The Beautiful, Horrifying Past: Nostalgia and Apocalypse in Don DeLillo's Underworld

In a New York Times article published shortly before Underworld (1997), Don DeLillo claims, "The novel is the dream release, the suspension of reality that history needs to escape its own brutal confinements."¹ He then provocatively invokes Aristotle's distinction between history and poetry, favoring the latter for its transformative powers. At its best, in other words, the historical novel becomes poetic exactly as a way of suspending history in order to comprehend it. The writer's task, DeLillo contends, is to fight through language "the vast and uniform Death that history tends to fashion as its most enduring work."² DeLillo's 11th novel, Underworld, engages in such a struggle.

The notion of history in Underworld has been most often analyzed through tropes of commodification or paranoia in the context of the 1950s Cold War.³ Apocalypse and nostalgia—the focal points of this essay that are approached in relation to the (post-)Cold War era—have not been in the center of critical attention even though they were associated with the questions of historical memory and the fear induced by the Cold War.⁴ I argue, however, that the critical attention to the themes of nostalgia and apocalypse provides a new insight into the novel and the historical moment upon which it concentrates. But the nostalgic and apocalyptic themes of the novel are not projected into the past or the future; instead, they exist within the present. In that sense, nostalgia and apocalypse are correctives to the contemporary moment. Even more importantly, the focus on nostalgia and apocalypse reveals the characters' discomfort in their own present; the characters long for the moments when history was horrifying and the days in which they dreaded the apocalypse. They are nostalgic—despite all of the attempts of denial—because the approaching end of the world seemingly stabilizes in their view the global order. In other words, they are nostalgic for the time during which they dreaded the apocalypse.

A close reading of the novel, focused in particular on nostalgia that the characters express toward the apocalyptic moments of the Cold War and the actual catastrophic elements of the Cold War period, suggests that history in Underworld is formed as an abiding conflict between nostalgia and apocalypse. DeLillo's characters reject their present because they recognize in it a source of their existential uneasiness caused by the changed historical conditions. In this essay, the characters' discomfort is analyzed first in relation to their present (1990s) and then their past (1950s-1960s), while the essay's conclusion is an effort to answer questions, posed by DeLillo's narrative, about historical ends and a possibility of historicizing the American contemporary moment. But even the attempt at the end of the novel to reconcile the political conflicts and historical discrepancies within the World Wide Web (WWW), as well as the character's identity dilemmas—announced by the word peace—points back to nostalgia for a more structured world that is, paradoxically, marked by a threat of looming apocalypse.

Order of the Past

What I really want to get at is the ordinary thing, the ordinary life behind the thing. Because that's the heart and soul of what we're doing here.

—Don DeLillo, Underworld (1997, p. 77)

Nostalgia is longing for a time that cannot be restored in the present. Linda Hutcheon claims that nostalgia marks "the invocation of a partial, idealized history [that] merges with a dissatisfaction with the present,"⁵ while Svetlana Boym divides nostalgia into reflective and restorative; the former critically looks at the past and is often expressed through works of art, whereas the latter "attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home"⁶ and is associated with kitsch and "midnight melancholias."⁷ Ascribing an aesthetic value to nostalgia, Boym adds that restorative nostalgia is the basis for all national and religious revivals of a specific historical moment, whereas reflective nostalgia can present "an ethical and creative challenge"⁸ to the moment. Although Underworld's nostalgia is often more reflective than restorative, the novel contains both aspects of nostalgia...