Gone Fission: The Holocaustic Wit of Don DeLillo

Gone Fission: The Holocaustic Wit of Don DeLillo TOBY SILVERMAN ZINMAN Don DeLillo's best-selling novels are witty and erudite and full of such breathtakingly new information that he sometimes seems anthropologically clairvoyant - and, sometimes, they are laugh-out-Ioud funny. Because he is known primarily as a fiction writer, I will try to establish the themes and the images that span his nine novels before I address the ways these same themes and images inform his two plays, The Engineer of Moonlight' and The Day Room,' partly because the fiction is the dominant geme and partly because it is always interesting to see if and how an author can jump genres. I take Beckett's caveat to heart: " If we can't keep our gemes more or less distinct, or extricate them from the confusion that has them where they are, we might as well go home and lie down. " 3 The problem becomes additionally interesting because DeLillo's first play is, it seems to me, essentially nondramatic , while The Day Room achieves its geme brilliantly. DeLillo's overriding obsession is language and his overriding theme is death - not the physical act of dying, nor the metaphysical implications of Death, but the fear of dying as the crucial definition of our humanness, the most sensible response to OUf technological culture. In Ratner's Star one of the characters says that "No definition of science is complete without a reference to terror,"4 and in a rare interview, DeLillo spoke of our society as being "steeped in the idea of death. " 5 So it is not surprising that his work is fllled with anxiety-laden characters who inhabit bodies and worlds filled with arcane symptoms of undiagnosed conditions. DeLillo's super-slick fiction roams through such diverse subjects as international terrorism, exobiology, football, grief management, risk analysis, counter-intelligence, rock music, and astronomy; but, finally, as the main character of White Noise tells us, ..All plots .. . move deathward. ,,' In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag, writing about tuberculosis and cancer, tells us, "The very names of such diseases are felt to have a magic The Holocaustic Wit of Don DeLillo 75 power" 7 and laments the corrosive superstition that would have us believe that pronouncing the names of these diseases out loud hastens the course of the disease. But Don DeLillo deeply believes in the magic of the nominative act, and this idea is fundamental to his work; naming is the basis of language and language is the basis of life. DeLillo's most recent novel, Libra, published in 1988, is a huge, fictionalized account of the Kennedy assassination in which we learn that a loose-cannon cadre of the CIA dunnit; in it, there is a curious character named David Ferrie who is one of the primary operatives: Ferrie suffered from a rare and honific condition that had no cure. His body was one hundred percent bald. It looked like something pulled fro~ the earth, a tuberous stem or fungus esteemed by gounnets. But he wasn't about to give in, grow despondent. sit in a dark room drinking Tastee Shakes and jerking off. He had some lively interests. A cure for cancer was one interest, almost a lifelong interest.8 Indeed, in a book filled by players - and they are players rather than characters - who are obsessive, mainly about reclaiming Cuba from Castro, Ferrie's early comment is 'resonant: The question is can you cure the disease before it kills you? Once you set out consciously to cure the disease, as I did even before I knew the word cancer, you run the risk of catching it. Comprellde? Whatever you set your mind to, your personal total obsession, this is what kills you, (p. 46) Thus, it is foreseeable that Ferrie is found dead in his apartment five days after his name is linked to the assassination of the President. Although the coroner declares hjs death to be the result of «natura] causes," "some people wonder how Ferrie had time to type a farewell note to a friend in the middle of a brain hemorrhage ... " (p. 58). It is not so much that cancer becomes more and more...