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Interlude II Cyberspace and the Unconscious (Underworld III) I suggested at the outset of Part II that Don DeLillo’s Underworld is a great contemporary novel about the relationship between waste, weapons, and faith, the environmental crisis, the weapons industry, and religion. This network of associations or connections is sometimes explicit, conscious and aboveground, and sometimes just below the threshold, in the underworld or unconscious of memory and history. DeLillo’s use of the word or image of the underworld is itself a perfect example of this: it refers in the novel to the vast landfills that today pockmark our planet, to underground nuclear test sites, but also to the underworld of gangsters, where Nick’s father Jimmy is thought to have lived and died; it refers to catacombs , to the New York City subway system, and to the underground basement where Nick’s life changes forever as a loaded shotgun discharges in his hands, killing George Manza, a heroine addict who had aroused his interest, his anxiety, and his horror. These are the shades of Nick Shay’s underworld, ‘‘the underground of memory and collection’’ (U 321), the shades of a past that is seemingly long gone but that can nonetheless rise out of the ashes of memory and of mourning. Living now in Phoenix, descending into the underworld for him means not just going ‘‘back East’’ but back in time (U 333), breathing onto the embers of the past in order to revive what remains living within them. For Nick, then, the underworld is both his present and his past, his past as it seeps into the present —and that is, of course, the point: for how does one keep one’s underworlds separate, how does one dispose of one’s waste or one’s past 199 without fear of return? How can one draw a line between one’s desires and one’s fears, one’s dreams and one’s nightmares? ‘‘Underworld’’ thus names Nick’s past but also our own; it has been part of our cultural imagination ever since Odysseus recounted his travels to the land of the dead in book 11 of the Odyssey. It is also the name, as DeLillo reminds us, of both a 1927 gangster film and Sergei Eisenstein’s 1930s classic Unterwelt, a film that is described in detail at the center of the novel during a screening at Radio City Music Hall, a film that seems eerily prescient in its depiction of underground prisons, lasers, and nuclear weaponry.1 By the very end of the novel, underworld seems to be the best name for what we now call cyberspace, a vast network of interconnections that can bring together in just a couple of keystrokes the miracle and the machine, faith and weapons, one website devoted to miracles and another to the war machine that is the nuclear bomb. DeLillo thus ends Underworld with two sections entitled ‘‘Keystroke 1’’ (U 817–24) and ‘‘Keystroke 2’’ (U 824–27), the first revolving around a miracle in the Bronx and the second around the bomb and the interconnections made possible by the Internet, by the web that—or at least this is the phantasm —is capable of bringing the entire twentieth century into relationship with itself. ‘‘Is cyberspace a thing within the world,’’ the narrator asks, ‘‘or is it the other way around? Which contains the other, and how can you tell for sure?’’ On the Internet—and this will be the last reference to the title of the novel in the novel—you can ‘‘follow a word through the tunneled underworld of its ancestral roots’’ (U 826), a word, for example , like the last word of the novel, at once a noun and a greeting, a word that can be used in a constative or as a performative, as an idea or as a prayer—‘‘Peace’’—a word the narrator seems to utter, to whisper, whispering without whispering, breathing without breathing, perhaps, as he looks away from the screen, away from the underworld for a moment, to the everyday objects of the room around him. The underworld of Underworld is thus all of this and more—the unconscious , the past, a scene of crime, waste, and weapons, a place of nightmares and, of course, of the triumph of death, the realm ruled over by Hades or Pluto. As Nick Shay, waste management expert, reminds us early in the novel: ‘‘We built pyramids of waste above and below the earth. The...

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