[(Routledge Research in American Literature and Culture)] Philipp Wolf - Death, Time and Mortality in the Later Novels of Don DeLillo (2022, Routledge) - libgen.li

Death, Time and Mortality in the Later
Novels of Don DeLillo
This book offers the first systematic study of death in the later novels of
Don DeLillo. It focuses on Underworld to The Silence, along with his
1984 novel White Noise, in which the fear of death dominates the protagonists most hauntingly. The study covers eight novels, which mark the
development of one of the most philosophical and prestigious novelists
writing in English.
Death, in its close relation to time, temporality and transience, has
been an ongoing subject or motif in Don DeLillo’s oeuvre. His later work
is shot through with the cultural and sociopsychological symptoms and
responses death elicits. His “reflection on dying” revolves around defensive mechanisms and destruction fantasies, immortalism and cryonics,
covert and overt surrogates, consumerism and media, and the mortification of the body. His characters give themselves to mourning and are
afflicted with psychosis, depression and the looming of emptiness.
Yet writing about death also means facing the ambiguity and failing
representability of “death.” The book considers DeLillo’s use of language
in which temporality and something like “death” may become manifest.
It deals with the transfiguration of time and death into art, with apocalypse as a central and recurring subject, and, as a kind of antithesis,
epiphany.
The study eventually proposes some reflections on the meaning of
death in an age fully contingent on media and technology and dominated
by financial capitalism and consumerism. Despite all the distractions,
death remains a sinister presence, which has beset the minds not only of
DeLillo’s protagonists.
Philipp Wolf is an adjunct professor of English and American literature at
the University of Giessen in Germany (Hesse). He has widely published
on early modern literature, modernist and postmodernist literature, as
well as on theory.
Routledge Research in American Literature and Culture
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Ulf Schulenberg
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Marginalisation and Utopia in Paul Auster, Jim Jarmusch, and Tom Waits
The Other America
Adriano A. Tedde
Lynd Ward’s Wordless Novels, 1929-1937
Visual Narrative, Cultural Politics, Homoeroticism
Grant F. Scott
Authoritarianism and Class in American Political Fiction
Elite Pluralism and Political Bosses in Three Post-War Novels
David Smit
Death, Time and Mortality in the Later Novels of Don DeLillo
Philipp Wolf
For more information about this series, please visit:
https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Research-in-American-Literatureand-Culture/book-series/RRAL
Death, Time and Mortality
in the Later Novels of
Don DeLillo
Philipp Wolf
First published 2022
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an
informa business
© 2022 Philipp Wolf
The right of Philipp Wolf to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-032-26003-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-26795-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-28993-7 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003289937
Typeset in Sabon
by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)
I wish to thank my wife Stefanie Rück Complete
Acknowledgement: I wish to thank my wife Stefanie Rück
for her unswerving support and patience.
Contents
1
Introduction
1
The Culture of Death: Fear of Death, Responses to
Death and the Management of Death or “Terror
Management” 2
Methodological Problems 7
Notes 10
2
White Noise: The Inconceivability of Death, Hitler and the
Supermarket
12
Consummatum Est 12
“Why Can’t We Be Intelligent About Death?”
Capitals in Quotation? 16
“Hitler Studies” 20
The Fearful Beauty of Apocalypse: Apparition 26
Notes 27
3
Underworld and “Terror Management”: Apocalypse,
the Bomb, Cold War, Crowds
“Terror Management”: Apocalypse 31
Socio-Cultural and Anthropological Contexts 32
The Bomb and the Cold War 35
Crowds 41
Pop and Consumption: “Rejoice, Redeemed Flock”
(J. S. Bach) or “Cocksucker Blues” 43
Consumerism and Waste 45
Media, Killing, Death 48
Moment of Moments: Apparition 50
Notes 52
31
viii
4
Contents
The Body Artist: Death, Mourning, Time and the
“Humanity of Man”
56
Mindfulness and Emptiness: Lived and Dead Time 56
The Provo-Care of the Death of the Other: The
“Humanity of Man” 60
“Body Time” and the Sublation of Death (“Trauerspiel”
or “Play of Mourning”) 67
Redeeming Moment 69
Notes 70
5
Cosmopolis: Cybercapitalism, Alienation and Death
73
The Tenacity of Capitalism and Alienation 73
Alienation, (Auto-)Aggression, Death 76
“He Died so You Can Live” 76
De-Individuation and Disembodiment 78
Data, Acceleration, and the Disappearance
of the Presence 81
Temporal Alienation 83
Monetary Alienation 87
Physical Alienation 91
The Journey to Self-Destruction and Death:
“The desolation of reality” (W. B. Yeats) 93
A “Smart” Epiphany of Death 97
Notes 98
6
Falling Man
Relating Unspeakable Loss 102
Images of Loss, Two Victims, Two Terrorists and Death
Dealers 103
Shirts 103
Shrapnels 104
Still Lives 105
Falling Man: Performing Death and Mourning 107
Keith: Trauma and Lethargy 110
Lianne: Mourning, Care and an Epiphanic Moment 112
Hammad and Amir: Terrorist Cult of Death 115
Notes 117
102
Contents ix
7
Point Omega: “When Time Stops, so Do We”:
The Aesthetics of Disappearance
120
Temporality and Death 120
The Anonymous “Man,” Caillois and Lacan:
“But Imagination Was Itself a Natural Force,
Unmanageable.” (P 81) 121
Murder or not? 126
Elster, Teilhard, “Dead Matter” and the Epiphany of a
“Handful of Mucus” 127
Notes 133
8
Zero K: The Ideology and Aesthetics of Immortality
135
Cryonics and a Tale of Two Worlds 135
End Time: Apocalypse and Eschatology 138
The Aesthetics of Apocalypse and Eschatology 140
Video and Corridors 140
Architecture and Sculpture 143
Heidegger and the Cryonic Transhumanists: “Man Alone
Exists” 146
Heidegger as Antithesis: Existentialism 146
The Rock as Art 150
Art as Untruth 155
Art in Pods 158
Moment of Moments: The Affirmation of Life 163
Notes 165
9
The Silence and the Death of Civilization
169
The End of “Being-in-the-World” 169
An Electricity Failure 169
The Endgame 170
Notes 178
10 Epilog
Index
180
181
1
Introduction
When it comes to death and killing, popular forms of narrative entertainment (TV features, crime thrillers) are primarily interested in the person
of the deceased, the reason for their demise or the plot of the whodunit,
including the motives or craziness of the (psycho-)killer. Not so Don
DeLillo. In an interview, following the publication of Underworld,
DeLillo remarks:
People talk about the killing, but they don’t talk about what it does to
them, to the way they think and feel and fear […]. They don’t talk
about what it creates in a larger sense. The truth is, we don’t quite
know how to talk about this, I don’t believe. Maybe that’s why some
of us write fiction.1
The effects of killing and, more generally, death, whether of natural or nonnatural causes, have indeed been an ongoing subject in Don DeLillo’s fiction, notably in End Zone, White Noise and, of course, the recent Zero K.
When asked in 1993 about the meaning of the “accelerated but vague mortality” in some of his novels to date, DeLillo responded: “Who knows? If
writing is a concentrated form of thinking, then the most concentrated
writing probably ends in some kind of reflection on dying.”2 (Conversations,
102) It is not only that people die in his novels, death is also a looming
presence, which has beset the minds of the protagonists, who either respond
with defensive mechanisms, with subliminal death and destruction phantasies, or both. In 1987, after having returned from a three-year sojourn in
Greece, he had to learn that “[d]eath seems to be all around us […] I can’t
imagine a culture more steeped in the idea of death.”3 (Conversations, 24)
In the present study, I want to focus on DeLillo’s “reflection on dying”
in his later novels from Underworld to The Silence along with his 1986
novel White Noise, in which the fear of death dominates the protagonists
most markedly and “death,” as a human idea, phantasma or construct, is
dealt with throughout. But before going into the novels, it seems appropriate
to put the “fear” and the “idea of death” into a historical and larger
sociopsychological context.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003289937-1
2
Introduction
The Culture of Death: Fear of Death, Responses to Death and the
Management of Death, or “Terror Management”
Surely, death, mortality, and their concomitant time and transience have
always been “natural” themes and subjects of literature, philosophy and
theology (not to mention medicine and esotericism). Death was paramount to classical antiquity from Plato to Epicurus to Seneca; it was and
is pivotal to the medieval and early modern ars moriendi4 or the morality
play (Everyman), to Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial or the highly successful
Carpe Diem/Memento Mori genres, to novels such as Tolstoy’s The Death
of Ivan Ilyich, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying or Nabokov’s Pale Fire and to
the recent work of Julian Barnes (Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Levels of
Life) – to drop only a few names. These texts, generally speaking, reflect
on dying, on death as a (ontological) fact, and, of course, the way the
consciousness of death determines life. Yet the way we deal with death is
also very much a historical phenomenon, omnipresent, supratemporal
and pertinent as it is.5 While the 19th century developed, as often claimed,
a highly complex and publicly visible culture of death and mourning,
modernity is much more inclined to repress or even deny and hide away
death. The reasons are manifold: secularization and the waning belief in
an afterlife (but also in purgatory and hell), the decreasing likelihood that
you or one of your children might die early, the separation of the location
where one dies (in a hospital) from one’s home, the immediate removal of
the corpse, the technologizing and medical rationalization of death, to
name only a few. Yet the fact that people are more likely to attain old age,
as well as the displacement and covering up of the phenomenon, has not
led to its disappearance, on the contrary. The late 20th and the early 21st
centuries have shown an unheard-of wealth of publications on death and
mourning.6 The waning of public forms of mourning, of sepulchral culture, and the tabooing of public expressions of pain and grief has not
only brought forth more clandestine and individualized ways of dealing
with it, but it has also resulted in more or less conscious surrogate strategies, ersatz religions or compensatory means (such as (self-)destructiveness and anticipatory or preemptive, but often forlorn defenses, as, e.g.,
fame) to repress, escape or deny the inevitable. In fact, the 1980s of the
past century, when Don DeLillo’s White Noise appeared, and its author
felt that death was “all around us,” were more prone to the fear of death
than the preceding decades. In those years, the feeling of social insecurity
among many Americans was increasing; self-esteem, however, was
decreasing. Ronald Reagan’s neoliberalism (“Reaganomics”) and social
cuts, his Manicheism, a reinforced risk of a nuclear clash with the Soviets
as well as a depreciation of one’s significance after the disaster of Vietnam
(or e.g., the Challenger catastrophe in 1986) led to a sustained sociopsychological destabilization. In addition, after the technological disasters
and a new awareness of ecological and economic scarcity, the optimism
Introduction 3
of modernism was ceasing. It gave way not only to political conservatism
but also to a new historical pessimism and even apocalyptic thinking.
One may assume, on the other hand, that the new social and political
insecurity called for new mechanisms of self-protection. If, according to the
psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski, we
can cling to a stable “cultural worldview,” a sense of “personal significance” and an appropriate degree of “self-esteem,” we may well be protected from the “fear of inevitable death.”7 In order to maintain these
protective shields, premodern society, they claim, was relatively well
equipped with the supernatural, with ritual, myth, religion, forms of art
(and, one might add, organic memory) that serve to ban the terrible. (63–
81) Through all ages to the present, human beings have aspired to literal
immortality or after symbolic immortality. (82–123) The first one tries to
achieve by evocation of the eternal soul (and resurrection) or by means of
alchemy (panaceas or nostra, secret cure-alls, etc.). The latest attempts in
respect thereof are made by high-tech immortalists in Silicon Valley and –
most graphically – by cryonics (96) with companies such as the “Alcor Life
Extension Foundation” or “The Cryonics Institute” (the subject of Zero
K). Symbolic immortality one tries to attain through fame (by creating literary works, as e.g., John Keats did) or other public achievements, through
procreation, family and children, heroism and nationalism, wealth and the
acquisition of scarce and apparently lasting objects, and (conspicuous)
consumption in general, an almost ongoing topos in DeLillo. The identification, or at least fascination, with a (seemingly) charismatic leader who
appears to be the master of death (like Hitler) and who pretends to make
his followership stand out forever, has also been helpful.
These protective shields are still working, but in modernity “terror
management” (IX, 9 et passim) becomes more varied. My death-transcending and death-managing worldviews are more likely to be called in
question by competing “belief systems.” (131) They relativize one’s own
convictions, thereby undermining my self-esteem. We react with the discrimination, inclusion/exclusion, humiliation or dehumanization of the
other. We instigate (updated) crusades, Jihads and go to war against “the
axis of evil.” In fact, the terrorist attacks on the “West” by radical Muslims –
often under the motto “death to the unbelievers” – may well be put down,
according to Pankaj Mishra,8 to a deeply felt humiliation of Muslim identity. Terrorism may thus be seen as a kind of retaliation and a discharge
of sustained resentment. But bringing death to Western “civilization” is
also, I think, an attempt at restoring the validity of (radical) Muslim
beliefs which are to ensure symbolic immortality by also shattering the
death-managing self-esteem of the West.
But precisely because the old mythological, religious or supernatural
systems have been weakened (or relativized), we have turned much more
to the natural, this-worldly or earthy side of existence. From here we try
to exclude, taboo and negatively fetishize anything material and chthonic
4
Introduction
that seems to be reminiscent of death. We try to suppress our animality,
our excretions and excrementitious matter, and we have developed intricate systems of doing away with our waste and refuse and bury it underground or in the “Underworld” – as in Don DeLillo’s novel of the same
name. On the other hand, we mortify and manipulate our bodies. We
purify it, and with the aid of health food, sports and cosmetics we try to
evade portents of mortality and death. We shun our vegetative-animal
nature and castigate our body by “working out” and excessive running.
It becomes a reified and malleable instrument for overcoming death.
Interestingly, Solomon et al. also point out what they call “distal and
proximal defenses.” Proximal defenses are probably the most banal, if
efficient, way to deal with the fear of death. When conscious of death, we
make “rational (or rationalizing) efforts” to “repress” the thought about
death; we “try to distract ourselves” or “push” the problem into a “distant future.” (171) Corresponding formulas are “I am still very fit” or “I
still have a long time to live.” (173) Distal defenses are more intricate and
more relevant on a cultural scale. They have “no logical or semantic relation to the problem of death,” yet once we think we may have resolved
our fear of death (by means of proximal defenses) “our distal defenses
kick in.” Distal defense mechanisms basically consist of what constitutes
culture. They make people want to believe they are “valuable contributor[s]
to a meaningful cultural scheme of things.” (172) Pursuing a mission,
accomplishing an ambitious project, identifying and defending a worldview, altruism, social commitment but also challenging death by reckless
behavior, a shooting or driving rampage, may convey the illusion of
power. But those activities will also bolster self-esteem and cover up the
unconscious death fears, that, according to the findings of Solomon et al.,
are always present in your subconsciousness.
Toward the end of their study, (185) Solomon et al. go into a number
of psychological disorders that may also be caused by death anxiety
(schizophrenia, phobias, depression, suicide, obsessions, compulsive disorders, drug, alcohol abuse – and, one may add, gambling and computer
addiction). Clearly, people who were exposed to death very closely and
dramatically are prone to develop “post-traumatic stress disorders.” This
became only too significant after 9/11 (the subject of Falling Man). It
frequently occurs to people directly involved in military action or those
who lose their spouses or near relatives through accident or suicide (as in
The Body Artist).
It is noteworthy that Solomon et al. are not occupied with states and
acts of mourning and grief. This is perhaps because mourning seems to be
directed toward the other more than to oneself. Mourning denotes, however, a highly variable subjective response to the “role of death in life.”
Mourners are not only painfully reminded of death, they also claim that
a part of themselves has passed away, too; and they often melancholically
want to reintegrate what has been lost. Mourning, on the other hand, is
Introduction 5
one of the most crucial – culturally and individually highly diverse – ways
of coming, more or less, to terms with death. Rituals of mourning have
been globally ubiquitous. DeLillo gives us an impressive example in
Cosmopolis.
It seems a little oversimplified to describe culture or the aspiration to
the significance and fortification of “cultural values” (183) as a means of
channeling and limiting the death drive. One could well have second
thoughts about such a reductionism, which can be traced back to
Schopenhauer and Freud. Arguably, we simply become fascinated by categories of novelty and difference just for their novelty and difference (and
not for the sake of self-delusion). Spatio-temporal extension, symmetry
or beauty are attractive in themselves along with the desire to be creative
and to overcome the given. Thus, many cultural activities can develop a
dynamic and flow of their own that we simply enjoy. Nonetheless, human
beings want continuity, permanence and durability,
which life, by itself, so sorely misses. But death (more exactly, awareness of mortality) is the ultimate condition of cultural creativity as
such. It makes permanence into a task, into an urgent task, a paramount task – a fount and a measure of all tasks – and so it makes
culture that huge and never stopping factory of permanence.9
Culture is, after all, the mode and space through which we go beyond
ourselves. By taking a position outside and toward one’s self, one cannot
help realizing that the body and the whole framework of our being are
transient, perishable and bound to nothingness. Yet by the same token, we
add a timeless or time-transcending value to objects (from money to trivial
collector items to “high” art and not least to our bodies), which is not
inherent in those objects. Commodities and art appear to open up what
death precisely cuts and closes down, namely the prospect of new, indefinite and other possibilities. The fetishization of consumer goods and the
transfiguration of the common into something everlasting – art – have
furnished culture with the tenacious illusion of deathlessness in this life.
One should, moreover, keep in mind that especially postmodern
humans seem to have become incapable of enduring boredom and emptiness, empty spaces or empty time. It is hardly bearable to be simply there
with one’s body alone. Boredom – or exposure to time – gives a premonition of nothingness and, by the same token, death. The portent of emptiness has certainly led to an increasing urge for ekstasis and intensity
(through sports, speed, “the event,” sex).10 People not only get hooked to,
or lost in, computer screens, there is also a strong desire to merge with
masses of people and to get absorbed into a crowd of other bodies. This
seems evident enough to suggest a need for and the omnipresence of “terror management.” Yet ever so often, when we think we can abandon
ourselves to those objects or crowds, the prospect of nothingness – or
6
Introduction
empty time – returns most threateningly. In an age, moreover, in which
the only historical alternative to consumption (and work) appears to be
consumption (and work), the feeling of tedium and surfeit has become
much more virulent. Since the 1980s and “The End of History” (Francis
Fukuyama), that is, the disillusionment of progressivist (critical) thinking
and future expectations, the present has come to be without alternative.
But the lack of historical meaning has once again brought forth eschatological scenarios, doom, gloom and the desire for some ending, or at least,
the disruptive event. White Noise, Underworld, Cosmopolis, Point
Omega and The Silence are informed by this mindset. The clinical psychologists Solomon and his colleagues do not really go into what accordingly could be called historical mentality (or the temporal consciousness
of particular historical phases), they also only touch upon (meta-)historical consciousness at large. In spite, or precisely on account of Western
secularization, intellectuals (such as the main figure in Point Omega) are
spinning out spatio-temporal ideologies and projections to counter the
limitation of our time on earth: geological time, apocalyptical, teleological, messianic time, eternal recurrence, cosmological space-time (Martin
in The Silence), eternity, or vice versa, ecstatic now-time (Cosmopolis),
technological timelessness by means of digital immortality (Zero K,
Underworld, Cosmopolis).
To talk about death, then, also means to talk about time, to which it is
phenomenologically and thematically closely related. Time has often
been seen as precursor to death; since Horace, one has been frequently
asked to “seize the day”: Life is short, your time is limited. That is, human
consciousness of time is shaped by and unfolds against the latent knowledge of timeliness, finitude and death. We want time to pass, yet are afraid
of the passing of our time. Time means becoming and, likewise, passing
away, growth and decay, no time without transience, transitoriness and
mortality. As death is within as well as outside time, it is and it is not – a
temporal ambiguity that has been cogently formulated by Bernhard
Taureck: “Death exists, inasmuch as it is possible, and loses its existence
inasmuch as it becomes real.”11 It appears both in the mode of possibility
and a future mode (of irrealis) that remains uncatchable in the future.
Other philosophical questions ensue. Is time only a series of incidents and
death only one in a row, or is time like a cohesive wave or line and death
an ongoing phenomenon? Time, then, historical, and structural, will be
another focus in this study. Literature as a linguistic and mimetic medium
has a temporal dimension which may be expanded or shortened, interrupted and even brought to a standstill; it may give a “sense of an ending,” or may linger on. There is the time of the narrator and narrated
time. Especially in his novellas, short as they are, Point Omega and The
Body Artist, DeLillo makes the reader perceive this phenomenological
and existential dimension of experience. White Noise and The Silence
take place in both a historical deadlock and end time.
Introduction 7
Methodological Problems
The ontology of death (in post-metaphysical and post-mythological
times) deals primarily with notions of absence, presence and nothingness
(or absolute difference and the singularity of the event). Surely, modernist
literature in particular may well evoke (non-)spaces of nothingness
(through silence, blanks, endings); narrators or characters may ponder
over it. Yet narrative literature is more poignant if it reflects upon deathin-life, its significance for the living and on conventional and changing
attitudes toward death.12 This points to a methodical problem which the
notion of the absence (or irreal factuality) of death already bears upon. If
one identifies culture or any cultural activity as a vehicle to avert (the fear
of) death, a study on death in literature will be bound to find death in
virtually any subject, motif or topic in a given work. This means its
research value will be rather limited, unless one focuses and contextualizes one’s research interest and object. The perspective, in other words,
will only turn out more fruitful if there are conspicuous traces, motives
and behavior patterns in the narrative or life story which will make the
ensuing action (here: that embodies a concern with death, the fear of
death) plausible.13
If, in addition, the fear of death can express itself in so many ways, it
may be owing to the very inconceivability of the phenomenon itself. The
fear of death, in other words, could only be countered if death is proved
nameable and identifiable. Its suppression, moreover, implies that death as
a fact and the subliminal fear come to pass only indirectly in symptomatic
ways. Death, along with Time, therefore, poses a cognitive problem: “who
knows?” It is for certain an empirical reality, but it nonetheless eludes
objective description: “The truth is,” to quote DeLillo once again, “we
don’t quite know how to talk about this, I don’t believe.” Death itself,
inaccessible as it is, can only be described from outside in abstract phenomenological or temporal categories. Corresponding phrases are either
“life as (timely) being-toward-death,” death as post-(mortem, human),
standstill, nothingness, a cancellation or sublation of time, or one ends up
with mere tautology, as Dostoevsky does in The Master of Petersburg. In
this novel,14 J. M. Coetzee arrestingly demonstrates the methodical and
linguistic impasse which ensues from the desire to understand death. The
exiled Dostoevsky has come to Petersburg to retrieve his dead stepson
Pavel. Halfway through the novel, he meets the former terrorist friends of
Pavel (also possibly his murderers). They take him up to the platform of a
disused tower on Stolyarny Quay from which the young man was pushed
to death. When climbing up, Dostoevsky counts the stairs trying to transform space into time. “Pavel. Here.” […] “He counts backwards to the day
of Pavel’s death, reaches twenty, loses track, starts again, loses track again” –
realizing that he cannot bring Pavel back by dialing time back, he must
continue his way toward Pavel’s “not-being-here.” The platform, then, only
8
Introduction
shows the place of an absolutely singular rupture and discontinuity. Pavel
was “no more” within seconds, smashed to death. He fails to grasp the
“not-being-here” of death: “He takes off his hat and grips the railing, trying not to look down. A metaphor, he tells himself, that is all it is – another
word for a lapse of consciousness, a not-being-here, an absence.”
Dostoevsky, who first thought he could approach death via metaphor by
comparing it to his epileptic blackouts, now takes it in in exasperation:
“Metaphors – what nonsense! There is death, only death. Death is a metaphor for nothing. Death is Death.”15 Each death is singular; it eludes comparison, with no common tenor to share with someone or something else.
The will to understand death ends up in non-sequiturs and tautology.16
Tautological and intangible as notions of death eventually are, the writer
faces a representational and the critic a methodical problem,17 the existential
omnipresence of death notwithstanding. But precisely since it has become
impossible to banish, mystify or allegorize death, it goes on, for all its indeterminacy and opacity, to occupy both the unconscious and subconscious of
society. If there is no immediate causal relationship between the above-mentioned
cultural phenomena and death, one may hope for a comprehensibility and
likelihood of the association between, say, the fetishization of commodities
or the evocation and temporal consciousness of apocalypse, and death. And
even if there are no definite statements about dying or death, literature,
through its (subjective) perspectivity, preliminarity and (intended) ambiguity,
may offer an intuitively accessible account of our fear of death and the corresponding strategies. DeLillo leaves throughout traces which ironically
erase or question those cultural activities from shopping to sightseeing, traveling, sports or media consumption that are supposed to raise us above the
daily mementos of futility and transience. Entertaining as they are, a vapid
feeling of voidness may nonetheless loom ahead.
Don DeLillo’s later work is, indeed, shot through with the (above mentioned) various manifestations of the fear of death, of cultural symptoms
and responses which death elicits. It also addresses the ineluctable ambiguity, opacity or failing presentability of “death.” His “fiction” and
“reflections” revolve around defensive mechanisms and/or subliminal
death and destruction phantasies, around immortalism and cryonics,
covert and overt surrogates, such as consumerism and wealth, the fascination with (apparently) charismatic leaders, terrorism (or the “symbolic
exchange of death”) and, notably, apocalypse. They center around the
(underworld) exclusion of (excretious) matter and waste, the mortification and purification of the body, and “distal and proximal defenses.” His
characters escape and merge into crowds, give themselves to media and
intensity, and are afflicted with depression, post-traumatic stress disorder,
grief and mourning, as well as the looming of boredom or emptiness.
