Timothy L. Parrish - From Hoover's FBI to Eisenstein's Unterwelt: DeLillo Directs the Postmodern Nov

8/17/2019 Timothy L. Parrish - From Hoover's FBI to Eisenstein's Unterwelt: DeLillo Directs the Postmodern Nov

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Copyright © 1999 The Purdue Research Foundation. All rights reserved.

odern Fiction Studies 45.3 (1999) 696-723

From Hoover's FBI to Eisenstein's Unterwelt : DeLilloDirects the Postmodern Novel

Timothy L. Parrish *

II. Postmodern Art and Authorship

Fiction rescues history from its confusions. It provides the balance and rhythm wedon't experience in our daily lives, in our real lives. So the novel which is withinhistory can also operate outside it--correcting, clearing up and, perhaps mostimportant of all, nding rhythms and symmetries that we simply don't encounterelsewhere.

--Don DeLillo qtd. in DeCurtis

Don DeLillo's often stated assertion that he writes in opposition to the culture he depicts raisesa critical conundrum that typies his ction and is endemic to postmodern ction generally.That is, DeLillo's work raises the question: is it possible for a writer to produce ctions that arenot in turn absorbed by the cultural forces out of which they are made? Critics haveconsistently identied DeLillo's remarkable ability to construct in his novels conictingnarratives [End Page 696] inected through varying representations of media (music, radio,lm, photography, television, video). To many readers, however, DeLillo's almost uncannyability to recreate in his narratives the ontological instability that characterizes postmodernismis incompatible with the aims of ction. John Johnston says of Libra that it communicates "anessentially unrepresentable multiplicity whose every manifestation is entangled with conictingversions and contaminated physical evidence" (321). Glen Thomas suggests that in DeLillo'swork "information refuses to coalesce and remains stubbornly fragmentary" (109). Speaking of

Mao II , another critic observes that "one misses" in reading this novel "an old-fashionednovelistic virtue, the attempt to communicate the distinctive accents of a culture" (Scanlan246). 1 The irony that critics repeatedly face is that DeLillo's ability to deconstruct "old-fashioned novelistic virtues" is in large part what enables his work to capture the distinctiveaccents of postmodern culture.

DeLillo's readers thus nd themselves in a critical bind. On the one hand, they delight in thevirtuosity of his multimedia mimicry--his ability to transmit a range of media forms through hisnarratives seriatim. That the very success of his narrative mimicry leads readers to worry thathe is an impersonator co-opted by the narrative forms that he replays suggests how difcult it isfor DeLillo to succeed in being both innovative and in control of his ction. 2 Confronted witha demanding and difcult writer like DeLillo, critics have understandably called uponinuential postmodern theorists--Jean Baudrillard, Paul de Man, Gilles Deleuze, LindaHutcheon, Fredric Jameson, and Hayden White--to provide a vocabulary for addressing theintellectua l problems raised by DeLillo's ction. 3 Precisely because DeLillo's ction is

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concerned with imagining how conicting postmodern practices collide, it resists the coherencethat theory demands. Trying to account for Miguel de Cervantes's accomplishment in DonQuixote , Jorge Luis Borges asserted that "every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realmof reality" (194). This idea led Borges to ask, "Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be areader of Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet ?" and to answer that "these inversionssuggest that if the characters of a ctional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers, orspectators, can be ctitious" (196). Whereas Borges is describing a culture that reads print textsand watches live performances, DeLillo is writing for a culture that watches and makes [EndPage 697] recordings. Television, movies, and cameras comprise the media through which we

know ourselves.If everyone is both watcher and participant--as the omnipresence of the Zapruder lm inDeLillo's ction suggests--then the philosophical dilemma Borges identied with Cervanteshas become everyday currency in a way that Cervantes could never have imagined. Watchingthe Zapruder lm, Klara Sax wonders at how "it carried a kind of inner life, somethingunconnected to the things we call phenomena" (DeLillo, Underworld 495). Its "footage seemedto advance some argument about the nature of lm itself" (496). From Klara's perspective, thelm is not about what Oswald intended on that day or who may have manipulated him. Theshooter's mind is less important than the mind shooting it, which, for DeLillo, is the viewerwatching it. Film becomes a visible manifestation of our thoughts; we create the lm and thenthe lm creates us. 4 Hence, Klara wonders "if this home movie was some crude living likenessof the mind's technology" (496). This lm's existence makes manifest the postmodern claimthat there is no real that might be condently opposed to the ctional; thus, DeLillo the novelisthas to nd alternative means to incorporate into his ction the media that have helped to effectthis transformation in perception. Although Bill Gray may surrender his calling topostmodernity, DeLillo's ction--and novelistic form--is animated by it.

Consequently, DeLillio's ction has replaced the solitary and singular artist-observer familiarfrom Henry James and James Joyce with a multiplicity of competing aesthetic technologies.Thus, Underworld takes its title from an imaginary word-lm, titled Unterwelt , that ispresented as if it were a lost work of the great Russian director Sergei Eisenstein. 5 This moveis of course a kind of joke but one that makes a point about both the ubiquity of technologicalrepresentation and DeLillo's conception of himself as a novelist. The lm's presence in thenarrative--its celluloid shadow--disrupts the reader's condence in the transparency of theword, which may suggest to many that DeLillo has surrendered to lm the power onceattributed to the novel. "The lm was printed on her mind in jits and weaves," DeLillo writes of one viewer ( Underworld 445). Moreover, the same characters who witness the rare showing of the almost secret Unterwelt are also present at an exclusive screening of the Zapruder lm of

John F. Kennedy's assassination. Watching this lm, the characters have to confront the actual[End Page 698] death of the president less than "the famous headshot [that obliges them to] tocontend with the impact" (488); that is, they have to confront the existence of the event as lm.

The two lms, one real and one not, provide a kind of textual subconscious to the novel. Theynot only raise questions about the ontological status of the narrative but also are doubled assecret lms that tell stories from opposite sides of the Cold War. Underworld 's more than 800pages are loaded with Cold War incidents: from Bobby Thomson hitting the home run thatbecame part of the "miracle on Coogan's bluff" coinciding with the Russians' rst successfulexplosion of the atom bomb in 1951, to narrator Nick Shay witnessing an underground nucleardetonation of waste in the 1990s. According to Underworld 's version of the Cold War, politicalideology is subsumed within the mechanical forces of reproduction by which Cold Warattitudes are circulated. Thus, what connects the various Cold War events in the novel are theirtechnological reproduction and re-representation. Watching the Eisenstein lm, Klara sensesthat "this is a lm about Us and Them" (444). With Zapruder, what begins as a commemorativehome movie becomes a document that is classied as a threat to national security because it

