Counterpoint and Counternarrative: Baseball, DeLillo’s “Pafko and the Wall,” and Harper’s Folio

In 1992, Harper’s Magazine launched its Folio section, dedicated to works that would provide a counterpoint to the rest of the magazine in terms of both length and content. The magazine chose Don DeLillo’s novella “Pafko at the Wall” to launch the section. DeLillo had a reputation for writing counternarratives to historical events, and his novella promised more of the same, undermining the nostalgia surrounding a 1951 playoff baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants. In order to promote this reading of DeLillo’s novella, Harper’s made several layout decisions that evoke the nostalgia surrounding the game and signal that DeLillo’s novella presents a counterpoint to that nostalgia. This essay examines those layout decisions, with particular attention to the six photographs that accompany the novella, demonstrating that the interplay between image and text in the 1992 publication reinforced DeLillo’s reputation as an author of counternarratives, while establishing Harper’s Folio as a place to find such counternarratives.