Embedded and Embodied Memories: Body, Space, and Time in Don DeLillo's White Noise and Falling Man

Don DeLillo has long been concerned with the nature of time, the minute details of human existence, and how human beings interact with the spaces and places around them. Indeed, his 2010 novel Point Omega features a character who reflects on the nature of time as he watches the movie Psycho, slowed to an excruciating pace. Other characters, including a filmmaker and a war expert named Elster, discuss time, space, and the city. The desert is compared to New York, where "other people are conflict" (23) and life consists of a "minute-to-minute reckoning" (44) that is meant to counteract terror; in contrast, the desert reveals "Time that precedes us and survives us" (44). Literature once provided ballast against the terror of time, creating meaning, but now Elster claims that we are driving toward extinction, the point omega that will remove consciousness and return us to "inorganic matter" (53) in a "sublime transformation of mind and soul or some worldly convulsion" (72). This theory is, however, undermined by the disappearance and possible murder of Elster's daughter, Jessie. At that point, the supreme individuality of trauma supersedes philosophy:

It seemed so much dead echo now. Point omega. A million years away. The omega point has narrowed, here and now, to the point of a knife as it enters a body. All the man's grand themes funneled down to local grief, one body, out there somewhere, or not.

(98)

This condensed, elliptical novel takes DeLillo's interest in philosophy to an extreme; it portrays almost no action, slowing literature down to a process of meditation. Though Point Omega is not the focus of my discussion here, it does reflect DeLillo's longstanding interest in issues of the body, space, and time, an interest that has been particularly well developed in his work of the past decade.

Especially in his later novels, DeLillo creates condensed narratives that echo in their very form his focus on minute details reflecting his characters' bodies, thoughts, and environments. Repeated concerns in The Body Artist, Cosmopolis, Falling Man, and Point Omega include the nature of embodiment (or consciousness as contained in a physical form), how human beings experience time, city spaces as opposed to natural landscapes like the desert or the country, and how the author might represent pain or trauma. In particular, Falling Man (2007) addresses the loss of life on 9/11 and demonstrates an ethics of embodiment that focuses on how trauma affects the individual, and how individuals need to connect with the people and places around them in order to heal and to create a stable identity. The iconic White Noise (1985) is particularly useful as a point of comparison because it deals directly with memory, loss, and subjectivity through a focus on the body and its vulnerability. This novel analyzes how individuals relate to spaces and places; it reveals a decentered subject, Jack Gladney, who cannot orient himself in his world, with DeLillo suggesting no solution to his problems. White Noise is of course somewhat anomalous in DeLillo's body of work, reflecting an ironic postmodern sensibility that he does not maintain in his later novels, although he continues to question certain aspects of postmodern life. His turning away from this type of postmodernism reflects his interest in going beneath the surface of American life and meditating more deeply on the nature of individual and cultural trauma, as well as its intersection with the experience of time and embodiment. This practice prepared him to deal artistically with 9/11; in Falling Man, he counters any sense of celebration regarding the postmodern subject and implicitly advocates a movement past modernism and postmodernism, instead invoking an embodied ethics that examines the individual's relationship to place, to the body, and to others.¹

Beginning with White Noise, I will show DeLillo's desire for depth of thought and a stronger sense of identity as related to place, moving beyond ecocritical divisions between nature and the urban to investigate the mnemonic effects of what Frank Lentricchia calls...