Contemporary Literature

Hungerford, Amy.
Don DeLillo's Latin Mass
Contemporary Literature - Volume 47, Number 3, Fall 2006, pp. 343-380

University of Wisconsin Press

Amy Hungerford - Don DeLillo's Latin Mass - Contemporary Literature 47:3 Contemporary Literature 47.3 (2006) 343-380 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Don DeLillo's Latin Mass Amy Hungerford Yale University Don DeLillo has described himself as a writer essentially formed by the experiences of his early life in the Bronx, where he was born and raised, and where he attended Catholic schools until he graduated from Fordham University in the late fifties. While he does not discuss his family's Roman Catholicism in the same way he talks about his discovery of modern art and jazz in the city in the sixties, he nevertheless points to the Catholic fabric of his childhood and adolescence as the source of his most enduring preoccupations. The traces of this source can be found everywhere in DeLillo's novels, interviews, and essays: in his choice of words, in his subjects, in his imagery, in the ways he understands faith, belief, agency, guilt, redemption, and human relations. I will argue in this essay that DeLillo ultimately transfers a version of mysticism from the Catholic context into the literary one, and that he does so through the model of the Latin mass. This transfer does not, moreover, mark him as either doctrinaire or conservative in the sense that one might think; rather, it marks the way he skirts doctrine while maintaining a Catholic understanding of immanent transcendence. Because I am interested in how DeLillo makes that transfer, I...