In formal terms, DeLillo manipulates (textual) temporality (including
disruption and discontinuity) to the effect that mimetically something
like “death,” an awareness of death or even the “death drive” may become
Introduction 9
manifest (The Body Artist). There is, finally, his central and recurring
interest in art, that is, the transfiguration of time into performance art,
still lives or natura morta.
The second chapter is on White Noise. A focus here will be on the
question of the conceivability or rather inconceivability of “death,” the
function of consumption and the protagonist’s most outrageous response
to the fear of death. The third chapter on Underworld (1997) takes up
apocalypse, which was already dealt with in White Noise, and addresses
a number of the means of “terror management,” such as crowds, tedium,
hedonism, the fitness cult, art, and, most of all, the objectification of annihilation in the bomb. It ends with what could be called the externalization of death to Kazakhstan along with a profane miracle, a kind of
antithesis to the omnipresent culture of death. Chapter 4 focuses on the
short novel succeeding Underworld, The Body Artist (2001). It is almost
entirely dedicated to the process of mourning (clinically speaking: “posttraumatic stress disorder”) by castigating the body, taking care of someone and re-presenting grief (and the dead husband) in an artistic
performance. The novel can also be read as a meditation on or formal
attempt at (representing the awareness of) time and death. Chapter 5 on
Cosmopolis (2003) is concerned with cybercapitalism, the acceleration of
time and the destructiveness and alienation which a society and some
individuals may engender that are completely and exclusively given to
digital screens, consumption, the “physical” and the accumulation of
capital. Gloomy and somber as Cosmopolis may be, there are instances
of redemption. Chapter 6 on Falling Man (2007) is about the individual
response (trauma) to a terrorist attack and devastating disaster, which
has death most dramatically “protrude into being-there,” to use Martin
Heidegger’s language. The point here is that the novel indicates modes of
getting to terms with the inconceivable while insisting at the same time
that the rupture it inflicts can never be fully mended. Chapter 7 on Point
Omega (2010, DeLillo’s darkest text perhaps) deals with the pathological
desire of a psychotic “Anonymous” and a deeply frustrated war consultant to merge with an object or state beyond time and processuality. Their
wish comes down to their disappearance and farcical nothingness. The
eighth chapter on Zero K centers on the ideology and aesthetics of a
project called “Convergence” in the steppe hinterland of Kazakhstan.
Apocalypse (versus eschatology), video, architecture and sculpture are to
legitimize and enforce immortality, to be realized by cryonics and other
technologies. As in Underworld, Kazakhstan serves as a “non-place” for
the reification or (in Heidegger’s terminology) evasion of death, which is
taken out and literally covered up in some remote hinterland. The final
Chapter 9 is dedicated to DeLillo’s most recent work The Silence (2020).
In this novel, there are no deaths in person, yet death is more present
perhaps than in any other of his texts – if one regards language (media
and communication) as a necessary requirement for “Being-in-the World.”
10 Introduction
Critics have repeatedly pointed to the Catholic background of Don
DeLillo.18 This may account for his rather cautious and unobtrusive allusions to spirituality and (also digital) transcendence. The novels not only
suggest an alternative way of dealing with death through mourning and
remembrance (in The Body Artist or Falling Man), they also evoke epiphanic moments of salvation, albeit never without ambiguity. While on the
one hand, the emptiness of unfulfilled time may well give a premonition
of nothingness to postmodern man, DeLillo still points to moments of –
sensuously – fulfilled experience, which may break unexpectedly into the
dreariness of ongoing time. As these moments are not reducible to the
fast interests of the market or other-directed ideologies, their sociopsychological effect goes beyond the short-termed comfort late capitalist
surrogates of inauthenticity, media, consumerism and ideologies continue
to offer. Even as secular epiphanies, they will create more memorable and
lasting states of relief, or even elevation and transcendence in which the
otherwise omnipresent fear of death seems to be absent.
Notes
1 Don DeLillo, Conversations with Don DeLillo, ed. Thomas DePietro
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 144. The conversation with
David Remnick (first published in The New Yorker, Sept.15, 1997) was conducted on the day when TV was full of reports on the killing of the fashion
designer Gianni Versace.
2 DeLillo, Conversations, 102. Killing, dying and death surely signify different
processes. But since in DeLillo’s work the process or phase of dying, apart
from Love-Lies-Bleeding and perhaps Zero K, does not stand out as a major
subject of its own (even if it is implicated), we do not have to differentiate.
The overall subject is fear of death, subliminal fascination with death, its
repression, escapism, and elevating or transcendental experiences, which I
take as a profane answer to the threat. The Interview was conducted by Adam
Begley and originally published in The Paris Review, Fall 1993.
3 DeLillo, Conversations, 24, originally with Mervyn Rothstein and published
in The New York Times on Dec. 20, 1987.
4 Well-known English examples are Anselm of Canterbury’s Admonitio
Morienti et de peccatis suis nimium formidanti or Robert Southwell’s A
Foure-Fould Meditation (1606).
5 The seminal work on its history is Philippe Ariès, The Hour of our Death
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991).
6 An overview for the United States offers e.g. Lawrence R. Samuel, Death,
American Style: A Cultural History of Dying in America (Lanham: Rowman
& Littlefield, 2017, 20131).
7 Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the
Core: On the Role of Death in Life (London: Penguin, 2015), 9. I have dealt
with this at some length because it presents an update of Ernest Becker’s The
Denial of Death, a book regarded highly by Don DeLillo. The current studies
were conducted in the field of empirical psychology. The clinical studies are
based on systematic and methodologically sound double-blind experiments –
and are convincing. Further references to this book are given in the text.
Introduction 11
8 Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present (London: Allen Lane,
2017), 330–46. Terrorist resentment against the “West” is also a subject in
Falling Man.
9 Zygmunt Baumann, Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies
(Stanford: Stanford UP, 1992), 4.
10 See Tristan Garcia, La Vie Intense: Une Obsession Modern (Paris: Autrement,
2016).
11 Bernhard H.F. Taureck, Philosophieren: Sterben lernen? Versuch einer ikonologischen Modernisierung unserer Kommunikation über Tod und Sterben
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), 46. My translation.
12 Dante’s Hell, Hades and other realms of death (or Lethe) are still present but
only as literary and mythological references. It is one of the disillusioning
effects of our post-modern culture that the many traditional allegories and
metaphors can no longer capture our imagination, even if in fantasy novels or
films they may still strike a chord. The allegory of the reaper, even though or
precisely because it contains a skeleton figure and a scythe, does not really
help us to comprehend the fact. Communicative substitutes and props, such
as hourglasses, unrigged ships and lilies only refer to life, i.e., transitoriness,
its temporality, annihilation or simply defunctness. For the problems and
aporia of our communication about death, see Taureck.
13 The problem, on the other hand, is not that significant in Don DeLillo since
all his novels in question explicitly refer to death, if not explicitly to the fear
of death.
14 J. M. Coetzee, The Master of Petersburg (London: Vintage, 1999, 19941).
15 Ibid., 117–8.
16 The aporia is that, even as a metaphor for “nothing,” “death” will go on to
signify – as a proposition without proposition or predicate. Death is a “fact,”
as Bernhard Taureck has appropriately put it, “without continuity.” (Taureck,
212).
17 Strictly speaking, one had to distinguish between mental states and processes
of affectivity (fear, etc.), the many outer forms and imagery those states may
assume, the process of dying and the fact of death itself, possible transcendent, spiritual or philosophical narratives of the same (mimetic adaptation),
as well as posthumous states and forms of mourning and grief. To rigorously
follow such a systematics would have made it very difficult, though, to follow
the chronology of DeLillo’s novels.
18 Paul Giaimo, Don DeLillo: The Moral Force of a Writer’s Work (Santa
Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2011). John A. McClure, “DeLillo and mystery,” in The
Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, ed. John N. Duvall (Cambridge:
CUP, 2008), 166–78.
2
White Noise
The Inconceivability of Death, Hitler
and the Supermarket
The logical incompatibility of death’s “being-here” with its “not-beinghere” is at the center of Don DeLillo’s White Noise. It is a multifaceted
satirical novel in which the fear of death and various discussions of the
issue of death (by unreliable narrators or cynical protagonists) are due, of
course, to complex cultural and historical interrelations.1 DeLillo depicts
(as he will do extensively in Underworld) a narrative tableau and kaleidoscope of American society in its individualistic multifariousness, along
with its generality or homogenized individuality. The novel contains only
a few allusions to the historical time in which it may be set. But references
to “strange new diseases” (W 158) and the “modern virus” (W 174) of the
recent AIDS epidemic (and hysteria), the introduction of the barcode or
generic (grocery) goods and, most of all, the evaporation of the academic
spirit of 1968 in academia and its replacement by postmodern “Cultural
Materialism” are indicative of the early 1980s.2
Consummatum Est
The two brief and succinct initial chapters already line out the cultural
superstructure that hovers above a lurking underside beset with the fear
of death and disintegration. The new September term at the College-onthe-Hill is about to start. The students return in station wagons with their
parents, the fathers “accomplished in parenthood” with an air of “massive insurance coverage,” their conscientiously suntanned wives “in diet
trim.” The students spring out of the cars and open the trunks – a vast
cornucopia – to receive all the commodities dear to them: from “stereo
sets” to “personal computers” to “lacrosse sticks” and “controlled substances” to “birth control pills” to “the junk food still in shopping bags,”
the “Waffelos and Kabooms,”3 the “Dum Dum Pops, the Mystic Mints.”
(W 3) For Jack Gladney, the first-person narrator, “it is a brilliant event,
invariably.” The assembly of the station wagons leads on to the reunion
of “the like-minded and the spiritually akin.” (W 4) It has something
liturgical about it, remotely reminiscent of a spring procession or, for that
matter, harvest festival which is to ensure – albeit by means of reverence – one’s
DOI: 10.4324/9781003289937-2
White Noise 13
existence lastingly. The arrivals “feel a sense of renewal, of communal
recognition.”
Communion and renewal are also what religio and religious services
are supposed to perform. The like-minded become one; they assure themselves of the fullness, but more so, of the perpetuation and continuance of
their being, the eternal recurrence of the same. Another term of abundance may begin, while annihilation and death are temporarily warded
off on this brittle level of cultural ritual. When at home Jack Gladney tells
his wife Babette about the procession of the station wagons, she remarks:
“I have trouble imagining death at that income level.” (W 7)
However, immediately after the depiction of the student arrivals, we
are given a picture of the college town suburb, which (through Gladney’s
eyes on his way home) is rather glum and slightly evocative of the films
of David Lynch. There is “an insane asylum,” there were “deep ravines,”
there are signs “concerning lost dogs and cats” and the noise from the
below expressway is perceived at night like “a steady murmur […] as of
dead souls babbling at the edge of a dream.” (W 4–5) As if to counterpoint the gloomy tone, Gladney introduces himself immediately thereafter as follows: “I am chairman of the department of Hitler studies at the
College-on-the-Hill. I invented Hitler studies in North America in March
of 1968 […] It was an immediate and electrifying success.” (W 4) His
studies “around Hitler’s life and work” are, perversely enough, paramount means to work against his fear of death, his manner, as we shall
see, of managing “terror.”
Of course, Jack and his patchwork family are equally dependent on the
world of goods in order to cushion their being against the void of nothingness. As a rule, the family stays in the kitchen and the bedroom: “the
power haunts, the sources.” (W 7) Here they gather in a “deadly serious
anticipation” of a wide range of “brightly colored food” individually
designed, packed, wrapped or tinned in plastic, carton or foil. The rest of
the house serves as “storage space” for “furniture, toys, all the unused
objects of earlier marriages […] and rummages. Things, boxes.” (W 7–8)
Naturally, Gladney and his family are very fond of shopping. After one of
their massive sprees, he feels more than elated, enthusing about the “sheer
plenitude,” the “well-being” or “security” the exuberant products bring
to “some snug home” in their “souls” achieving “a fullness of being.” (W 24)
But the “fullness of being” is soon undermined when, on leaving the
supermarket, Gladney’s colleague, the Elvis Presley specialist Murray J.
Siskind, appears to “sneakily” approach and covet Babette. In fact, in the
supermarket, it had already become obvious that in an advanced consumer society reification is no one-way road. Human beings are likewise
turned into spuriously idealized objects and reduced to partial aspects or
functions beyond their command or disposal. Not long after having taken
his pleasure in sniffing out the commodities, the “extra-strength pain
reliever,” “honey dew melons” or “ginger ale,” in the Gladney’s cart, Siskind
14 White Noise
turns covetingly to the “living wonder” of Babette’s hair: “[S]he has
important hair.” As if this was proof of her motherliness, he alleges that
“[S]he must be good with children […] the type to take control, show
strength and affirmation.” (W 23) Babette will turn out to be the most
vulnerable and weak protagonist in the novel.
Shortly thereafter in the subsequent chapters, his son Heinrich’s receding
hairline and the recently unusually glorious sunsets make Gladney muse
about technology. It is the 1980s of the “American Century,” and he sees in
the erstwhile promise of salvation, which technology used to be, already
the “daily seeping falsehearted death.” (W 25) Technology is closely linked
to and the very precondition of modern consumption.
It is one of the characteristics of late capitalism that consumers copiously surround themselves with innumerable objects which are only of
very limited or of no use to them.4 This is not at all to say that objects,
whether artifacts, tools, natural or found objects or consumer goods, do
not serve benign purposes possessing a cultural or natural right in and for
themselves.5 They open up the world and may impart positive values, and –
as the baseball in Underworld – social and historical identity to individuals and communities. But precisely because of the eccentric position of
man beyond his bodily center, humans tend to symbolically overcharge
and confer a meaning to things not intrinsic to them. DeLillo exposes the
symbolic overdetermination of objects, when – quite unexpectedly, often
in the form of a rhythmic incantation – he recites brand names as the ones
above or such as “Kleenex Softique, Kleenex Softique” (W 46) or “Clorets,
Velamints, Freedent.” (W 263) The brands are to suggest pleasure, desire,
even transcendence,6 but as they only resound emptily lacking narrative
significance, they appear as pure and redundant signifiers – signifying
nothing. Siskind, who functions as a kind of advocatus diaboli in the
novel, reasserts the symbolic charging of commodities with “veils of mystery,” or “ceremonial phrases.” If religion and the church used to be the
antidote to our mortality, it is now shopping and the supermarket that
“recharge[s] us spiritually […]. Here we don’t die, we shop.” The supermarket is a “place” that is “sealed off” and “timeless.” (W 44–45) It is
outside of the world, pointing to the (postmodern) end of history, the
“historical gap” and “empty time”7 that White Noise denotes and out of
which Gladney will fail to lift himself.
The “affluent society” (Galbraith) is characterized by redundancy and
superfluity, and yet by an increasing feeling of existential disenchantment,
disillusion and even remorse.8 This is due, of course, to the nature of desire
itself but also to the “things” in themselves that one acquires. Since Marx,
we have been well aware of the fact that objects, rather than through their
use value, are defined through an exchange value, attaining a fetish character.9 But most of the commodities stored in one’s house become even devoid
of their exchange value. They are no longer embedded in a continuous and
self-evident interrelation with one’s environment. They turn into what
White Noise 15
Walter Benjamin calls a souvenir (“Andenken”): “manifestation of the
increasing self-alienation of man who takes stock of his past as dead possessions.”10 Phenomenologically speaking, those “things” are – in terms of
their temporality – doubly marked. They appear to imaginarily transcend
space and time, yet once they are simply “there,” they are too obviously
located in and limited by space and time. Things that one thinks are worth
keeping refer to a lived time, evoking perhaps vivid memories, while they
relate at the same time to a past that is indelibly gone or consumed. Still
and motionless as they are, they indicate loss. “Simple things are doomed,”
Gladney thinks, when the “question of dying” turns up again. (W 18) The
“comfort of things” (Daniel Miller) no longer holds. Aliveness is also
always undermined by emptiness, transience and mortality. This is the reason why they convey melancholy: “Why do these possessions carry such
sorrowful weight? There is a darkness attached to them, a foreboding.
They make me wary not of personal failure and defeat but of something
more general, something large in scope and content.” (W 8) Sure, one may
ask oneself what was there first: Does the “darkness attach” itself to things
because of the ongoing fear of death, or is it the other way round: Do those
“possessions” prompt and keep up the fear of death? The answer is that
there is a mutual relation and effect. The “things” are, after all, active
agents, they “carry” the “foreboding,” they make “wary.” As long as we are
subconsciously attached to things, we seem to be under the illusion to keep
living on and on. “Tibetans,” Siskind claims disenchanted, “try to see death
for what it is. It is the end of attachment to things.” (W 44)
Babette is “not happy with her hips and thighs.” She therefore regularly
runs up “the stadium steps” and intends to put herself on a diet of
“yoghurt and wheat germ” she keeps buying only to throw it away
“before she eats it,” as her daughter Denise asserts. (W 8–9) Babette feels
guilty both when not buying and when buying health food, yet cannot
resist the shiny junk food which makes her also feel uncomfortable. She
is therefore in a double bind: The promises of food as sensually elevating
pleasure here and the promise of the chastened body there. Babette then
fulfills what consumere originally meant, namely “the using up and physical exhaustion of matter” as well as of the body (also originally applied
only to (wasting) diseases such as tuberculosis). Consumere is etymologically related to consummare, meaning “to complete something, as in
Christ’s last words: ‘It is finished’ (consummatum est).” Thus “waste” and
“finished” were and are still used in the same breath. The English word
“consummate” can now mean “perfect” or “accomplished,” but “consummated” can also mean “executed.” That is, consumption, satisfactory
as it may be for the moment, has always a frustrating ring of finality to it.
Babette buys the stuff, but yoghurt, wheat germ or Kaboom cannot bring
the hoped-for consummation. She throws it away since it turns bad, indicating thereby its own wastefulness or consumption. Redemption negates
itself. Therefore, she has to endlessly go on shopping.
16 White Noise
“Why Can’t We Be Intelligent About Death?” Capitals in Quotation?
However, it is the very opacity and unpredictability of death itself (which
also accounts for the continuous material self-verification of consumers
and collectors) that is more distressful than the wastefulness of consumption. For waste, industrialized countries have found ways of, albeit preliminary, disposal; consumption is made palatable over and over – if only
for a short time – through the promise of novelty, even if it leaves an
insipid taste of emptiness. The fear of death, in contrast, could only be
done away with if death might be identified.
If one takes a look at the novel as a whole, regarding the main metaphor “white noise,” the ambiguity and inconceivability of “death” stand
out. Already at the beginning of the novel, Gladney mentions his doubts
about the knowability of death, adding some interesting conjecture:
“Maybe there is no death as we know it. Just documents changing hands.”
(W 7) That is, we even do not know about the physical eventuation of
death. We are left in doubt about the date of its arrival. Hence the question “Who will die first?” (e.g., W 17, 35) runs like a thread through the
narrative. Death and particularly the time of death must be officially certified by a medical authority. Death, then, is similarly puzzling as identity.
Identity and name, together with the certified time of birth, are conferred
to me on account of an official document. Otherwise, one is a non-person,
legally entitled to nothing. Death, accordingly, is the mere result of a
conventional (or contingent and not necessary) act.
There is moreover a linguistic and logical problem. Even if “death”
comes down to nothing but a metaphor for “nothing” (as Coetzee’s
Dostoevsky thinks), it will go on to signify, if only itself as a proposition
without proposition or predicate. Pointless as death as/or nothingness
may be, in ontological terms there is nothingness and death. Death
includes and results in nothing; it is a “fact without continuity.” However,
by making a statement using the verb “to be,” we cancel the nothingness
of death, just as we affirm the existence of nothing by negating nothingness or proposing that there is nothing. This paradox insolubly determines and permeates our attitudes toward death (and mourning). As one
cannot talk oneself out of it, it stays on. The closure of death does not
lend itself to resolution and closure.
In order to get a grasp on or at least approach the phenomenon of
death, Siskind, Gladney and Babette refer to The Tibetan Book of the
Dead, (W 44–45) biomedical data, the computer (W 165) is brought forward, and one turns to reflexive or esoteric discourse (on afterlife W 166,
328). Yet death evades rational grasp: It is “hard to fathom.” It is “everywhere and nowhere,” (W 44–45) Murray Jay Siskind asserts: “[M]odern
death […] has a life independent of us […]. We know it intimately. But it
continues to grow […].” (W 175) And Jack Gladney futilely tries to comfort his wife, who is severely depressed from fear of death: “Death is so
White Noise 17
vague. No one knows what it is, what it feels like or looks like.” (W 225)
He himself has to learn from a manufacturer of anti-fear-of-death-pills
(of all persons): “[D]eath adapts […] It eludes our attempts to reason
with it.” (W 354) Death remains as impenetrable and diffuse as “white
noise”11 or the “airborne toxic event” in the sky, which looms above like
“a shapeless growing thing,” (W 129) the “billowing dark mass,” reminiscent of “some death ship in a Norse legend.” (W 148) Gladney, who
has apparently been exposed to the toxic substance, is told by his doctor
that he may develop a “nebulous mass” in his body without “definite
shape, form or limits.” (W 322) The metaphors to denote the vague
threat, both from outside and inside, become indistinct and blurred.
Gladney is at a loss; on his way home, watching “racing clouds across the
westering moon,” he speciously comforts himself with a hollow slogan of
the medical industry: “Your doctor knows the symbols.” (W 323)
And yet, it is precisely its inconceivability and unfathomability, its tautological character and refusal to be subsumed to the principle of identity,
which makes death a fearful and covert medium of social communication
and a pertinent motif in literature. Common and less common ways of
coping with the daunting openness (or overdetermination) of the fact are
nicely spelled out in Chapter 37 of White Noise. Significantly, Gladney
and Siskind begin with the “obvious” question “Why can’t we be intelligent about death?” (W 324) And they embark upon a longer discourse,
even though they surmise that it is out of “our fear” that “we talk ourselves into it.” (W 325) Gladney wants to have his “dying” valorized; what
he gets are only echoes of the received assumptions about the fear and
meaning of death. Siskind acts as a kind of (Socratic) straight man,
Gladney responds. The first point Siskind makes is “accomplishment” (or,
vice versa, incompleteness). It is a very common argument, suggesting that
Gladney would be less angst-ridden and regretful if he had reached the life
goals he might have set for himself. Gladney rejects this rather trite argument first by reaffirming his basic will to live, prior to all achievements in
contents. “There’s only one issue here. I want to live.” (W 326) This sounds
obvious, but he might have invoked a philosophical discourse12 lastingly
(and interestingly) revived in the early 1980s, especially by Thomas Nagel.
“Life,” according to Nagel, should be seen as “emphatically positive” even
if the bad elements of one’s experience outweigh the good ones. The “positive weight” accrues “by experience itself, rather than by any of its contents.”13 This is to mean that constitutive human properties, intentions,
abilities, such as perception, thought, desire, and, one might add, hopefulness or the very possibility to sense oneself in one’s own aliveness, make it
in principle more valuable to live than not to live.
People do not want to defer death only to achieve something or something more. One would not ask a grocery bagger, Siskind points out, if he
fears death “because it is death” or if he fears death because he might not be
able to bag more or enough nice groceries in his given lifetime. Accordingly,
18 White Noise
Gladney does not “want it to tarry awhile” for a monograph; he wants it
“to go away for seventy or eighty years.” (W 326) The next point (which
protestant parsons are particularly fond of) is “love.” To the question
whether he believes love is “stronger than death,” Gladney (who appears to
be in love with his wife Babette) answers: “Not in a million years.” (W 327)
Surely death also deprives of the ability and possibility to love. The (rather
trite) psychological presumption that only those fear death who are “afraid
of life” is brusquely discarded as “completely stupid.”
Then they get on to “completion,” which is, philosophically, probably the
most challenging argument pro an acceptance of death. “Do you believe,”
Siskind asks, “life without death is something incomplete?” If life dragged
on indefinitely, or if one were not conscious of one’s finitude, life would lose,
thus the underlying argument, its existential value (as commodities generally do). Precisely because of its limitation (or scarcity of time), life and one’s
beloved become precious. It is due to the knowledge of one’s mortality,
Siskind contends, that one “can begin to live life to the fullest.”14 Even if this
represents the most serious and convincing – subjective – argument about
death, Gladney remains adamant: “Death is what makes it [i.e. life] incomplete,” and more firmly: “Once our death is established, it becomes impossible to live a satisfying life.” Common and inevitable as Siskind’s point may
be, like the often-raised objection of global overpopulation, it comes down
to a commodification of individuals. Each being by virtue of being alive and
a being with the (unlikely or likely) potential for preferences or interests
should have the right to live on. Subjects are geared, as it were, to look forward to an open future, always hoping for other and new possibilities.
Accordingly, Gladney would never want to know when he is going to die:
“Absolutely not. It’s bad enough to fear the unknown, we can pretend it isn’t
there.” (W 327–8) Thus if we do not know the date of our demise, we can
still cherish the illusion that life may be an open process. For the moral
philosopher James Rachel, this is the reason why there might be something
“bad about the death. It is because we are able to view life as in principle
open-ended, as always having further possibilities15 that still might be realized, if only it could go on.”16,17 Since death cuts off everything that a subject
may potentially wish for and realize for his or her self, including the very
subject of this self itself (“this consciousness,” “subjective time”), death, one
must concede, may well be considered as evil in principle:
It is true that various of my possibilities […] will remain unrealized as
a result of my death. But more fundamental is the fact that they will
cease then to be possibilities – when I as a subject of possibilities as
well as of actualities cease to exist.18
Against the background of the contemporary (American) philosophy of
death, it is only understandable that Gladney remains inconsolable faced
with his (assumed) imminent demise. Gladney prefers to live with the
White Noise 19
paradox and self-contradiction inherent in the “unknown,” or, for that
matter, death. It is frightening because it is unknown, but since it is
unknown “we can pretend it isn’t there.” (W 328)
According to a much older philosophical tradition, there is no rational
point in dreading something of which we are ignorant, hence one of the
most frequently quoted sentences of classical Stoic philosophy: “Death
[…] is nothing to us, since so long as we exist death is not with us; but
when death comes, we do not exist.”19 The early materialist Epicurus
should actually appeal to the modern mind. But the Western ennoblement
of the self – as it shows exemplarily and satirically in Gladney’s very selfcenteredness and self-aggrandizement20 – does not allow for this equanimity. Gladney would not have been impressed. One does not know who one
prenatally was (if one had been conceived or the fusion of sperm cell and
oocyte had occurred at another time, one would have become an entirely
different person). But most people are pretty self-assured about who they
are now and what they are probably going to miss in the future. Apart
from that, if death as non-existence is something bad (like pain) that lies
in the past, it may still be nagging, but it is surely not as frightening as a
future misfortune (pain, nothingness, death) that lies ahead still to be
expected. Modern individuals are teleological rather than retrogressive.