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might undermine the "ofcial truth" of the assassination. For DeLillo, these two lms are ColdWar narratives not simply because they reect familiar Cold War attitudes of paranoia, butbecause they enable him to explore how the Cold War was itself created in part by thedisjunction between author and text that each of these lms reproduces. Unterwelt has anauthor, Eisenstein, but no existence; the Zapruder lm has a reality--it exists---but no author.Walter Benjamin imagined a degrading of the aesthetic product because of the separationbetween artist and art enforced by the technology of mechanical reproduction. DeLillo, bycontrast, understands the aesthetic product created by the technological forces of reproductionto have achieved an augmented power that he wants to capture as an artist. 6 In this respect,DeLillo's novelistic ambition is to absorb the unauthorized cultural power of the Zapruder lmand fuse it with the artistic authority that he attributes to the Eisenstein lm. Presenting hisnovel Underworld as the double to the lm Unterwelt , DeLillo invokes the possibility of mimicking something that does not exist not to assert through the form of the novel his statusas creator. Not only a novelist of technology, DeLillo is creating a new technology of the novel.[End Page 699]

If DeLillo has no Stephen Dedalus in his work, he expresses his aesthetic sensibility throughmarginal or unlikely artists who create competing and often complex renderings of experiencein different formats. 7 His portrayal of baseball broadcaster Russ Hodges, junk artist Klara Sax,comedian Lenny Bruce, and the grafti tagger Moonman 157 as rival artists reects his ownconception of himself as a late twentieth-century novelist who, like them, experiments inhybrid forms for transient audiences. Although only Bruce relies on the manipulation of language, all of DeLillo's artists use available technologies in an aesthetic akin to what DeLillofashions in his novels. While DeLillo's self-identication with bricoleur artists isunderstandable, more shocking is his aesthetic sympathy with the "creative" work of J. EdgarHoover and the Texas Highway Killer. As Underworld makes clear, DeLillo's practice as anoppositional, postmodern novelist feeds on and reconstructs the same technologies of information control for which Hoover became "Director" of the FBI. Indeed, implicit in

DeLillo's presentation of Hoover is the uncomfortable recognition that Hoover's ability tocombine politics, aesthetics, and capitalism made him an exemplary postmodern theorist,reader, and even artist. By DeLillo's reasoning, Hoover is to postmodernism as Joyce is tomodernism. DeLillo writes Underworld not to supplant Hoover, but, in a sense, to out-HooverHoover. That is, by siphoning the techniques that Hoover and these other rival artists employ,DeLillo, as he says in an interview with Anthony DeCurtis, wants to use the novel's ability tobe both within history and outside of it in order to provide a framework for understanding thepast fty years of American history (DeCurtis 294).

This process begins in the Prologue to Underworld with DeLillo's attempt to defamiliarize the

familiar by historicizing it. Here, DeLillo recreates the legendary 3 October 1951 encounterbetween the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers that was decided in the bottom of theninth inning by Bobby Thomson's dramatic home run. If for many readers baseball is anemblem of American identity, DeLillo reveals how the famous recording of announcer RussHodges's call of this game transmits an empty, decontextualized American history. To DeLillo,what is compelling about this moment is not merely the game, but how the game seems to beplayed in isolation from the cultural context that surrounds it. On the same day that BobbyThomson hits "the shot heard around the world," the Soviet Union successfully detonates [EndPage 700] its rst atomic bomb. Ironically, this cataclysmic event, which would ensure that theCold War continued for another forty years, seems relatively insignicant in the context of anepic baseball game. Throughout the novel these two events become intertwined so that DeLillocan explore how nostalgic recollection of the baseball game seems to efface any historicalconsciousness of the Cold War. In subsequent decades, memory of the game replaces memoryof the bomb. The game stands as a cultural reference point for the innocence of the 1950s, incontrast to the social and political chaos of the 1970s.

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DeLillo originally published the prologue to Underworld in Harper's magazine under thelovely title "Pafko at the Wall." Andy Pafko was the left elder for the Dodgers that Octoberday and it was over his head the ball traveled past the left eld fence and into the memories of mid-century Americans. Thus the phrase "Pafko at the Wall" marks the boundary in DeLillo'stext between nostalgia for the game itself and the secret history that is about to overwhelm thegame's meaning (42). The ball's journey beyond the park and into history becomes the threadthat ties together the disparate parts of this massive novel. Recovering the ball becomes a wayof refusing both history and one's involvement in it. Most obviously, this connection is madethrough the novel's occasional narrator, Nick Shay, who buys the ball for $34,500 and seems

amazingly unaffected by the social and political events through which he lives. However,Marvin Lundy, who makes recovering the ball his life's mission, recognizes that the lost ballmight have a more complex "inner history" than the nostalgic version normally attached to it.Having spent years tracking the ball and discovering the many shades of meaning it has takensince leaving Thompson's bat, Lundy understands his search for this lost baseball as a kind of conspiracy narrative. Upon hearing Lundy's convoluted account of his search for the ball, onecharacter thinks he is listening to "an eerie replay of the investigations into the politicalmurders of the 1960s" (180-81).

The comparison is apt because conspiracy theories demand that there be an originary momentfrom which a concatenation of events can be traced. In Underworld , the baseball game is thatmoment, though of course DeLillo on every page deconstructs our desire to believe in thatmoment. No matter how complicated the reasoning becomes, one still believes that anexplanation exists that could explain everything. [End Page 701] All plots lead to death, acharacter observes in White Noise . But here DeLillo suggests that the converse is true, too.Following a plot to its mythical point of origin offers the hope of a birth, or a rebirth, thatreplaces the original one. Lundy tells Brian Glassic that "the hidden mentality of let's stayhome" surrounded the game. (It was played before a nearly half-empty stadium.) "It's like theyknew. They sensed there was a connection between this game and some staggering event thatmight take place on the other side of the world" (172). Without alluding specically to thenuclear bomb the Russians exploded that day, Lundy implies that the atmosphere of the bombpermeated the perception of the game. He adds, "people had a premonition that this game wasrelated to something much bigger. They had the mental process of do I want to go out and be ina big crowd, which if something awful happens is the worst place to be, or should I stay homewith my family and my brand-new TV." Glassic acknowledges that Lundy's account is"lyrically true," even "unprovably true," as it has about it the aura of "authentic inner narrative"through which paranoid narrative makes sense of the world (172). 8 Lundy is, like DeLillo,inventing the game after the fact, making it conform to the audience's altered sense of reality.

