Don DeLillo, Pillow. Pillow, Don DeLillo; or (muffled screams)

The popular press fête few novelists with the intensity which accompanies each new Don DeLillo "event."  So before I crashed the party I decided I should see whether anyone else had.  Thanks to Gale's Expanded Academic ASAP, I now know I'm not alone.  Earlier Jonathan chided me for "an unfortunate and inaccurate comparison to Baudrillard [un]worthy of Dale Peck."  My only (admittedly lame) defense consisted of a frank admission that I thought the comparison both obvious and apropos.  So I delight in communicating that someone else considers the comparison equally apt: in his review of Cosmopolis, James Wood makes a strikingly similar observation:

Eric [Packer] is given to riffing on contemporary culture and technology, in a Baudrillard-bruised language evocative of an assistant professor of cultural studies with, alas, an MFA: "He took out his hand organizer and poked a note to himself about the anachronistic quality of the word skyscraper. No recent structure ought to bear this word. It belonged to the olden soul of awe, to the arrowed towers that were a narrative long before he was born." Or: "He was thinking about automated teller machines. The term was aged and burdened by its own historical memory. It worked at crosspurposes, unable to escape the inference of fuddled human personnel and jerky moving parts. The term was part of the process that the device was meant to replace."

He being James Wood and me being my lowly self, he trumps my bland comparison by coining the compound "Baudrillard-bruised" to describe Packer's language.  Still, the fact that his impression of DeLillo-speak dovetails neatly with mine encourages me to perform even greater displays of brazen evaluation.  But I need not bother, because Wood has already done the work for me:

 The difficulty of the book is working out how much of this is Eric's mildly satirized theory and how much of it is DeLillo's indulged and wanton theory. Eric would think just like this, one supposes. But as so often, DeLillo's language seems too complicit, in its scrabbling enthusiasm, with the subject of his protagonist's reflections. "Here was the heave of the biosphere" (whatever that means): alas, this sounds like DeLillo, not Eric. (But then we do not know what Eric sounds like, because he has no quiddity.) It is DeLillo who seems to be excited as he regards "the heave of the biosphere."

Exactly!  I too am unable to differentiate between DeLillo's voice and the voices of his various narrators.  I took my copy of Underworld from the shelf to prove this, but Wood says it better than I can:

Eric Packer's techno-incantations, his amorous ruminations on postmodernity, are continuous with Brian Glassic's in Underworld, the Brian Glassic who stood before the Staten Island landfill and reflected thus on garbage:

To understand all this. To penetrate this secret. The mountain was here, unconcealed, but no one saw it or thought about it, no one knew it existed except the engineers ... a unique cultural deposit ... and he saw himself for the first time as a member of an esoteric order, they were adepts and seers, crafting the future, the city planners, the waste managers, the compost technicians, the landscapers who would build hanging gardens here, make a park one day out of every kind of used and eroded object of desire.

Brian's rapt tone—bathetically close in impulse to Wordsworth on the Simplon Pass, or to Ruskin on Rouen Cathedral—is hardly different from Eric's tone when he regards the digital ticker in his car. There is the same rising churn of language, the same hovering incoherence, and the same conversion of concrete singularities into massive plurals. Thus, as Brian moves from thinking about one specific landfill to thinking about countless technicians, seers, planners, and adepts, so Eric moves from his ticker to the mere prospect of "the planet's living billions" and "the heave of the biosphere."

Lest you think this entire post an argument from authority, I should say that I very rarely agree with Wood's criticism.  In this case, though, he beats me to every roundhouse I wanted to throw.  A lesser scholar would have proceeded to build his case despite the knowledge that he really only wandered into another man's mansion.  But I am no lesser scholar.  (For you to quantify my scholarship thus it would have to be readily available for public consumption.  In truth it sits here on the hard drive, twiddling its thumbs in anticipation of its eventual apotheosis in the pages of prestigious journals.)  That said, I feel obliged to produce some compendium of my own complaints. 

So I've devised a game I call "Name That Narrator!"  All of the examples are from Underworld.  Each of them has a racial and class heritage outlined with precision in the novel.  I want you to 1) identify this heritage and 2) demonstrate how you have come to this conclusion (or as the mathematicians say, "show your work").  Hands on your buzzers...

