DeLillo's Thing: Democracy and Reason in Underworld

Stefan Mattessich

It is not otherwise touchable somehow, for all the menacing heft and breadth of material, the actual pulsing thing...

Underworld (805)

For all that Don DeLillo’s characters are given over to an almost unbearable randomness, contending with the liquidated value of their thoughts, actions, and feelings in an indifferent narrative universe, they remain remarkably balanced, lucid in and about their own facticity. We sense this in Lee Harvey Oswald’s rationalizations of anonymity, slowly maturing into an act of assassination in Libra; Jack Gladney’s willful courting of the “death” he also fears in White Noise; or Bill Gray’s fatal recoil from, and descent into, the world of political violence in Mao II. In each case consciousness is not simply a matter of something his characters refuse to admit in themselves. On the contrary they are always laying things bare, to the point of threatening our ability to take them seriously. If they are not caricatures of the sort we expect from a Pynchon or a Barthelme, we can say that DeLillo constructs for them psychic topologies of a distinctly two-dimensional compression, in which unconscious depth, telescoped to a sentient surface, forms a kind of blind spot in thought, or speck in the eye of perception, like the stigmatic point of a star in the twilight of their postmodern limbo.

These psychic topologies, and the peculiar consciousness they suggest, reflect DeLillo’s interest in the subjective experience of change in the structures of American democracy since the end of the Second World War. This change consists, to put it plainly, in a hardening of liberal democratic social and political hierarchies into oligarchic forms of power and wealth. Especially in the years since 9/11 it has become apparent that the political establishment in America (whether democrat or republican, neoliberal or neocon) sees democracy, in its classical liberal sense, as an anachronism. The traditional function of a political class to mediate the reason (or logos) that it deemed people could not provide themselves, never particularly egalitarian, fit nonetheless within the bounds of a juridical proceduralism that meant in principle accountability to people and for the social conditions sufficient to the (at least minimal) exercise of democratic passions. What we are witnessing now is the abandonment by this class of its representative responsibility, indexed in the corporate straightjacketing of the legislative branch, the strengthening of executive power, the curtailment of civil liberties for the sake of security, and the monopolization of mass media. Concomitant with this, we see a depoliticized polity pressed to find the equivalents of those democratic passions in private life (domestic, consumerist) while their public conditions of possibility erode out from under it.

DeLillo has been recording this erosion, and its consequences for both the individual and society, his entire career, from the earliest novels to his most recent, tellingly entitled, Falling Man. For this reason his fiction helps us to trace in the post-Second World War era the contours of a slowly maturing anti-democratic paradigm, particularly where it conditions a privatized subjectivity and deflects social communication into more and more empty forms. We sense the effect of this paradigm today in the difficulty we have making reason, causality, facts, interest, or even opinion count in a public sphere subordinated to the agendas of the “rogue” political establishment (or the global economic powers it does represent). More disturbingly, it could be argued that the knot in the legitimation strategy purveyed by this establishment tightens when people demand of the state that it coincide with its own principles, or exhort renewed commitments to civic participation, political action, and a re-invigorated expression. The better metaphor here might thus be a vicious circle, since the engagement we call for in each instance presupposes what is at the same time lacking: democracy itself.

In saying this, of course, one recalls the negative foundation that has always determined the democratic concept for political philosophy; what makes the current situation exceptional, therefore, lies less in the dilemma it discloses than in the way it commits us to the disavowal of just how disenfranchised we really are. Without...