Lundy suggests how the search for Thompson's baseball is a desperate effort, an attempt torepress the cultural forces that were being unleashed that day. More than a return to the securityof the womb, the ball is a form of birth that is also a death. "People who save these bats andballs preserve the old stories through the spoken word and know the nicknames of a thousandplayers, we're here in our basements with tremendous history on our walls. And I'll tell yousomething, you'll see I'm right. There's men in the coming years they'll pay fortunes for theseobjects. They'll pay unbelievable. Because this is desperation speaking" (182). The men Lundydescribes are also using fragments of history to piece together a version of the past that willexplain their present. However, their historical reconstructions are committed in the name of lost innocence. They are blissfully unaware of the interpretative issues that Lundy recognizes;consequently, they imagine that with the ball they can recover the game's original aura. Lundy,though, discerns that recovering the original ball requires an act of technological reconstructionincompatible with the purity that the lost ball represents. Lundy employs the same sort of techniques of historical [End Page 702] recovery used by Kennedy assassination buffs. Headvertises for amateur lm footage and rephotographs it; he alters, enhances, repositions theimages to nd the clue he needs to begin his search. It is "a work of Talmudic renement"

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(177). Finding the ball is less important than Lundy's discovery that he can reinvent historythrough technology. "Reality doesn't happen," he wryly observes, "until you analyze the dots"(182). DeLillo amplies this point: "This is what technology does. It peels back the shadowsand redeems the dazed and rambling past. It makes reality come true" (177). Technology doesnot bring us any closer to the lived experience of the game; it replaces a memory of the gamewith another version.

DeLillo underscores the ironies of Lundy's act of techno-historical reconstruction by presentinghis account of the baseball game through his own act of reconstructive simulation. Ironically,

this is an art that he adapts from the announcer Russ Hodges. Waiting for the pennant-decidinggame to begin, Hodges reects how he "spent years in a studio doing re-creations of big leaguegames. The telegraph bug clacking in the background and blabbermouth Hodges inventingninety-nine percent of the action. And I'll tell you something scout's honor. I know this soundsfarfetched but I used to sit there and dream of doing real baseball from a booth in the PoloGrounds in New York" (DeLillo, Underworld 25). Relying solely on the facts that the telegraphprovided, an announcer would simulate a game as if he were witnessing it live. Crowd noise,the sound the ball makes when struck by a bat, the umpire's voice--with the help of an engineer,the announcer worked these details of authenticity into his description of the game. Whatmatters more than the basic facts of the game is the experience being recreated. Thus, alongwith telling who made which out when, the announcer might describe, as Hodges says he did,"a carrot-topped boy with a cowlick (shameless, ain't I) who retrieves the ball and holds italoft" (26). That such images were nally as canned as the recorded sounds of ball striking batmatters less than the fact that the moment described was part of an established ritual. Even asthe recreated event was taking place, then, there was an element of nostalgia.

Where Hodges once faked games to create what was in some sense an authentic experience,DeLillo mimics nostalgia for an audience who no longer believes in it. He makes the distanceseparating his recreation from the original moment part of the narrative that he [End Page 703]relates. He thereby complicates an exercise in willed innocence by historicizing it. 9 The homerun ball becomes a symbol for Cold War America's desire to recreate perpetually the conditionsof its own cultural innocence despite the obvious conicts of its history; the recording of Hodges's radio transmission becomes the narrative mechanism by which DeLillo exposes thewillful and dangerous nostalgia required to maintain such an illusion. As DeLillo makes clear,it is an accident that Hodges's call and hence the game ever became ingrained in our culturalmemory. The game was lmed, but it was not ofcially recorded for audio. The recordingexists because an amateur with a tape recorder happened to preserve Hodges's call. DeLillorecreates the game to explore how this accidental recording replaces--becomes, in fact--thegame itself. Paradoxically, as the recording replaces the game, the game accrues meaning in the

culture's memory of it. Through this bit of technology, the game becomes detached from themoment it records and thus that moment can be continually re-experienced outside of thehistory in which it was played. "The shot heard around the world" signies memory of BobbyThomson's homer, not the acceleration of the Cold War. Reliving the game over and over is away of repressing the fact of the Cold War. For DeLillo, if not for Hodges, the communalcamaraderie of the ballgame exists only in the context of "the secret of the bomb" (51).

Speaking of how technology has to inuence cultural perception, DeLillo has described theassassination of John Kennedy as the "seven seconds that broke the back of the Americancentury" ( Libra 181). For DeLillo, a transformation in cultural perception took place as a

consequence of Zapruder's lm that has had a greater cultural impact than the fact that apresident was assassinated: "We seem from that moment to have entered a world of randomness and ambiguity, a world totally modern in the way it shades into the century's'emptiest' literature" ("American" 22). The Zapruder lm--which conrms Lundy's theory thatreality does not happen until you analyze the dots--provides the reader with the context forunderstanding what Hodges's call, replayed into innity, now signies about the game. By



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Lundy's post-Oswald reasoning, this altered sense of reality was already part of the game as itwas being played. Hence, his desire to recover the ball is also a desire to discover an "innernarrative" that demands, as another character puts it, that everything be connected. [End Page704] Consequently, Lundy identies a coincidence between the atomic bomb and a baseballthat resituates the two events as mutually constitutive reections. "When they make the bomb,"he says, "they make the radioactive core the exact same size as the baseball" (DeLillo,Underworld 172). Practicing a kind of paranoid history that DeLillo endorses, Lundy is able tosee how the bomb that the Russians explode and the ball that Thomson hits becomeinterchangeable. During the game, the spectating Hoover intuits this connection by saying that

he "can almost hear the wind blowing across the Central Asian steppes, out where the enemylives in long coats and fur caps, speaking that old weighted language of theirs, liturgical andgrave. What secret history are they writing?" (50). While the ultimate answer to this question isof course the history that DeLillo presents in Underworld , it also points to Hoover's own skillsin writing secret histories.

Hoover's presence introduces an element of paranoia to a narrative that seems to be about theeasy familiarity of community. Sitting with Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, and Toots Shor,Hoover "admires the rough assurance of these men. [. . . T]hey have a size to them, a naturalstamina that mocks his own bible-school indoctrination even as it draws them to the noise"(DeLillo, Underworld 29). Hoover cannot blend into the scene without knowing that "theirhidden lives are in his private les, all the rumors collected and indexed, the shadow factsmade real" (17). Initially, Hoover is another mechanism by which DeLillo distances thereceived memory of that event in order more fully to historicize it. A messenger informsHoover that the Soviets "have exploded a bomb in plain unpretending language." The "news ishard, it works into him, makes him think of the spies who passed the secrets, the prospect of warheads being sent to communist forces in Korea" (23). Ostensibly enjoying the ballgame,Hoover's thoughts predict the next forty years of United States foreign and domestic policy:"the genius of the bomb is printed not only in the physics of its particles and rays but in theoccasion it creates for new secrets" (51). As a reader of the game whose thoughts shift fromintuiting the writing of a "secret history" to interpreting that history immediately in "plainunpretending language," Hoover is more than just a particularly adept postmodern reader.Rather, he deciphers the text of history before it is even written.