Siskind’s philosophical suggestions cannot convince Gladney. Thus, the
conversation turns to those (post-)modern means of “terror management,” which seem appropriate to conceal, occlude or repress (“get
around”) the fact of death. The first cultural agency Siskind comes up
with is, hardly surprising, technology: “It creates an appetite for immortality” and helps to cover over “the terrible secret of our decaying bodies.” (W 328) Technology – in its very ambiguity – is, of course, one of
Don DeLillo’s paramount motifs and themes anticipating the Silicon
Valley “Immortalists” who hope to defeat death by means of technology.21 It promises to raise us beyond our physical limitations (“nature”)
while threatening at the same time “universal extinction,” as Siskind
remarks. Technology nurses the temptation, as we shall see in Cosmopolis
and Zero K, to go beyond all limits, unmaking the world together with
one’s own life. The decaying body, “real” and “abject” as it appears to us,
has always been the most imminent reminder of death. Overcoming and
transfiguring the body – the technical devices (medical or prosthetic
appliances) are innumerable – has long been a remedy for the fear of
death. It is not so much the devices’ actual efficacy as their suggestive,
imaginary or even religious effect that might do the job: “God’s own
goodness.” (W 328) This metaphysical idealization turns up again in
Underworld or in Cosmopolis or Zero K. In The Body Artist, we will
encounter a very distinct form of bodywork.
But Gladney’s horror of doctors makes him also reject that alternative,
so that Siskind proposes, in his postmodern fashion of randomness, the
vast esoteric supermarket, which sells various forms of afterlife from
20 White Noise
reincarnation to hyperspace: “Pick one you like.” DeLillo’s Siskind was
obviously not yet aware of the “cyberspace” in which immortalists such
as Ray Kurzweil want to store the content of their brains for good. Yet
Gladney rightly realizes that without genuine conviction these beliefs
won’t do the job. And after a brief and useless consideration whether it
would help to narrowly escape a life-threatening situation (and a short
side trip into a shoe store),22 they finally turn to Gladney’s Hitler Studies.
“Hitler Studies”
One would think it a matter of moral and historical responsibility to see
in Hitler and the Nazis, first of all, the cause for an abominable disruption and collapse of civilization (“Zivilisationsbruch,” Dan Diner), resulting in many millions of innocent victims.23 But in his department, Gladney
is only interested in the doubtful aesthetics of the movement, its mass
rallies, propaganda, media, signs and ideology.24 It comes down to nothing but a more or less covert affirmation of the ignominious and megalomaniac mixture of false mythology and cheap ritual that still attracts so
many men (less so women) stuck in adolescence. But Siskind is well aware
of the real motive behind Gladney’s fascination with “magical […] mythic
figures” such as Hitler: “Some people,” he argues,
are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death. You thought he would
protect you. […] You wanted to be helped and sheltered. The overwhelming horror would leave no room for your own death. ‘Submerge
me,’ you said. ‘Absorb my fear.’ On one level you wanted to conceal
yourself in Hitler and his works. On another level you wanted to use
him to grow in significance and strength.
(W 330–1)
The eerie question is: In which (terrifying) sense may Hitler (the master
of annihilation) have been larger than death, so that one’s individual fear
of death might be masked, overlaid and even fade away? There are three
possible explanations.
For the first, we can turn again to Solomon et al. In a hypothetical election, they could experimentally demonstrate that participants were much
more inclined to vote for a charismatic leader, emphasizing greatness, if they
were reminded of death. Drawing on Ernest Becker, they could also show
that when “the cultural scheme of things” denies “a reliable basis for feeling
significant and secure” people look out for a bold personality with a “vision”
of “collective immortality.”25 If their narrative does not mention the economic crisis at the beginning of the 1980s, the double threat of ecological
and technological disaster certainly looms in the background. Gladney, by
his own account, had invented “Hitler studies” already in 1968, the year
that marked in many respects a cultural revolution. Nevertheless, the
White Noise 21
student rebellion did hardly stop the development of a culture industry and
consumer ideology which led to the socio-cultural recurrence of sameness
and historical vacuity the novel so aptly depicts.26 And, one should add,
Gladney’s Hitler Studies were not really meant to responsibly come to terms
with and to account for the “collapse of civilisation.” The narrator Gladney
professes that his “Advanced Nazism”-course, with “special emphasis on
parades, rallies and uniforms” was “designed to cultivate historical perspective.” But the “historical perspective” appears to be devoid of any contemporary relevance, closer examination or a social and political context.
Rather, it is designed to arouse excitement and sublime thrill, with a special
emphasis on the suggestive power of crowds and the related death cults. The
core of the class consists of Nazi propaganda films, which Gladney has
edited into an impressionistic eighty-minute documentary. Crowd
scenes predominated […] people surging, massing. […] Halls hung
with swastika banners, with mortuary wreaths and death’s-head insignia. […] Ranks of thousands of flagbearers arrayed before columns of
frozen light, a hundred and thirty anti-aircraft searchlights aimed
straight up – a scene that resembled a geometric longing, the formal
notation of some powerful mass desire. There was no narrative voice.
Only chants, songs, arias, speeches, cries, cheers, accusations, shrieks.
(W 29)
The scene Gladney has cut out, with the frozen searchlights aiming
straight up into the sky, is cinematically and pathetically arranged to be
tantamount to and to express “powerful mass desire.” The mass recipients are aesthetically deluded to experience something like their own
ascension and even apotheosis, which is, of course, strongly linked with
the ideology and mentioned power insignia of the Nazis. It points to a
strong propagandistic means of “terror management” (only to prepare
millions for their own death on the battlefields).
Yet Gladney does not much more than add just another facet to the
intellectual entertainment industry, which is in line with a society that
revolves around itself and foregoes any historical perspective. Even if, or
precisely because, his cultural approach belittles Hitler, the fascination of
the fascist “pathological affection for death” (with slogans like “Long
live death”) should be appealing to Gladney. This even more so as “the
Thousand-Year Reich” managed to combine cleverly its morbidity with
an ideology of heroic resurrection. With regard to the victims of the First
World War, in particular, Hitler proclaimed that “the dead” were “never
really dead” and that “the graves” would “open and send the silent mudand blood-covered back as spirits of vengeance to the homeland.”27
For two further explanations, Theodor W. Adorno and Hans Blumenberg
might be helpful, two (if ideologically very different) philosophers, scarred for
life by Nazism and the Holocaust. In his Negative Dialectics Adorno wrote:
22 White Noise
“In the camps death has a novel horror; since Auschwitz fearing death means
fearing worse than death.”28 What happened in Auschwitz defies words and
description. Before the victims were led into the gas chambers, they were
reduced to mere numbers, they were deprived of their names and identity,
utterly dehumanized and de-individualized. The Nazis did not only want to
kill, they wanted to totally efface and obliterate their victims. In this sense, the
millionfold death they realized was larger than death. Since man or humanity
was annihilated as such, the question for Adorno was whether it was still
possible to “go on living” after Auschwitz.29 How can a survivor live with this
memory of horror? The Holocaust was nothing short of a singular negation
of humanity and, according to Adorno, everyone must be filled with terror if
he or she wants to be or, rather, wants to become human again.30
Against this background, Gladney’s accommodation of Hitler is particularly perverse. He uses Hitler to relieve himself from his individual
fear of death, precisely because the murderous executions were “worse
than death,” or “larger than death,” annihilating and negating all individuality. The killing of an anonymous and naked humankind is so “overwhelming” – or, in a negative sense, “sublime” – that it will exceed
Gladney’s power of imagination and take his mind off his own individual
death: There is no room left for it. At least his own individuality is to
subsist, and he will die an individual death surrounded and commemorated by his large patchwork family.
Gladney does not respond to Siskind’s rather critical remarks on the
monstrosity of his motive for “using” Hitler. Instead, he immediately
reasserts his awe and horror of death, and reveals his entirely inappropriate association of his own prospective death with the death or degree of
annihilation Hitler brought about. Overwhelmed by his emotions as
Gladney is, the reader clearly senses an undercurrent of uncanny admiration in his exclamations:
‘The vast and terrible depth.’
‘Of course, he [i.e., Siskind] said.’
‘The inexhaustibility.’
‘I understand.’
‘The whole huge nameless thing.’
‘Yes absolutely.’
‘The massive darkness.’
‘Certainly, certainly.’
‘The whole terrible endless hugeness.’
‘I know exactly what you mean.’
(W 331)
Gladney, whose exclamations are consistently (duplicitously and falsely)
endorsed by Siskind, uses a language reminiscent of the sublime. The sublime is characterized by a spatial dimension that cannot be apprehended
White Noise 23
and conceived of in sensory, especially visual terms. Here it seems to collapse into an eschaton of dark nothingness. He perceives the morbid culture and practice of Nazism in the same way as one would vision an
apocalypse, which is fueled here by nothing but a neurotic fear of death.
What Gladney admits to is not a moral and historical mistake in personally using Hitler (and instrumentalizing the victims) but a “confusion
of means,” namely to use him to boost his career and personality and to
conceal his fear behind the “endless hugeness” of Hitler: “Dumb.” (W 331)
Yet, after another (and logical) interim visit to the surrogate realm of the
supermarket,31 they soon come back to the ghoulish interrelation of
dying and killing. Siskind once more takes the role of a Mephistophelian
tempter who wants to instill the advantage of killing over dying. It is
worth quoting these remarkable passages at some length.
I believe, Jack, there are two kinds of people in the world. Killers and
diers. […] We let death happen. […] But think what it’s like to be a
killer. […] If he dies you cannot. To kill him is to gain life-credit. The
more people you kill, the more credit you store up.
(W 333–4)
Gladney first responds with astonishment and doubts to these suggestions: “What does this have to do with me?” Thus, Gladney continues
with his purportedly Socratic dialogue (“I only want to elicit truths you
already possess,” W 336–7):
Nothingness is staring you in the face. […] The killer, in theory,
attempts to defeat his own death by killing others. He buys time, he
buys life. […] It’s a way of controlling death. […] You can’t die if he
does. He dies, you live. […] They [people] do it on a small intimate
scale, they do it in groups and crowds and masses. Kill to live. […] The
more people you kill, the more power you gain over your own death.
(W 334–5)
Even though Siskind does not explicitly mention Hitler here, he may have
the Nazi murders (and the “precision” of Auschwitz) in mind: “There is a
secret precision at work in the most savage and indiscriminate killings.”
Gladney still hesitates to accept the “theory” and suspects Siskind of
instigating him to “plot a murder,” which for him means “to die” anyway.
But Siskind picks up on that and underpins his thinking with a decisionist
concept of “plot”: “To plot is to affirm life, to seek shape and control.”
(W 335) DeLillo may have intended here a metatextual and ironic reference to the novel, associating the conventional “murder plot.” But “plot”
also denotes the determination to control, to decide and to unwaveringly
take things into one’s own hands in the sense of an existentialist selfempowerment, propagated by some precursors of fascism such as Carl
24 White Noise
Schmitt (“Decisionism”). When Siskind moreover proffers an anthropological-essentialist justification (or naturalization)32 of killing only to
eventually and “honestly” exclaim: “Better you [die] than me,” (W 337)
Gladney acquiesces.
If we take Siskind’s above logic at face value, the fear of death may be
tackled by hastening the death of others before the bell tolls for oneself.
The killer gains “life-credit,” buys “time,” controls “death,” – the more
killings, the more “power” over death and time. In this respect, Hitler and
his accomplices (Himmler, Goebbels, Heydrich, etc.) were surely masters
in organizing death, from the war machinery to the Holocaust. And yet
there is, as Hans Blumenberg pointed out, another final monstrosity to
the “Führer’s” willing to be “larger than death”: the violent “enforcement” of the “convergence” of “life-time” and “world-time.”33 Blumenberg
quotes from a conversation between Hitler and his air force adjutant von
Bülow after the failure of the Battle of the Bulge (Ardennes): “We do not
capitulate, never. We may perish. But we will take along a world.” (80)
The indefinite article, Blumenberg explains, leaves open the extent of
what should be dragged along into his downfall.34 (It obviously depends,
one might add, on your means, space of action and megalomania whether
the world to be brought to naught consists of one person (a “little world”
or a nation.) But only by also wiping out the/a world, and thus an indefinite future, one can be larger than death and thereby surpass and, as it
were, outperform death and time. One captures death’s job acting arbitrarily at one’s own discretion; the killer gains more space, and the scope
of death is diminished. The world has to end in a bang, not a whimper.
Psychologically the desire to take someone along discloses an extremely
narcissistic personality. “A single life defines its meaning precisely by
claiming that it is something whereupon nothing else may come.”
(Blumenberg 80) The narcissist cannot endure the knowledge that something is withheld and denied to him or her, and that this subsequently
goes to someone else who will profit instead. (See Blumenberg 72,78)
World and time are indifferent to me. The world was and will be the
same, no matter if I existed or not. (cf. 75)35 This is an important motivation behind individual killings and killing sprees, and clearly behind ideas
of apocalypse and eschatology. To believe that one will not be survived
has a consolatory effect if it goes hand in hand with the conviction that
all will be lost, even if one gets deprived of what one had in and of the
world (which will happen through death anyway). (Blumenberg 78)
White Noise is an apocalyptic novel, or rather, a novel in which apocalypse and death have beset the minds and phantasies of the protagonists.
If apocalypse or eschatology do not fulfill themselves, one has to hasten
the end of all things. This is symptomatic for a consumerist world that
literally and figuratively revolves only around itself, the more so if it is
unsettled by ecological and technological incalculables. In Underworld,
one both fears and reveres the “bomb.”
White Noise 25
Before he sets about his killing mission, Gladney, interestingly enough,
throws out remainders, remnants and reminders of consumption from his
“picture-frame wire” to his “ridiculous hip boots.” The attachment to
these things means, after all, an existential stalemate: “I bore a personal
grudge against these things. Somehow they’d put me in this fix. They’d
dragged me down, made escape impossible.” (W 338)
When Gladney proceeds to kill Willy Mink, he also does so out of
exasperation. The former psychologist and pharmacist had seduced
Babette by offering her “Dylar,” the pill which is supposed to mitigate the
fear of death. Yet it is no less a violent – ideologically and psychologically
well-prepared – attempt to escape the socio-historical drabness and
pointlessness of his existence.36 Gladney drives to the tellingly named
“Germantown” in “Iron City” (“looking for signs of some erstwhile
German presence” (!), W 349) with a “German-made” (W 291) gun carrying the very Germanic name “Zumwalt” (which is today the name of a
devastating navy destroyer). The gun creates “a second reality” for him, a
reality he “could control.” When he was given the gun by his father-inlaw Vernon Dickey, it is at once to him a “second life, a second self, a
dream, a spell, a plot.” (W 292) His mind – that is, his object-relation –
appears to undergo a fundamental change. He sees the things of his environment no longer as disconnected and dead, and becomes “aware of
processes, components, things relating to other things. […] I saw things
new.” (W 350) His new decisiveness finds expression in the often (eightfold) repeated affirmation of his “plan” (“Here is my plan,” W 349).
Sentences become short and crisp, often with an imperative structure,
expediating the action. The new clear-sightedness and purposefulness
convey to him a “heightened reality,” a “denseness.” He finds himself “[c]
lose to a violence, close to death,” (W 353) in “the network of meanings.”
(W 358) Peter Boxall has also drawn attention to the temporal acceleration of the narrative, which tries to follow Gladney “as he blasts open the
continuum”37 of historical standstill, so arrestingly described by Walter
Benjamin in his “Thesis on History.” But the decisionist attempt at a disruption and breakout of cultural dead-end comes down to a farce.
Gladney’s repetitive reaffirmation of his plan may equally imply a kind of
(other-directed) compulsiveness. Toward the climax, the narrative also
changes into “slow motion,” taking on a “cinematic” quality.38 In fact,
when one sees “blood squirt,” in a “delicate arc,” one is reminded of
sequences in films by Kurosawa or Quentin Tarantino. The killing fails
ridiculously; Gladney drags Mink to a hospital with nullifidian, Germanspeaking nuns and an absurdly kitschy representation of afterlife: Jack
Kennedy and Pope John XXIII holding hands in heaven. (W 363) Gladney
does not, of course, learn anything that could make him break open his
vacuum; he fails to apprehend and realize the meanings of networks
beyond ideological and late-capitalist delusion. Accordingly, the book
and the narrator end up in the supermarket, now equipped with the
26 White Noise
scanner: the “carts stocked with brightly colored goods” and at the
checkout tabloids providing “cults of the famous and the dead.” (W 374)
However, even White Noise offers, if arguably, a redeeming perspective
or, for that matter, an alternative attitude toward death. There is, for one,
the unpretentious neuroscientist Winnie Richards. She seems not only to
be able to genuinely experience the “beauty” of the sunset (W 261), without “postmodern” (W 260) awe and the apocalyptic predisposition. She
also tells Gladney that only through the boundary and defining power of
death does life attain beauty and meaning. If this is not a thoroughly surprising argument,39 her pleading for a less consequential attitude to one’s
self is also a plea for a demystification of death and for equanimity: “Self,
self, self. If death can be seen as less strange and unreferenced, your sense
of self in relation to death will diminish, and so will your fear.” (W 263)
Vernon Dickey, Gladney’s father-in-law, surely embodies the cliché of the
traditional American male with macho attitudes and the belief in the
defensive necessity of weapons, but his stance on both objects and death
is indeed different. Vernon is a versatile repairman. He is capable of mending what needs to live and abide; he does shingling and rustproofing,
repairs caskets and washers and knows about “grouting, caulking, spackling.” Thereby, he commands Gladney’s respect: “These were the things
that built the world. Not to know or care about them was [according to
Vernon] a betrayal of fundamental principles, a betrayal of gender and
species.” (W 282) Vernon does not see in things mere commodities to be
thrown away before long; he cares and appreciates their use value, “techniques and procedures.” He is, on the other hand, completely indifferent
to consumer goods, money or the state of his car and, although a heavily
coughing smoker, he is not at all worried about his health. “That’s the way
it’s supposed to be.” (W 294) Given all this serenity, he is nevertheless
aware of death: “You get old […] You’re always getting prepared.” (W
285) Even if this made him visit his daughter after all, there is a great deal
of stoic calm in Vernon.40 One can assume that Vernon has always been
intuitively familiar with the “network of meanings.” However, as any of
Don DeLillo’s characters, Vernon is not univocal. He almost imposes the
handgun upon Gladney who initially resists Vernon’s persuasive attempts:
“Was he death’s dark messenger after all?” (W 291), Gladney first wonders. Yet he soon willingly accepts his “second life” with a “lethal weapon.”
If the gun is a metonymy and symbol for death, Vernon only transfers
death symbolically to someone else, and may indeed be its “messenger.”
The Fearful Beauty of Apocalypse: Apparition
At the end of White Noise, just before the final visit to the digitalized
Supermarket, Gladney, Babette and their son Wilder go, as they often do
now, to a motorway overpass to watch the setting sun. The overpass is
regularly visited by a large crowd of people, predominantly the middle-aged,
White Noise 27
older adults, handicapped and helpless in wheelchairs. They watch the
sunset, which appears to be irradiantly and luminously transfigured by
the toxic cloud. The sky has taken on “content, feeling, an exalted narrative life” with “turreted skies, light storms, softly falling steamers.” (W
373) There are even epiphanic moments: “Something golden falls, a softness delivered to the air.” (W 374) The spectacle engenders a fearful
beauty, which in its sublime mixture of doom and aesthetic elatedness
appealed to writers and poets from Milton to Rilke. William Blake’s
speaker is fascinated by the “fearful symmetry” of the “Tyger, burning
bright.” In DeLillo the spellbound onlookers are also not sure how to
feel; some are “scared,” some “determined to be elated.” There is certainly
“awe,” but they are not sure whether they are “watching in wonder or
dread.” There is an “anticipation,” but the introverted beholders do not
know whether this means “a level of experience […] into which our
uncertainty will eventually be absorbed.” (W 373) Nonetheless, if White
Noise paints the picture of a profoundly alienated society, steeped in the
fear of death, there remains the fleeting glimpse of beauty (and perhaps
salvation) in a sky that rings “like bronze.” (W 369)
Notes
1 The conceivability of death is questioned both by the protagonist and Hitler
specialist Jack Gladney and his colleague, the Elvis specialist Murray Siskind.
As the occupation of the main persons already suggests, White Noise displays
both the social folly and alienation of the American middle classes in the
1980s. Apart from the fear of death, it relates and satirizes academic vogues
(cultural materialism), consumerism, TV, technology, media and virtualization,
as well as the American family. As, in addition, the story is set in the catastrophic 1980s and is also told from Gladney’s unreliable perspective (who
converses with the cynic Murray), it is always questionable to take this or that
particular assumption and statement as authoritative and binding for an analysis of the subject in DeLillo’s later work. Nonetheless, Siskind’s partly gratuitous statements and Gladney’s fears may well tell us something about the
dominant consciousness of the society and class in question.
2 The “historical vacuum” of and within the narrative due to the capitalist
assimilation of the 1968 avant-garde forms the interpretative foil for Peter
Boxall’s account of White Noise. See Peter Boxall, Don DeLillo: The
Possibility of Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 109–30. For
an excellent essay on White Noise see also John N. Duvall, “The (Super)
Marketplace of Images: Television as Unmediated Mediation in DeLillo’s
White Noise,” the text is reprinted in Don DeLillo, White Noise: Text and
Criticism, ed. Mark Osteen (London: Penguin, 1998), 432–55. Duval focuses
on Jack’s “Hitler Studies” and sees the Supermarket and Television as serving
“the Participant (shopper/viewer) as a temporary way to step outside death
by entering an aestheticized space of consumption.” (433)
3 Here the cereal brand is meant, of course. But it is worth mentioning that
Kaboom was also a very popular contemporary video game: “Kaboom! is an
Activision video game published in 1981 for Atari 2600 that was designed by
Larry Kaplan. David Crane coded the overlaid sprites. It was well received
and successful commercially, selling over one million cartridges by 1983.
28 White Noise
4
5
6
7
8
9
Kaboom! is an unauthorized adaptation of the 1978 Atari coin-op
Avalanche. The gameplay of both games is fundamentally the same, but
Kaboom! was re-themed to be about a mad bomber instead of falling rocks. An
ex-Atari programmer, Larry Kaplan, originally wanted to port Avalanche to the
Atari 2600. In Avalanche all the boulders are lined up at the top, which is difficult to accomplish on the 2600, hence the shift to the Mad Bomber.” (Accessed
September 9, 2018, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaboom!(video_game).
The 1983 change in contents is worth stressing.
An average German now owns more than 10,000 objects, which he almost
exclusively stores in his house. See Frank Trentman, Empire of Things: How
We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the TwentyFirst (London: Penguin, 2016), 1.
See Stefanie Samida, Manfred K.H. Eggert and Hans Peter Hahn, eds.,
Handbuch Materielle Kultur: Bedeutungen, Konzepte, Disziplinen (Metzler:
Stuttgart/Weimar, 2014) for the social, psychological and phenomenological
significance of objects and things. See in particular the balanced articles by
Aida Bosch, “Identität und Dinge,” 70–7 and Hans Peter Hahn, “Orientierung/
Desorientierung durch Dinge,” 125–32. See also Christopher Tilley, Webb
Keane, Susanne Kuechler-Fogden, Mike Rowlands and Patricia Spyer, eds.,
Handbook of Material Culture (London: Sage, 2013), passim; and the Work
of Daniel Miller for a rather positive view of things and consuming.
It is worth quoting another nice passage in which the religious and redemptive connotation of consuming is made explicit: “The utterance was beautiful
and mysterious, gold-shot with looming wonder. It was like the name of an
ancient power in the sky, tablet-carved in cuneiform. It made me feel that
something hovered. But how could this be?” (W 180)
Boxall 2006, 115.
Consumer skepticism has been commercialized in itself now for some time
with slogans such as “Small is Beautiful” or movements such as the “New
Minimalism.”
The corresponding famous passage from Das Kapital is as follows:
In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mistenveloped regions of the religious world. In that world, the productions of the
human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life and entering
into relation both with one another and the human race. So, it is in the world
of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism
which attaches itself to the products of labor, so soon as they are produced as
commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of
commodities.
10
11
12
13
14
See Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I, Trans.
Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books (1990) [1867]), 165.
Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des
Hochkapitalismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992), 177 (my translation).
The metaphor may likewise connotate the permanent background humming
of advertisement slogans and brand names.
It is notable that the discourse hinges on the modes of possibility, and the
possible future which subjects in their subjectivity may be deprived of through
death, no matter how old. This also seems to mirror the spirit of the time.
Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: CUP, 2012), 2.
