The DeLillo Dilemma

Allen, Glen Scott.

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 53, Number 3, Fall 2007, pp.584-593 (Article)

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the delillo dilemma

Glen Scott Allen

Peter Boxall. Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction. London: Rout-ledge, 2006. xii + 252 pp.

David Cowart. Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2002. xi + 257 pp.

The novel is revolutionary, not only in its style but in its very appearance. Its frontispiece is an image of a block of marble, or is it a lily pond? And after that it only gets worse: pages filled entirely with asterisks, or entirely with nothing; plot digressions that ultimately are the plot; a narrator who intrudes continually and to no apparent purpose. It befuddles critics so thoroughly that they are reduced to in-vective, saying of it "nothing odd will do long," (Samuel Johnson) that it is "an impure presence," (William Thackeray) and an "irresponsible (and nasty) trifling" (F. R. Leavis) (Boswell 696; Howes 27; Ross x). The work's structure, style, dynamics, thematics—to say nothing of its punctuation—simply don't fit into the usual categories. The novel is, of course, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, often called postmodern even though it was first published in 1759, well before there was any modernism to be post. Like, that is, other "postmodern" works such as The Satyricon (61 AD), or Tale of Genji (1000 AD), or Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532).

In other words, the "post" of postmodernism is, to say the least, an inconvenient if not meaningless prefix, and the overall term's definitions are as varied as its examples. Certainly some postmodern works seem to be antirealist, others to be modernism on steroids, and

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others focused on the cultural dynamics of late capitalism. A critic's choice of which of these attributes to use as the reason to label a work as postmodern seems most dependent on their critical approach: new criticism, poststructuralism, or Marxism, take your pick.

Is Don DeLillo postmodern? Since his early works, critics have tried to read DeLillo, in his concerns about individual freedom of action as well as his stylistic independence, as either exemplary of American literary traditions, or conversely as a radical postmodernist. Neither placement seems quite right, as clearly DeLillo's work is too stylistically innovative and thematically sophisticated to be comfort-able among the vast majority of mainstream American fiction, even American modernist fiction; yet it is too stark, streamlined, and more often than not primarily concerned with American landscapes—urban as well as suburban—to be quite typically postmodern. Thus DeLillo fits uneasily into postmodernism, the way Ernest Hemingway seems unconvincingly jammed into modernism, neither quite the exemplar of their respective categories. Certainly DeLillo doesn't look like Robert Coover, Donald Barthleme, Italo Calvino, or John Barth, any more than Hemingway remotely resembles Gertrude Stein or Wil-liam Faulkner. In attempts to outflank this categorical conundrum, contemporary critics often read DeLillo through one critical prism or another, applying a single organizing thematic focus in addition to, or substitution for, postmodernism in their struggle with an oeuvre that stubbornly resists tidy unification.

Both of the books under discussion use such central organizing principles for their analyses of DeLillo's entire production to date. Such a comprehensive project is a daunting task, and both Peter Boxall and David Cowart bring immense erudition, sophistication, and impressive referential breadth to their works. However, in both cases it is this very overarching thematic that sometimes obscures and at other times warps their readings of DeLillo's works.

The frontispiece of Boxall's book declares that his goal is to ask of DeLillo "how far his writing can be thought of as an enact-ment of the possibilities of literary fiction." Such a formulation of the relationship between possibility and fiction is one of the two major problems I have with the thematics of this book. While it is true that in DeLillo, "[t]he writer . . . is under threat . . . from new forms of mass communication" it does not follow that "his writing charts the disappearance of critical fiction" (x). Boxall suggests that in DeLillo, as in Samuel Beckett before him, what is called postmodern is a re-sponse to the end of the possibilities of traditional literary fiction. More specifically, Boxall's definition of the possible is based on a statement by Ernst Bloch during the Cold War political climate of 1964, wherein Bloch suggested that possibility was equally threatening to both the

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right and the left: to the former because it meant change and to the later because it meant distraction. These politics of the possible are important to Boxall's argument because his context for reading all of DeLillo's work is in the post-9/11 world of the "globalization of capital," where 9/11 is read as a "violent resistance to western hege-mony" (2). The possible is, then, for Boxall, a category of resistance to and subversion of the dominant cultural paradigm, as that which, in Bloch's phrase, "has not yet become conscious" (2).