If DeLillo uses Hodges to advance the art of historical recreation, [End Page 705] then heportrays Hoover as his master conspiracy-theorist-as-artist. In this respect, Hoover marks theculmination of a series of characters (Globke in Great Jones Street , Murray in White Noise , andFerry in Libra , among others) who are adept analysts of media forces and conspiracy theories.Hoover is the only character present who is capable of making the sorts of cultural and

historical connections that DeLillo demands of his readers; thus, in a disturbing way, DeLillomakes reader and author complicitous with Hoover. Hoover is included in the novel almost asan homage. Like Hoover, DeLillo cherishes secrets for their own sake. His art depends onthem. For example, a character in Libra at one point wonders whether identity itself is notcontingent on keeping secrets. In that same novel DeLillo suggests that the Hearings before thePresident's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy , or the Warren Report, isthe logical extension of Finnegans Wake . The claim that DeLillo makes about the WarrenReport suggests how DeLillo understands his own aesthetic practice. Its massive accumulationof detail, the sense of multiple contradictory narratives existing simultaneously as validexplanations of an historical event, the location of millions of facts that seem to reproduce

themselves exponentially, breeding ever more narratives of conspiracy and secrecy, comprisenot only DeLillo's view of the Cold War era but also congure the historical "text" of Americathat Hoover so masterfully manipulated. Where, for instance, Julio Cortázar's postmodernnovel Hopscotch (1966) imagines the possibility of rearranging narrative sections into endlesspossible wholes, DeLillo's Warren Report likewise becomes a toolkit for constructing rival andeven contradictory histories. While Libra is invented largely out of the materials of the Warren


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Report and hence is almost a subsidiary work, Underworld , with its one, massive accumulationand astonishing scope, aims to supplant the Warren Report. DeLillo's counter-history then isequal parts Joyce and Hoover.

None of DeLillo's prior conspiracy theorists has Hoover's astonishing imaginative power.DeLillo understands that Hoover is a dominating gure, both real and mythical, and as an artisthe wants to usurp Hoover's power. John N. Duvall suggests that "it is through the gure of Hoover that [DeLillo] suggests how global politics become aestheticized, so much so that thehistory of the Cold War nearly disappears from American consciousness" (293). Obviously, this

sort of critique applies perfectly to Ronald Reagan, who, it can be argued, hovers over [EndPage 706] the narrative as an unnamed presence. 10 DeLillo here presents a highlyaestheticized version of the Cold War, but does so not to efface it from our consciousness. AsDeLillo and Hoover both recognize, aestheticizing cultural processes is not necessarilycoincident with anaesthetizing cultural processes. Like DeLillo (and unlike Hodges), Hooverstands apart from the ballgame even as he predicts how the ballgame might be recreated by thefuture. The ballgame is open: the home run is for everyone to enjoy and remember. The bombalso is for everyone, but it releases layers of information unavailable to all. Hoover reects onthe importance of announcing the news before the Soviets do. "By announcing rst, we preventthe Soviets from putting their sweet spin on the event. People will understand that we'vemaintained control of the news if not of the bomb" (DeLillo, Underworld 28). If spies cannotcontrol the Soviets' ability to develop nuclear technology, then the U.S. government canproduce agencies that can create information for the purpose of concealing it. Hoover's powerderives from his recognition that secrets must remain secret in order for him to augment hisown cultural and narrative power. What the secrets contain matters less than the fact thatpeople believe in their existence. DeLillo thus co-opts Hoover's narrative strategy by recreatingthe baseball game as if it were the bomb. Unpacking the layers of history embedded into thisseemingly innocent baseball game allows DeLillo to explode the mythology of the Cold War.

Co-opting Hoover's narrative power does not eliminate Hoover or expose him as some sort of terrible cultural presence. It is important to understand that DeLillo is undermining Hoover'spolitics, not his aesthetics. DeLillo is not so naive as to think that by exposing Hoover'saesthetic practice he can eradicate Hoover's dangerous cultural legacy. Demonizing Hoover orthe technology that Hoover employs, as attractive as this is, does not alter the fact that Hooverwas capitalizing on possibilities inherent in the culture and therefore available virtually toanyone. Years after the baseball game, caught in the midst of the 1960s, Hoover reects on his

enemies-for-life[. . . T]he way to deal with such people was to compile massivedossiers. Photographs, surveillance reports, detailed allegations, linked names,

transcribed tapes--wiretaps, bugs, break-ins. The dossier was a deeper form of truth, [End Page 707] transcending facts and actuality. The second you placed anitem in the le, a fuzzy photograph, an unfounded rumor, it became promiscuouslytrue. It was a truth without authority and therefore incontestable. Factoids seepedout of the le and crept across the horizon, consuming bodies and minds. The lewas everything, the life nothing. (DeLillo, Underworld 559)

As DeLillo recognizes, Hoover's dossier becomes a kind of novel-in-progress--a counterpart tothe Warren Report. As a new form of media, Hoover's dossier is more powerful than theWarren Report not simply because it is never released and thus never readable. It also acquires

power because it does not attempt to formulate a cohesive narrative or reveal an organizingauthorial agency. The mere fact of its existence--its unlimited capacity for rumor and innuendo--implies omnipotence. DeLillo describes Hoover's dossier in terms traditionally associated withthe novel--a deeper form of truth, transcending facts and actuality. By showing how Hoover co-opts novelistic strategies, DeLillo imagines Hoover inventing the kind of postmodern novelthat DeLillo writes.



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On the other hand, writing in the era after the Cold War, DeLillo's narrative task is in a sensemore difcult than Hoover's because the paranoia of the Cold War no longer provides structureto his narrative interventions. Lundy recognizes that

You need [. . .] both sides to keep the Cold War going. It's the one constant thing.It's honest, it's dependable. Because when the tension and rivalry end, that's whenyour worst nightmares begin. All the power and intimidation of the state will seepout of your personal bloodstream. [. . .F]orces will come rushing in, demandingand challenging. The cold war is your friend. You will need it to stay on top.

(DeLillo, Underworld 170)By the time Lundy nally catches up with the baseball that is the object of his desire, it hasbecome the last vestige of the Cold War, the talisman that props up the shaky edice of theCold War. It comes into Lundy's possession by way of what might be called the future. Thoughhe tracks the ball relentlessly, Lundy hits the critical jackpot because "a man's driving along inhis car, someone shoots him dead" (179). Among [End Page 708] the murdered man's effectsis the ball. DeLillo leaves it to the reader to make the connection, but Lundy's search iscompleted by the Texas Highway Killer.

The reader is also left to determine why the ball's mystery should be solved--unknowingly--bythe Texas Highway Killer. The appearance of the Texas Highway Killer marks the point atwhich the centrifugal energies of the Cold War dissipate. The conuence of these two plot linesis a coincidence that is no accident. What connects the baseball game with Richard HenryGilkey's murdering spree is that both are public events apprehended through the media. Part of the initial charm of DeLillo's account of the game is the suggestion, ultimately withdrawn, thatthe game is an unmediated event. "The Thomson homer continues to live," says one character,"because it happened decades ago when things were not replayed and worn out and run downand used up before midnight of the rst day" (98). The narrative begins with a single kid,Cotter, sneaking into the game. The implication is that we will know this game throughsomeone who was actually present. As we have seen, one of the meanings the ball yields is thelonging for unmediated presence. The game's mystique, however, derives from the fact thatthere was "a man on 12th Street in Brooklyn who has attached a tape machine to his radio so hecan record the voice of Russ Hodges broadcasting the game. The man doesn't know why he'sdoing this. It is just an impulse, a fancy, it is like hearing the game twice" (DeLillo,Underworld 32). A precursor to the Zapruder lm of the Kennedy assassination, the 12th Streetrecording arrives as a moment of lost innocence, miraculously recaptured.