It's the rule of confrontation, faithfully maintained, written across the face of every slackwit pitcher since there were teams named the Superbas and the Bridegrooms.  The difference comes when the ball is hit.  Then nothing is the same.  The men are moving, coming out of their crouches, and everything submits to the pebble-skip of the ball, to rotations and backspins and airstreams.  There are drag coefficients.  There are trailing vortices.  There are things that apply unrepeatably, muscle memory and pumping blood and jots of dust, the narrative that lives in the spaces of the official play-by-play.

I believed we could know what was happening to us.  We were not excluded from our own lives.  That is not my head on someone else's body in the photograph that's introduced as evidence.  I didn't believe that nations play-act on a grand scale.  I lived in the real.  The only ghosts I let in were local ones, the smoky traces of people I know and the dinge of my own somber shadow, New York ghosts in every case, the old loud Bronx, hand-to-mouth, spoken through broken teeth—the jeer, the raspberry fart.

I carried my house keys in an ankle wallet that fastened with a velcro closure.  I didn't like to run with house keys jiggling in my pocket.  The ankle wallet answered a need.  It spoke directly to a personal concern.  It made me feel there were people out there in the world of product development and merchandising and gift cataloguing who understood the nature of my little nagging needs.

Enough already!  Enough!  I'm on page 86 and I already have to halt this experiment.  This prose has that cloying postmodern nostalgia for meaning responsible for DeLillo's popularity among academics.  Can't you see that he's writing sentimental narratives designed to appeal to those who resist the thrall of the postmodern condition?  Can't you see that this comforting pseudo-intellectual crap seems intelligent because it mimes the concerns you've acquired through years of study?  Can't you see this?  The tone of resignation in the face of global capitalism is a trope DeLillo abuses in every single sentence.  He may attempt to brook this bathetic display by introducing themes which undermine it ... but those themes are intellectual, whereas the tone works on readers' emotions.  If we focus on the intellectual substance of his books, we necessarily pass over, unadjudicated, the sentimentalism which compels us to take the books seriously in the first place.  In other words, I like DeLillo as his sentences pass before my eyes because his pablum flatters my concerns; but as soon as his pap ceases soothing my critical faculties I feel dirty and used. 

To be frank, I'm floored anyone falls for his schtick.  I would attribute it to the precision of his sentences, only that falls under the aegis of evaluative critcism, and defenders of DeLillo always speak to the quality of his ideas (and because in the contemporary academic environment evaluation is anathema).  So all this adds up to little more than a rage against the dying of insight ... and its replacement with the comfortable "truths" of contemporary life. 

Comments

[Jonathan]

Wood recognizes the problem in the first sentence of your second quote. His justification's precipitated by irritation. It's as much mistake to confuse the author with his characters as it is to confuse him with his critics. Your entire penultimate paragraph seems to be mocking a series of critical clichés--fine but irrelevant.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Jonathan, you made this same claim previously. But characters don't exist, and so if their narrative voices are annoying then it's the author's problem. I can only direct you back to the immortal words of Adam Warren, which you previously scorned as farce; no amount of authorial wink-and-nodding ("mild satirization" in the Wood quote in this case) can seperate the faults of a narrative character from the faults of the author that indulges in this particular voice.

[Luther Blissett]

Dunno. I've always assumed we're never to take DeLillo's protagonists at their word -- or to accept their ideas for their intellectual content. Greg Tate made this point years ago in a Village Voice article on *White Noise*. Tate brilliantly argues that DeLillo consistantly deflates that white male supremacism in the heart of the techno-professional class. Do you trust Murray and Jack in *White Noise*? Of course not! So why would you trust Packer or Glassic? These are purposely "horrible" characters. Each guy uses "theory" to stave off death. And each of DeLillo's major novels is about white male fears of being penetrated, being flaccid, being vulnerable, being exposed, etc.

Is DeLillo limited? Sure. Insofar as he's treated the same themes in each of his major works, we're tempted to say so. Then again, Pynchon and Henry James and William Faulkner base each of their major works on the same obsessive images and themes. I do think parts of *Underworld* descend to mere repetitions of *White Noise*, and *Cosmopolis* feels more like a footnote to *Underworld*. But take *The Names*, *Libra*, *White Noise*, and *Mao II* and you've got four nearly perfect novels.