One of the two positive counter-examples (as the relation to death is concerned) is Winnie Richard, a neuroscientist at the university. After Gladney
White Noise 29
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
had asked her to analyze the anti-fear drug “Dylar,” she gives him the following advice: “[…] I think it’s a mistake to lose one’s sense of death, even one’s
fear of death. Isn’t death the boundary we need? Doesn’t it give a precious
texture to life, a sense of definition?” (W 262)
See also Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York/Oxford: Oxford
UP, 1986), 228: “My existence seems [from a subjective view] to be a universe
of possibilities that stands by itself […] The subjective view projects into the
future its sense of unconditional possibilities, and the world [i.e., death)
denies them.” Or: Mortal Questions, 8–10.
James Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy (New York: Random
House, 1986), 51.
Robert Nozick develops this point even further in his Philosophical
Explanations (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard UP, 1981), 571ff. (“Philosophy and
the Meaning of Life”).
Nagel 1986, 226.
Epicurus is discussed and quoted in John Broome, “The Badness of Death and
the Goodness of Life,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Death,
eds. Bradley et al. (Oxford: OUP, 2015), 218–33, here: 218–9.
There are many references to this end. His pompous demeanor at the campus,
his repeatedly telling his wife that he wants to die before her, while he is certain he does not, and there is, of course, his Hitler project, to name only a few
instances.
“Technology is lust removed from nature.” The new immortalists are also
proposing to remove culture definitely from nature. One method is “to provide new organs.” (W 328)
“Weejuns, Wallabees, Hush Puppies,” (330)
It is, of course, not possible (and, since it is not a matter of quantity, morally
dispensable) to give exact numbers of the overall victim of Nazi tyranny. But
according to a reliable source (www.comlink.de), they amount to approximately 50 million people killed owing to the reign of violence and the war.
As mentioned above, the 1980s marked the beginning and high times of
Cultural Materialism and Semiotics in the English and American Humanities.
Don DeLillo satirizes this. The approach, focusing on the signifier, the iconography, structural or functional make-up of cultural expressions or artefacts,
was prone, however, to neglect the moral and socio-economic content side of
the phenomena in question. “There are full professors in this place,” Siskind
remarks, “who read nothing but cereal boxes.” (11)
Solomon et al., 121, 117.
As commentators of the novel have repeatedly pointed out, DeLillo uses in
White Noise the déjà vu topos as well as the postmodern simulacrum phenomenon. I think it is appropriate to interpret these as indicative of the historical deadlock of aimless recurrence and self-reproduction. “I saw all this
before,” Gladney’s daughter Steffi exclaims, when they evacuate the town.
They ascribe the déjà vu to the effects of the poisonous cloud (“Nyodine”),
but cannot be sure of that: “Is there a true déjà vu and a false déjà vu?” (W 146,
see also 155). “THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA”
exists only on the strength of being an endlessly photographed barn: “No one
sees the barn,” Siskind asserts. “We are not here to capture an image, we’re
here to maintain one. […] We see only what the others see […] They are taking pictures of taking pictures.” (14) See Boxall (2006) and, for an application
of Jean Baudrillard’s corresponding theory and consumption, see Marc
Schuster, Don DeLillo, Jean Baudrillard, and the Consumer Conundrum
(Amherst, New York: Cambria Press, 2008), here Chapter 1.
30 White Noise
27 Solomon et.al., 121; the quote is from Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
28 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York:
Continuum, 1992), 371. The German original can be found in Negative
Dialektik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966), 364: “Neues Grauen hat der Tod in
den Lagern: seit Auschwitz heißt den Tod fürchten, Schlimmeres fürchten als
den Tod.“
29 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 363, German Original: “ob nach Auschwitz
noch sich leben lasse […],“ 355.
30 See also the Chapter on “Annihilation” (“Vernichtung”) in Petra Gehring’s
good overview on the “Theories of Death,” (publ. in German as Theorien des
Todes, Hamburg: Junius, 2010), esp. 154–55, which I have drawn on here.
31 With its “Blasts of color, layers of oceanic sound” and banners that Siskind
likens to a “Tibetan prayer flag.” (W 331)
32 He claims that there is a deep male “prehistoric” remnant of a killing instinct,
“buried” in one’s “soul,” which one might tap into, occasionally. (W 336)
33 Hans Blumenberg, Lebenszeit und Weltzeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), 80.
All other references to this book are given in the text, all translations are
mine. Die “Erzwingung der Konvergenz von Lebenszeit und Weltzeit” or: the
enforcement of a convergence of one’s individual and definite life span with
the time of what exists (in all indefinite future) apart from me. It is probably
another humiliation of man that in post-eschatological times the life span of
the micro-cosmos (man) and that of the macro-cosmos (world or universe)
are ever drifting apart.
34 But Hitler (unlike Napoleon), Blumenberg further explains, “had no world”
and no world horizon. It did not matter to him, just as his posthumous fame
or reputation did not matter to him. (84)
35 Blumenberg also recognizes here a Faustian impulse: if one considers the limited time one has on earth and realizes its disproportion with the abundancy
of wishes and possibilities, it may come to one’s (malevolent) mind to make
up for this discrepancy by an overabundance of misdeed.
36 “Routine things,” Gladney says in another context, “can be deadly.” (285)
37 Boxall 2006, 128.
38 Ibid., 128–9.
39 There are numerous versions of the argument. One of the first known also
dates back to Blumenberg.
40 Heidegger would certainly have been pleased with that, looking at death as
something that is always already within the horizon of one’s being.
3
Underworld and “Terror
Management”
Apocalypse, the Bomb, Cold War,
Crowds
“Terror Management”: Apocalypse
The surreal scenery at the end of White Noise may be taken as iconographic for modern apocalypse, which is logically marked by paradox
and, experientially, by contingency. The sunset and sky are exceptional
and thereby transcend the common frame of perceptional experience and
everyday life. Like an extraordinary experience with the beauty of art,
natural spectacles may also hold the promise of revelation and illumination. Yet on DeLillo’s overpass, the marvelous sky is bound up with terror
and devastation. Out of it may unfold, after all, an ecological apocalypse1
foreboding the end of a world. This causes anxiety, yet there is also a
sense of expectation and elation induced by the possibility of reaching a
level of being where all uncertainty has been dispelled. On the one hand,
this comes down to a modern version of a Burkeian and terror-stricken
version of the sublime, surpassing in a fearfully threatening manner our
absorbing capacities. On the other, it presents a weakened form of the
premodern strictly dualistic forms of apocalypse, especially in their millenarian, eschatological or chiliastic varieties. There is still some hope for
redemption and resolution as an alternative to the current state. Even if
divine redemption (or the second coming of Christ) is “clipped off,”2 and
the “contemporary zeitgeist brims with the most diverse apocalyptic narratives,”3 one may anticipate, if no divine revelation, at least some kind
of resolution. Apocalypse holds out an answer to “uncertainty,” which is
also due to the “concealment” or opacity of our Being-toward-death and
death itself. Death and the fear of death are closely related to our perception of time (not least as the result of our fleetingly unstable object-relation
in a consumerist world), as we have seen. Apocalypse – for the time being
– anticipates not only a radical cancellation of time but also, hopefully,
the disclosure of a radically different time, subsequent to “the end of the
world as we know it.”4 According to Klaus Vondung, the leading (nontheological) scholar in this research area, the apocalyptic zeitgeist springs
from a deep-felt deficiency in one’s lifeworld, meaning “experiences of
failure […], of physical, intellectual, also moral inadequacy right up to
DOI: 10.4324/9781003289937-3
32 Underworld and “Terror Management”
the all-pervasive experiences of transience, of loss, of aging, illness and
death.”5 Apocalypse, in contrast, will bring about some cathartic purification resulting (necessarily vaguely) in “fullness” and concord. Even if the
sociopsychological causes and the (religious) structure of apocalypse
have changed, in its secular as well as diverse sectarian forms, it remains
ever-present. It belongs, as the German intellectual Hans Magnus
Enzensberger once wrote, to “our ideological hand luggage.”6 According
to a 2002 Time/CNN poll, 59% of Americans thought the “Book of
Revelation would come true.”7 This was after 9/11, but at the height of
the Cold War, one can assume, numbers were not all that different.
Socio-Cultural and Anthropological Contexts
Apart from The Body Artist,8 apocalypse (and more specifically, the fear
of death) looms more or less large in all of Don DeLillo’s novels dealt with
here. This is remarkable, since the time in which White Noise and
Underworld are set (the latter extends from 1951–1992), was characterized by (a relative) social affluency. Medical progress should have diminished the quotidian fear of death. Diverse vaccines had been found; polio,9
tuberculosis and many other potentially deadly diseases had been defeated.
The mortality rate sank; the birth rate, procreating the “Boomers,” rose.
Yet (the fear of) death works on two levels. As an anthropological constituent, it is covertly always there. Since it could happen any time and
nobody knows the time of his or her own demise, it forms the deep structure of our being. In this respect, Underworld is an existential novel in
which the same incomprehensible and (in itself) meaningless undercurrent
of death lurks beneath the surface. Don DeLillo has the fact of death
voiced by the two most conspicuous social outcasts of the novel. For one,
there is the black New York street preacher who, on the basis of his
15-year study of a dollar bill, is able to predict the apocalypse,10 “the day
and the hour […] when the time is come,” (U 354) preaching Matthew 24:
“Nobody knows the day or the hour.” (U 352, 354) The paranoid “old
man with a hungry head, veined at the temples” appears (chronologically)
for the first time in October 1951 after the Giants had defeated the
Dodgers, and Manx Martin is about to sell the ball (also U 653–4) his son
had captured. Interestingly enough, the novel’s major figures (see e.g., U 140)
have all come across the apostle of death. So has Lenny Bruce, the “postexistential” satirist and “persecuted junkie” who speaks in tongues and dies
(in 1966) of an overdose. In 1962, in front of a large audience at Carnegie
Hall, Lenny does the preacher’s voice – “unavoidably:” “Nobody knows
the day or the hour.” The voice of death, the underworld or undercurrent
of death recurs, speaking through him: “[H]e could not seem to stop doing
the voice.” (U 628)11 The “national unconscious”12 can only be articulated
“cross-voiced,” by “wastelings of the lost world” as Lenny calls the
preacher, the latter’s small audience, and, implicitly, himself. That is, only
Underworld and “Terror Management” 33
the desperate are free to bring into the open what lurks underneath. (see
also U 506–7) They live outside the cultural mainstream of “terror management,” to which we will return soon. Lenny’s performance had been
given just after the Cuban Missile Crisis had been settled.
The historic-anthropological or existential substructure cannot be
clearly differentiated from contemporary social circumstances. As any,
the American post-war period was marked by a process of modernization
and globalization that called forth new collective anxieties. Underworld
was moreover written against not only the backdrop of an apocalyptic
Cold War but also “hot” wars in Korea and Vietnam or the Iran Crisis.
The conservative modernist W. B. Yeats responded to an entirely disillusioning and miserable First World War with the apocalyptic and extremely
effective poem “The Second Coming.”13 The ambivalent and absorbing
poem displays a fearfulness which is shot through with fascination, even
though it announces the possible advent of a “beast” (communist rather
than a fascist) or despot following the dissolution of the naturalized and
closed (hierarchical and patriarchal) social entities dominating old
Europe. The United States saw its “falling apart” of social matters and
cultural self-understanding after the Second World War. The hegemonial
classes, unable to recognize modernization as the reason for the sociocultural changes, found their antichrist most of all in the Communist as
such, most vigorously embodied by Stalin and then Brezhnev. I do not
have the space to outline even remotely the highly complex post-war
social culture; some general remarks, leading us back to Underworld,
must suffice.
The German historian and hermeneutic Reinhard Kosellek, a close
friend of the above-mentioned Hans Blumenberg, has drawn attention to
the critical consequences of the increasing incongruity between what he
calls the “space of experience” and the “horizon of expectations” in
modernity.14 Especially after historically incisive events, such as the French
Revolution, the First or, for that matter, the Second World War, society
anticipates an un-heard-of bounty of new possibilities. Those possibilities,
however, become contingent, particularly in an age of expedited mobility,
technology and media domination, as after the Second World War. The
new options that offered themselves were neither necessary nor impossible, but only possible options. There may have always been alternatives,
for better or worse. With the mobilization and medialization of culture,
the experience of reality is accelerated, while a new plurality and heterogeneity of life design and social agents emerge. More and more appear to
exist synchronically.15 The expectant individual becomes disoriented and
insecure in the face of open and multifarious horizons of future possibilities, precisely because they are increasingly disconnected from one’s past
experience, and, moreover, because they are not instantaneously fulfilled.
They just repeat themselves diachronically and synchronically. The way
out is a suspension of the contingency of what lingers on, through the
34 Underworld and “Terror Management”
invocation of a historical revolution and the return to an assumedly
homogenous past, or an evocation and the precipitation of an entirely
different salvific historical state. Both concepts work by exclusion, the first
is suffused with nostalgia, the second with an “angstlust” or thrill in the
face of the annihilation of what is, of destruction and apocalypse.
Especially the first strain needs enemy images, but both can be intricately
and ambivalently interwoven in one personality (as in Edgar J. Hoover, for
example). On the more individual level, the desire to speed up redemption
may prompt Dionysian experience, attempts at disrupting time by way of
violence, dissolution in the crowds, consumerism and drug abuse.
James T. Patterson, in his monumental history spanning the years from
1945 to 1974, very convincingly describes the “Grand Expectations”16 the
United States developed after two triumphantly won and, by all indications, just wars: “In this golden age it often seemed that there were no
limits to what the United States could do both at home and abroad.” But in
the 1960s at the latest, in the wake of the assassination of a president, of
less righteous, misguided wars, McCarthyism, civil unrest and racial conflict, this euphoric optimism was undermined: “Both the internal divisions
and the blunders aroused dissension and enlarged the gap between what
people expected and what they managed to accomplish.”17 The gap
between the horizon of expectations, finding expression in remarkable sentences such as “The impossible takes a little longer,”18 and the space of
experience widened. The problem was not least immanent to what we look
upon as (technological) modernization, media and mobility. The years after
the Second World War were, as Patterson notes, “an automobile age.” In
1945, 69,500 cars were sold; in 1955 the sales rose to 7.9 million.19 In the
three final decades of the 20th century, the sense of consumerism and the
modern dialectics of expectancy and disenchantment did not subside. In
his follow-up to Grand Expectations, Restless Giant (covering the time
from 1974 to 2000) Patterson remarks: “The explosive power of America’s
consumer culture, while liberating in many ways, was seductive and disorienting: The more people bought, the more they seemed to crave. Wants
became needs.”20 In 1975, 106.7 million passenger cars were registered.21
The automobile boom strongly stimulated the housing boom but also the
decline of the downtown22 and, on the other side, what Eric Avila calls the
“suburbanization of American culture.”23 This was a major reason for the
dissolution of traditional neighborhoods. The new suburban homes were
soon equipped, moreover, with television sets, which in their turn contributed to the “retreat from public life” and the “privatization of cultural
experience.” Television and cars opened new and multitudinous perspectives and possibilities but effected at the same time social closure. The automobile took the family along ever the same billboards to their suburban
home; TV reduced the world to a small screen with tiny dots and lots of
commercials. “At the height of the Cold War, in the shadow of the nuclear
bomb, television promoted an ideal of domestic containment, shaping an
Underworld and “Terror Management” 35
inward cultural focus upon the home as a sanctuary of mass consumption
and traditional gender roles.“24 Yet a mentality that relied on social closure
and cultural seclusion, the constraint of women to the kitchen and a promise of consumption that revolved only about itself, proves the more vulnerable, the more it tries to shut out what is not provided for in those
microcosms. Apocalyptic films such as War of the Worlds, (1953) Them
(1954) or The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) were symptomatic of
the fear of dissolution which only increased in the 1960s and 1970s. Violent
anticommunism, antifeminism, a hatred of hippies and all that was different, especially by the New Right, which continued to idealize the “white
nuclear family,” were, to be sure, motivated by the fear of losing social and
political hegemony but also a despairing response to contingency, or the
waning illusion that the seemingly impossible might be possible after all.
Underworld, like no other of DeLillo’s novels, illustrates the tension
between a secular,25 but highly expectant, capitalist society (which has
invested enormous amounts of consumption and labor into this new
identity of affluence and boundless opportunities), on the one hand, and,
on the other, the corresponding fear of the undermining and destruction
of that very identity, informed by a horizon of the expectations of salvation that is always receding.
The Bomb and the Cold War26
In Underworld, the latent desire for apocalyptic resolution materializes
most potently in the nuclear bomb along with (a possible Third) War of
cataclysmic consequences. Death hovers over society in a Cold War like
the mushroom of the atomic bomb (U 466), which has taken on an iconic
quality for the collective American consciousness, fascinated with weapons, secret threats, conspiracies and money (dollar bill) and waste. The
nuclear mushroom cloud in Underworld works indeed as a manifestation
of the sublime and thus on the same phenomenological and sociopsychological level as the toxic cloud in White Noise. Before and after the
nuclear tests were moved underground, the Nevada or New Mexico test
sites were vast media and tourist attractions. “People went willingly to
these places […] to meet some elemental need […] to locate some higher
condition.” (458) Films and photos of the explosions were widely distributed and sold as posters. A number of them include spectators watching
in the foreground, as well as camera men filming. The figures highlight
the enormity of the detonation that fills out the picture.27 The photos may
well be likened to Caspar David Friedrich’s romantic paintings of small
figures against a misty, sepulchral and gloomy scenery such as “Der
Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer,” “Sonnenuntergang (Die Brüder).”
Painted against the background of the Napoleonic wars and a crucial
historical turning point, they try to visualize, and hence somehow come
to terms with, the existential, but opaque, perils of modernization. By
36 Underworld and “Terror Management”
placing the – comparatively small, sometimes minute – individual within
the picture (see “Mönch am Meer”) in front of and in an appropriate
distance to the mystical and staggeringly beautiful horizon (or a jagged
and rugged rocky or icy landscape), the (transcendental) subject is still
brought into a relation with the incomprehensible. The self perceives it,
stays on (unharmed for the time being) and, by his or her very sensuousness, can still make sure of their own psychosomatic being. At the same
time, though, one can place oneself in some melancholic and mystical
relationality with what is yet unconceivable and potentially obliterating.
The sublime effect of the atomic bomb was made explicit by contemporaries. After the first detonation of an atomic bomb in July 1945, the following lines from the Hindu Bhagavad-Gita crossed, according to Robert
Jungk, the mind of Robert Oppenheimer, another modern mystic: “If the
radiance of a thousand suns/were to burst into the sky/ that would be like/
the splendour of the Mighty One” and “I am become Death, the shatterer
of worlds.”28 A radiance that exceeds our sun’s a thousandfold (which is
hardly conceivable), bursting into the sky, splendidly godsent and godlike,
is more than an impressive depiction of apocalypse. The second quote
refers both to Oppenheimer himself, the “father” of the bomb, and to God
alike. Vishnu and the scientist merge. A mortal being has now also become
the primary agent, prime mover of apocalypse. Yet this human selfempowerment has an ambivalent quality. By transferring, on the one
hand, the origin of apocalypse onto man, apocalypse loses some of the old
horror of the Mysterium tremendum (et, though, fascinosum); one is no
longer at the mercy of the entirely Other. If he or she through their relational presence seem to partake, they become both object and subject of
the apocalypse. It appears to be manageable to a degree, as was the Cold
War. But by the same token, another source of the uncanny sneaks in.
While one could formerly still hope for God’s mercy, technology is relentless, it merely functions – or not. This is what the nuclear scientists –
approved of by the state – wanted to find out when they first dropped the
bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “All technology refers to the bomb,”
Matt Shay, an employee of the nuclear industry and Nick Shay’s, the main
protagonist’s brother, ponders. Matt visits, with his spouse Janet, a military testing ground in Arizona, the Sonoran Desert, which excites him,
because the terrain, in its interplay with the war machinery, “remaps” a
“neural process,” a “craving” from the “brain stem.” (U 451) The external
mirror imaging of his covertly annihilatory mindset reaffirms his identity.
For him people went “willingly” to the storage sites for nuclear weapons;
scientists wanted to “meet some elemental need.” People wanted to find
sites of “some higher condition.” Thus, the storage facilities for the most
powerful instruments of death became destinations of pilgrimage. The
skeptical Janet gets to the heart of the matter: “You make it sound like
God,” while Matt goes on to fantasize “or some starker variation thereof,”
in the country of evil – notably – the Russian tundra: “the visionary flash
Underworld and “Terror Management” 37
of light, the critical mass that will call down the Hindu heavens, Kali and
Shiva and all the grimacing lesser gods.” (U 485) Don DeLillo does not tell
us if Oppenheimer was also present in Matt’s mind.
We may well assume that Matt’s fantasies were shared by the vast majority of the US-Americans. Edgar Hoover was always fearful of apocalypse,
which, in his case, was mainly due to subversive (predominantly anarchist,
hippyish and communist) insurgents, “who tried to bring about apocalyptic change.” It was a relief when the state came to hold sway over “the most
destructive power available. With nuclear weapons, this power became
identified totally with the state. The mushroom cloud was the godhead of
Annihilation and Ruin. The state controlled the means of apocalypse.” (U 563)
But Hoover, uptight and paranoid as he was, was still apprehensive of
internal (socio-cultural) “scruffy and free-fucking” forces, intent on shaking “the world.” (U 564) Clearly, the social changes in the three decades
after the war engendered, as we shall see, existential to abysmal anxieties.
Yet the atomic bomb (framed by the Cold War) proved by far the grimmest
and hence most reliable reaper to visualize and bring death home to a
degree. It provided the mixture of both subcutaneous pleasure and awe, of
secular transcendence and existential reassurance: Death is imminent, but
one is still there; it can be contained for the time being. On the other side,
the globally cataclysmic effect the bomb held ready points again to
Blumenberg’s idea that the Cold War may have been driven by a forced
desire for a convergence of lifetime and world time. If our life ends, the
Soviets and maybe the rest of the world will have to perish just the same.
The Cold War bomb offered the very possibility of mediating death. It
could be, superseded, sublated and distanced into something both feasible and abstract to a degree that for some it was no longer felt as instantaneously threatening. It moreover worked similarly to Thomas Hobbes’s
biblical Leviathan, who was to embody all the citizens of a state on the
grounds of their common fear of destruction. The description of the
appearance of the bomb as “The godhead of Annihilation and Ruin”
matches the evil God of the Gnosis as well as the wrathful Jahweh, the
Old Testament God, who exceeds our power of imagination and cannot
be named. Klara Sax, a garbage artist who repaints decommissioned B-52
airplanes, thereby turning the fatal machines into art, wistfully remembers the early years of the Cold War and its symbol and metonym, the
sublime bomb: “[I]t out-imagined the mind.” (U 76) It evades easy media
processing and framing, and thus provides one of the last approaches to
the “Real”29: “You can’t name it. It’s too big or evil or outside your experience.” (U 77) In the early years of the Cold War, Albert Bronzini, Matt’s
teacher, reads the Times coverage of the explosion of the first Soviet
bomb, but fails to grasp and verbalize the unspeakable:
He could not keep the image from entering his mind, the cloud that
was not a cloud, the mushroom that was not a mushroom – the sense
38 Underworld and “Terror Management”
of reaching feebly for a language that might correspond to the visible
mass in the air.
(U 668)
Lenny Bruce, the sardonically clear-sighted comedian, realizes the parareligious and apocalyptic significance of the bomb: “We feel at home with
this judgement.” The impending Last Judgement gives us, in other words,
a sense of being. It directs our attention either to life itself, a kind of decisiveness (“Entschlossenheit”) to live it conscientiously and responsibly, or,
much more common, to the distractions of “man” (to use Heidegger’s
terms). It surely conveys intensity, emotions that we have lost in a technological society that has overcome most of the hazards our ancestors were
exposed to. Eric Deming, a colleague of Matt, who, like other “bombheads,” is “awed by the inner music of bomb technology,” (U 404) enjoys
spreading stories about the mortal effects (mainly cancerous) of the
nuclear: “For the edge. The bite. The existential burn.” (U 406) Sister Alma
Edgar, a nun and social worker in the Bronx, lined her walls with “Reynolds
Wrap as a safeguard against nuclear fallout.” Yet she thought “a war
might be thrilling. She often conjured the flash […].” (U 245)
The Cold War deterrence strategy marked the appropriate political framework. The core of the “mutually assured destruction” – concept was that one
must be capable and ready to fatally strike at any time, first, or in retaliation,
without actually carrying it out. Its logic was both highly alarming and comforting. While the Soviets (as the story goes) were in possession of sufficient
intercontinental ballistic missiles which could reach the US territory within a
very short time, the Americans had B-52s, which were always in the air,
equipped with bombs, of course. The aircrafts alternately approached the
Soviet airspace at a very high altitude and peeled off only close to the border.
They were “sweeping the Soviet borders,” (U 75) as Klara Sax maintains.
Both parties knew, of course, that the other would always have enough time
for a deadly response if one struck first. Any response would have a by far
more disastrous effect than the bombing of Hiroshima. Consequently, one
could be relatively sure that no one would strike. “The men came back and
the targets were not destroyed.” (U 76) This means one was or could be
permanently and thrillingly conscious of the fact of death and likewise relatively confident of its deferment on grounds of a first-strike determent. Death
may happen, but not now. In this way, the bomb and the Cold War worked
excellently as “proximal defenses” against death.
Therefore, it is understandable that people looked back to the Cold War
with nostalgia.30 In the early 1990s Klara Sax, the waste artist, remembers
feeling “a sense of awe […] of mystery and danger and beauty.” She connects those emotions right away with “power”:
It was stable, it was focused, it was a tangible thing. It was greatness,
danger, terror, all those things. And it held us together, the Soviets and
Underworld and “Terror Management” 39
us. Maybe it held the world together. You could measure things. You
could measure hope and you could measure destruction.