Contrasting with the recording of Hodges's radio call is the random recording of Richard HenryGilkey murdering a randomly chosen driver. The account of a little girl who, while playingwith a video camera during a family outing, accidentally catches a murder on tape develops thetroubling implications that have been attached to the proliferation of amateur recordings sincethe Zapruder lm. Likewise, the Texas Highway Killer lives by virtue of the repetition of hisact before a faceless and nameless audience--among which is his next likely victim. Appearingevery half-hour on networks like CNN's Headline News, his carefully planned and executedmurder of a person randomly chosen briey becomes part of the national consciousness. Bygiving a second-person account of the video, DeLillo implicates the [End Page 709] reader inthe serial reproduction of the Texas Highway Killer. As if we were watching television insteadof reading a book, we become part of the logic that transforms a family video shot for fun into

a documentary of a murder. What DeLillo says of the little girl shooting the video is also trueof the audience: "it is the camera that puts her in the tale" (DeLillo, Underworld 157). DeLillo'snarrative voice posits a reader/viewer who has seen the tape over and over--who enjoysrepetition for the opportunities it allows for analysis. DeLillo encourages the reader torecognize a crucial connection between the video and the crime. While "taping-and-playingintensies and compresses the event," the fascination the video inspires has something to do


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with the suspicion that "this kind of crime became more possible when the means of taping anevent and playing it immediately, without a neutral interval, a balancing space and time,became widely available" (159). Marvin Lundy's "dot theory of reality, that all knowledge isavailable if you analyze the dots," suggests that the video's authority takes precedence over theevent it depicts (175).

Whatever power or energy the primary event has is subsumed by the technology of the video:the manipulation of the event that the technology makes possible is itself a kind of serialkilling. He "came alive in them. He lived in their histories, in the photographs in the

newspapers, he survived in the memories of the family, lived with the victims, lived on,merged, twinned, quadrupled, continued into double gures" (271). By treating the tape as"entertainment," the viewer becomes complicitous with both the murderer and the victim. Asthe tape becomes "deader and colder and more relentless," it "sucks the air right out of yourchest but you watch it every time" (160). In this context, the random shooter Gilkey is in turn"shot" by the random camera holder. The camera does not record what he did, but changes thereality in which he acted. Likewise, allowing for the differences between lm and video, wecan see how the "identity" of Gilkey or Oswald can be broken down, rewound, and cut up inthe same way one splices a lm. Technology creates a mass death wish that advertisers andTexas Highway Killers gratify even as we consume it.

Ironically, the Texas Highway Killer experiences the same deadening effect that any otherviewer watching the tape would. This recognition is partially what prompts him to call CNNstudios and explain his actions over the airwaves. "Why I'm calling is to set the record [EndPage 710] straight," he announces. "I feel like my situation has been twisted in with the prolesof a hundred other individuals in the crime computer" (DeLillo, Underworld 216). DeLillo haselsewhere pointed out that assassins and serial killers in American culture require three namesto maintain the integrity of their identity. The assassin needs to believe he is original; hence, hesolidies his identity by claiming the name "Texas Highway Killer" as his own. There is afterall only one Lee Harvey Oswald, just as there is only one Texas Highway Killer, RichardHenry Gilkey. Thus, Gilkey is "suspicious of the tape" because it implies that the act no longerbelongs to him (270). So does the fact that his acts are doubled by an anonymous person whocopycats the crime. The doubling that changes Gilkey's existence is the video itself, for itmakes Gilkey into a copycat of himself. He kills serially to reassert the authenticity of hisoriginal, once singular, act of murder. The Texas Highway Killer's response to his ownaccidental videotaping recalls the brilliant moment in Libra where DeLillo imagines Oswald'sdeath as coming through the television monitors. Oswald dies watching himself beingmurdered on TV: "[H]e could see himself shot as the camera caught it" ( Libra 439). DeLillo, of course, throughout Libra, challenges the idea that Oswald could have acted alone. Even

discounting the conspiracy theories that link Oswald to the Maa or the CIA, the more subtlepoint is that the way in which the event is received by the intended audience renders itimpossible for Oswald to control the reaction. Thus, one can almost say that Oswald is notkilled by Jack Ruby's bullet, but by the self-division the image of himself on television createsin his own mind.

If the Cold War establishes the context for understanding Bobby Thompson's home run, thenwhat provides the context for understanding Gilkey's murders? The existence of the bombcannot explain this event, nor can a Hooverian theory of the power of secrets. In this case, anact meant to be unrepresentable becomes public property. As the popularity of television

programs such as America's Funniest Home Videos and Cops demonstrates, one now expectsthat the camera is always on and trained on you because the camera now belongs to any andeveryone. The private information that Hoover so meticulously recorded and collected is nowan established communal ritual. As the documentation and circulation of secrets throughtechnology become ubiquitous, Hoover's power is dispersed. What private information [EndPage 711] could Hoover possibly have on Gilkey that would compromise him in the eyes of his


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audience, especially since by this logic we have all become Hoover? That there is noconspiracy to explain Gilkey, no obvious social or political context in which to understand hisactions, suggests how thoroughly our frame of reference is created by the technologicalinnovations through which we see ourselves. The ideological vacuum left by the Cold War'sdisappearance becomes the space in which the technological advances of the Cold Warcontinue to be played out.

While the Cold War may be over, Gilkey's emergence reveals how the energies that went into itcontinue to nd expression. Our sense of history becomes irreparably fragmented--like

Oswald's image of his own assassination. Consequently, Gilkey is a more terrifying gure thanHoover because his murders--his narratives, if you will--have, even to him, no context beyondtheir random technique. To use an outdated expression, he is all form and no content. At theoutset of the novel DeLillo suggests that "longing on a large scale is what makes history"(Underworld 11); it is impossible to see how Gilkey's longing, such that it may be, createshistory in any recognizable sense. Baudrillard has argued that, in the postmodern era, historyloses its sense of progression because "events [. . .] no longer have a negative (progressive,critical or revolutionary) potency since their only negativity is the fact of their not taking place "(17). In other words, history goes commercial: it becomes different forms of advertising. In thiscommercialization of American history, the singularity of J. Edgar Hoover has given way to themachinations of an endless series of corporate gures. As Charles Wainwright, pioneeradvertising executive who is also one of the baseball's many owners, tells a colleague, "Youhave to read the mysterious current that passes in the night and connects millions of peopleacross a continental landmass, compelling them to buy a certain product rst thing in themorning" ( Underworld 534). Thus, Gilkey's act becomes entertainment marketed as abjectterror. The representation and replication of his act become equivalent with a well-producedorange juice advertisement. Forced to become a call-in talk show crank to take credit for hisacts, Gilkey nds that both the forces and the audience that he wishes to control subsume his"artistry." He emphasizes that he is a virtuoso performer because he can kill and drive at thesame time only by taking into account the physics of the [End Page 712] situation. Having toexplain the power of his own work betrays his frustration at being unable to control his acts.From DeLillo's perspective, Gilkey may suggest both rage and anxiety regarding the culturalrelevance of the postmodern artist.