And Scott, I question your suspicion of DeLillo's sentimentalism. Perhaps you come to literature too much through the lens of criticism. Having myself arrived at "theory" and "scholarship" relatively late in my reading, I've never quite "got" the critical drone of "postmodern = ideas." Pynchon is supremely nostalgic and sentimental. As is Acker. As is DeLillo. All the intellectual junk is used to generate emotion. Wait: isn't that what *all* good novels do? Who reads novels for "ideas"? It would be simplistic simply to write off sentimental writers, right? Aren't we beyond bullshit modernist doctrine? And who taught the pomo crowd that ideas temper/guide emotion? Joyce. *Ulysses* being the most sentimental novel of the 20th century and all. And thank god for that.

[Jonathan]

I finally remember now, Rich. You were referring to the nerds on Buffy.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Jonathan, I don't think you see realize how condescending you sometimes are. I can recognize the difference between my being irritated and the text being irritating...and I can outline why that is (as I did in this post). It's not that I'm confusing one DeLillo character with DeLillo; it's that 98 percent of his characters speak in the same voice; mouth the same postmodern cliches; are, in fact, transparent surrogates for DeLillo himself. You'd have a right to mock me for my stupidity if I based this generalization on a single novel. As it stands, your "defense" consists of underestimating my intelligence, which, while fine and all, isn't much of a defense.

Luther, you can group DeLillo in with other novelists who return to the same theme, but if you're going to do that, you have to give those other novelists the credit they deserve: Benji sounds nothing like Shreve who sounds nothing like Quentin. Yes, Faulkner returned to similar themes...but he didn't do so in the same narrative voice focalized through characters with different names but not much else. As for sentimentalism, I'm not condemning it per se, only the particularly vapid impotent sentamentalism of the Baudrillard-inspired author. Which is another way of saying that the more I read Ulysses the more it becomes a story about a man distracting himself while his wife has an affair. That's not what DeLillo does, though; he inspires pity for himself by proxy; as I noted and Wood seconded, his characters' voices resemble his narrative voice so perfectly that reading a DeLillo novel has the effect similar to that of eavesdropping on someone else's therapy. "I feel so sorry for myself! I can't find meaning in the world! But I think the Internet may be the answer!" As I said, I'm constantly floored that other people can't see through his transparent schtick. I honestly don't understand how this isn't blindingly obvious to anyone...and am tempted to say, as I implied above, that those (largely privileged white male-type) people who find his characters' structural lack compelling would rather not admit why they do so...and instead fall back on the ideas he proffers in novel after novel.

Rich, obviously, I agree.

[Josh]

A good critic can help immensely in helping one understand one's own aesthetic response. Thanks, Scott, for a persuasive explanation of why, when I read DeLillo and Franzen, I'm all like, what are these white people going on about, which is not a feeling I get when reading about characters from similar milieux in Baxter, Powers, or Moore.

I only agree with Rich if one puts italics and caps and double-underlines around "indulges." 'Cause persistently faulty voices and annoying characters are wonderful. Herbert Stencil's faults, and the faults in his way of thinking and voice, are not Pynchon's. Frank Dillon's are not Jim Thompson's, and it's unfortunate that there are Thompson critics who spend half a chapter apologizing for being interested in a character who's that unpleasant.

Obviously, neither of those authors is Faulkner; and each has stylistic and ideological fixations that will leave some readers as cold as DD leaves you and me. But the "intellectual junk" in both does a better job of persuading me that something real is at stake for the characters and elicits my curiosity as to what actions and perceptions their perversities will lead to. Whereas with DeLillo's people, I'm not invested in any way in their pmc anguish or pomo clichés: I just want them immediately to suffer the fate Edward Said recommended for Baudrillard. "I lived in the real," indeed.

[Adam Roberts]

Seems to me there's more to any author than 'likeable/unlikeable characters' or 'character-voices that are clearly distinguished from narratorial- or authorial-voice.' And 'schtick' is an unsatisfactory piece of critical terminology, I feel. I weave complex variations on a tightly defined series of fundamental thematic fascinations. You seem stuck in the grooves of your aesthetic obsessions. He wheels out his old schtick yet again.

But, having said that, I'd agree both that Underworld and Cosmopolis felt jaded to me when I read them, compared to best of early DeLillo. One of the very great things about, say, White Noise is that it is a really really funny novel. With the later stuff I ask myself: where has the hilarity gone?

[Luther Blissett]

Scott, I suppose what I'm saying is that we're never to feel sorry for "the loss of meaning" or other issues of "structural lack" in DeLillo's novels. We're meant to observe the coping mechanisms of a certain cerebral class of American man.