(U 76)
Given that apocalypse, howsoever terrible it may be, appears to be gaugeable, balanced and sensuously palpable for all, it can even bring about
some overarching collective identity. In these respects, Cold War apocalypse strongly resembles the religious medieval and early modern one.
Traditional apocalypticists could foresee the date (based on some more
or less willful interpretation of the Holy Scriptures and natural phenomena), measure tangibly the consequences and form large communities of
followers (as e.g., Thomas Münzer).
Klara does rather an intricate job and keeps pace with the times, retro
as they were in the 1990s. By colorfully and lastingly repainting the
B-52s, the bringers of death, she converts them into sublime works of art,
removing them thus from timeliness. “We are not going to let these great
machines expire in a field.” (U 70) She was motivated to start this gigantic
project when she realized she had to “salvage” (U 78) the sexy pinup girls
the former crew of the machines had painted on the nose as “a charm
against death.” (U 77) She wants especially a “very blond” girl, called
“Long Tall Sally,” to be part of her project: “This luck, this sign against
death.” (U 78) Unnamable and unimaginable as the Old Testament bomb
was, it could well channel and anchor the individual consciousness of
death into something abstract beyond their space of experience. Klara
wants to maintain its “awful” memory by lifting the B-52s out of time
beyond transitoriness. She does not want to bring back the “force” of the
Cold War, yet retain its sublime and identity-forming aesthetics. She conserves and exhibits the defunct B-52s because she thinks she can “find an
element of felt life” and “show who we are.” (U 77) Yet all the same: They
are converted into remote museum pieces amounting to another form of
deadness and fetish, which will effect only a mitigated shudder of fear.
Toward the end of Underworld, Nick Shay, the now global waste manager, visits a Soviet site where contaminated nuclear waste from Western
countries is to be disposed of underground by “means of nuclear explosions.” (U 791) The mutual nuclear armament driven forth by the Soviets
and more so by the Americans (from the 1970s at least) entailed “Five
hundred nuclear explosions at the test site.” (U 799) After the victorious
end of the Cold War, nuclear waste, the scrapped “godheads” and fetishes
of death, are outsourced to find a temporary burial place in remote
Kazakhstan. “The place is strange, frozen away, a specimen of our forgetfulness.” (U 793) The nearby city of Semipalatinsk features a “Museum of
Misshapens” in which – in “Heinz pickle jars” – disfigured fetuses, monstrosities of all kinds, are preserved and displayed. And a local radiation
clinic accommodates the radiated and doomed, blind and cancer suffering children who play a game of falling down and getting up: “They all
40 Underworld and “Terror Management”
fall down, get up.” For the narrator they seem like the remains and remnants of the Cold War culture, the underworld and subconscious culture
of the fear of death: “All the banned words, the secrets kept in whitewashed vaults, the half-forgotten vaults – they’re all out here now, seeping invisibly into the land and air, into the marrowed folds of the bone.”
(U 802–3) Not unlike the American landscapes of consumer waste and
debris outside the big cities, the Kazakhstan steppe absorbs the “halfforgotten” tokens, remainders of the Cold war. However, as it also seeps
“into the marrowed folds of the bone” (U 803), it will return like “the
secret history, the underhistory” (U 791) of any human waste.
The iconic bomb is surely the most drastic and intuitive metonymy of
apocalyptic death in Post-War Societies. But DeLillo employs a variety of
other figurative representations that haunt, attract and capture the
American imagination. He calls his first chapter “The Triumph of Death.”
It is the title of an early modern painting by Pieter Bruegel (dated 1562)
that reveals the most formidable and recurring (or revenant) doomsday
scenario in the novel. The motif “haunts the novel, and infects it with its
epic morbidity.”31 Peter Boxall not only extensively pursues reverberations and semantic fields of Bruegel’s painting, “lending the novel a medieval deathly hue,”32 he moreover juxtaposes it with another of Bruegel’s
works that appear in the novel, namely “Children’s Games” (1560),
which, rather than light-heartedness and innocence, comes to signify
something “sinister,” (U 682) some “medieval awe […] that crawls
beneath the midnight skin,” (U 678) for Klara and Bronzini. If the picture
is related to the disconcerting play of the (above mentioned) doomed
children in Kazak, late victims of the Cold War, then the novel may indeed
be marked throughout by sinister negativity, or, in Boxall’s words, “an
underlying connectedness between birth and death, innocence and corruption, redemption and damnation.”33 The close existential connection
of birth and death has a respectable philosophical tradition associated
with Sophocles (Antigone), Seneca, Schopenhauer or Emil Cioran, so has
Negativity,34 especially since Hegel’s dialectics. But there is no negativity
without positivity. Thus, the novel’s “celebration” and “witnessing” of
“the triumph of death” is not only interwoven with (rather marginal)
“unhomely” voices or “glossolalia” (as Lenny Bruce’s or the street
preacher’s) and Nick Shay’s (self-)alienation and desire for (self-)transgression. Don DeLillo’s novel also unfolds an affirmative sensuousness
and counter-memory (in the tactility and memory of the baseball leitmotif, or Klara’s desire to retain a memory of the young woman behind the
pinup of “Long Tall Sally,” or the backward images of the Bronx)35 that
opens up no less of a positive perspective.36 In those passages, DeLillo
does not celebrate death. The blackened pages notwithstanding, the entire
text in its descriptive and lyrical richness is a celebration of life, sublating
its, to be sure, largely melancholic content in an extraordinary aesthetic
experience.
Underworld and “Terror Management” 41
Crowds
Bruegel’s “The Triumph of Death” was reproduced large-scale in Life
Magazine on the first of October 1951. It floats down from the stands
among other bits and pieces of paper at the climax of the legendary baseball match between the New York Giants and the Dodgers on 3 October
1951, and gets stuck on Edgar J. Hoover’s shoulder, deeply arresting his
attention. He “can’t take his eyes off” the “painting crowded with medieval figures who are dying or dead.” (U 41) It is highly significant that at
the same time when Hoover becomes absorbed into the apocalyptic scenery, the crowd goes frenetic, delirious, merging ecstatically. Bobby
Thomson has swung and tomahawked the ball, and Russ, the stadium
speaker, “feels the crowd around him, a shudder passing through the
stands.” (U 42) He gets carried away, becomes nothing but “shout,”
repeating excitedly: “The Giants win the pennant and they’re going
crazy.” (U 43) The teammates “are stunned by a happiness that has collapsed on them,” (U 44) the fans “are coming down to crowd the railings,” (U 44) “a thousand pounding hearts,” people “dipping frantically.”
(U 45) The crowd is “happy and dazed,” the fans “pressed together […]
screamers and berserkers […] those who will light the city with their
bliss.” (U 51) Russ’s “voice is dead and buried. It went to heaven on a
sunbeam.” (U 54)
The famous opening chapter of Mao II portrays the wedding of thirteen thousand devotees37 of Sun Myung Moon, the leader of the
Unification Church, in the Yankee Stadium New York. “The future
belongs to the crowds,” the chapter ends. (M 16) Indeed, modernity has
created many occasions for the secular subject to merge in and with a
crowd (which may well represent an anthropological disposition). People
love to assemble as they are taken up, absorbed in the communication
with the other, the more so if the common cause is ritually and/or emotionally highly charged as in mass weddings or crucial sports events.38
The climax of the match of the Dodgers versus the Giants resembles a
modern version of a Dionysian orgy. The mass is getting beside itself;
people transcend the principium individuationis, overcome their individuation. For the time being, they lose their sense of temporality and go
beyond themselves. Although mitigated within “the civilizing process,”39
this nevertheless means a return to amorphous anonymity, a form of selfdissolution (Nietzsche’s “Entzweiung:” disfigurement, dismemberment or
diremption), and, amounting to the same, an immersion into an allencompassing unity. What happens is, on the one hand, a kind of rehearsal
of self-loss,40 yet, on the other, the quotidian life-toward-death, the everlatent fear of death becomes absent in the wake of Bobby Thomson’s
“Shot Heard ‘Round the World.” Modern mass events, such as Baseball,
American football or soccer (besides, e.g., rallies, pop concerts, funerals),
form culturally constructed access doors for the contingent miracle. Even
42 Underworld and “Terror Management”
the (technically) outstanding favorite may be defeated and succumb to
the zeal and stamina of the competitor. It is also a matter of luck, coincidence, or fatum, with no life-threatening consequences, though. The fans
form a religio, a secular religious bond. Russ, asserting the miraculous
character of the event, “thinks they will carry something out of here that
joins them all in a rare way, that binds them to a memory with protective
power […] a thing like this keeps us safe.” (U 59–60) The memory of the
state of exception attains a magical potency to fend off death. Bobby
Thomson becomes the prophet and the memorabilia or relics become
devotional objects. Nick Shay eventually pays 34,500 dollars for the ball,
which has turned into a sensuous worship surrogate. The Dodgers, the
losers, form no less of a deep bond over loss and mourning, having suffered a kind of proxy death, which entails a melancholy in which one
may even self-compassionately please oneself. It will help to reconcile
oneself with loss.41
The very moment when the miracle happens becomes an extraordinary
instant in everyone’s life history. They make “it a point to register the
time:” 3:58. People are throwing all kinds of paper waste, from laundry
tickets to torn-up love letters they had carried on their bodies for years,
revealing “the fans’ intimate wish to be connected to the event, unendably, in the form of pocket litter, personal waste, a thing that carries a
shadow identity.” (U 45) The moment marks an outstanding breaking-up
of the continuum of abstract history, of the existential tedium of work
and reproduction, always reminiscent of transience and the course of life:
“[T]his midcentury moment enters the skin more lastingly.” (U 60) Rather
than the history of “eminent leaders,” it is another condition of a deep
psychosomatic resonance that will define the past for those who were
present.42
In Hoover’s eyes (and Don DeLillo’s language) the action in the stadium (“[T]he fans pressed together,” 51), the action within Bruegel’s
painting (“The meatblood colors and the massed bodies,” 50) and the
action on the Kazakh Test Sites (U 50) commingle. In the two months
preceding this memorable and legendary game, the Soviets (according to
Wikipedia) had conducted five nuclear tests in Kazakhstan, which were
featured in Times Magazine with a spectacular cover story. On the very
day the Thomson shot resounded around the earth, the Soviets successfully detonated another bomb precipitating the Cold War.43 Yet while the
fans are entirely absorbed by this state of exception, Hoover is incapable
of abandoning himself to the ecstasy. The temporary self-loss of the orgiastic fans and the orgy of death in Bruegel’s painting exercise some morbid fascination but no release or catharsis. Uncontrolled behavior is
excruciating for him. The powerful and paranoid director of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation continues to be pursued by images of death and
morbidity. (See U 574, 575, 576, 577, 578) For him, unlike Nick Shay,
there is no relief.
Underworld and “Terror Management” 43
Pop and Consumption: “Rejoice, Redeemed Flock” (J. S. Bach) or
“Cocksucker Blues”
The possibility of death, fetishized, transferred, and thus temporarily
fended off, pervades Don DeLillo’s post-war society. In fact, the imaginary representation of, or visual allusions to, death are often closely
related to forms of entertainment which modern culture has precisely
formed to aestheticize (romanticize, or transfigure) death, divert from
death and even transcend mortality. Pop culture has devised multifaceted
arrays of “terror management,”44 esoteric orgies and cults among hippies
(Aleister Crowley, professing the extinction of the self, The Tibetan Book
of the Dead, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, “Conflation”). The Grateful
Dead became the eminent rock band of the 1970s; the skull, a popular
accessory on rings or black t-shirts; Metal (“Black Sabbath”) or Gothic
rock became phenomenally successful music styles. This was also, to be
sure, a matter of pure provocation, a means to break up decrepit structures or simply a strategy for creating media attention (and high sales
figures). The anti-bourgeois stance of the post-war generation was politically motivated, but to a large degree it also came down to no more than
a kind of cultivated decadence, which, in its mixture of fascination and
repulsion, went beyond a merely fictive play with doom and demise.
Part 4 of Underworld, entitled “Cocksucker Blues,” offers an impressive instance of that historical mentality. It is particularly remarkable for
DeLillo’s extraordinary skill in conveying the corresponding atmosphere.45 In 1974, Klara, her boyfriend Miles and her sister Acey meet a
film group in a loft to watch Robert Frank’s 1972 documentary (now
accessible on YouTube) of the first Rolling Stones US Concert Tour after
the Altamont concert in 1969, notorious for a murder right in front of the
stage. The focalizer, often indistinguishable from the heterodiegetic narrator, is Klara, but Acey, who has been to one of the concerts, chips in
with her comments and memories (a roadie had tried to abuse her in one
of the tunnels beneath the concert hall). Frank’s film is, of course, a highly
defamiliarized and selective medial representation of the tour, using transition and aperture to immerse the fast-changing settings in “washed blue
light” suggesting “an unreliable reality.” It is yet no less real, for that
matter, even if it appears “subversive.” The aesthetics of the film is in
keeping with what it depicts. It creates a hazy and shaky montage of
concert sequences and intimate pictures of scenes behind the stage, in
hotels and on an airplane. The scenes “fly by.” They radiate “a kind of
crepuscular light […] corruptive and ruinous, a beautiful tunnel blue.” (U 382–3)
People hang around in anonymous rooms or are asleep on planes, indulging in “that edge-of-time feeling.” (U 383) The tour entourage appears to
have entered a time tunnel and emptied-out vacuum, which leads either
into nothingness or hazy indeterminateness, or, alternatively, onto the
stage and the hysteria of the masses: “the loud white glare and prehistoric
44 Underworld and “Terror Management”
roar.” (U 384) The orgies of Dionysian disfigurement take place in front
of and behind the stage. The shutter dissolve, in contradistinction to the
other takes, uses “gelled red,” producing, as Klara thinks, “the backlit
nimbus of higher dying.” But rather than on the ecstatic self-forgetfulness
of the concert crowd, the film focuses on “[p]eople sitting around, two
people asleep in a lump or tripped out or they could be unnoticeably
dead, the endless noisy boredom of the tour – tunnels and runways.” (U 383)
Klara loves the “blue” and these “nothing-happening parts” The indulgence in nothingness is accompanied and reinforced by “dope, sex” and,
again, mutual “picture taking,” (U 385) narcissistically losing themselves
in images of themselves. Some voice asks whether she “suck[s] him off.”
“No,” she answers, “Just took a picture with him.” (U 384) The entourage continues to film themselves, “nothing happening.”
There are heroin, cocaine and ribald sex scenes in which pale and
girlish groupies are evidently used and abused. There are “mumbling
junkies on a bed” squinting at the needle. While a man threads a needle
into his arm, another one talks about the “Tomb of the Unknown
Junkie.” Rather than a celebration of vitality, freedom, and protest
against an ossified and deadening post-war society, the film depicts a
gloomy doomsday scenario. Pop culture’s hedonism comes down to
narcissism and escapist self-destruction. It would be too easy, though, to
reduce this demeanor to the tedium of some spoiled children of an affluent society. The drugged and sexed absorption into the pleasure principle, which, in fact, becomes devoid of pleasure and an utter linguistic
and mental indifference mark the climax of what Heidegger (in Being
and Time) would call “Fallenness” (“Verfallenheit”). Bored with themselves, and with being in general, they desire the “edge,” a definite mortal kiss. They seek the closeness of nothingness or death to overcome
the very fear of nothingness. The weary historical time, which is always
also a time-toward-death, appears suspended. One rushes forward on
planes and nonetheless seems to be in a time capsule. It is notable that
this dreariness forms also the material for an artifact and a wider audience. For the latter, the film – in its very fleetingness – aestheticizes and
thereby distances the orgiastic absences. The audience can imaginatively
and without harm indulge and partake in the experience of “fallenness.”
One of the postmodern ways with death or terror management: Life is
sped up to get more out of it, it is intensified, moving faster from one
timeframe of surrogate diversion into another. Yet seen from a distance,
it is only the flight from nothingness and boredom, which gives a premonition of death.
Accordingly, there is a lot of traveling in Underworld; Nick Shay is
always on the road or in the air, globally managing waste, unless he is
running. “Everybody is everywhere at once,” his son remarks. (U 805) In
airports and planes, “incredibly many people” are “intersecting,” Nick
observes, vast crowds “scatter and vanish in minutes.” (U 105)46
Underworld and “Terror Management” 45
Consumerism and Waste
Watching the “Cocksucker Blues,” Klara Sax’s attention is caught by
Mick Jagger’s mouth, a public eye-catcher which seemed to be omnipresent: “Maybe,” she thinks, “it was the corporate logo of the Western
world.” As such, Acey replies “everything that everybody’s eaten in the
last ten years has gone into that mouth,” (U 382) which in the feature is
shown “gargling and spitting, licking ice-cream cone.” The Jagger logo
may have had a satirical touch, but his pouting mouth, thick lips and
licking tongue became something of the oral icon and symbol of the
1960s to 1980s for the never-ending intake of products charged with
desire and promise. Like no other group in the 1970s, The Rolling Stones,
notwithstanding their anti-bourgeois demeanor, fueled conspicuous consumption, demonstrating ostentatiously a sexualized flamboyant jetset
life. Pop and design, which, from the 1960s onwards, lastingly inspired
one another, created the desire to aestheticize and transfigure one’s lifeworld. The modernist Klara Sax, without naming any movement, may
have that in mind, when (in 1974) she perceives contemporary art as
something “in which the moment is heroic, American art, the do-it-now,
the fuck-the-past – she could not follow that.” (U 377) Even the most
trivial consumer objects and commodities were now given a brightness
and radiance, as well as linguistic charm,47 that pop artists such as Andy
Warhol, Peter Blake or Richard Hamilton only needed to reproduce and
exhibit (in the institutional context of art, to be sure) to label and identify
them as art. The artistic effects of alienation and distanciation both
exposed (and ironized) what the commodities promised, namely elation
and elevation over the hard and stolid facts of reality. With the splendor
of bright colors and their beauty, they associate what art traditionally
was to represent, namely timelessness and, if not immortality, a sphere
beyond sordid transitoriness (as the mural wall paintings in the
“Condomology” U 109). Consumption, less for use value than imaginary
value, held the prospect of regeneration and continuation. It worked and
works as a fortification and shelter against the contingencies of life, the
more so in what Ulrich Beck described as modern “risk society”48 with
potentially apocalyptic (ecological, nuclear, virus epidemic) dimensions.
Objects and commodities serve to avert and absorb the undercurrent
prospect of nothingness;49 consumption affirms your identity and existence: I consume, therefore I am.50 If they do not suggest a sense of (self-)
transcendence, they convey an erotic, even sexual impression of individual procreation and reproduction. To consume then means to continue
one’s self; consumerism makes sure that one lives on: consummatum est,
or, put another way: “Consume or die.” (See Fn. 107)
In White Noise, the spheres of consumerism, especially the world of supermarkets, were comically, often farcically, represented as spheres of spiritual
and communal elation. Here, Eric Deming, the son of one of Nick’s
46 Underworld and “Terror Management”
colleagues, opens the large fridge and assures himself of the brilliant surrogate world of consumption. He masturbates with a condom (he enjoys its
“sleek metallic shimmer, like his favorite weapons system” U 514) and finds
that Jane Mansfield’s breasts are reminiscent of the “bumper bullets on a
Cadillac.” (U 517) Self-perception and the awareness of others are completely filtered by the images created by the entertainment, advertisement
and weapons industries. Eric then opens the fridge only to take a reassuring
look at the cornucopian wealth inside:
The bright colors, the product names and logos, the array of familiar
shapes, the tinsel glitter of things in foil wrap, the general sense of
benevolent gleam, of eyeball surprise, the sense of a tiny holiday taking place on the shelves and in the slots, a world unspoiled and ever
renewable.
(U 517–6)
In Eric’s “eyes” the commodities have assumed (in the words of Karl
Marx) “a fantastic form […] the productions of the human brain appear
as independent beings endowed with life.” They have “changed into
something transcendent,” – a “sinnlich übersinnliches Ding,” i.e., “sensuous supersensible or supernatural thing.” Rather than to the use value of
the products, Eric is drawn to the independent life the products seem to
have taken on, the “bright” and “tinsel glitter,” the “benevolent gleam”
and “tiny holiday” celebrated in the fridge. Cut off from the conditions of
their production,51 done up and sexed up aesthetically and market-compliantly, they adopt a magical appearance, which suggests the “mistenveloped regions of the religious world.”52 A lotusland “world unspoiled
and ever renewable” is the allure to keep the capitalist society consuming
and probably a very efficient antidote to existential angst, decline and
death. Constant renewal through the purchase of something “new”
makes people look to a brighter future without woe and degeneration.
In Underworld, as in White Noise, DeLillo enjoys quoting and satirizing
commercial tags (“War and treaties, eat your Wheaties,” (U 141) and brand
names, as “Lexus,” “Jell-O” and “Kelvinator.” By interspersing them into his
narrative, often disconnected and without an immediate reference to the context, he exposes the linguistic arbitrariness as well as utter emptiness of those
phrases. The signified or even referent is, if at all, of secondary importance.
Indeed, as soon as the product is used up, its imaginary charm wanes and
fades away. As we saw in White Noise, the effect, beyond the short-term
release of dopamine and other happiness hormones, is quite to the contrary.
Commodities continuously point to the passage of time and the fading of
possibilities, or, by the same token, transience and mortality. Melancholy is
always already inscribed into them. Consumere, as we saw above, also meant,
“the using up and physical exhaustion of matter,” the wasting of the body and
(related to consummare), the completion of something: consummatum est.
Underworld and “Terror Management” 47
Indeed, there is no life without metabolism and no metabolism without wastage, excretion and energy dissipation. Becoming entails fading and perishing.
Products in advanced consumerist societies are manufactured precisely not to
last in the function they were purchased for; they are made to become what
people by no means wish to become, namely waste. This is one of the ironic
consequences of the advanced consumption industry. But due to oil-based
plastic, metalworking and the nuclear industry, waste has increasingly
achieved durability, the transient commodity a certain, albeit dysfunctional
and useless, lastingness. The higher the turnover of products and consumption (in increasingly non-agricultural societies), the higher the amount of
waste. As a breeding ground for germs and disease, it has always been a
source of anxiety, but with the evolution of inorganic chemistry and nuclear
physics it turns out, at a progressive rate, to be imminently life-threatening. In
an affluent society of hyperconsumption and growing energy turnover (such
as post-war North America), both the industrial management and the cultural
reverberations of waste became a significant issue. Waste, then, besides historical and individual (counter-) memory, the Cold War and the bomb, is
probably the outstanding motif of Underworld. Nearly all of the commentators53 on the novel have dealt with it and its sociopsychological undercurrents. Waste turns up again and again in the novel. Nick Shay and his friend
Brian Classic are waste managers; in the New York of the 1970s, garbage is
frequently piling up in the streets (after labor strikes), the recycling of garbage
has evolved into a household ritual, Klara Sax turns trash into art.
Waste is a disconcertingly ambiguous and ambivalent matter. It is immanently linked with what imaginatively and really perpetuates our lives. Yet
as a meaningless and potentially obnoxious remainder, waste reminds us
incessantly of the endless preliminaries and futility of consumption. It points
to the compulsive repetition and disillusionment consumption entails, and
hence works as a constant portent of death. It must be disposed of and
buried underground.54 Waste, on the other hand, is linked with what makes
life possible. As it maintains our leftovers and cultural memory, it preserves
at least the semblance of immortality. It persists as a (although bacteriologically) living matter; without cease rubbish plants emit odors which remain
subcutaneously connected with us: “Every bad smell is about us,” Nick
reflects on occasion of a visit to a huge waste-treatment plant in Holland:
“We make our way through the world and come upon a scene that is medieval-modern, a city of high-rise garbage, the hell reek of every perishable
object ever thrown together, and it seems like something we’ve been carrying all our lives.” (U 104) Smells bring back past experiences involuntarily.
(Proust had, of course, different scents in mind.) Owing to their very durability, garbage dumps have become memorials and reuniting archives of
human civilization. “It is necessary,” Nick asserts, “to respect what we discard.” Brian Classic, “invigorated” when visiting a huge landfill near New
York, thinks of the “Great Pyramid at Giza,” a “unique cultural deposit,” (U
184) which merges, includes and preserves the consumptive leftovers of
48 Underworld and “Terror Management”
humankind: “[I]t all ends up here, newsprints, emery boards, sexy underwear […].” (U 185) In our waste, we appear to live individually and collectively on; it forms, according to a Russian specialist, “the secret history, the
underhistory, the way archeologists dig out the history of early cultures.” (U 791)
Waste gives the impression of resurging and arising again by itself from the
underground. It may suggest some mundane redemption: “Maybe we feel a
reverence for waste, for the redemptive qualities of the things we use and
discard. Look how they come back to us, alight with a kind of brave aging.”
(U 809) Waste management (the more so for the “Church Fathers of waste,”
U 102) has evolved into a form of religion: “Waste is a religious thing.” (U
88) Yet, like human remains, waste, for its potentially noxious effects, must
be buried,55 with care and reverence, though. Even waste management has
become a means of terror management. To manage waste is to manage
death.
Media, Killing, Death
The (historical) Texas Highway Killer “Richard” leads, in DeLillo’s narrative, a non-existence. He is largely disregarded by his sick and infirm
father and his morose and pushy mother, with whom, in his 40s, he still
lives. His friend Bud, who “wasn’t really his friend,” (U 262) doesn’t
respect him either. Walking into Bud’s house, the latter “barely noticed
him, it was like the normalcy of dying. It was the empty hollow thing of
not being there.” (U 268) He has been relegated from a supermarket
booth to a checkout counter, where he is yelled at by dissatisfied customers. It depresses him that now he “has to talk in the open space where
anyone could hear.” (U 272) In his parallel life, though, Richard has
developed the routine to maintain the “normalcy” of living by shooting
people to death while driving on highways. He, moreover, calls “the
superstation in Atlanta” (U 269) to talk and make (a one-sided) eye
contact with the TV anchorwoman Sue Ann. When he drives out to kill,
he feels “the true force of the wind.” (U 269) These are his ways to fill in
the void of his being. For Richard to do someone to death seems less a
means of exerting absolute power, to be – deliberately and instantaneously – the godlike master of life and death (surely the main motive of
serial killers, as it was, on another level, Hitler’s.) He wants to be taken
notice of and thereby become someone, in and through the perception of
the other – perversely and most effectively in those of the next of kin of
his victims:
He came alive in them. He lived in their histories, in the photographs
in the newspaper, he survived in the memories of the family, lived
with the victims, lived on, merged, twinned, quadrupled, continued
into double figures.