But to support this angle of approach to DeLillo—or for that mat-ter any writer—one must believe that possibility has in fact somehow been exhausted in traditional literature. And furthermore one must forget that this debate is not a new one. One might argue that such "possibilities" were created by Tristram Shandy as well as all the other problematic novels before it, or, more recently, one might recall the intense debate surrounding the publication of John Barth's essay "The Literature of Exhaustion" in the Atlantic Monthly in 1967. In that essay, Barth argued that Beckett represented much the same kind of answer to this theorized exhaustion that Boxall sees in DeLillo.

Beckett's work, Boxall suggests, "marks the exhaustion of the possibility of fiction", (3) an exhaustion supposedly encapsulated in the famous last few words of The Unnamable as "I can't go on, I'll go on" (Beckett 414). But such a reading misses the point of the title. Any thing, finally, is unnamable, due to the absolute separation of the world of words from the world of things. This unbridgeable gulf is the abyss on which all of Beckett's and most of DeLillo's work stands. Boxall states that the line "brings fiction up against a blank and un-navigable aporia." But it doesn't do this at all, nor does it bring us to a kind of "closure, or impasse" (3). Just as there is no possibility of adequately or accurately naming any thing with words, there is no possibility for ceasing the attempt. That's what fiction—any fic-tion, postmodern or otherwise—is, an attempt at naming. Beckett's statement isn't a shrug of frustration, but a deeply honest, even comic appraisal of the absolute impossibility of ever accomplishing that which realist fiction or literal language claims to accomplish. This honest, macabre realization serves as the heart of both Beckett's and DeLillo's oeuvres.

Boxall is on much firmer ground when he says that DeLillo's work seems constantly worried that the "work of cultural critique [has been] handed over to terrorists" (4). This is the concern the character William Gray addresses explicitly in Mao II when he says that "Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of culture. Now, bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that ter-ritory. They make raids on human consciousness" (87). Specifically, in Boxall's discussion of The Names and White Noise, he notes how

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both narrators decry the consumerist orthodoxy of contemporary America, creating a language climate where "remarks exist in a state of permanent flotation" (88). This would suggest the end of referential language, a theme I believe DeLillo addresses more fully in Ratner's Star, but which is certainly present to a greater or lesser extent in all his novels. Boxall suggests this thematic arises from DeLillo's fear of globalized capital, but I believe that is only the symptom. Language is the root cause. Boxall rightly notes that what DeLillo fears about capitalism is its mass-market commercialization of resistance to the mass market: Che Guevara on a t-shirt, Mao by Andy Warhol. Capital's most powerful defensive strategy is, after all, its ability to absorb even its fiercest critiques and to turn them into expressions of itself. DeLillo is certainly aware of this strategy as a barrier to ef-fective critique. But he understands that this inability arises not from some conspiracy of globalized capital, but from the very language by which capitalism—or any other ism—expresses itself.

Boxall quotes Beckett saying in 1937 that "language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it" (9). I would characterize this as the frustration of all modernists, still laboring under the illusion of realism and its belief that there was some "under" to the world of words to get at. The postmodern Beckett and the postmodern DeLillo know there is no thing behind language—except more language. The absence of this critical component of poststructuralist theory is the basis of my major disappointment with both of these works.

For instance, it is a misreading of poststructuralism to suggest, as Boxall does, that it presents only two options: "the abandonment of the possibility of critique," or "the possibility of its persistence" (12). It is similarly wrong to suggest that Jacques Derrida, Giles Deleuze et al are "organized around the impossibility of . . . critical space" (12). Rather, deconstruction argues, like Einsteinian physics, that there is no such thing as a privileged position from which to enact or interpret language; all meaning is relative to the interpretive context. Derrida's critique of the traditional Enlightenment notion of critique is centered not on the impossibility of a critical space, but rather on the impossibility of that space existing somehow separated from that which it critiques, on some other rhetorical level or outside the textual space it engages. Therefore, when Boxall quotes Derrida as saying "critique and non-critique are fundamentally the same," he is missing Derrida's meaning (12). Both are rhetorical forms whose meaning is derived more from what we call them than from anything inherent in the forms themselves.