I mean, who feels sorry for Jack Gladney? Eric Packer? Brian Glassic? Scott, what I'm saying is that it's *your* misplaced emotions, not DeLillo's manipulation, that's at stake here. I enjoyed *WN*, *Under*, and *Cosmo* insofar as I enjoyed watching DeLillo cooly unpack the defense mechanisms of white men. That they share a common narrative discourse is the point, whether or not we as readers have gotten tired of it. But I don't think you can argue that this is the same discourse as the major characters in *Mao II* or *Libra*, or the same discourse as the non-Glassic early chapters or all the later chapters of *Underworld*.

And for every Faulkner who literally writes in extended dramatic monologues (they has better be different) -- you have a Henry James. A Virginia Woolf. Or even with Faulkner you have *Absalom*.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Josh: "I only agree with Rich if one puts italics and caps and double-underlines around "indulges." 'Cause persistently faulty voices and annoying characters are wonderful."

If a persistently faulty voice or annoying character works, it's to the author's credit. If not, it's the author's fault. It's a very basic statement, and has nothing to do with a blanket condemnation of faulty voices or annoying characters. I was responding to Jonathan's "It's as much mistake to confuse the author with his characters as it is to confuse him with his critics" which itself referred to Wood's "The difficulty of the book is working out how much of this is Eric's mildly satirized theory and how much of it is DeLillo's indulged and wanton theory." You can't get around a complaint about the narrative tone of a book not working by saying that it's the character's tone, not the author's.

Jonathan, a minute with Google would tell you who Adam Warren was, if you were interested. I admit that I enjoy referencing a low-culture source whenever you get into your oft repeated and contentless "you're not (smart / sophisticated / whatever) enough to criticize this author that everyone who's anyone knows is great" bit. Adam Warren knows all about the folly of trying to say that because a comic book has postmodern critics appearing in it that deconstruct the implications of the characters' image, and because the author, characters, and (hopefully) readers all "know what is going on" complete with all the signifiers of mild satirization, that it isn't still a comic book featuring scantily-clad young people.

Adam Roberts: "Seems to me there's more to any author than 'likeable/unlikeable characters' or 'character-voices that are clearly distinguished from narratorial- or authorial-voice.'" Again, no one is saying that characters have to be likeable. But you don't see the weakness in a book that tries to mildly satirize a viewpoint that it appears to implicitly support? It's the standard "I'm only joking" defense once again, last seen on nearby blogs in a discussion of a person to be known only as "Z". It's not really funny because it's a defensive gesture, not a joke. I'd say that it makes bad art as well as bad theory.

[Jonathan]

I think that you, Scott, have a tendency to think people are questioning your intelligence when they disagree with you. You did begin, after all, by including yourself in a group of people with bigger brains than Delillo. That might in fact be true, somehow, but it's not really the relevant question.

The postmodern clichés you mention seem to me to be an ongoing diagnosis, begun in Americana, of what might be termed the desert of the real. There are probably similarities to Baudrillard, though I'd guess that this is an example of convergent evolution. I find Delillo's craft, particularly his sentence-level writing and dialogue, which is often perfect, to be the most enjoyable thing about him as a reader. His humor, also. I see no reason to believe his characters are mouthpieces. Similarity in tone--which I disagree with you about how pervasive it may be--doesn't indicate this. I don't think that even unskilled writers of fiction can do this because there's a transformational immanence in narrative creation. Your criticisms seem more familiar to me from critical pieces I've read about his work than the work itself. Would you have the same reaction if Delillo had no entries in MLA bibliography and no cachet? Possibly, but I doubt it.

He's a novelist, not a social critic per se or a philosopher. And Rich, the range of reactions any given reader can have to a text is a bounded infinity and reveals only the personality of that reader. Large samples or tightly focused ones can also tell us something about the book itself.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Jonathan: "the range of reactions any given reader can have to a text is a bounded infinity and reveals only the personality of that reader. Large samples or tightly focused ones can also tell us something about the book itself."

Which is another way of saying that evaluative criticism is not possible, or if possible, can only be done by survey. (In other words, imagine sending out a survey form to 100 prominent critics. If a majority say that a particular work is good, it is good, and there is no possible other sense in which "good" as opposed to "influential" is a meaningful term in this context. Well, the survey can be larger or smaller, or to a more or less educated audience, but the survey aspect is definitional.)