(U 271)
Underworld and “Terror Management” 49
If this desire has not been created by media in the first instance, media is
certainly highly accommodating. With his special voice device, he can
talk to Sue Ann “from the heart,” while watching her lips and eyes: “This
was the waking of the knowledge that he was real […]. He was coming
into himself.” (U 270) Through the medium as an intermediary, he metamorphoses into an imaginary “person.” Yet since his identity is only constituted through the other on the set, who will (according to the logic of
the medium) soon lose interest, he has to keep on killing.56 There is, as
one may assume, probably a recursive and intrinsic relationship between
media, violence and death, which has beset the American (indeed the
global) imagination, with the Hollywood dream factory, TV, reality TV
and not least private videotaping as catalysts.57 Since Americana, media
has been an ongoing subject in DeLillo’s novels. Especially in Libra, he
paradigmatically demonstrates that we are and become the way we are
only against the background of the pictures and images which media
produces and which we cannot help consuming. They produce a subject
position. Media is the vehicle for adopting or becoming the image of the
masses. Doing an outrageous thing of extreme violence will help. It fascinates and captures. According to a 1993 report of the American
Psychological Association, “[a]n average American youth will witness
200,000 violent acts on television before age 18.” Another source states
that “weapons appear on prime-time television an average of nine times
each hour.” Almost all movies (91%) “contain violence, even extreme
violence.”58 Of course, it would be shortsighted to claim that media
“hyperconsumption”59 furthers our disposition to commit violent acts.
One must not forget that especially American TV performs in accordance
with a clearly communicated moral code and manipulation of sympathy.
Yet it certainly affects our imaginary and the way we psychologically
manage violence and death.
The fact, however, that there are copycat killers, following Richard’s
steps without being recognized, points back to the first possible motive
for murder: to bring someone to death willfully, abruptly and randomly
just for the absolute power kick. This upsets Richard: “I know who I am.
Who is he?” (U 272)
Accidentally, one of the murders of the Texas Highway Killer was videotaped by a teenage girl in a family car. DeLillo’s narrator first wonders
about the consequences of this random and innocent shooting for the
girl, the hazy and strange phenomenology of the video itself filming a
man in the fast process of dying.60 It is indeed hardly imaginable what
such an unheard-of “event” that cuts through “reason” and “expectation” does to an ingenious teenage girl. Toward the end of the chapter, he
reflects on the perception of the moment itself:
Seeing someone at the moment he dies, dying unexpectedly. This is
reason alone to stay fixed to the screen. It is instructional, watching a
50 Underworld and “Terror Management”
man shot dead as he drives along on a sunny day. It demonstrates an
elemental truth, that every breath you take has two possible endings.
(U 159–160)
The tape has a strange appeal. One keeps on watching it “every time,” even
though it becomes “deader and colder,” sucking “the air right out of your
chest.” (U 160) The gripping thing here is the simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous, in other words, the ordinary continuity of existence along
with its immediate cessation (“driving along on a sunny day”). Due to the
incursion of the unheard-of, breath as the epitome of life may discontinue
all of a sudden, leaving a void in time. It is a reminder of the basic fragility
and contingency of existence: [I]t could happen anytime, or not. For the
spellbound spectator, it comes to pass like the crisis, a peripeteia plus catastrophe without the retarding moment. What occurs, is the absolute Other.
To be sure, the medial framing predetermines and guides our perceptual process. There is some inevitability: “Because once the tape starts
rolling it can only end one way. This is what the context requires.” (U 160)
Yet dying fascinates here not only because death comes across in a mediatized, slightly unreal way. It is the other who dies. The film engages your
visual and aural senses and thereby drags you in more intensely than
written news. Yet, even though the video shows a real event, you are at
the same time aware of the virtual status of your involvement. You realize
continuously or at least intermittently that you are outside of the picture61; once you have got off and escaped with your life, the “distal
defense” mechanism is at work. Dying by proxy is, after all, the most effective way to fend off the fear of death.
Moment of Moments: Apparition
There is a structural analogy between death and epiphany. Even if death
announces itself (if the person suffers from a terminal illness), it nevertheless bursts into life underivably. It effects a hiatus in and cessation of
temporality. Thereafter, everything is different from aforetime. Epiphanic
apparitions mark an unpredictable and indeterminable temporal crisis
that results in something not comprehensible in rational terms. Unlike
death, though, they do not lead into darkness,62 but to spiritual illumination and enlightenment, which may entail even a possible reconciliation
with death. It is toward the end of the novel that DeLillo relates such a
spectacular virtual incident, which involves the apparition and resurrection of the 12-year-old girl Esmeralda and the spiritual transformation of
Sister Edgar63 in the Bronx (Nick Shay’s former teacher and place of origin). It is less of an epiphany,64 which (in their modern versions) are usually singular, but rather a vision that shows up repeatedly to attract an
overwhelmed crowd. What happens is a secular version of a Marian
apparition, a “mystery.”65
Underworld and “Terror Management” 51
Esmeralda was a homeless and derelict girl, Sister Edgar an “old spindle-shanked” and embittered nun who wanted to save the girl both physically and spiritually. (U 810–11) Esmeralda becomes the victim of an
utterly senseless crime of a psychotic who rapes her, hits her, and throws
her off a four-story building. Sister Edgar is shattered by her cruel fate,
but reconciled with the sheer fact of death through the apparition that
descends upon the Bronx community like a divine miracle. When the
headlights of a commuter train sweep across a billboard, advertising a
brand of orange juice (“Minute Maid,” U 820), it is the face of the murdered girl that appears: “She sees Esmeralda’s face take shape under the
rainbow of bounteous juice […] and there is a sense of someone living in
the image, an animating spirit […] She feels something break upon her.
An angelus of clearest joy.” (U 822) The crowd, along with Sister Edgar,
goes into a religious ecstasy: Women “roll their eyes to heaven,” fall into
a “trance.” Edgar experiences a kind of Pentecostal revelation, which
makes her “pour into” and become one with the enthused crowd, embracing the Bronx gang leader and graffiti artist Ismael: “She looks into his
face and breathes the air he breathes and enfolds him in her laundered
cloth.” (U 823) The stadium transcendence of the merging crowd at the
beginning of the novel is paralleled by this religious communion at the
end – another most effective way of “terror management.” Edgar’s mortal
fear of the impure, of germs and fatal contagion is gone. She keeps the
girl’s image tightly in her mind and dies “peacefully in her sleep.” (U 824)
She ironically ends up in a Cyberspace fantasy,66 which closes the novel.
One should note, however, that DeLillo’s miraculous event is to be
taken with a pinch of salt. The face reappears only for a split fleeting
second on the billboard before it is dark again, and on the following day
the board is wiped blank for new commodity advertisements: “Space
available.” (U 824) The apparent miracle is first replaced by blankness
and nothingness, which in turn will soon be filled up again with another
glorified item of consumerism that comes down, after all, to another, yet
far less satisfactory means of “terror management.” Consumption is nevertheless a profane and fast surrogate, which dispels the fear of death for
the time being, and has rendered religion superfluous for many.
The apparition may also have been contrived, as DeLillo suggests, by
Ismael who has a record of painting trains and whose friends had already
sprayed memorial graffiti for Esmeralda. Visions, epiphanies and miracles
always depend, of course, on a subjective perspective; Don DeLillo never
fails to communicate the ambiguity of those experiences. There are second-order views, especially when it comes to death and its seeming overcoming. The vision nevertheless epitomizes visually the mnemonic effect
a deceased person may have in the imaginary of the bereaved. She appears
somehow really present and perceptible, to be at the same time (or within
a moment) unconsolably absent. This is the subject of Don DeLillo’s subsequent novel The Body Artist.
52 Underworld and “Terror Management”
Notes
1 Contemporary ecological apocalypses may be traced back to the Club of
Rome’s “Limits to Growth,” which was published in 1972 (against the background of a looming oil crisis in 1973). Other notable incidences which motivated the apocalyptic consciousness were the Bhopal gas disaster in 1984, the
Exxon Valdez Oil Spill in 1989 or the emblematic German “waldsterben” in
the 1980s and 1990s. The 2020ff. Corona crisis, with viruses probably passed
over from wildlife animals, marks a new frightening quality. These crises
appear to permeate more and more upon individual realities.
2 Klaus Vondung sees a “kupierte[n] Apokalypse” at work in modernity. Klaus
Vondung, Apokalypse ohne Ende (Heidelberg: Winter, 2018), 122 and his
seminal study Die Apokalypse in Deutschland (München: DTV, 1988).
3 John R. Hall, Apocalypse: From Antiquity to the Empire of Modernity
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 220.
4 Ibid., 3.
5 Quoted in Alexander-Kenneth Nagel, “‘Siehe, ich mache alles neu?’:
Apokalyptik und sozialer Wandel,” in Apokalyptik und kein Ende?
Apokalyptik und kein Ende?, ed. Bernd U. Schipper/Georg Plasger (Göttingen:
Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2007), 253–72, here 254.
6 Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, “Randbemerkung zum Weltuntergang,” in
Finale! Das kleine Buch vom Weltuntergang, ed. Dietrich Harth (München:
Beck, 1999), 185–88, here 185.
7 Hall 2009, 2.
8 Yet the death of her husband is for Lauren existentially so incisive that, for a
certain period, it marks for her the end of time or personal apocalypse.
9 For the devastating effects of the polio epidemic in 1944, one may turn to
Philip Roth’s heart-rendering novel Nemesis (London: Jonathan Cape,
2010).
10 The street preacher’s mythology is typical for the structure of conspiracy
theories. He offers a highly complex, but somehow immediately comprehensible story on analogy, to utterly reduce the complexity of contemporary
social and political risks.
11 See Boxall 2006, 189–90.
12 Ibid., 190.
13 W. B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1985),
210–1: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the
falconer. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”
14 Reinhart Kosellek, Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989).
15 See also Michael Makropoulos, who refers to Kosellek and Blumenberg,
“Modernität als Kontingenzkultur. Konturen eines Konzepts,” in Kontingenz,
eds. Gerhart v. Graevenitz, Odo Marquard (München: Fink, 1998), 55–80.
16 James T. Patterson, Great Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New
York/Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996).
17 Patterson 1996, viii.
18 This slogan is quoted by the editor of the Oxford History of the United States
C. Vann Woodward in his introduction to Grand Expectations, (xvii).
19 Patterson 1996, 70.
20 James T. Patterson, Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate To
Bush v. Gore (New York/Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005), 6.
21 Patterson 2005, 5.
22 Patterson 1996, 71.
23 Eric Avila, American Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018), 84.
Underworld and “Terror Management” 53
24 Avila, 91.
25 “Secular” does not mean there were no religious energies, aspirations, desires,
etc., left in the United States, on the contrary.
26 There is by now a vast corpus of literature on Underworld. Good essays to
begin with are Patrick O’Donnell, “Underworld,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Don DeLillo, ed. John N. Duvall (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2008), 108–21; Thomas Hill Schaub, “Underworld, Memory, and the
Recycling of Cold War Narrative,” in Don DeLillo: Mao II, Underworld,
Falling Man, ed. Stacey Olster (New York/London: Continuum, 2011),
69–82; John Duvall, Underworld: A Reader’s Guide (New York/London:
Continuum, 2002).
27 See, e.g., https://www.history.com/news/live-from-nevada-its-an-a-bomb-test;
https://www.google.de/search?q=nuclear+blast+nevada&client=firefox-bab&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiymNjqqczpAhVN6QKHaKiD68Q_AUoAnoECA0QBA&biw=1366&bih=626#imgrc=q8uZR
folnzpWkM.
28 See Robert Jungk, Brighter than a thousand suns: a personal history of the
atomic scientists (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1958), 201. The
quote can also be found on: http://www.faktoider.nu/oppenheimer_eng.html.
For a corresponding reference to Oppenheimer (and Teller), see U 466.
29 Klara Sax refers to Oppenheimer, who, according to her, called the early
bomb “merde,” that is “shit.” Shit belongs indeed to the sphere of the “Real.”
30 Surely, the so-called asymmetric wars that replaced the symmetric Cold War
proved by far less calculable and comfortable.
31 Boxall 2006, 179.
32 Ibid., 181. One example will do: When the “old war nun” (U 245) Edgar watches
people come out of the subway, she cannot help associating the skeletons, that
deeply impressed her in a subterranean chapel in Rome and she remembers thinking “that these are the dead who will come out of the earth to lash and cudgel the
living, to punish the sins of the living – death, yes, triumphant.” (U 249)
33 Boxall 2006, 182.
34 For Negativity see my essay “Über die Unvermeidbarkeit der Modernisierung.
Oder warum wir uns mit Transhumanismus und neuen Technologien
beschäftigen müssen: Neue Perspektiven und alte Vorbehalte,” in
Transhumanismus, Posthumanismus und neue Technologien, ed. Philipp Wolf
(Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2020), 1–37.
35 See my chapter on Underworld in: Philipp Wolf, Modernization and the Crisis
of Memory (Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi, 2002), 169–91.
36 I would not share Boxall’s teleological interpretation of Don DeLillo’s postwar history as an apocalyptic movement toward the “arrival of the millennial
moment.” The apocalypse – a figure of thought – remains one of endless
deferment. I would share even less Boxall’s identification of death or the
“catastrophe” with the “globalization of capital,” (Boxall 183) the
“Americanisation” (Boxall 177) of everything, “global capitalism” and
“apocalyptic truth.” (Boxall 207) I would rather contend that capitalism is
per se nothing but a now universally accepted (and rather successful) system
of organizing work and trade, for better or worse. But I do also think that
capitalism (esp. growth and accumulation) holds a number of means (surrogates, escapist diversions) in store which enable people – if only temporarily –
to “terror-manage” death and nothingness: consumption, work, mobility.
37 “They assemble themselves so tightly […] that the effect is one of transformation. […] they become one continuous wave.” (M 3)
38 Totalitarian regimes are certainly very good at making use of this. On the
other hand, they are strongly suspicious of the basic right to assembly.
54 Underworld and “Terror Management”
39 The term is borrowed from Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (London:
Blackwell, 1994).
40 DeLillo mentions two heart attacks. (U 48)
41 Nick’s early loss of his father is an “unconscious motive” for his “eventual
purchase of the Thomson ball.” (Duvall 2002, 39)
42 For many West-German “boomers,” the peace demonstrations in Bonn in
1981 (300,000 people) and 1982 (500,000) against the NATO Double-Track
Decision had a similar life-shaping effect.
43 The juxtaposition of the events was clearly intended by DeLillo.
44 One should make clear that it would be too easy to claim that the many pop
stars who died too early – most of them through the abuse of drugs or alcohol
(Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison) were escapist hedonists, who
failed to manage death. The psychological as well as media backgrounds and
circumstances differ and are surely too complex. Here I can only deal with
general symptomatic trends and tendencies.
45 Ekphrasis, or for that matter, the description of (historical) filmic material is
a means DeLillo frequently recurs to. Don DeLillo’s short story “BaaderMeinhof” provides an impressive example, reprinted in The Angel Esmeralda:
Nine Stories (New York: Scribner, 2011), 105–18. See also my essay “Memory
and Ekphrasis in Early Modern, Modern and Postmodern English and
American Literature,” in Anglistentag München 2003, eds. Christoph Bode et
al. (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2004), 411–25.
46 For “Locomotion and Flexibility” in Underworld, see: Wolf 2002, 177–8.
47 DeLillo caricatures this in a passage where Brian Glassic and Nick visit the
Condomology shop, set in the 1980s (when the Aids pandemic was still at its
height): “Behind the products and their uses we glimpsed the industry of vivid
description. Dermasilk and astroglide and reservoir-tipped.” (U 111)
48 Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage
Publications, 1992). The “Risk Society” is already virulent in the many hazard warnings on various packagings DeLillo cites in his portray of the
Demings’s household in 1957: “If swallowed, induce vomiting at once,” or
“May cause discoloration of urine or feces.” (U 515, 516) Eric Deming also
works for the nuclear industry.
49 Cf. Duvall 2002, 60.
50 Similarly, Don DeLillo in an interview given in 1993, although he primarily
means one’s social exclusion and death, if one is incapable of consuming: “If
you could write slogans for nations […] the slogan for the US would be
‘Consume or die.’” (Conversations 115)
51 There is hardly a better literary description of Marx’s analysis of the “social
(and imaginary) relationship” commodities have adopted in a capitalist society than the following from Underworld: “All these [various ads for consumer products] were on the billboards around him, systematically linked in
some self-referring relationship that had a kind of neurotic tightness, an inescapabilty, as if the billboards were generating reality.” (U 183)
52 Karl Marx, Capital, 165, 164. I have also quoted here from the German original, which seems more fitting to me.
53 I have dealt with it at length in Wolf 2002, 181–84, see also: O’Donnell, 110–13.
54 The German word “entsorgen,” with regard to waste, seems quite appropriate,
meaning literally “de-woe” oneself, “to get rid of one’s woes or concerns.”
55 It is interesting to point out the phenomenon of what has been called “Messy”
(a proper German word now), which no longer means only “disorderly.”
“Messies” now refers to people who cannot help storing their trash nearby in
their houses, flats or under their beds. Usually there is, of course, some compulsion neurosis.
Underworld and “Terror Management” 55
56 Don DeLillo once again proves up to date. Serial killers and terrorists regularly use camcorders to place their rampages on the internet.
57 The mutual relation has been suggested by Don DeLillo’s narrator himself.
With reference to the video taken at random of one of Richard’s murders, he
ponders: “You sit there and wonder if this kind of crime became more possible when the means of taping an event and playing it immediately, without a
neutral interval, a balancing space and time became widely available. Taping
and playing intensifies and compresses the event. It dangles a need to do it
again.” (U 159)
58 The data (and resources) are summarized in https://www.aafp.org/about/policies/all/violence-media.html.
59 Don DeLillo disapprovingly uses this term in an interview with the Austrian
paper Der Standard, Oct. 30, 1998 (A1): “Sprache ist der einzige Fluchtweg.”
60 “There’s something here that speaks to you directly, saying terrible things
about forces beyond your control, lines of intersection that cut through history and logic and every reasonable layer of human expectation.” (U 157)
61 The question why virtual or imaginary experiences affect and capture us to
such emotionally intense degrees has still not been satisfactorily answered. I
have dealt with this in “Contemporary Theory: Difference, Différance and an
Aesthetics of Literary Freedom,” in REAL 10, ed. Herbert Grabes (Narr:
Tübingen, 1994), 95–23.
62 For faithful Christians, to be sure, death is the entrance into a sphere of eternal light.
63 Sister Edgar, a poor-relief worker in the Bronx, who holds a rigorously harsh
Manichean world picture of good and bad, betrays a neurotic fear of germs,
yet not at all of dying: “She intended to meet her own end with senses intact,
grasp it, know it finally.” (U 245)
64 An epiphany originally meant the appearance of God and later of some saint.
Esmeralda will, by the force of her apparition, certainly undergo some
apotheosis.
65 A good overview of mystery in DeLillo’s work offers John A. McClure,
“DeLillo and Mystery,” in The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, ed.
John N. Duvall (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008), 166–78.
66 It seems clear who carries out the “Keystroke” which leads to http://blk.
www/dd.com/miraculum (U 810), where (in the paragraphs below)
Esmeralda’s death and the billboard miracle are reported. Nick’s son Jeff visits a website “devoted to miracles.” (U 806) But “Keystroke 2,” which initiates
Sister Edgar’s cyberspace apotheosis visiting “the H-bomb home page,” may
well have been executed by the nun herself shortly before she dies. Interestingly
enough, she not only traces the test explosions of the past Cold War, she also
feels “the power of false faith, the faith of paranoia” and is united with “her
male half,” J. Edgar Hoover (826): a final ironic deconstruction of the nuclear
culture of death.
4
The Body Artist
Death, Mourning, Time and the
“Humanity of Man”
After the neurosis, deaths, and fears of death in Underworld, Don DeLillo
went through a kind of catharsis or profane exercitation in his enigmatic
novella The Body Artist. The first chapter, a condensed exercise in the
narration of time, depicts the body artist Lauren Hartke and her husband, the film director Rey Robles, in the kitchen of the seaside house
they have rented for six months. They have breakfast together, he asks for
his car keys, leaves, and the next thing we read is an obituary, interspersed before Chapter 2. “The cause of death,” it informs us, “was a
self-inflicted gunshot wound.” (BA 27) The remainder of the book is dedicated to the ways she deals with his death and his memory; in between
Chapter 6 and the final one, there is another journalistic text which
reports a body performance she has given in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Mindfulness and Emptiness: Lived and Dead Time
The kitchen scene is revealing less for the relationship of the couple as for
the way the recounting of temporality reveals the subjectivity or beingthere of the protagonists. It both parallels and contrasts a temporality in
the remaining text, experienced and acted out by Lauren after the event
of death and realization of her loss. Time in the initial episode is represented as contiguity. The subsequent act of mourning aims at inverting it;
it is informed by Lauren’s desire to retain and preserve what seems to
have passed and get lost in contiguity. Time first appears objectively, that
is, it depends – as usually and quite trivially – on the successive perception of exterior things and acts. Subsequently, it is Lauren’s time of memory that defines the body artist’s (Lauren’s) consciousness, first in a
traumatic, then creative and redemptive way.
The novel begins with an explicit reference to time in its transitoriness:
“Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and
you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web.” (BA 7) Time, Kant’s
continuous inner sense, appears to pass and becomes conscious in the
exterior intuition as (what we sense, or DeLillo’s anonymous implied
reader “you” senses as) a moment of a seemingly arresting object. The
DOI: 10.4324/9781003289937-4
The Body Artist 57
prose style is congruous and highly effective.1 By means of simple paratactic sentences, the connectives “and,” “then” and the pronouns “his,” “he,”
“her” and “she,” DeLillo structures the text and arranges temporality and
difference throughout the chapter:
She went to the counter […]. He got up and took his toast […] and
she had to lean away from the counter […]. She poured milk into the
bowl. He sat down and got up. He went to the fridge […].
(BA 10)
For the time being, the narrative suggests, their life is reduced to the
banality of ordinary routine, organized by the kettle she takes “back to
the stove because this is how you live your life,” (BA 12) and carried on
by soya granules (which are mentioned at least eight times), the news and
the “glass of juice.” (BA 19) All this makes sense only through simple
grammatical opposition and allocation: “It was her newspaper. The telephone was his […]” (BA 12) – and only insofar as the reader is likely to
do a similar thing, have breakfast, in the morning. In this vacuum, it does
not matter that the perception of endlessly “identical lines of print” in an
outdated paper becomes interchangeable (as to content and quality) with
seeing a glass of juice. (BA 19) Without a differential exterior object – the
division of time into days – time becomes all alike: “All day yesterday I
thought it was Friday.” (BA 20) The first chapter, then, consists of what
Boxall calls “evacuated time” without a “narrative quality.”2 Put another
way: The chapter takes place in a temporal continuum with utterly trivial
acts in a secluded space apart from the quotidian distractions of the city.
This initial sequence may be an impressive exercise in the narration of
time; narrating time and story time converge. But if it was not for some
beautifully lyrical sentences, it is also a stretch one has to endure, a performance of tedium and nullities.
The place, on the other hand, turns out to be the appropriate setting
“to know more surely who you are.” (BA 7) Thereat, even the smallest
trivia may draw attention, raising, by the same token, one’s self-awareness. There ought to be, though, the mental disposition to give and abandon oneself to the exterior intuition with its given objects, no matter how
irrelevant in functional terms they are. It is contingent upon the question
whether (uneventful) time may nevertheless be experienced as lived or
fulfilled time or, conversely, as empty, utterly boring or dead time, no matter whether there is a “narrative quality” or not. If one is no longer
immersed in an exterior reality with unceasing and spectacular medial,
communicative, and extraordinary stimuli, a person must subjectively
furnish, or rather animate, their environment with significance. A “leaf,”
then, may be “stabbed with self-awareness.” (BA 7) It depends on the
receptivity or “mindfulness” of the subject, if she or he hears, sees or
tastes the spectacular phenomenon as something meaningful that can still
58 The Body Artist
“make a day,” or if those phenomena just add to the feeling of another
pointless day in a series of pointless days. This difference is crucial for a
person’s being-there in the world. It accounts, as I suggest, for Rey’s suicide (not altogether, to be sure) and Lauren’s arrestingly devoted work of
mourning. It is clear from the beginning that Lauren can abandon herself
to the moment, to get something sensual out of it, even if that moment
has oftentimes been the same. Rey cannot. If Lauren is more of a Virginia
Woolf-or Peter Handke-like figure, Rey has a Beckett-like ring to him.
Lauren uses all her senses to discern and discriminate. She “noticed [for
“the first time”] how water from the tap turned opaque in seconds. It ran
silvery and clear and then in seconds turned opaque […] she’d never
noticed how the water ran clear at first and then went not murky exactly
but opaque […].” (BA 8) She is “feeling a sense” of the blue of her jeans
“runny and wan,” (BA 9) and she repeatedly tries to identify and distinguish accurately the smell of soya granules.3 When she reads the outdated
paper, she gets absorbed and loses herself in the text.
