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]

Was that the tune you whistled on Eagleton a while back?

You conflate the singular and the plural in the first paragraph. There are individual reactions and then there is a developing consensus. Both are arbitrary and have nothing to do with intrinsic value. In your haste to reduce my position to something you find easily contemptible, you neglect that I put no value on the "received opinion of insitutional authorities." I simply insist that it must be separated from the author's intention.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Jonathan, I'm sorry that I didn't realize that you put no value on the received opinion of institutional authories -- you rely on them so often that I got the wrong impression. (Why then, on the Wolfe thread, did you quote your list of prominent critics who disagreed with me?) But your latest is even more incoherent than your previous. Surely you don't believe that authorial intention is in some way knowable or important? We're constructing an implied author, not talking about the "real" "DeLillo", whoever that may be.

Let me step back, then. You wrote that "Large samples [as opposed to individual reactions]or tightly focused ones can also tell us something about the book itself." What can they tell us about the book itself? You also said that we shouldn't retire the concept of evidence in these discussions. Evidence of what? You've said that artistic flaws do not reside in the text itself. We are discussing artistic flaws. You don't seem to want to say that we are talking about nonsense by definition. So why do you keep pointing back at the text as if textual context means something outside of its construction?

[Jonathan]

I didn't quote a list of prominent authorities, Rich. I gave a list of people who likely would agree that Wolfe should be, absent compelling evidence to the contrary, judged differently than a seventeen year old stoned Sabbath fan.

What is the relation you're proposing between authorial intention and implied author?

Artistic flaws do not entirely exist in the text itself. They have to be activated. Recognizing them is a result of a complex process of enculturation, and standards vary. You are using "reside" in too narrow of a sense.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Jonathan, you described this thread as "The reduction rollercoaster, the Sisyphean" over on The Valve. You know, you might just describe your views in more detail, rather than answering questions with a question plus another sentence.

But I don't mind explaining what I mean. I think that Eco's concept of the model author is a valuable one. More generally, when in discussions like this one in which a majority of the participants appear to believe in some version of the "death of the author" (as you do, do you not?) I take it as assumed that when we refer to "DeLillo" or "Wolfe" we are referring to the implied author, which the reader constructs from the text, not the empirical one. Or maybe you don't hold to the death of the author, since you've cited "what Wolfe said" as the key to the interpretation of texts before. But I admit that I assumed that was just a spur-of-the-moment grasping after straws, given your other views about artistic flaws and so on (and given that Wolfe actually said, in interviews, the opposite of what you claimed that he said, which implies that you didn't check beforehand).

That in mind, I think that you completely missed the point with "I gave a list of people who likely would agree that Wolfe should be, absent compelling evidence to the contrary, judged differently than a seventeen year old stoned Sabbath fan." No seventeen year old stoned Sabbath fan could write a series of novels that attempt to manipulate the reader in the way that I suggest that Wolfe does. And there is every evidence that the implied author of _The Book of the New Sun_ is the kind of writer who would do this. The entire book is, after all, one long manipulation -- the plot relies on an intricate series of deus ex machina contrivances and coincidences and features predestination, the protagonist has been effectively written as lacking in many of the usual sorts of self-motivation in order to make him a better puppet, the single unreliable narrator plus unfamiliar setting (in which the reader has no prior knowledge that might conflict with the narrator's version) provides maximum possibilities for misdirection, and so on. Even the ostensible reason for the torture motif presented to the sophisticates who want one -- "Christ with a whip" -- is a manipulative one, intended to shock. And there is clearly a reason for the implied author of The Book of the New Sun to attempt this form of manipulation: it causes readers to be attracted to and to defend the books. The Wolfe that I'm criticizing is not the seventeen year old stoned Sabbath fan, it's the second-rate author who doesn't trust his undeniable talent, but also relies on attracting a readership through these technically quite sophisticated but aesthetically objectionable means.

So, back to artistic flaws. I agree that they do not entirely exist in the text itself. The problem is that you equivocate whenever I try to ask which of the many theories that hold the possibility of artistic flaws as being real you actually hold.

[Joe]

There is some validity to the criticism but there are other times when Delillo's characters have very distinct voices. I am thinking of Oswald's mother in Libra. I am thinking of the first person monologues in that 1972 comic masterpiece End Zone.
I am not an academic or particularly interested in theory. I am a writer and the question of narrative point of view interests me from a technical standpoint. Third person narration can be shallow or deep, can be Victorian omniscient narrator or submerged camera's eye. DeLillo's third person voice can describe the thoughts without being them, the question is less one of tone but content. To what extent are the character's mere puppets for the author's concerns? The key is that the author can claim to be giving voice to subconscious perceptions. DeLillo being an author concerned with the social effect of various phenomenon (mass man) there could well be intended meaning in the monotholic responses of his varied characters. The poetry is meant to sing that subconcious mass response.
Also, there comes a point when the sheer concrete beauty of his sentences makes the novel into a new kind of thing, like a sculpture of typeface where the shape of the words arranged on the page carries the brunt of the aethestic charge, meaning is a faded second cousin.