This is, to use a Derridean phrase, a blindspot these works share. For instance, Boxall quotes Cowart saying of poststructuralist theory

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that it "misvalues and belies language" and that DeLillo "charts new territory for literary art in fictions that constantly probe language for an epistemological depth largely denied by poststructuralist theory" (14). Cowart's statements and Boxall's praise of them demonstrate a mutual misunderstanding of poststructuralist theory generally and Derrida specifically. This misunderstanding is evident when Boxall discusses the role of revelation and apocalypse in many of DeLillo's novels, from the airborne toxic event of White Noise to the arrival of mohole rich space in Ratner's Star. As he rightly points out, the actual revelatory moment never arrives in DeLillo (much as it is absent in Thomas Pynchon, as in The Crying of Lot 49). But such a writerly strategy represents a debunking of the very idea of revelation rather than, as Boxall reads it, an inability to reveal.

This strategy is part and parcel of DeLillo's understanding of the dynamics of language, how strong the illusions it creates are, and how fierce must be the commitment to refusing to roll out tradi-tional illusions, like plot, climax, or resolution. Or truth. Or literality. In an earlier essay in Postmodern Culture, I've suggested that the unrevealed revelation at the end of Ratner's Star is the merging of the literal world of things with the metaphorical world of words —the crossing of the abyss to which I referred earlier—but with the recognition that such a universe would be inexpressible, incoherent in any of the ways we understand coherence.

In fact, the role of mathematics in Ratner's Star can be taken as the role of language throughout DeLillo. When Billiy Twillig says that his field of mathematical study, zorgs, has no application, one thinks of the current critiques of String Theory as elegant language detached from experimental validation (as in the book by physicist Peter Woit titled Not Even Wrong). Boxall rightly characterizes the novel's treatment of mathematics as follows: "Rather than regard-ing numbers as signs which make useful reference to the world, the novel is fascinated by their non-referential, formal beauty, their intricate substructures, their endlessly involuted internal mechan-ics" (51). This is in fact a very apt description of how all language operates in DeLillo's novels, as DeLillo realizes that math is, after all, just another language. Boxall again gets it right when he says that Ratner's Star "is organised . . . around a poetic exploration of the point at which language and poetry and thought meet with the unseeable, the unreadable and the unthinkable" (51). However, he sees DeLillo's awareness of the limits and complexities of language as a kind of failure of literary imagination; again, as statements about the end of possibility rather than the impossibility of such an end existing anywhere in language: "The beauty of mathematics is that it provides, through its sheer, unmediated, logical perfection, a

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language that can bring together the utterly dissimilar" (56). But in fact the utterly logical language of Logicon in the novel is meant to reveal the emptiness of this view. Boxall comes closest to realizing this when he discusses the message from the stars that Twillig is meant to "decode": "But if the message speaks . . . of the uncontain-ability of number, of a kind of willful numerical disobedience, it also suggests an opposite tendency, the tendency for number to become self-referring, self-duplicating, and hermetically sealed" (57). Well this is what language is, what it can only be.

Later, in discussing the mysterious cult in The Names, Boxall states that "[t]he meaning of the cult cannot be approached directly, or spoken in words, because it works at the very point at which language meets the world . . . in which language and the world are knotted together" (100). That is a most succinct declaration of the blind spot to which I referred earlier, in that, in DeLillo's novels as in poststructuralist theory, language and the world are never "knotted together." What Boxall calls "that region between signifier and signified which might be thought of as the space which determines the very possibility of writing," and "that mysterious magnetic space, that glues names to things" is in fact a region that is not a space and a glue that does not bind (104, 101). Steeped in poststructuralist understandings of language as DeLillo's works are—Players is practically a primer of Lacanian theory, Mao II a treatise on Jean Baudrillard's notion of simulacra, Ratner's Star a meditation on Paul de Man and his theory of allegorical language—such statements are disappointing.

