Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language

Introduction

Introduction In his acute rendering of the bi-millennial moment, Don DeLillo ranks among the most important of contemporary novelists. But the trend away from books on single authors (a trend much discussed in the academic press) threatens even the most distinguished of living writers with premature obscurity—at least insofar as their reputations depend on acts of scholarly attention and commitment. If literature is to have any place in the increasingly utilitarian curriculum of the future, its academic custodians in the present must do a better job of articulating the unique importance of great works of the imagination . On the other hand, with the exception of certain lapidaryprécieux, the best contemporary writers embrace an encyclopedic range that confounds or precludes narrow-gauge analysis. Good DeLillo criticism, in any event, properly engages the whole landscape of postmodernism. It also engages the supreme humanities subject, the one that subsumes the specialized discourses of i science and mathematics as it ties together linguistics, literature, philosophy, history, anthropology, sociology, theology, and psychology. This subject, not emphasized in the otherwise admirable book-length studies of DeLillo by LeClair, Keesey, and Osteen, islanguage. The present book focuses on DeLillos career-long exploration of language as cultural index, as "deepest being," as numinosum. Throughout his twelve novels, DeLillo foregrounds language and the problems of language. He has an uncanny ear for the mannered, elliptical, non sequitur-ridden rhythms of vernacular conversation (the common response to "thank you" has somehow become "no problem"). He is an adept parodist of the specialized discourses that proliferate in contemporary society—in sport, business, politics, academe, medicine, entertainment, and journalism. The jargons of science, technology, and military deterrence offer abundant targets , too. But the authors interest in these discourses goes beyond simple parody, and it is the task of criticism to gauge the extra dimensions of DeLillos thinking about language. Though DeLillo strikes many readers as sui generis, his books are nonetheless highly representative of the most sensitive and innovative work being done in current American fiction. In a not altogether friendly review of the 1977 novel Players, John Updike admitted that Don DeLillo has, as they used to sayof athletes, class. He is original, versatile, and, in his disdain of last year s emotional guarantees, fastidious. He brings to human phenomena the dispassionate mathematics and spatial subtleties of particle physics. Into our technology-riddled daily lives he reads the sinister ambiguities, the floating ugliness of Americas recent history.1 In analyzing the oeuvre of a writer so gifted, one seeks fresh perspectives on contemporary literature. At the same time, one explores some of the basic aesthetic principles of the age. Tobe sure, DeLillo has contributed to the substantial , growing body of literature that explores the essential circularity of signification in all its forms. Since the publication of his first novel in 1971, he has taken his place among the postmodern masters, the writers who recognize, more or less instinctively, that language commonly represents only itself. The enigmatic quality of the DeLillo aesthetic suggests a recognition that language will always resist and betray attempts by the unsubtle to make it a transparent medium, a window on the world of things. Immured in language, one has, like Nabokov s Humbert Humbert, only words to play with—words that refer to other words and such reality as words may construct, but never to the world in its extralinguistic integrity. The named thing escapes. 2 Introduction Some postmodernists embrace this doctrine and specializein the creation of separate, autonomous worlds wholly discontinuous with the familiar terra. This "ontological" emphasis, according to Brian McHale, is a major element in the postmodernist aesthetic.2 A writer like John Hawkes is typical: he prides himself on making worlds, not reproducing or imitating them. Other practitioners —Nabokov, again, or Coover in The Universal Baseball Association or Kundera in Immortality—like to stage encounters, even contests, between their created worlds and the genuine article. In doing so they devise ontological puzzles, usually at the expense of traditional views of reality, and invite readers to admire the ease with which their factitious worlds achieve legitimacy alongside —and interact with—the préexistent world. The achievement of a rare art, the perfectly hermetic fictions of such writers, resistant to all but selfreferential meanings, invite recognition of a seemingly infinite tolerance of the image and its ontological pretensions. Two-dimensionality is the signature of the age. Americans live in an...