudes, new stories (Saltzman 1998, p. 490; DeLillo 1986, pp. 324-5).

Contradiction again persists in the oscillation ‘between wonder and dread, between inspiration and angst’ (Saltzman 1998, p. 490; DeLillo 1986, pp. 324-5). The only certainty, in White Noise’s Blacksmith, and in academic readings of DeLillo, ‘is that people linger, exchange, participate – instead of pressing heedlessly, habitually onward, they [move] to interpret and dwell upon’ (Saltzman 1998, p. 491) the uncertainties. DeLillo’s triangular model of transgressive meaning creation, connecting sex, language, and space, is a narrative 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’ (Cowart 2003, pp. 5-6).

I have been motivated by the hope that readers will be ‘variously – in anger, identification, pleasure, envy, ‘permission,’ exclusion – stimulated to write accounts ‘like’ this one (whatever that means) of their own, and share those’ (Sedgwick 1987, p. 137). Beyond the question of DeLillo’s adulterous topographies, when he says ‘it’s possible for a writer to shape himself as a human being through the language he uses…He not only sees himself but begins to make himself or remake himself’ (LeClair 2005, pp. 6-7), DeLillo explicitly suggests that the writer has the reproductive capability of shaping, indeed making human beings. This connection marks one of the beneficial directions in which further consideration of his sexual and linguistic landscapes might lead: to the Oedipal overtones in DeLillo’s work. Critics including Cowart (2003), Keesey (1993), LeClair (1987), and Pastore (1990) all remark on the Oedipal dimension

Diana Jenkins 236 December 2005 in Americana, Cowart moving the discussion beyond the psychology of the Bell family to a compelling reading of the American landscape as a violated Jocasta (Cowart 2003, p. 132, pp. 241-2). I have used Ballard’s contention that intercourse is a model for something else to demonstrate that DeLillo uses the adulterous triangle as a model for transgressive meaning. Cowart’s reconceiving of DeLillo’s American landscape as evincing an Oedipal strain offers the debatable possibility that DeLillo’s verbally envisaged America is also a model for something else: that is, a complex sculpture of feminine sex that includes the mother figure. To advance critical discussion of sexual intercourse in DeLillo’s semantic frontier beyond these pages, one need only follow Americana’s David Bell and Pike “Due West,” “Into the great white maw”:

“The great white maw and her sister Katy. A man can get killed out there at this time of year. Ask Gash here. She hails from Wyoming, the equality suffrage state” (DeLillo 1990, p. 48).

Thus David’s odyssey across America in DeLillo’s first novel is “a religious journey” (DeLillo 1990, p. 49), perhaps, but from its ‘conception’ also a powerfully, even controversially, sexual one, which, one suspects, is only the beginning.

Diana Jenkins 237 December 2005 Works Cited

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