Despite resisting the totalizing tendencies of postmodernism, DeLillo depicts the way we areimplicated in these systems of information control. To DeLillo, Hoover and the Texas HighwayKiller exploit the same techniques of cultural creation used by more sympathetic gures suchas Klara Sax, Moonman 157, and Lenny Bruce. The difference is that where Sax and Moonmancreate to express--in an old-fashioned sense--their humanity, Hoover participates in a process

that replaces humanity with aesthetic technique. In this respect, Hoover is a precursor to theTexas Highway Killer. DeLillo resists the formulation of postmodern theorists such asJameson, Baudrillard, and even Wainwright, who argue that there can be no difference betweenaesthetic production and commodity production. Ultimately, DeLillo's model postmodernartists practice an art that, in Hutcheon's terms, "depends upon and draws its power from thatwhich it contests" (120). Consider the example of Lenny Bruce, the centerpiece for part 5 of the novel, entitled "Better Things for Better Living Through Chemistry: Selected FragmentsPublic and Private in the 1950s and 1960s." An expression of "whatever zoomed across hisbrainpan," Bruce's "rap mosaic" is so quick he often becomes bored by his own act. DeLillosays he closed one show

with a monologue that had a kind of abridged syntax, a thing without connectives,he was cooking free-form, closer to music than speech, doing a spoken jazz inwhich a slang term generates a matching argot, like musicians trading fours, theroad band, the sideman's inner riff, and when the crowd dispersed they took thisrap mosaic with them into the strip joints and bars and late-night diners, the places


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where the nighthawks congregate, and it was Lenny's own hard bop, his speechesto the people that rode the broad Chicago night. (586)

By describing Bruce's art, DeLillo evokes his own. As Bruce speaks, DeLillo writes--movingin and out of voices, channeling through the cross-currencies of American speech andconsciousness. These 150 [End Page 713] pages may represent DeLillo's most realized effortalong these lines. Like Bruce, DeLillo is a mimic, an impersonator, a ventriloquist. His novelsconsist of the simultaneous expression of multiple, disparate voices. A verbal practitioner of what we call, after the French lm director Jean-Luc Godard, jump-cutting, DeLillo's novels

proceed by moving multiple voices in and out of one another so that his narratives seem tocome to us "without connectives."

Bruce, of course, was known for his ability to improvise--to put himself into a comedicsituation and then work through it to see what would happen. Formally, his work was aboutrisk. Once he found a line that worked, Bruce would duplicate it endlessly, changing the timbreand intonation of his voice, pulling it out in unexpected contexts, but nonetheless repeating itover and over. Just as Bruce himself ventriloquized the heteroglossia of the American voice,DeLillo mimics Bruce's dialogic monologues to capitalize on their multi-voiced power. DeLillouses Bruce to focus seemingly random cultural energies into a single, devastating joke. In

response to the Cuban missile crisis, DeLillo's Lenny Bruce improvises the perfect line: " we'reall gonna die! " In performance after performance he screams it repeatedly at his audienceregardless of context. "Lenny loves the postexistential bent of this line. In his giddy shriek theaudience can hear the obliteration of the idea of uniqueness and free choice. They can hear thereplacement of human isolation by massive and unvaried ruin" (507). Bruce here captures theatmosphere that DeLillo creates in this section: a seemingly improvised, free oating, surrealatmosphere of hysteria --one that combines humor and terror. Bruce's bond with his audience isbased on a kind of knowing powerlessness, yet he transforms this powerlessness into aperspective from which to comprehend the incomprehensible. The laughter he inspires initiallyreleases the tension this knowledge creates in the audience only to leave them feeling angrierand more powerless after the show is over. Thus, "the line that had made them bust their gutslaughing astonishingly" ultimately leaves them feeling "morose and then angry and thenfatalistic and plain shaking scared" (508-09).

A character in DeLillo's The Names remarks, "If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being toldthe novel is dead. How liberating, to work in the margins, outside a central perception" (235).Bruce is not a novelist, but he achieves this kind of aesthetic desire. As one willing to assumethe role of writing in the margins, DeLillo toys with the possibility [End Page 714] that thebond between him and his audience also derives from a sense of knowing powerlessness.DeLillo's rejection of this stance is apparent in his creative sympathy with Moonman 127 andKlara Sax. Moonman is a grafti artist who paints subway trains and whose "tag" is Moonman.He himself was rst inspired by a grafti writer's tribute to Charlie Parker: " Bird Lives ."Moonman responds to the power of the "spray-paint scrawl" (435); it makes him wonder whothis Bird was. What is the power of an art form that could inspire a tribute to someone who isunknown to almost everyone who will see the tribute? What is the power of a tribute that mostwould see as eye-litter and not a powerful form of expression? "I'm your movie, motherfucker,"Moonman apostrophizes his unknown audience (441). Invoking alternative forms to explain hisart, DeLillo forges a connection between himself and Moonman (and Parker) as artists.Complicitous with the cultures they write over, they are also motivated by their knowledge of

how to use unfamiliar and discredited forms to reach an audience unlikely to appreciate thepower or aim of their work.

Hence, Moonman relishes working in obscurity. While he creates for his peers, other graftiwriters and watching kids literally hold him up when the "master" needs to paint a difcult-to-reach place. He creates principally for equally anonymous audiences--those thousands of


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unknown passengers riding Moonman's trains to all parts of the city. Esther Winship, one of those riders who happens to be an inuential art house broker, wants to sign him up to do ashowing. "The kid's a goddamn master," she tells Klara Sax. However, Moonman's art is notmeant for the galleries. Its power derives largely from its contingent status, refusing closure,remaining unsanctioned. From a legal perspective, he defaces public property; from anaesthetic perspective, he declares his existence despite all the forces that would render himanonymous. "The whole point of Moonman's tag," DeLillo writes, "was how the letters andnumbers told a story of backstreet life." His art is poignant, then, because it is always on theverge of disappearing. Moonman boards a train "that was bombed inside and out by Skaty 8, a

thirteen year old writer who frantically tagged police cars, hearses, garbage trucks," andeverything else. "Not a style king, no way, but a legend among writers for the energy he putforth." Moonman recalls the "genuine regret" that went through him upon Skaty 8's death: "heslumped and sagged all over again and felt the deepest kind of soldierly [End Page 715]sadness--Skaty 8 hit by a train while he's walking on the tracks under downtown Brooklyn"(DeLillo, Underworld 434).