[JT Velikovsky]

Hi Scott

In DeLillo's defense... (and bearing in mind, so far, I've only read, in their entirety: White Noise, Cosmopolis, and Point Omega. But I've read White Noise, about 10 times. The first time was when I studied it in college, and I was stunned by it then. ie How good it was.)

(1) Yes, most of DeLillo's characters speak in his authorial voice (and in the same style) - but, the same can be said of Woody Allen, Quentin Tarantino, and Joseph Heller (Catch-22). This is just conjecture, but - it's also possible that, if the other characters spoke too differently, (in DeLillo's oeuvre) the character / voice that dominates may sound jarring - and the effect may be lost. (I am just speculating, but why not.)

(2) DeLillo had a professional career as an advertising copywriter prior to becoming a novelist... If anyone is a deep thinker, and works for very long in advertising, I've noticed, they all come to the same moral position that DeLillo frequently exhibits in his work. They find the excesses of capitalism to be absurd. Advertising of course being one of the extreme excesses of capitalism, the triumph of form over content. If you work for very long in that space, you soon find the excesses of the culture to be deeply absurd. This insight (which - is not new) and the way of expressing it (which DeLillo does a lot in his work that I've read or scanned, I have started a fewof his others but not yet completed them) for me (and likely, most of his fans?) is the genius of DeLillo.

(3) As I say, I've read White Noise about 10 times. (Maybe even more.) I find it to be utterly: a masterpiece. - It is incredibly funny, wonderfully satirical, has heart, and essentially paints a masterful and unique portrait of contemporary life (I don't want to say `postmodern' life as it's a fairly meaningless term now). By which I mean, in White Noise, he (Jack Gladney) often walks past the television set, and we get a line of dialog that the TV has just spoken. (eg: "Let's sit half-lotus and think about our spines".) The absurdity of the information that bombards us everywhere is captured so well, so humourously, and so cleverly. Also his son playing chess with a mass-murderer, and the other things the genius son observes, are almost-all instant-classic lines... (All just in my opinion, but it's the best opinion I'll ever have in this lifetime.)

(4) Most genius creatives usually only ever create one major masterpiece. I haven't yet read Underworld, but White Noise is - for my money - a masterpiece. It doesn't matter what else he wrote before, or writes after... With Heller, it was Catch-22. The rest of his novels I have read and was disappointed. (However his early short stories are fascinating, to see how his voice was before it developed into full-blown Catch-22 form. Sorry I digress, but I am a Creativity scholar and that stuff fascinates me.)

(5) More random praise for "White Noise": the fact that in interviews DeLillo talks about the `daily disaster' he noticed on the TV news (eg - a mud slide in Angola, earthquake in China, a plane crash in the US, etc), and the way The Airborne Toxic Event is even named (I find that name utterly hilarious), and the way people react, etc. Classic. Genius.

(6) I love the consilience of the novel, the way he keeps referring to scientific views of things. eg His idea of waves and radiation, and `psychic data' in supermarkets, etc.

(7) The satire of academia is priceless: The Cinema of Car Crashes. Hitler Studies. The way his colleague wants to set up `Elvis Studies' in the same vein. This stuff is pure gold. I can forgive him that every character speaks in that same voice -- as Catch-22 is the same thing: as long as we're on the `funny' rollercoaster, the ride is so much fun, who cares.

Anyway, that's just my 2c.

Cosmopolis also captured an ethos very well (the shallow, surreal life of a high-powered business exec). I saw the Cronenberg film of Cosmopolis recently, and like all Cronenberg's work, it was good, solid, and kind of weird, but I'm still glad I saw it.

Point Omega had moments of genius, but I was slightly disappointed with in places, as I'm a longtime filmmaker - and I don't think it worked as brilliantly, in so many directions, as White Noise. - I prefer the funny stuff, as opposed to the more sombre serious stuff. But, in my view (and it's the only view I've got) if anyone doesn't find White Noise an absolute comic masterpiece, they just must'nt `get it'... i.e. Maybe, they don't have a sense of humour? They're probably a Republican - or a lizard-alien, or both.

Anyway, all just my $0.02... `White Noise' is enough. Because of that novel alone, DeLillo is a creative genius, all else he writes is a bonus, even if it's not as great.

Cheers,

JT