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5. Revelation of the Quantum Realm: Underworld and Against the Day
- University of Virginia Press
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Revelation of the Quantum Realm: Underworld and Against the Day The first reviews of Underworld in 1997 praised the opening prologue, a description of a 1951 baseball game; delighted in the number of characters and incidents; hailed the prose style and the backwards chronology ; and focused on the half-century of history, between the Cold War and its collapse, covered in the book. Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times in “Of America as a Splendid Junk Heap: A Novel That Tries to Grasp the Heft and Texture of 50 Years” declared it an “astonishing new novel . . . an amazing performance . . . a dazzling, phosphorescent work of art.” She lauded the wonderfully rich, elliptical narrative, filled with recapitulations, refrains and leitmotifs, a narrative that possesses all the improvisatory rhythm and magic of jazz . . . from real and imagined conspiracies to the media’s Heisenberg effect to the threat of terrorism and random violence . . . the incalculable losses of life, the vagaries of chance and fate . . . where paranoia has replaced religion as an organizing principle [with its] teeming Dickensian cast of baseball fanatics, conspiracy nuts, hustlers, con men, scientists, businessmen, schoolchildren, graffiti artists, and nurses. She also mentioned the many artists in the novel who transform waste into art, such as Klara Sax and the grounded B52s and the Watts Tower made out of available junk. What is interesting here is that Kakutani hits all the critical highlights that literary critics will tackle in depth later on: the structure, the style, the ellipti5 5 5 5 5 5 5 160 : quir ks of the qua ntum cal shape of the narrative, the reference to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the unresolved struggle between chance and fate, paranoia as religion, the overwhelming size and scope of the book, and DeLillo’s more personal style, less chilled sociology and a more penetrating probe of individual characters. We can see glimmerings of what quantum theory will help to confirm and explain. Other early reviewers focused on similar elements. In Time, Paul Gray also used the word “astonishing” and then proceeded to confront the polarized but unresolved vision of the novel: “Is this novel a vindication of paranoia or a critique of the human hunger for pattern?” Martin Amis, while praising Libra as “the through-the-roof masterpiece” in the New York Times Book Review, views DeLillo along with Robert Stone and Thomas Pynchon as writers taking over the American mainstream, emerging “beyond Updike and the Jews.” He isn’t certain if Underworld is a great novel or not but is convinced that DeLillo is a great novelist, dealing with the Cold War and the moral void that resulted from its reign. Polarities and contradictions that erupt from Underworld in very different forms and at very different times continue to fascinate reviewers, although they do not know exactly what to make of or do with them. Luc Sante in the New York Review of Books mentions Einstein’s “contradictions of being” and DeLillo’s “continual surprise at the fluidity and resilience of the human condition,” eager to make the reader see and appreciate these contradictions. Paul Gediman in the Boston Review reveals a more pointed description of Underworld’s structure: “Underworld is not held together by relationships of cause and effect but rather by the vaguer stuff of association, echo, and mirroring. . . . Some of the book’s many connections are ineffable quantum leaps . . . a vision of a world governed not by mere randomness but by something —with its proliferation of patterns and subpatterns and counterpatterns —very like a holy mystery” (emphasis added). Gediman goes on to proclaim the novel “a monumental feat of imagination.” In Sante’s and Gediman’s reviews we can see the ghost of quantum theory, the contradictions that are never resolved, the “leaps” that suggest something besides mere chance lies behind events, although exactly what it is remains “a holy mystery.” On the language of the novel DeLillo remarked in David Remnick’s New Yorker article “Exile on Main Street” that the prologue “is written with a sort [54.221.159.188] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 06:10 GMT) Revelation of the Quantum Realm : 161 of super-omniscience. There are sentences that may begin in one part of the ballpark and end in another. They become sort of travel-happy; they travel from one person’s mind to another” (44). In his own “The Power of History ” in the New York Times Magazine DeLillo also described fiction as “a kind of religious fanaticism, with elements...