Writing this kid's secret history, Moonman and other grafti artists challenge the status quo inways that even Lenny Bruce could not. Where Bruce acknowledges changing his name fromLeonard Alfred Schneider to Lenny Bruce in order to assimilate into the mainstream society heviciously mocks, Moonman and his confederates are "spray-paint scrawling" the fact of theirurban ethnic existence all over the city. Their creations assert identity as acts of deance: "Thetrains come roaring down the rat alleys all alike and then you hit a train and it is yours, seeneverywhere in the system, and you get inside people's heads and vandalize their eyeballs"(435). As the word "system" suggests, Moonman works within and against a Cold War contextas well--his enemy is not just the city politicians and newspaper editorialists who want toprotect the "cleanliness" of the city, but the CIA and Dow Chemical, whose alliance creates achemical solvent more effective than orange juice in erasing the art from the trains. But DeLillomakes an ironic, undercutting connection as well. To "vandalize their eyeballs" is to get insidehis audience's unconscious more completely than even Hoover can--as completely as thoseconducting massive ad campaigns. As Charlie Wainwright explains elsewhere, "They're doingresearch" on "retinal discharge. They secretly photograph women in supermarkets" to "recordexcitations of the inner eye, motions of the eye far more subtle and telling than a simple blink,and it seems women go completely crazy eyeballwise when they see certain colors, packages,and designs" (531). Like DeLillo, Moonman writes against Wainwright's knowledge byafrming an individual consciousness despite the seemingly anachronistic nature of this desire.

Moonman's work partakes of consumer culture without entirely being of it. Like his creator,Moonman is less seducing his audience through technological mastery than challenging them

to recognize chains of startling associations. The real triumph of Moonman's art is the unlikelyconnections it establishes among different classes and races of people who ordinarily refuse toacknowledge each other's existence. Like the advertising executives, Moonman watches andstudies strangers' reactions to what he produces. He observes how

they reacted to the train, their heads went wow. Some shocked looks too, they'reseeing hell on wheels, but mostly [End Page 716] the eyes go yes and the facesopen up. And he studied the riders as they shufed in, carrying umbrellas, some of them, and concealed weapons, others, and gum wrappers and phone numbers andcrushed Kleenex and hankies wrapped around house keys all wadded together in

their mulatto bodies because the subway's where the races mix. (434)He sees a tourist, a man perhaps from Sweden, he thinks, so amazed by the spectacle Moonmanhas created that the man takes out a camera to photograph it. Moonman steps into the train sothat the man, unknown to himself, might have a picture of the "writer" with his work. In thatmoment, the pathos of Moonman's at once deeply public and terribly private work is almost


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unbearable. An act of self-irony, Moonman enacts both his achievement and his eventualdisappearance. Thinking of the wall-writing that rst inspired him, we can say, " Moonman

Lives !" but only in the photograph of the anonymous man who cannot know what he possesses.

Without the novelistic frame that DeLillo provides, though, Moonman's art would have nocontext other than the immediate one of its creation. The only other artist in Underworld whorivals DeLillo in scope is Klara Sax. Called at times the "bag lady," she possesses the wit anddaring of Moonman 127, since her works convert discarded scrap materials into art. Yet hermajor work, like DeLillo's Underworld , covers the past fty years. Her major exhibit, if that is

the right word, takes places on an abandoned aireld in the southwestern desert where she isconverting deactivated bomber planes into a massive spectacle of experimental art. Using abattery of helpers (as Moonman did), she is reclaiming the instruments of the Cold War. As sheexplains, "we're painting, hand-painting in some cases, putting out puny hands to greatweapons systems" (77). The point, she says, is that the nuclear bombs many of these planescarried were never dropped.

The missiles remained in the underwing carriages, unred. The men came backand the targets were not destroyed. You see. We all tried to think about war but I'mnot sure we knew how to do this. The poets wrote long poems with dirty words

and that's about as close as we came, actually, to a thoughtful response. Becausethey had brought something into the world that out-imagined the mind. (76) [EndPage 717]

On one level Klara's strange, ambitious project is itself a version of the Cold War--it evenduplicates the basic Cold War supposition that there exists an anti-universe parallel to theknown one insofar as her project is an eerie refection of the military's own operations. Klara,however, deactivates the dangerous energies of the Cold War by transforming its materials intoforms for her art. Like DeLillo borrowing the surveillance and narrative techniques of J. EdgarHoover, Klara takes possession of her subject by adapting its paranoid power to her own uses.

Klara admits that her project brings with it a sense of loss. Along with Marvin Lundy, shesuspects that the Cold War was what "held us together, the Soviets and us" (76). Sax'swistfulness, her willed poignancy at the end of the Cold War, is shared by Nick Shay.Contemplating the fact that the nuclear war did not happen, he says, "I listen to the microtonalhum of the systems and feel a quiet kind of power because I've done it and come out okay"(803). Actually, Nick, unlike these other artists, has been absorbed into the microtonal hum. Hetoils in the elds of waste management for a company, Whiz Co, that advertises itself as "TheFuture of Waste" (282). Nick is so comfortable living among the ruins of the Cold War that hemakes his living cleaning up after it.

We are ying to a remote site in Kazakhstan to witness an underground nuclearexplosion. This is the commodity that Tchaika trades in. They sell nuclearexplosions for ready cash. They want us to supply the most dangerous waste wecan nd and they will destroy it for us. [. . .] Tchaika is connected to thecommonwealth arms complex, to bomb-design laboratories and the shippingindustry. They will pick up waste anywhere in the world, ship it to Kazakhstan, putit in the ground and vaporize it. We will get a broker's fee. (788)

Nick's description brings us full circle back to 3 October 1951, the date of the baseball gameand the Soviets' rst nuclear explosion. Former enemies are now partners in nuclear garbage. J.Robert Oppenheimer once remarked that the atomic bomb is "merde." Nick amplies on thisremark by observing that "waste is the secret history, the underhistory, the way archaeologistsdig out the history of early [End Page 718] cultures, every sort of bone heap and broken tool,literally from under the ground" (791). Waste theorist Jesse Detwiler suggests that you know a


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culture by its garbage. Like shit, waste works as a kind of fertilizer to make cultures grow.

Nick, however, lacks the self-consciousness to be the kind of cultural archaeologist that hedescribes. Ironically, he purchases Thompson's ball from Marvin Lundy, but he tells Lundy thathe does not know why he is buying it. He has neither historical nor aesthetic self-consciousness; in comparison with the other artist-gures in the book, he seems strangelystillborn. Perhaps DeLillo employs Nick's unselfconsciousness as a way of suggesting howpostmodernity denies not only alternative or oppositional perspectives but also impedes theability to have a perspective at all. "No one talks about the Texas Highway Killer anymore,"

Nick remarks, unaware of the connection that he shares with that gure through the purchase of the ball. Yet, if Nick cannot see how his possession of the ball connects him to the otherdisturbing events in the novel, DeLillo makes sure that we, his paranoid readers, do. AsDeLillo also knows, he is a rare creature--a serious novelist in the age of technology. As I haveargued, it is misleading to think that DeLillo writes against technology; rather, he strives toexplore as thoroughly as possible how we invent and sometimes destroy ourselves bypostmodern technologies that threaten to produce a new Cold War from within. Like Klara andIsrael, though, DeLillo wishes to preserve what remnant of human individuality still exists. Heeven aims for what technology seems to deny--transcendence. It may even turn out thattranscendence and technology are connected too.