Yet her sensuous mindfulness and receptivity for what at the moment
and from moment to moment connects her with the outside world
become most striking when (only) she notices4 the birds
cracking off the feeder again. They passed out of the shade beneath
the eaves and flew into sunglare and silence and it was an action she
only partly saw, elusive and mutely beautiful, the birds so sunstruck
they were consumed by light, disembodied, turned into something
sheer and fleet and scatter-bright.
(BA 12–3)
These passages are not only highly graphic, lyrical and aesthetic; through
the frequent use of past and present participles, time seems to gain
momentum to fulfill itself in a moment of sublimity. Being and language,
bodies in action and their phonetic manifestation, and signified and signifier appear to onomatopoetically coincide – if only for an illusionary
moment: “The birds broke off the feeder in a wing-whir that was all b’s
and r’s, the letter b followed by a series of vibrato r’s. But that wasn’t it at
all. That wasn’t anything like it.” (BA 17) At least temporarily, she feels
something like the cancellation of difference (time and language), getting
hold of, or merely glimpsing, a thing in motion in itself (“a wing-whir
that was all….”). It looks and sounds as if this event would take up,
though only momentarily and fleetingly, everything else. This basically
aesthetic point of view – or spatialization of time and motion – becomes
more explicit in a little scene following a talk about the identity of the
current weekday and her “waiting for him to say yes or no to coffee.”
Against the nugatory background, she suddenly becomes aware of a jay:
“She stopped dead and held her breath. It stood large and polished […]
and she could nearly believe she’d never seen a jay before. It stood
The Body Artist 59
enormous, looking in at her.” (BA 21) She watches on and is fascinated:
“[S]he thought she’d somehow only now learned how to look. She’d
never seen a thing so clearly […].” It comes to her as an epiphany: “There
was also the clean shock of its appearance […].” (BA 22) Depicted with a
minimum of static verbs (“stood,” “was posted where it was”) and an
overabundance of predicates, the Jay is transfigured into a momentary
manifestation and revelation beyond time. She wants to probe its essential being-there “past the details to the bird itself” (BA 22) and establish
a kind of mutual relationship through the reciprocity of seeing: “She
wanted to believe the bird was seeing her, a woman with a teacup in her
hand.” The epiphanic view, metaphysical as it is, makes the bird drop out
of time and context, turning it into another still life in motion5: “[…]
never mind the folding back of day and night, the apparition of a space
set off from time.” (BA 22) It moreover creates some mutuality, even
identity between the thing outside and Lauren, who is at the same time,
however, aware of the transitoriness of the moment, which she yet seems
to sense in the bird: “She was alert to the clarity of the moment but knew
it was ending already. She felt it in the blue jay. Or maybe not.” Even if or
precisely because DeLillo makes Lauren feel ambiguous about the status
of this “clear moment,” the whole passage sounds like a typical instance
of an (outdated) modernist aesthetics.
It is, nevertheless, highly significant for the notion of “terror management” – as well as an ethos of mourning, which does not want to give in
to the absolute difference of death and which wants to – belatedly –
resuscitate the dead. The spatialization of time (in the mnemonic form of
a work of art, an epiphany or even a lasting memory), which necessarily
contains transience and failure, is, as one must stress, a most sustained
means to counter the hard fact of death. Lauren’s passing epiphany
(within the emptiness of a sequential now and then in the kitchen) anticipates her later striving at transcending time in the process of mourning.6
She will return – if only figuratively – a presence to her deceased husband
he lacked already before his suicide. For Lauren “the apparition of a
space set off from time” “made my day. My week.” (BA 23)
To Rey, all this does not make a difference. When she wants to tell him
about the blue jay, he only half turns to answer without any enthusiasm:
“Don’t we see them all the time?” (BA 22) Rey is excluded from this lifesustaining experience, remains unaffected, and is probably no longer able
to feel something similar. She wants to tell him to look up, but she does
not, since “if Rey looked up, the bird would fly.” (BA 22) What he sees
when looking out of the window is “an untended meadow tumbled to the
rutted dirt road that led to a gravel road.” (BA 23) Before he had already
lost “interest” in talking. What appears to be “insignificant” he takes,
other than Lauren, “as a kind of self-diminishment.” He watches the
foam in his glass but “wasn’t paying attention” and doesn’t remember the
“details.” (BA 9, 10, 11) Rey is obviously worn out by the dreariness of
60 The Body Artist
the course of time: ‘“I’m the one to moan. The terror of another ordinary
day,” he said slyly. “You don’t know this yet.”’ (BA 15) The only question
that might have led to some communication, he stops short with: “It’s
boring.” (BA 17) Eventually, he disrupts the taedium vitae of sequentiallinear temporality by driving to New York to shoot himself in the flat of
his former wife. Perhaps with a further tinge of allegory, he tells her
before leaving: “All my keys are on one ring.” (BA 25)
Rey’s and Lauren’s different backgrounds give us some hints as to their
divergent responses. Lauren, the body artist, is dependent and focused on
the mimic and gestic subtleties of her own constitution and subjectivity.
She looks and listens into herself to discover something meaningful. This
enables her, as we shall see, to bring perception, action and her own being
into a synchronic or even simultaneous accordance. Rey, the film director,
does of course also and necessarily draw upon his subjectivity, but he is
also dependent on a film set, a script, narrative and actors, that is, a
stimulating object world, which now is no longer available to him. Time
and action are contingent on media (the camera, etc.). The obituary
speaks for itself: “His subject is people in landscapes of estrangement. He
found a spiritual knife-edge in the poetry of alien places, where extreme
situations become inevitable and characters are forced toward life-defining moments.” (BA 29, a quote within the intertext) His “answer to life,”
he had told an audience once, “is the movies.” (BA 28) Having forfeited
professional success (after phases of alcoholism and depression) and
without the artistic fulfillment and experience of “extreme situations”
and “life-defining moments,” Rey must have found himself in a vacuum.
For him, the boredom in the setting of a solitary kitchen will signify only
the “terror of another day.”
The Provo-care of the Death of the Other: The “Humanity of
Man”
The (subsequent) obituary recounts in a chronological, formal and rather
hackneyed way his life and aims at closure, as all obituaries do. Lauren
does not follow this traditional, public and private way of putting up
with death. After Rey’s cremation, she returns to the lonely house they
have rented for six months, declining her friends’ pointless offers of consolation.7 Rather than “directing herself out,” she has the firm intention
of getting “into” mourning – in spite of the physical and psychological
consternation she undergoes. Phone calls by friends keep coming in who
cannot understand why she spends her time (it will be more than two
months) in a lonely and rundown house by the sea, which will permanently work as a mnemonic token of the parting and demise of her husband. Isolation is after all additionally conducive to depression and pain.
No one can understand that it is the only way for Lauren to mourn appropriately. She is as existentially shaken at the beginning of the narrative of
The Body Artist 61
her mourning as she is toward the end; before she regains her Self, only
in the last paragraph of the novel, she has transformed and virtually
physically received her dead husband in a body performance and imaginative sexual act. Lauren “refused to yield to the limits of belief.” (BA
122)
Similarly to other mourners, she suffers a confusion of fundamental
rational and perceptive categories, of inside and outside. She also wants to
die. The world only “seems” to her, (BA 31) “doubtful” and “ever changing” (BA 36) and she feels a “painful weight” in her chest, (BA 31) days
move achingly slow, (BA 32) her body feels different, “tight, framed” and
she nearly collapses (BA 33): “The world was lost inside her.” (BA 37) Like
Dostoevsky in Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg,8 who is stricken with
grief for his son, she identifies with the dead, and wants to be dead: “She
wanted to disappear in Rey’s smoke, be dead, be him.” (BA 34) It is the
death of the other person that reveals her own vulnerability and therefore
her own being, as we shall see. She encounters herself in her own (unsubstantial) singularity via the provo-care of the death of the other.
She becomes obsessed with disinfecting the house, using a “bottle with
a pistol-grip attachment.” She finds it “hard to stop pressing the trigger,”
simulating the final moment of Rey. And like many other mourners she
continues to feel (throughout the narrative) his presence: “[S]he felt him in
the rooms,” “[s]he felt him behind her.” (BA 32–4) Death, in its incomprehensibility, means an absolute rupture of time. Consequently, Lauren loses
her sense of time (see BA 37) and gets absorbed into a life-streaming video,
which keeps on showing nothing but a road in a remote Finnish city, cars
going monotonously in and out all day long. Each day she reserves some
time for it, since it gives her an impression of simultaneity, of an ongoing
presence of a spatial now, “a place contained in an unyielding frame.” (BA
38) She gets captured by the “mystery of seeing over the world to a place
stripped of everything but a road that approaches and recedes, both realities occurring at once.” (BA 39) Evidently, “containment in an unyielding
frame” implies the same “death-in-life, life-in-death” paradox that has
bewildered so many modernist writers from Keats to Wilde, or Yeats
(“Byzantium”). But the very ambivalence of an unrelated state that leaves
one static, unchanging and therefore dissevered from a world of lived (i.e.,
temporal) life (call it “melancholic” or “traumatic”), actually represents
the state of those who are left behind, perceiving the world as something
seemingly unreal (movie-like), their sense of time being broken. Lauren
has a vague plan “to organize time,” (BA 37) but she has no specific intentions; if she possesses an identity at this time, it is certainly “nonsubstantial” (Emmanuel Levinas) and without autonomy.
It is in this state of suspension that she comes across a strange figure.
Lauren calls him “Mr. Tuttle” in honor of her science teacher, with whom
she happens to associate him. The identity of the “smallish and fine-bodied” person of indefinite age (from Lauren’s focal point of view) has
62 The Body Artist
posed a major riddle to critics.9 Nevertheless, he is described in a realistic
way. There is nothing ghostly about him, even though the circumstances
of his existence in the house, where he must have been without (or hardly
any10) food for months,11 are highly improbable. Similarly strange are his
appearance, bearing and manner of speaking. The narrator (with Lauren
as the focalizing subject) uses the predicate of a “stick-figure” to describe
the unlikely character: “a cartoon head and body, chinless, stick-figured.”
(BA 62) Interestingly enough, the focalizer Dostoevsky, who, albeit
ambivalently, wants to salvage his dead son Pavel, uses the same expression when becoming aware of the strange appearance in his room: “if not
a full person then a stick figure.”12 Drawn with only one line and a circle
for its head, a stick figure is suitably reduced to suggest an “everyman”
with no particular qualities. It is precisely for this blankness and reduction
that it allows for an effective animation (in cartoons) as well as the evocation of something essential and existential that is common to all of us.
Yet Tuttle, reminiscent of “the first toy ever built with moving parts,”
(BA 62) is far removed from the contextual spaces of animated cartoons
(or even empty stock figures). She wonders about his possible origin (see
BA 49) without a feasible result; instead, she hears something in his voice,
“at the edge, unconnected to income levels or verb tenses […].” (BA 50)
The reader (and critic) is left at a cognitive loss, less so Lauren. When she
finds him, following the noise, she is not at all surprised to meet “something so strange.” Not that she had been intentionally looking for something to mitigate her grief. But she thinks of him as “inevitable.” (BA 42)
He has “a foundling quality” with necessarily only her as “the finder.”
(BA 43) It is as if “she had to find him, a waif who did not call, whose call
she yet responded to.”13 He, therefore, touches upon something of crucial
significance: “She didn’t know how to think about this. There was something raw in the moment, open-wounded. It bared her to things that were
outside her experience but desperately central, somehow, at the same
time.” (BA 63) He evades age classification, is “unfinished,” (BA 45) not
a child, but “not quite a man either,” outside the “sway of either/or.” (BA
69) He is indefinable, indeterminate, does not know his original name, if
there was ever one (BA 54–5)14 and cannot be brought to give any new
(or synthetic) information. He simply parrots Lauren and utters tautological sentences: “Say some words to say some words.” (BA 55). Even
Tuttle’s eyes, traditionally the window to human inwardness and subjectivity, do not give a clue to what we take as an individual personality:
“[…] there were no stirrings of tremulous self.” His eyes,15 as anything
else, forego objectifying intentionality, the more arresting thereby her
attention and responsivity: “the gaze that demonstrates we are lonely in
our souls [?].” (BA 85) No less interesting is his lack of a linear-sequential
sense of time. He commingles different tenses in an utterance referring to
one action, replaces “rained” for “will rain” and seems to exist only in the
presence: “Being here has come to me. I am with the moment […] I will
The Body Artist 63
leave the moment from the moment […] Coming and going I am leaving.”
(BA 74) If it is through narrative that we structure our history and identity, Tuttle has none. “He is here and there, before and after” and lives in
a “kind of time” that has “no narrative quality,” (BA 64–5) unable to
make “arbitrary divisions.” (BA 91)
In this timelessly vacuous state, this indefinite being speaks not only in
her voice but also – without having been asked – in Rey’s, which Lauren
realizes with “a brief fit of shivering.” (BA 51) While she is reading about
childbirth from a book about the human body, Tuttle suddenly starts
speaking: “This was not some communication with the dead. It was Rey
alive in the course of a talk he’d had with her […].” (BA 61) Lauren
understands that she “could not miss Rey, could not consider his absence,
the loss of Rey, without thinking along the margins of Mr. Tuttle.” (BA
82) Tuttle presents pieces of Rey’s speech, but the point is that it is not or
does not seem the deliberate repetition of something that is over once and
for all: “[S]he didn’t think the man was remembering. It is happening
now. […] reporting helplessly, what they say.” Sensing his presence physically, she feels that Rey lives “in this man’s mind” now, “in his mouth and
body and cock.” (BA 87, my italics) One is reminded of Derrida’s “mnesic
representations which are only lacunary fragments,”16 through which the
dead come to speak in us.
I think it is too simple to reduce Tuttle to a purely psychological phenomenon or projection of a traumatized woman. DeLillo’s realistic language creates (from Lauren’s point of view!) a figure nowhere suggesting
a figment or phantasmagoria. Lauren deals with him in a thoroughly sensible way, with no signs of schizophrenic or neurotic self-delusion.17 One
should take him as he appears: as a de-individualized person who has
come to stay, albeit mysteriously, in a remote and neglected chamber of a
lonely house by the sea, and, furthermore, as the literary correlative or
allegorical manifestation of a situation that follows the death of a beloved
person. He represents the presence of someone beyond temporal and conceptual difference, a singular event lacking the received socio-cultural
framing. Labeling him as “autistic” will satisfy our own discursive needs
but will remain exterior to Tuttle and what goes on between him and
Lauren. It may be equally simplifying to pin the figure down as the Other
or Otherness,18 although Tuttle, intangible and impenetrable as he apparently is, comes close to that non-concept. The Otherness that arrives (arrivant) precludes, according to Derrida, identification and a priori concepts.
That is, the epistemic openness on the part of the receiver (Lauren) necessarily implies indeterminateness and namelessness on the part of the arrivant. The latter remains both inaccessible and completely unassuming.19
He is human and male, and different, but beyond that he cannot be
categorized, since he himself appears to act and speak outside of those
categorical aspects such as time and causality that make up reality for us.
He never judges. He has an indistinct appearance, is completely open and
64 The Body Artist
makes no demands; he simply looks at her. (BA 43) His first unclassifiable
and grammatically impossible utterance is “It is not able.” He is indeed
impossible or only potentially possible. He is merely there, without any
pretension, empty eyes that look at the other and a voice that comes from
other people, most notably Rey’s. He brings Rey’s voice to pass, without
being Rey. He is and is not Rey. He lives “in this man’s mind” (see above),
and “[i]t isn’t true because it can’t be true. Rey is not alive in this man’s
consciousness or in his palpable verb tense.” (BA 91) Tuttle embodies the
paradox of death. The deceased Rey seems to become present in Tuttle’s
voice and gestures, only to indicate at the same time Rey’s absence. (Lauren
tries to record and maintain his voice on tape which comes down, of
course, to only another substitution.) Tuttle appears to somehow call forth
Rey, or at least some other sphere of being, yet he/they remain elusive:
But this is the point, that he laps and seeps, somehow, into other
reaches of being, other time-lives, and this is an aspect of his bewilderment and pain.
Somehow. The weakest word in the language. And more or less.
And maybe. Always maybe. She was always maybeing.
(BA 92)
It is important to note that Tuttle’s intangibility as a person also reveals
an “aspect of his bewilderment and pain.” His lack of intentional personality traits, his nakedness and defenselessness, lay bare, moreover, what
can be called, according to Derrida (calling forth Kant), “the humanity of
man”20 or the substantial and indissoluble dignity inherent in any human
being, no matter whether dead or living. In his extremely reduced existence (anonymous,21 and merely present), he brings forth potentially
everything that is human, and also “bares her” to the individual generality that is fundamental to all of us. He, thus, comes as a “gift” that gives
himself or itself to her as “goodness itself but also as the law.” Tuttle in
his very vulnerability not only offers an echo of Rey but also “the memory of humanity.” Thereby, he acts as a “command to the donnee”22 to be
open to change and to take care. Unable to sleep, she goes to his room
after midnight and listens to “the raspy nasal intake” and finds
herself moved in an unusual way. In sleep he was no more unknowable than anyone else. Look. The shrouded body feebly beating. This
is what you feel, looking at the hushed and vulnerable body, almost
anyone’s, or you lie next to your husband after you have made love
and breathe the heat of his merciless dreams and wonder who he is,
tenderly pondering the truth you’ll never know, because this is the
secret that sleep protects in its neutral depths, in its stages, layers and
folds.
(BA 54)
The Body Artist 65
Facing such profoundly existential, “almost anyone’s,” states (which
draw our empathy more to children and animals than rationally minded
adults), we are emotionally the more inclined to respond and take care of
the other. This is what Lauren does. In a very mindful way, she attends to
his body and baths him, washing “his chest and arms, wordlessly naming
his parts for him.” (BA 68) In an almost ritual manner, she pays respect
and dignifies his whole body (including penis and testicles).
The act is reminiscent of both a last ablution and the motherly love and
care for her baby. It evokes the ritual with which we pay respect to the
dead and at the same time the maternal devotion at the beginning of a
(new) life. She salvages and redeems the body and also re-members and
reintegrates it by naming its parts for him. The rather chaste sexual
undercurrent is emphasized by an indirect unification and identification
of the two: “His hand came out of the water holding the cloth. She took
it from him and held it spread across her face and pressed into the pores
and she rubbed it over her mouth and gave it back to him.” (BA 68) Since
he lacks a “protective surface,” “alone and unable to improvise” in “the
howl of the world,” she offers “touches and calming sounds.” And since
he is (“was,” she changes into past tense) simply here and scared, she
provides (like Coleridge in “Frost at Midnight”) protection and consolation. She still wonders how she could at all know about his state of mind.
However, beholding him in his utter defenselessness, “curled in a thin
blanket,” (BA 90) she does not hesitate to express her ethical imperative:
“You are supposed to offer solace,” and does so in a wholly devoted way,
lies on top of him, rubs him and begins “to breathe with him.” (BA 90)
Her sympathy for the other, “humanity in man,” manifests itself in a kind
of mimetic adaptation and identification with the other. When he stops
eating, she does so too and finds it “suitable.” (BA 94) She keeps on looking after his most fundamental needs, feeding “him soup while he sat on
the toilet once.” (BA 95) Her protective urge amounts to “a deathly devotion almost,” which is – from an economic-pragmatic point of view – of
course not especially useful. Yet it is in accordance with the absolute ethical claim of the other, who in his creatureliness shows nothing but “a
surplus of vulnerability.” (BA 96)23 Lauren responds conscientiously and
willingly to that, simply out of a basic feeling of sympathy.
Doing justice to the deceased by recognizing the other in his or her
peculiarity (individuality or singularity) is another important dimension
of the ethos of mourning. Thus, when Rey’s lawyer calls to point out his
“debts cascading on other debts,” Lauren is not at all worried. On the
contrary, it makes “her feel good,” because “[i]t was the Rey she knew
and not some other.” It is not inappropriate, then, when she responds to
the grave numbers brought forth by the lawyer with gaiety, wishing him
luck. (BA 94)
It is also notable that Tuttle’s presence reminds her of Ray telling her
once “that she was helping him recover his soul.” This “iceblink of
66 The Body Artist
memory” is accompanied by Rey’s words rendered in Tuttle’s most coherent utterance:
I regain possession of myself through you. I think like myself now,
not like the man I became. I eat and sleep like myself, bad, which is
bad, but it’s like myself when I was myself and not the other man.
(BA 61–2)
Tuttle/Rey speaks in the present tense. During and on account of her mindful mourning, Rey is therefore re-membered and once again dignified as the
singular self that he was or wanted to be. It is self-evident that the bereaved
experience some profound personal alteration while mourning. Along with
Rey’s posthumous, spiritual individuation, Lauren will also regain her own
unique human self together with her sense of beauty. (See BA 82)
If Tuttle works as a kind of “catalyst”24 for Lauren’s own transmutation,
it is not surprising that at some point of their relationship silence begins to
take place and that Tuttle vanishes eventually without leaving a sign. She
misses him and looks for him for days, even though she knows that he has
gone for good. His sudden disappearance is within the logic of the other (as
well as of death itself) who has gone and come without announcement,
eschewing our rational expectations or intentions. His ontological status of
timeless and pure presence (as opposed to becoming or passing) has been
replaced by absence, even though this absence cannot eliminate the impressions and traces left in Lauren. Don DeLillo has her sensuously, visually,
and bodily live through and accomplish this ambiguity. She imagines him
from afar looking like “someone you technically see but don’t quite register
in the usual interpretative way. […] Like someone you see and then you
forget you see.” (BA 95) Back in the house, she thinks she would find him
sitting on his bed again, while knowing at the same time he would not.
When she realizes that the rooms have become empty, she still feels “something in her body try to hold him here.” (BA 96) She has become aware of
the continuation and persistence of those who seem to have gone into
nothingness, which foregoes the simple binary logic of 1 and 0, there and
not-there. Her life with Tuttle, by the way, will not be meaningless in a
practical sense. It will find its way into her body performance.
What remains moreover for Lauren is the basic experience of humanity
and care beyond all intentional and temporal contingencies. In her devotion to the other, she has “taken upon herself” his gift of humanity, performing, as it were, a spiritual and ethical sublation of the death of the
other (not processing in the sense of Freud’s grief work) in and through
Tuttle. She continues to feel with him and still wants to “take him in.”
(BA 100) The reality status of Tuttle, whether a “ghostly” manifestation
of Rey, a psychic “phantom,” or a real person25 does not matter. What
matters is that he was capable of making “her husband live in the air that
rushed from his lungs.” (BA 62) Tuttle has become the medium that helps
The Body Artist 67
her to mourn Rey appropriately; on the telephone she now uses his voice,
turning partly into Tuttle, “where Rey lives.” (BA 100) Thereby, he has
shown her a possibility of creating a future of her own. (See BA 98)
Early on, Lauren had already taken up her bodywork, stretching and
breathing exercises, to regain possession of her body. Toward Tuttle’s
departure, she moreover embarks on a rigid physical transformation of
herself, which amounts to her very own de-identification, baring or disclosure of her fundamental humanity. This is in line with Tuttle’s reduced
state of being. She literally wax-strips, scrubs, scratches or rubs anything
from her body that can be taken or peeled off, depigments herself and cuts
off her hair: “to disappear from all her former venues of aspect and bearing and to become a blankness, a body slate erased of every past resemblance.” She wants to transmute into a kind of nowhere woman without
qualities, someone one usually does not notice or someone one looks
through. (BA 83–4) Scouring even her tongue she becomes determined to
“alter the visible form” and close off “outlets to the self.” (BA 97) Lauren,
that is, removes anything that seems accidental, confining herself (passingly) to some essential being beyond the spatio-temporal thingness of the
material present. She uses her body to appear bodiless, while the process
of depersonalization she pursues marks both an alienation from her body
and its re-presentation. Rather than recovering the outer sense of sequential time, she turns toward the autogenous time of her body-self.
“Body Time” and the Sublation of Death (“Trauerspiel” or “Play
of Mourning”)
By means of the body, which is defamiliarized and stripped of all received
referentiality, she is ready to give form to her mourning – combined with
a symbolic memorial for Rey. Her performance, called “Body Time,”
which she has given for three nights in Boston, is conveyed through a
review article by a former friend, Mariella Chapman, who has met Lauren
in a café. This adds a third and necessarily public, social and general
dimension to her mourning. To Mariella she looks “bloodless and ageless
[…] rawboned and slightly bug-eyed,” (BA 103) while Lauren tells her
that she works toward “emptiness.” “Hartke,” the journalist comments,
“tries to shake off the body – hers anyway.” (BA 104) Paradoxically,
Lauren stages a highly intense (BA 104) body performance to also assimilate into a (dead) body, a Bone Man or “Knochenmann,” the traditional
allegory of Death. She enacts the contradictio in adiecto of nothingness:
Even if there is nothing anymore for us, there is still “nothing,” or the
very possibility of something. It is the utterly unconditional condition for
the possibility of the event of the “arrivant.” Lauren does not know “if
the piece went” where she “wanted it to go.” (BA 104) When acting, she
is “always in the process of becoming another.” (BA 105) She is open to
what may come or not.
68 The Body Artist
The temporal dimension, which refers back to the initial kitchen scene,
is of crucial importance. Lauren slows down time to a degree that it
becomes hardly bearable so that people walk out: She “wanted her audience to feel time go by, viscerally, even painfully.” (BA 104) The artist,
thus, reminds us of the possibility of a temporal horror vacui and standstill, which is especially for modern man unendurable, pointing, as it
does, to the very possibility of death: “When time stops, so do we.”26 By
repeating actions countlessly, “stopping time and stretching it out,” “halfpirouetting in very slow motion,” she exerts a hypnotic effect on the
remaining people, making them feel “physically and mentally suspended.”