I always understood you to be saying something like this, Jonathan. It's both boring and self-contradictory. It's boring because it never calls for opinions to be supported by textual reference -- they are, after all, just opinions which can only reveal something about the opinioneer, so who really cares why they are held? Scott can quote various excerpts in which different characters speak with the same narrative voice, and you can blandly write "I see no reason to believe his characters are mouthpieces", and they are opinions of equal value, little check marks on the survey forms.

It is self-contradictory because you don't really have a theory about why some opinions are more valid than others, even though you attempt to take advantage of this assertion. Your general retort boils down to something like "5 out of 6 prominent dentists recommend DeLillo", but why should Scott care? It's the slip from taking a survey to holding up a copy of a survey that shows that a majority of Americans are churchgoing to an agnostic and telling them that they just don't fit in.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Jonathan,

Scott, have a tendency to think people are questioning your intelligence when they disagree with you.

No, I have a tendency to think people question my intelligence when they "inform" me of things like: It's as much mistake to confuse the author with his characters as it is to confuse him with his critics.

I'm not confusing all authors with all their characters ("Shakespeare said 'To be or not to be...'"), I'm making a case that this author writes with a consistency of narrative voice (irrespective of its origins in the narrative) which compels me to think his characters bear more relation to his authorial persona than is typical. In short, I'm not confusing the two like some freshmen comp. student.

I find Delillo's craft, particularly his sentence-level writing and dialogue, which is often perfect, to be the most enjoyable thing about him as a reader.

Yes, he can write a mean sentence...but when they're all variations of the same sentence, it gets a little old. The passage Wood quoted above--which could as easily be the observations of the unsympathetic Packer as the sympathetic Glazer--is a case in point. Well-crafted, yes, but it's a patent-pending DeLillo-sentence.

Your criticisms seem more familiar to me from critical pieces I've read about his work than the work itself. Would you have the same reaction if Delillo had no entries in MLA bibliography and no cachet? Possibly, but I doubt it.

It looks to me that I've been approaching this argument from the opposite direction; namely, that of an evaluative critic. Toss aside the ideas and what you have is a novelist who writes in a single register about similar issues again and again and again...and he does so to maximal critical acclaim.

Luther,

We're meant to observe the coping mechanisms of a certain cerebral class of American man.

Yes, that's the point. (I'd toss in some racial and class markers there, but still.) The same sort of man, who thinks the same sort of stuff, in the same sort of environment...if that is the point, I don't think it a coincidence that DeLillo himself belongs to this class, or that by dint of repetition it reeks of solipsism. Sure, one novel focalized through a character similar to the author...but 14? 15?

And for every Faulkner who literally writes in extended dramatic monologues (they had better be different) -- you have a Henry James. A Virginia Woolf. Or even with Faulkner you have *Absalom*.

A couple of points: Absalom, Absalom! isn't written in a univocal manner, so much so that when Quentin and Shreve's dialogues starting mingling in the end, we can suss out which is which (for a time). Also, I think James is an example of someone who, despite long periods in which his voice remained stable, does in fact write narratives which have distinguishing features...perhaps not in a single novel, but at the very least, say, the difference between Portrait and The Golden Bowl. But yes, I see your point about Archer sounding like Hyacinth sounding like...and think that my complaint about DeLillo works according to a similar logic.

Adam,

I think "schtick" may be unsatisfactory as a critical term, but as an evaluative one, I think it holds; esp. in the case of a writer like DeLillo who, even in Luther's defense of him, is said to have recycled the same solipsistic themes in his last dozen or so novels. I think Josh counters the idea that we're criticizing DeLillo for writing unlikeable characters: persistently faulty voices and annoying characters are wonderful. Herbert Stencil's faults, and the faults in his way of thinking and voice, are not Pynchon's. Frank Dillon's are not Jim Thompson's, and it's unfortunate that there are Thompson critics who spend half a chapter apologizing for being interested in a character who's that unpleasant. To which I'd say: exactly. It's one thing to have a set of "tightly defined series of fundamental thematic fascinations," but another entirely to address them in the same way, with the same voice, through characters who seem like puppets (despite their relative likeability say in Cosmopolis vs. Underworld) for the same criticisms. Yes, his prose zips on occasion; but yes, it zips in the same way in almost every one of his novels. Also, as you point out, his novels have become less funny as they've become increasingly self-involved.