DeLillo thus concludes Underworld with a weird melding of technology and grace. AfterNick's nal words, the narrative is interrupted yet again: " http://blk.www/dd.com/miraculum"(810). Inviting his readers to imagine we that we might be joined, author and audience, on theInternet, DeLillo accomplishes his last narrative transformation of technology. In so doing,DeLillo signals his narrative mastery of technology by presenting his book's conclusion as actitious website--as unreal as the Eisenstein lm, Unterwelt . Although the website might beseen as an opportunity to provide an outlet for readers to record their interpretations, the truth isthat this imaginary website belongs to DeLillo and thus marks his attempt to control thepublished material. [End Page 719] If with Unterwelt he evokes a real director to postulate animaginary lm, here he parodies the "real" DeLillo website to create an impossible address.You must be logged on to DeLillo's imaginary website to receive the conclusion both to thenovel and to the story of Esmeralda, a homeless Bronx girl who is rst raped and then thrownfrom a building to die. An otherwise anonymous death becomes legendary when an image of Esmeralda begins to appear nightly on an advertising sign meant to catch the glances of commuters on trains. The two nuns, Sister Grace and Sister Edgar, who for weeks had beentrying to coax the wild girl to come to their shelter, join the crowds that have gathered towitness the miracle for themselves. They watch the train approach.

The headlights sweep the billboard and she hears a sound from the crowd, a gaspthat shoots and sobs and moans and the cry of some unnameable painful elation. Ablurted sort of whoop, the holler of unstopped belief. Because when the train lightshit the dimmest part of the billboard a face appears above the misty lake and itbelongs to the murdered girl. A dozen women clutch their heads, they whoop andsob, a spirit, a godsbreath passing though the crowd.

Esmeralda . (821)

Sister Edgar wants to believe that a miracle has occurred while Sister Grace sees only a trick of

light. It is Sister Edgar, though, who dies a few pages later and is reincarnated in cyberspace,where she can shed her veil and habit and become "open--exposed to every connection you canmake on the world wide web" (824).

Those wanting to argue that DeLillo is memorializing the death of the individual would seemto have ample evidence here. The spirit of Esmeralda, who was too wild to be captured or to


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live, moves into Sister Edgar, who abandons herself to become one with technology. On theother hand, Sister Edgar's apotheosis might be seen as an emblem of DeLillo's novelisticcuriosity, a brave commitment to weld his ferocious intelligence to every available media of transformation. From this perspective, one may understand why DeLillo chose to have theformer Moonman 127, Ismael Muñoz, standing near the billboard where Esmeralda wasappearing as if by a miracle for a little while before the billboard sign is torn down andreplaced by the words [End Page 720] "Space Available" (824). Ostensibly retired fromtagging trains, Muñoz is seen by the nuns to be "looking a little ghostly in the beams of swinging light" (821). Previously, Moonman signed his work by stepping into the photograph

taken by the German tourist; here DeLillo autographs Underworld by making Moonman hissignature to this miracle of representation. In his prime, Muñoz would tell himself to "think of your tag in maximum daylight rolling over the scorched lots where you were born and raised"(439). Underworld becomes DeLillo's tag as it rises above not just the Bronx where he wasborn and raised and where Esmeralda died and was reborn, but the second half of the Americantwentieth century, which is coming to look like nothing other than Don DeLillo's owninvention.

Timothy L. Parrish has published essays on Kenneth Burke, Ralph Ellison, Charles Johnson,Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O'Connor, and Philip Roth. The title of his book-length work in progress is Walking Blues: Making Americans from Emerson to Elvis . Heteaches in the Department of English at the University of North Texas.

Notes

* I would like to express my appreciation to Elizabeth Spiller for her generous and insightfulsuggestions regarding earlier drafts of this essay.

1. Joseph Kronick says of Libra that it "refuses the satisfactions of narrative, the belief in

language as a source of knowledge above historical reality" (115).

2. Paul Civello suggests that, through Nicholas Branch, DeLillo portrays "the impossibility of the objective observer and, by extension, of the experimental novelist" (54).

3. Baudrillard is the postmodern theorist that many critics see as most relevant to DeLillo'swork; see Carmichael, Frow, and Wilcox. Employing the work of Ludwig von Bertalanffy'sGeneral Systems Theory (1968), Thomas LeClair conducts an intriguing systems analysis of DeLillo's work through White Noise . John Johnston draws on Gilles Deleuze to explain theeffect of Oswald's doubling in Libra . For an application of the critical theory of Hayden Whiteto DeLillo's ction, see Thomas and Carmichael, and for that of Paul de Man, see Kronick.

4. Frank Lentricchia also notes that lm in DeLillo's ction "is the culturally inevitable form of our self-consciousness" (" Libra " 446).

5. DeLillo employs a similar strategy in Running Dog (1978), which hinges on the author'saccount of a home movie allegedly shot by Hitler only hours before his death.

6. Benjamin's classic and by now well-known denition of "aura" as what distinguishes theoriginal artwork from copies derives mainly from his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." For two different, but highly engaging, discussions of therelationships between DeLillo's ideas and those of Benjamin, see Lentricchia, "Tales," andDuvall.

7. Much ado was made in the prepublication publicity for Underworld about this being the rstDeLillo novel in which the author explored his ethnic roots. DeLillo employs an occasional

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narrator, Nick Shay, who is from the same part of Brooklyn where DeLillo himself grew up.Although DeLillo uses Shay to narrate many sections of the novel, he is not DeLillo's alter ego;see Remnick and Kamp.

8. For an excellent discussion of productive paranoia in DeLillo's ction, see O'Donnell.

9. Duvall notes that Hodges is "DeLillo's ironized self-guration," adding that "Hodges'sparticipation in the mythologizing of baseball parallels President Reagan's use of amythological American past" (303). DeLillo is not equating Reagan with Hodges so much as

transforming Hodges's medium of communication into a reconsideration of how the past ispackaged through nostalgia.

10. DeLillo expects his readers to know that Reagan's career began as a simulator of baseballgames. As president, Reagan was able to enact--simulate-- the ofcial meaning of the ColdWar. See Duvall's discussion.

Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jean. The Illusion of the End . 1994. Trans. Chris Turner. Stanford: Stanford UP,1994.

Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Illuminations .1955. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969. 217-51.

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Timothy L. Parrish - From Hoover's FBI to Eisenstein's Unterwelt: DeLillo Directs the Postmodern Nov

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