Boxall suggests the Bucky Wunderlick in Great Jones Street wishes to "perform an action that is devoid of significance," but ev-erything in his novels suggests that DeLillo knows that is an impos-sible goal (38). Any utterance will be interpreted, even Wunderlick's silence. There are countless examples in DeLillo's fiction of characters resorting to silence in an attempt to outflank the all-encompass-ing power of commodification and depersonalization, and most of these attempts lead only to reinterpretation of that silence by their community and culture. This is not, as Boxall reads it, a sort of Borgian dictum that "resistance is futile," but rather a recognition that silence is part of language and therefore subject to the same dynamics as any other utterance. All the novels seek an act that can escape becoming immediately commodified, reproduced, hijacked, and emptied of uniqueness. And they know language can never be that escape—if anything can. This is the modernist's dream and the postmodernist's nightmare. When, in Beckett's Ohio Impromptu, the last line states "there is nothing left to tell," Beckett's point isn't to be interpreted literally as there's nothing left to tell; the statement itself in fact tells us something: that the narrator is telling us about

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having nothing left to tell. Rather it suggests that there is no, there can be no such thing as the exhaustion of telling. There is no end of possibility in fiction.

Unless perhaps one considers death to be the ultimate silence, the final uncolonizeable act. Boxall brings considerable critical focus to the theme of death in DeLillo's novels, and his chapter on the role of death in The Names, "Writing and Apostasy," is arguably the best in the book, presenting truly fascinating associations and analyses ranging widely across eras and cultures. Here he argues that the work of the cult is an attempt to link word with thing: "Death occurs in the space of a correspondence between body, place, and language," which might be said of the way death operates in every DeLillo novel (99). However, I believe the best example of what death represents in terms of resistance to cultural usurpation of meaning is to be found in Mao II, in the anonymous death of the writer William Gray.

Boxall discusses the importance of terrorism in DeLillo in his chapter on Mao II, "Terrorism and Globalisation." It might be argued that the quintessential act of terrorism is the suicide bombing, and as a public political enactment of what is typically a private gesture of despair it reveals much about the dynamics and limits of terrorism as politics. DeLillo knows this, and that is why Gray, who makes the most explicit link between terrorists and writers of any of DeLillo's characters, constructs his own suicide as an act of utmost anonym-ity, transcending—or, again, attempting to transcend—this dynamic of resistance reabsorbed. It is an act of antisuicide, with no note (other than his unpublished novel) left behind. In other words, when the culture you wish to critique commodifies all critique, you write a novel critiquing the commodification of critique, even as it critiques the very notion of critiquing the commodification of critique. DeLillo is as cognizant of Kurt Gödel as he is of Derrida and Lacan, that is to say, there is no escaping commodification by writing a novel that is published and sold, just as there is no escaping the limits of language via some metalanguage. When George Haddad says to William Gray "give [the artist] a dollar. Put him in a TV commercial," DeLillo is eating his cake and critiquing it too (Mao II 157).

Boxall's analysis is also at its best with the trilogy of early DeLillo: Americana, End Zone, and Great Jones Street. In discussing these novels, Boxall recognizes a kind of nostalgia for an America that per-haps never was, but always imagined it could be: "the possibility of a wild western America, an America living beyond the colonizing power of the USA, in which the population 'lived off roots and berries but no symbols'" (25). This "possibility" is however deeply complicated by DeLillo's recognition that, while fiction will never, can never exhaust the possibilities of symbols, it can also never live without them.

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The central thematic of David Cowart's book is also contained in his subtitle, The Physics of Language. And his use of that word "physics" is ultimately the focus of my disagreements with the book, as with Boxall's use of possibility. But also as with Boxall's book, Cowart's individual readings of DeLillo's novels are extremely insight-ful, often brilliant.

As Cowart says, one of DeLillo's most distinctive talents is his "uncanny ear . . . for vernacular . . . He is an adept parodist of the specialized discourses that proliferate in contemporary society" (92). Thus DeLillo's writing is an especially attractive subject for a close reading of language, and using the scientific vernacular of physics would seem an entirely appropriate approach for such a study. Un-fortunately, while Cowart does an excellent job of reading key scenes from several of DeLillo's novels, he never really makes a case for how physics supplies his overarching metaphors or methodologies.