Josh,

As noted, I think you've pinpointed one critical problem with recent DeLillo: the collapse of his voice into his character's. I've presented (well, copped, but it's still there) evidence of this...and wait, I've presented my "Name That Narrator!" challenge. Those who would defend him have yet to demonstrate the flaws in my contention. Jonathan has asserted that he doesn't believe DeLillo's characters are puppets, but he hasn't provided anything other than assertion and critical consensus to back it up. (As if academics aren't prone to forgive the aesthetic sins of novels which deal with issues in "an interesting way." The thing is, I think those who think that about DeLillo are projecting their own intelligence onto a far dimmer star. I mean, the Internet! Please.)

[Jonathan]

Rich, the survey reductio fails on quantification. Patterns of responses generate consensus, and then there is rhetorical force and institutional authority. Received opinion. I continue to think that Scott's response here is provoked by what he thinks are exaggerated claims of Delillo's importance as a writer by some academics, because his work lends itself to a certain type of broadly postmodern exegesis. The question of narrative voice and focalization, with the apparent similarities meaning that the various characters are "puppets" of Delillo's vaguely Baudrillardian ideas misses the mark by at least three circles: the evidence Scott cites lacks sufficent context, sufficent explanation of the very nebulous concept of focalization (or "narrative voice"), and is not a sufficient sample of Delillo's range. Consider the aforementioned Libra (exceptions don't "prove" anything, and it's best to retire the concept of "proof" [though certainly not evidence] in these discussions) and Ratner's Star. How does this narrative voice relate to the broader concept of style? How do each relate to focalization and implied narrator (or the author function or whatever you wish to term it?) Rich seems to enjoy objecting that any perceived artistic flaw can be explained away by unperceived authorial intention. While this is plainly not the case, it is also not the case that artistic flaws exist in the "text" itself. They are activated, constructed, and hence arbitrary.

Whereas you seem to think the confusions I mentioned are very simple, I think they are very complex and are never learned or continually unlearned by critics and scholars. Evaluative criticism, as I understand, seeks to demonstrate what the author wants to achieve and then judge whether he (pronoun appropriate for the mode) has succeeded. And that's fine, except that the first half doesn't get its due, more often than not, and hasn't gotten it here.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Jonathan, I still think that your remarks are self-contradictory in a fashion that tends to discourage discussion rather than encourage it. You write "it is also not the case that artistic flaws exist in the 'text' itself. They are activated, constructed, and hence arbitrary." Given that you still seem to think that evaluative criticism is possible -- that artistic flaws, while not existing in the text itself, can still be said to exist in some arbitrary fashion -- then they must exist within the system of text plus readers. If so, then your explanation of why Scott misses the mark is incoherent.

You say that his (textual) evidence lacks context, that he hasn't sufficiently explained focalization, and that his sample of DeLillo lacks sufficient range. But so what? Those are mostly textual matters. If you think that Scott is provoked in his criticism by "exaggerated claims of Delillo's importance as a writer by some academics", then this would by your previous definition be a valid mode of evaluative criticism -- Scott would in this interpretation be criticizing the readership part of the reader+text construction of the flaws in DeLillo's work. The fact that you fall back on textual questions indicates that you don't seem to believe your own theory.

The end result is that, as Scott writes, you tend to rely on "assertion and critical consensus". Both are fundamentally not very interesting. When people blog about authors or books, the best responses do not tend to be either "author X is great" or "everyone says that author X is great".

When you do dip one toe into the water of backing up an assertion, it's half-hearted: "Consider the aforementioned Libra (exceptions don't "prove" anything, and it's best to retire the concept of "proof" [though certainly not evidence] in these discussions) and Ratner's Star." OK, so we retire proof but not evidence, but what evidence are you actually citing? Any actual snippets of text from Libra or Ratner's Star in which DeLillo speaks in a recognizeably different authorial voice (if such a thing exists)? Or just a general concensus that Libra and Ratner's Star are different from the rest of DeLillo's work? Given that the whole concept of "DeLillo's work" is, in your world view, constructed, can your objection even apply if Scott does not mention these two works specifically?

[Jonathan]

First of all, Scott should rethink his color choices. Perhaps my eyes are going, but there's not enough contrast to read the text easily.

I want to follow the logic of your first paragraph, Rich, but I can't. Intratextual context, explanation of what is meant by focalization or narrative voice (much contested and difficult concepts) and why the presumed consistency (which I do see but not quite as strongly as Scott seems to) reveals univocal and tired philosophizing, and intertextual context: these are the three problems I see with Scott's claim as it relates to his evidence. I think the Wood quote was interesting in that Wood recognized what I think is the key problem--intention, irony, and differentiation--and then said to hell with that; he didn't like the book. I didn't much like Cosmopolis either, but I disagree with Wood's justification. It's too pat.