As I said, Cowart's linguistic analysis of DeLillo is for the most part quite deft, but, as in Boxall, there is a frustrating absence of poststructuralist understandings of linguistic exigencies that would seem absolutely key to a full linguistic appreciation. While I would agree that in the novels "language commonly represents only itself" I would disagree with the conclusion he draws from this tendency, to wit, that "the named thing escapes" (87). I would argue that this statement doesn't quite capture the spirit of the novels, where things named are indifferent to the naming process, not aware of it and try-ing to elude it. But Cowart is right in suggesting the novels suggest a resistance to what I have elsewhere called the postmodern terror of modern language, and that this resistance is offered, as it only can be, through language itself. However, in a long list of characters who attempt—and, Cowart argues, fail—to establish resistance through language, Cowart fails to mention the female character Tammy from Players. Specifically, Tammy's resistance is not seen as futile, and she ultimately does seem to achieve a kind of separate peace, not by escaping language—which again I would argue DeLillo knows is impossible—but rather by refusing to play the postmodern linguistic games of contemporary consumer American society and creating, to the extent possible, her own language. This does not mean, as Cowart argues, that "DeLillo's texts in fact undermine this postmod-ern gospel" of language as inescapable, but rather that they posit appropriate resistance as only to be found in contesting the control of language exercised by the powers that be and turning it to one's own ends (5).

One of the weakest chapters is, unfortunately, the first one, on the novel End Zone, intriguingly titled "Football and Unsäglichkeit." A rather meandering monologue on football, it seems more suited to

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a discussion of A Fan's Notes than End Zone. Perhaps this problem arises from the fact that the book is organized chronologically by novel, as is Boxall's, rather than thematically. It would be fascinat-ing, for example, to examine novels like Americana and Cosmopolis, or Mao II and The Body Artist, for the thematics they share, rather than treat them separately merely because of their publication dates. But this is a problem inherent in viewing all the novels through some single critical lens.

Throughout his book, Cowart is at his best when he is analyzing DeLillo's signature rendering of American idioms. DeLillo does know more about rhetoric as distinguished from common language than any other living American writer, including Pynchon: "the way language mediates between American sterility and the world's complexity. In language DeLillo locates the register or index of that sterility and the energy that might reverse it" (25). This "sterility" of postmodern American language is often presented in DeLillo's work as jargon which is drained of context and reference, as "alien linguistic units" (to use Billy Twillg's phrase), such as in the following exchange: "What is your thermal passover mode control?" "Vector five and locking" (qtd. in Cowart 25) But DeLillo isn't merely lampooning scientific language as all manner and no meaning, for even the most casual exchanges between characters express a similar decontextualized, areferential emptiness, as though modern conversation had become mere gesture toward communication, rather than communication itself.

In a reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein, Cowart sees this tech-nique as an expression of DeLillo's belief in "the tension between what language can express and lauter Unsägliches ('wholly untellable things')" (26). But this is Wittgenstein and Monday Night Football, not physics. And of course the idea that any story is finally in any absolute sense untellable is a fundamental precept of postmodern-ism—but again, not of physics.

This is all not to say that the individual chapters aren't good, because they are very good, especially the close readings of scenes from Players in the chapter "Mortal Stakes." Ultimately, this book seems more a study of the mysticism rather than the physics of DeLillo's language, and the phrase Cowart uses to describe that lan-guage, "mystical linguistics," does indeed characterize the uncanny, often surreal aura of his writing (8). But, to repeat, mysticism isn't physics, and this book would I think have benefited from an engage-ment with more linguists, especially Ferdinand de Saussure, and fewer philosophers.

Ultimately, these are the kind of disagreements that literary criticism is all about, and it takes books as good as Boxall's and Cowart's to provide the depth necessary to raise such complicated

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questions and concerns as I've raised here. My criticisms aside, I would recommend both of these books to all readers interested in DeLillo for the insights they provide into the labyrinthine nuances of DeLillo's enormously complicated oeuvre.

Works Cited

Allen, Glen Scott. "Raids on the Conscious: Pynchon's Legacy of Paranoia and the Terrorism of Uncertainty in Don DeLillo's Ratner's Star." Postmodern Culture 4.2 (1994) <http://www3/iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.194/allen.194>

Beckett, Samuel. Three Novels by Samuel Beckett. New York: Grove, 1977.

Boswell, James. Boswell's life of Johnson. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980.DeLillo, Don. Mao II. New York: Penguin, 1991.———. Ratner's Star. New York: Vintage, 1980. Howes, Alan B. Laurence Sterne: The Critical Heritage. Oxford: Rout-

ledge, 1995.Ross, Ian Campbell. "Introduction." The Life and Opinions of Tristam

Shandy, Gentleman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.