I have asserted things. Scott did agree with me about Libra being an exception to the mode he describes. I think Ratner's Star is as well, though I don't know if anyone's read it. And by the "rest of Delillo's work," are we all presuming here that we've all read it all? Because that's clearly bullshit. Rich in particular is proud of not reading the books he discusses on blogs (with the Wolfe being an exception, as I recall).

"Ask the weasel why he did it, boys."

"I punished myself by going for long underwater swims in the artifical lake, coming up gasping, the sky regarding me through misty spectacles, quire curiously."

"A man showed her his mutilated arm and asked for change."

"Milk is the subtlest of insults."

"Paper streamers came out of our eyes."

One of these is not like the other. Can you locate it?

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

You don't like the color scheme? Meg's a graphic designer, so when I first put this place together, I used one of her books full of color wheels to decide the text/background contrast. This combination should be easier on the eyes than the typical dark lettering on light background. I could look into changing it thought if enough people have that problem. The last thing I want driving readers away is the color scheme.

As to your post, first, I've never said I read everything DeLillo's written. To be specific, I've read: White Noise, Ratner's Star, Great Jones Street, Underworld, Cosmopolis, Mao II, and The Names. I haven't completed Libra (one reason I frequently forget it), but I've started it a couple of times. (Same with Ellroy's American Tabloid. I must have an aversion to the issue.) So I recognize that my criticism doesn't obtain absolutely; but I believe I've an ample sample size to work with here.

As for your test (assuming that only one of those isn't DeLillo), I'd say:

1. One of DeLillo's attempts to give voice to another which ended up in caricature.
2. Reads like classic DeLillo interior monologue.
3. Reads like classic DeLillo narration.
4. Reads like classic DeLillo interior monologue (Relationship Falling Apart Division)
5. Sounds far too absurdist to be DeLillo. (Maybe Nicholson Baker? John Barth?)

[Jonathan]

Very good. Barthelme is the last one. Delillo has a recognizable style, no doubt of it. I just don't think that's the question.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Well, I was 60% correct about #5. What I would ask is this: Why does he try (and fail) to produce naturalistic voices (as in #1) if he's not interested in representing them faithfully? Why can he not, like Pynchon, incorporate his ideas into a novel in which each character speaks with an individual (and individualized voice)? Do you believe this a choice? (And again, if it is, why would he populate his novels with such ethnic and class caricatures?)

[Rich Puchalsky]

Jonathan: "Rich in particular is proud of not reading the books he discusses on blogs (with the Wolfe being an exception, as I recall)." I think that you must mean the times when I insisted that one didn't have to read a theorist's books about theory in order to discuss their popular articles about politics, as long as you have actually read those articles. But I'm sure that your own internal version of this sounds better.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Jonathan, you say that you didn't follow my logic, though you want to. OK, I'll try it more simply.

You write that artistic flaws do not reside in the text itself, they are "activated, constructed, and hence arbitrary". You also write that "the range of reactions any given reader can have to a text is a bounded infinity and reveals only the personality of that reader." If you really believe this, why are you criticizing Scott for lack of intratextual or intertextual context? (I'll leave out the narrative focus bit; it's being adddressed elsewhere.)

Scott, by your description, can not produce any knowledge about the text no matter how much context he provides. You say that proof should be thrown out, but not evidence. Evidence of what? If Scott's opinion is just something about himself, then he needs no evidence of anything. Nor could you provide any evidence that would make your opinion any more valuable than his.

You write "Would you have the same reaction if Delillo had no entries in MLA bibliography and no cachet?" as if this were a problem with Scott's criticism. Well, if artistic flaws only exist as arbitrary constructions, then evaluative criticism has to address how the text is constructed. You should be congratulating Scott on addressing the flaws in the critical reaction to DeLillo, not referring to this reaction that you see in Scott as if it were vaguely disreputable.

You write that "Patterns of responses generate consensus, and then there is rhetorical force and institutional authority. Received opinion." Well, the one thing that Scott can't do, since he's a single person, is generate a consensus. Neither can you. Nor will any evidence or context assist you in doing so. All you can really do, under your model of criticism, is quote the received opinion of institutional authorities. Which (pardon me for the repetition) is boring.