Lauren thereby transforms not only her time of mourning into “still life,
that’s living, not painted,” (BA 106–7) she reenacts Rey’s ennui or temporal vacuum preceding and ending in his suicide, without referring to Rey’s
act itself and its finality. Her presence works as a memento mori (without
the latter’s moral subtext, of course), which evokes cessation, stasis and
termination and, yet, the expectation of something else – “living” – to
come. Her body will flow or inch into another unlikely posture.
Lauren performs the loss of a body as well as the “transposition” of
sequential temporality into a “figurative spatial,” yet not motionless,
“simultaneity.”27 As the Morandi still life paintings (“Natura Morte”) in
Falling Man, her “still life” unfolds a processual dynamics, it is “living.”
With this seeming paradox, she cites and overcomes the paradox of the
traditional genre of “terror management,” which, rather than withdrawing its subject from transience, fixes or arrests it in its (unrelated) stillness.
It, therefore, transforms it only the more into a dead or lifeless thing.
Benjamin’s characterization of the “Trauerspiel” (“Tragic Drama,” literally: “play of mourning”) as opposed to the “spasmodic chronological
progression of tragedy,” fits Lauren’s act well, “the Trauerspiel takes place
in a spatial continuum which one might describe as choreographic.”28
The “transposition” performance is accompanied by a video that
shows the sparsely trafficked, almost empty Finnish highway, along with
a display recording the time: “A car goes one way, a car goes the other.”
The audience thus sees and hears both “past and future” at the same time
(BA 107), accompanied by the voice of a telephone recorder repeating
“relentlessly” (BA 106) its announcement. After the incorporation of two
coincidental events, she quite randomly had come across after Rey’s
death (a Japanese woman as out of “a Noh drama,” (BA 105) and an
executive woman who repeatedly checks the time on her watch), she
finally embodies or rather disembodies Tuttle, Rey or Everyman: “the
naked man stripped of recognizable language and culture.” (BA 107)
When she finally speaks or only lip-syncs Tuttle’s incoherent and decontextualized voice, it is also “somehow” Rey who speaks. But this reincarnation is far from conciliatory and comforting: “Have I ever looked at a
figure on a stage and seen someone so alone?,” Mariella asks rhetorically.
Lauren’s “Trauerspiel” has finally come down to a “whipping and spinning,”
The Body Artist 69
utterly stripped-down “stick figure” as if out of an “animated cartoon.”
Her body impersonates bared humanity. The “Trauerspiel” ends with a
seizure that has the figure vault into another “reality.” (BA 108)
In the conversation with Mariella, Lauren declines a simple interpretation of her performance as coming straight out of “what happened to
Rey” and a drama “versus death.” Yet she immediately switches to a male
voice. Mariella is certainly right, when she concludes that Lauren’s body
art “is never the grand agony of a stately images and sets.” (BA 109) It is
not “tragedy,” it is a “Trauerspiel”: “It is about you and me.” (BA 109)29
The performance does not bring about redemption. Mourning is surely
a form of “terror management.” However, an ethics of mourning neither
objectifies death nor passes it light-mindedly over (as in the by now psychotherapeutic cliché of the “work of mourning” or “grief work”). In
contrast to Heidegger, it simply does not want to accept death as an existential fact and, therefore, opens up to non-trivial or symbolic forms of
resuscitation of the dead in memorials, pictorial or literary representation, or, for that matter, in body art. These forms, and clearly Lauren’s,
are non-trivial as they do not pretend to fend off or evade fetish-like the
fact of death. They rather bear its temporal trace with and in them. It is
given a form beyond reification and the short-lived satisfaction of daily
interests, agendas and vague desires; the form must prevent us from proceeding as if nothing had happened. In her transgressive performance,
Lauren exposes herself to the utmost existential degree. It opens up to the
“event,” to interrupt present temporality and to suggest an alternative
time (and space) outside the time toward death. Lauren’s “Body Time”
was repeatedly staged, yet the (subjective) event is singular and without
closure, and thus, other than Freud’s grief work, never really completed
or finished. The dead, due to the paradoxical ontology of death, are
absent and likewise present, not only in psychological terms.
Lauren returns to the rented house by the coast, responding to a remark
she is not sure Rey has made or not: “[S]he would be here in the end.”
(BA 111–12) In any case, she fulfills her responsibility of the provo-care
one owes the “call of” the deceased person. The departed is there and not
there, she sees him in her mirror image, yet “not really,” (BA 112) but
without doubt about his “arrival.” She knew “this was the day it would
happen;” (BA 113) she never gives up and stays open to his reality, his
language and stories and finally comes to a point, where she wants to
surrender completely to her grief: “Let death bring you down.” (BA 116)
She still refuses any “work of grief”: “Why shouldn’t the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin”? (BA 116)
Redeeming Moment
Eventually (after an awkward visit from her landlord), Lauren’s lamentation receives some response. She hears a chant “Being has come to me.”
70 The Body Artist
Her world appears to have come unconcealedly back to her; she has, after
all, “refused to yield to the limits of belief.” (BA 122) She approaches
Rey’s (former) room and feels or imagines Rey inside her chest, even his
“cock” in her hand.
However, DeLillo maintains the ontological ambiguity to the very end
of the novel. Before Lauren actually enters Rey’s room, she nurtures a
fantasy, a kind of resurrection epiphany: “The room faced east and would
be roiled in morning light, in webby sediment and streams of sunlit dust
and in the word motes […].” (BA 123–4) The language or formal level
that is addressed here (“the word motes”) undercuts already a possible
metaphysical or even religious experience. Accordingly, when she looks
she finds the room and the bed “empty all along.” Nevertheless, even if
Rey is “not there,” he has become a part of her and the world outside. She
does not know why, but opens the window – facing east30 – and realizes
she “wanted to feel the sea tang on her face and the flow of time in her
body, to tell her who she was.” (BA 124)
To give oneself to the subjectivity of a spatial continuum offers a mode
of resistance to death, if it is cast into a mold, brought into some intuitive
form (as in a sculpture, body performance, Trauerspiel or even a memorial
image). Yet it may turn into the rigidity of some frozen and asocial (aesthetically idealized) image, giving a premonition of what it wants to shut
out. Thus, when Lauren is ready to feel again “the flow of time in her
body,” the redeeming moment has eventually come to her. She opens up
again to the vivid resonance of the world out there. To become conscious
again of one’s subjective sensuousness and sensibility does not only tell us
“who we are,” it is probably the most elemental way of “terror management.”31
Notes
1 For good accounts of language and time in The Body Artist, see also Boxall
2006, 215–21 and Henry Veggian, Understanding Don DeLillo (Columbia,
The University of South Carolina Press, 2015), 80–87 (esp. 82).
2 Boxall 2006, 216. There is, though, the occasional but small hint, that
makes the reader anticipate some narrative development: There is something “about the house” (BA 8) or when Rey says “I want God to see my
face.” (BA 14)
3 “[S]omewhere between body odor, yes, in the lower extremities and some
authentic podlife of the earth, deep and seeded.” (BA 15–6)
4 She does so, one should mention, through the window, that is, beyond the
vacuum of the hermetic space in which the couple lingers.
5 One is reminded of Yeats’s birds in “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Byzantium,”
which seem to be beyond “what is past, or passing, or to come,” and “all
complexities.” See Yeats 1985, 217, 280.
6 After her tentative completion of the process of mourning and at the end of
the novella, she experiences another worldly epiphany.
7 “Alone is no good. […] you have to direct yourself out of this thing, not into
it. Don’t fold up.” (BA 39)
8 See note above.
The Body Artist 71
9 See Laura Di Prete, “Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist: Performing the Body,
Narrating Trauma,” Contemporary Literature 46, no. 3 (Autumn 2005):
502–3, 508; and Mark Osteen, “DeLillo’s Dedalian artists,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Don DeLillo, ed. Duvall (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2008), 147–8.
10 At their breakfast Lauren discovers a hair in her cereal, the origin of which
she cannot explain: “[…] a short pale strand that wasn’t hers and wasn’t his.”
The “short pale strand” may point to Tuttle having pinched some food from
the kitchen.
11 Three months earlier they had already heard some noise which “[s]he didn’t
think […] was an animal noise.” (BA 40)
12 Coetzee 1994, 236.
13 Using suchlike paradoxical formulations, Coetzee’s Dostoevsky strives to
open himself to the possible/impossible arrivant (J. Derrida) of his stepson
Pavel.
14 Names, in postmodern times, are taken to be the only reliable identity tags.
Tuttle does not have one. “[…] he’d forgotten it or lost it and could not get it
back.”
15 Cf. also: “She didn’t think his eye was able to search out and shape things.” (80)
16 Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man (New York, Columbia University
Press, 1986), 37.
17 “She knew, she told herself she was not an unstrung woman who encounters
a person responsive to psychic forces, able to put her in touch with her late
husband.
This was something else.” (66)
18 One may ask about the point of the “Other,” if this ever-withdrawing, i.e.,
negative notion is dissolved into psychological or theological categories.
19 Jacques Derrida, Aporias (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993), 33–5.
20 Derrida 1993, 35.
21 “She realized she’d never called him by his name.” (BA 81) “His name” was,
of course, assigned to him by her.
22 Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (Chicago & London: The University of
Chicago Press, 1995), 41.
23 It is worth quoting the whole passage: “How could such a surplus of vulnerability find itself alone in the world? Because it is made that way. Because it is
vulnerable. Because it is alone.” (BA 96)
24 Osteen 2008, 146.
25 After his departure, she asks herself quite soberly whether “she could have
made it up, much of it […] in memory,” but finds “she had it on tape and it
was him and he was saying it.” (BA 99)
26 Yet even here, DeLillo’s narrative refuses to be pinned down to an idea what
time, mourning or even death, could be about. She continues: “We don’t stop,
we become stripped down, less self-assured. I don’t know.” (BA 107). Later
on, she tells Mariella: “How simple it would be if I could say this is a piece
that comes directly out of what happened to Rey. But I can’t. Be nice if I could
say this is the drama of men and women versus death. I want to say that but
I can’t.” (BA 108)
27 I am referring here to Walter Benjamin’s “Ursprung des Deutschen
Trauerspiels,” in Gesammelte Werke I (Frankfurt: Zweitausendeins, 2011),
763–955, here: 813.
28 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. J. Osborne
(London: Verso, 1985), 95. The German original: “Im Gegensatz zu einem
zeitlichen und sprunghaften Verlauf, wie die Tragödie ihn vorstellt, spielt das
Trauerspiel sich im Kontinuum des Raumes – choreographisch darf man es
72 The Body Artist
nennen – ab.” (828) It is worth quoting Judith Butler’s comment in her reflection on “Loss”: “So now it seems that the loss of history is not the loss of
movement, but a certain configuration (figural, spatial, simultaneous) that
has its own dynamism, if not its own dance.” Judith Butler, “Afterword: After
Loss, What Then?” in Loss: The Politics of Mourning, eds. David L. Eng and
David Kazanjian (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003),
469.
29 “What begins in solitary otherness becomes familiar and even personal. It is
about who we are when we are not rehearsing who we are.” (BA 110)
30 Although there is no obvious religious reference, there remains an undertone
of spiritual salvation.
31 See Connie S. Rosati, “The Makropulos Case Revisited: Reflections on
Immortality and Agency,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death,
eds. Ben Bradley et al. (Oxford: OUP, 2013), 355–390, esp. 367–373: “The
Value of Simply Being.”
5
Cosmopolis
Cybercapitalism, Alienation and Death
The Body Artist is about the sublation of sequential-linear time in a spatial continuum, or simply, the mourning widow’s desire to slow down
and to stop time – if only for the time being. Cosmopolis is about the
acceleration of time and the elimination of space – for the purpose of
capital accumulation and as a defense against death. The one after the
other is sped up leaving behind the (spatial) one beside the other, as fast
as possible. The Body Artist is a (narrative) exercise in asceticism, in the
mindfulness and awareness of the given somatic moment, concretization,
and release. Lauren Hartke appears to alleviate grief and, to a degree, the
“terror” of death. Cosmopolis presents an exercise in excess and thriftlessness, the negation of the moment and the body, abstraction and selfloss. In modernity, the speeding up of time, acceleration, along with the
accumulation of capital, are both widespread methods of “terror management,” which yet turn out often enough to be self-defeating.
Cosmopolis is steeped in death. Within 24 hours, we have four casualties who die of unnatural causes and a funeral procession for a rap star
(death by natural causes). There is also a film shooting of 300 seemingly
lifeless and stark-naked people prostrate in a New York street and numerous allusions to death, the fear of death and the wish for immortality. It
also ends with a vision of some virtual, albeit deeply disturbing transcendence, which, other than Sister Edgar’s Cyberspace apotheosis, lacks all
spiritual qualities. Incidentally, the fast-moving narrative includes various
modes of “terror management” which we have come across before, such
as emphatic mourning, (merging into) the crowd, consumption, hypochondria, sports, sex and killing.
The Tenacity of Capitalism and Alienation
The novel may be read as a parable (with rather a covert moral lesson) of
postmodern cybercapitalism, featuring the exemplum and epitome of a
global financial shark, Eric Packer. One should note, though, that rather
than to personal moral shortcomings,1 excess and enormousness are systemic to the logic of financial capitalism per se, the more so in a digitally
DOI: 10.4324/9781003289937-5
74 Cosmopolis
globalized age. Eric is a 28-year-old Wall Street multibillionaire who
owns a company that speculates on the international money and asset
market. One morning in April 2000, he sets out for a trip in his stretch
limousine from Manhattan New York’s West Side to get a haircut. Most
of what happens, diverse meetings, financial transactions, medical checks,
take place within (roughly) a day and half a night in or in the vicinity of
his fabulously geared and armored car. The story leaves no doubt that
death and late financial capitalism, concordant with digital technology,
are closely related. The inner logic of advanced technology either to functionally occupy and assimilate or to neutralize spaces (to move ad libitum) finely dovetails with the inner logic of capital, that is, its fastest
possible accumulation.2 Accumulation and economic growth appear
more than expedient for one’s personal expansion, the transcendence or
“contraction” of present time and the “management” of the “terror” of
death. Yet, the purported containment and seclusion in a placeless and
virtual world of finance and quick consumption does not come off after
all. “Black swans,” the inertia and Real of the body and, for that matter,
death itself, interfere. Capitalism is, as I will contend, linked to a destructive urge, Freud’s notorious “death drive.” Yet I do not think that the
death drive is structurally imminent to “the system itself” as Cristina
Garrigós suggests.3 There is, as neoliberal theorists claim, the inbuilt possibility of destruction (of agents, players, industries within the system, old
industrial structures), but only to create something new and more resilient. As in the case of Eric Packer, there may be individual ruins by speculation, sociopsychological crashes, but another agent will soon replace
the failing or failed investor. Markets fail, markets recover, especially
since politics and central banks have chosen to intervene and refinance
the private sector (or to require “capital adequacy ratios”). There are no
self-regulatory market forces as the classical ideology would have it, yet,
failing liquidity or credit crunches (which happens evidently after Packer’s
excessive leverage) have never resulted in a destruction and dissolution of
the system per se. There have been “crises” (in the proper sense of the
word), in 1997 (Asia), in 2000 or 2006/7 and 2011, but financial capitalism and consumption, and the Dow, Nikkei and Nasdaq indexes were
soon in full swing again. The “gales of creative destruction” (Joseph
Schumpeter) have been compensated for by indefinitely rotating money
machines. There is, after all, an indefinite demand with plenty of trusted
money around (by far more than commodity value) and an ever-growing
readiness to both invest and consume. The continued recovery of capitalism (on a more basic economic level) is, most of all, owing to the necessity to raise and repay interest rates and to (product) innovation, which
in turn stimulates consumption. This does not mean that there are no
ongoing asymmetries and uncertainties. The reasons for those are (still)
informational discrepancies, and, what Alan Greenspan famously called,
“irrational exuberance” together with a chain of liquidity bottlenecks
Cosmopolis 75
triggered off by an investor who out of some more or less informed
uneasiness withdraws his or her funds.4
One of Don DeLillo’s characters seems to support the theory of capitalism’s resilience. When Packer reaches Times Square, he encounters a
group of anti-capitalist protesters who have crowded around the Nasdaq
center, soon attacking his car. Packer and his chief theorist Vija Kinski
(who like others of his advisory staff joins him for a short time in his
hermetic vehicle) are prompted to discuss the recursive and assimilatory
resistiveness of the system at large. “They are working with you, these
people. They are acting on your terms,” Vija claims, “as a way to reemphasize the idea we all live under.” (C 92) Old markets are “harshly
eliminated,” only to make way for more profitable new markets. Thus,
the set temporal pattern of Capitalism (and Packer): “Destroy the past,
make the future.” (C 93) Packer himself concludes (mentally, with a tinge
of melancholy):
The protest was a form of systemic hygiene, purging and lubricating.
It attested again, for the ten thousandth time, to the market culture’s
innovative brilliance, its ability to shape itself to its own flexible ends,
absorbing everything around it.
(C 99)
Among the deep psychological reasons for the persistence of the system
is, however, the anxiety of perishing socially and individually, in the sense,
though, that it precedes or motivates the disposition to an ever more
“irrational exuberance.” New products, increased consumption and a fat
bank account work, as we have seen, against the fear of death. Capitalism
and growth thus profit first from a profound anthropological effect
mechanism. Accumulation or growth may reach climaxes or tipping
points, giving rise to destructive forces, even if those will not bring the
system itself to a downfall.5 It produces a self-destructive urge, even death
wish, in those who are driven to a negation of death, precisely by way of
the appropriation of capital,6 of space and the “totalization of the time of
the self.”7 Neoliberal capitalism8 subjects everything, including body and
psyche, to a mechanism of valorization, utilization and self-exploitation.9
If individuals have become a mere function of commodification, exchange
value and media (reinforcing “value added”), and if even public political
protest is to recursively bolster the system, a weariness of life, selfdestruction or death seem to be the only alternative. The “ever more”
exhausts itself when immortality turns out not to substantiate in accumulated property, remaining too abstract to become tangible. The subject
realizes that money remains somehow alien to what it aspires to.
Capitalism, moreover, produces a self-alienation in its reified agents
that results in a hubris, a deadening of empathy and sympathy, in autoaggression as well as aggression against others, foregoing any resonant
76 Cosmopolis
relationality. What remains is pain and the “Real.” The hope for an up-todate spiritual state or transubstantiation to an immaterial (ethereal, airwave) data existence comes only down to death, bodiless as it is. In Packer
all this comes together: sophomoric megalomania, the fear of death,
death wish and a vague desire for an immaterial immortality. He has
grown weary of himself, yet still fears death, wishes for death and vaguely
desires an immaterial immortality, saturated ad nauseam, as he is.
Alienation, (Auto-)Aggression, Death
In fact, all is not well in the financial realm of Eric Packer. “In the stir of
restless identities,” he seems to have lost his mental orientation. His
severely sleepless and friendless life in his splendidly imposing apartment
is a “matter of silences.” (C 5) Eric is as alienated from his inner being as
he is from his environment. He will seek out, as we shall see, “his pain” (C 207)
and his death – the only liminal phenomena that remain essentially his
own and feasible. His “palest thought carried an anxious shadow,” he
feels “self-haunted” in his acts. (C 6) But rather than his father’s spectral
shadow, it is capitalism itself that haunts him, even though, or precisely
because, he is one of the biggest financial players on earth.
He recognizes his own state of mind when he witnesses outside an investment bank, with growing “respect for the protesters’ ingenuity,” a textual
variation on The Communist Manifesto: “A SPECTER IS HAUNTING
THE WORLD—THE SPECTER OF CAPITALISM.” (C 96) Pecker’s selfalienation is symptomatic of individuals who have devoted body and soul
to the medial and monetary abstraction of late capitalism. There is no longer a mutual exchange or relationality with the world: “Nothing existed
around him. There was only the noise in his head, the mind in time.” (C 6)
This mental and perceptive self-centeredness is only partly owing to the
atmosphere and solitude in the early hours of the morning. It is the inner
state of a man whose acts are “synthetic” (in the sense of artificial), whose
mind is in time only. For Eric, having changed to Einstein’s Special Theory,
Freud “is finished.” Famously, the theory is not only about the relativity of
time (to the observer), it also states that, by traveling faster, approaching
the speed of light, time will slow down, and, moreover, the faster an object,
the bigger its mass. There is no doubt that, more than Freud’s psychology,
this appeals to Eric.
“He Died so You Can Live”
Packer’s self-estrangement from the world is quite drastically borne out
by a subsequent short paragraph of two sentences. In a typically DeLilloan
way, they abruptly strike a blow, prompting metaphysical or at least
deeply existential questions, not to mention the frame of mind at the bottom of that: “When he died he would not end. The world would end.” (C 6)
Cosmopolis 77
In White Noise we noticed Gladney’s fascination with Hitler’s outrageous
delusional idea to force his lifetime and world time into absolute convergence: “A single life,” Blumenberg explained, “defines its meaning precisely by claiming that it is something whereupon nothing else may
come.”10 Eric’s phantasm is even more monstrous (and the expression of
an extreme fear of death). The world, in a moral sense, does not only
mean nothing to him, the world is going to cease not just in coincidence
but also as a result of his death (as Hitler hoped would happen). Packer
solipsistically absolutizes his own subjective time and negates intersubjective time. But what does Packer mean by “the world?” The world is,
one should think, all-encompassing and Packer necessarily included.
How could he subsist, then, if the world ends? Packer probably fantasizes
about some immaterial, metaphysical, or, most likely, virtual state (in the
form of a mind upload as planned, e.g., by the transhumanist Ray
Kurzweil). Even if this is supposed to mean that only the world, as hitherto known to him, could end, no one will be there to recognize or socially
acknowledge him in such a singular ethereal condition (nor will he himself). Packer ignores the simple fact that one’s Dasein is through one’s
relation to the other human being and object. Yet for the megalomaniac
narcissist, this does not matter, doomed as he still may be in the long run:
He will make it, surviving the others. His individual time increases in
reverse proportion to the foreshortening of the time of others.
When later on, during his odyssey through New York, he witnesses
(almost real time) the murder of another finance and media magnate in
Moscow, Nikolai Kaganovich, “he was glad to see the man in the mud.”
(C 81) He “felt good about it […] It relaxed him, the death of Nikolai
Kaganovich.” His chief theorist makes the proper comment: “He died so
you can live.” (C 82) This is, as we saw above, in line with Packer’s totalitarian narcissism. The death of someone else enlarges one’s life, reaffirms
one’s existence and the illusion of one’s triumph over death. The time of
the other is Eric’s time, especially if they are potential competitors. Since it
is the magnate who is annihilated, his own life and scope of action increase.
Another death Eric welcomes befalls Arthur Rapp, whose assassination in “Nike North Korea” is broadcast live “on the Money Channel.”
(C 33) Eric hated Rapp violently and cannot get enough of the scene,
watches all the replays and wants “them to show it again.” (C 34) Rapp
was the director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Especially in
the 1980s and 1990s of the past century, the IMF (together with the
World Bank and the World Trade Organization) was supposed to be the
spearhead of global neoliberalism. It issued loans to developing countries
or other highly indebted countries with balance-of-payment problems.
The credits, amounting to billions, were granted on the condition of a
“structural adjustment policy,” which among other things included cuts
in state expenditures and a deflation of the respective currencies.11 The
IMF, in other words, “adjusted” currency values all over the world,
78 Cosmopolis
taking care of the global liquidity and accumulation of money. It enabled
states to reduce or deleverage some of its debts (they mainly owed to
global funds and banks who had invested in government bonds), relaxing
the interest rates and improving their credit rating. The IMF (or its director), then, became a hate figure for extreme adversaries of neoliberal globalization. But it also encroached upon the territory of currency
speculators, who were geared to speculate on and propel the fall of the
currency.12 This is, after all, what Packer does and tries to do with the
Yen. Rapp, in other words, infringed on and diminished Packer’s scale
and scope of action. Even though Rapp stabilizes and encourages global
financial economy (the IMF at least proposes to do so), for Eric he is an
“interference factor.” Eric cherishes his death wholeheartedly.
The third death Eric witnesses is an interference factor of another kind.
There is a pinch of irony in the fact that the victim is an anti-globalization
(at that time predominantly anti-WTO) activist, immolating himself.
(C 99–100) Although the transgressive character of the self-sacrifice
makes a difference to Packer (as we shall see), the act will confirm those
comfortably settled within the system – precisely because of its outstanding and hardly comprehensible radicality.
Toward the end of the novel, Eric clears the way to encounter his assassinator and meet his own death. Eric kills the last person who requires his
time and limits his action scope, namely his chief security man, responsible for his body and life: “Torval was his enemy, a threat to his selfregard. When you pay a man to keep you alive, he gains a psychic edge.
[…] Torval’s passing cleared the night for deeper confrontation.” (C147–8)
It is clear by now that he is driven to the destruction of his monied, if not
necessarily his virtual existence: “[H]e would not end.”
De-Individuation and Disembodiment
Having shot Torval, Eric takes a contemptuous look at the dying man: “He
had mass but no flow. […] no true fluency of movement.” (C 146) Even in
the dying body, Eric can only appreciate what has come to determine his
existence. He wishes for a kind of liquid state; everything should be fluid and
on the move. Liquidity, movement and change is also what he “absorbs” in
his penthouse, “retaining every fleck of energy in rays and waves,” (C 8)
when he walks through his 48-room apartment in the “tallest residential
tower in the world.” Yet for all its (swanky) immensity, he feels ambivalent
about it. It mirrors his own enormousness, giving “him strength and depth,”
(C 9) yet he sees “a commonplace” in its “oblong whose only statement was
its size,” a “banality;” the word “skyscraper” he finds anachronistic. He has
set himself up within sheer material magnitude and quantitative excess. His
stretch limousine “was not only oversized but aggressively and contemptuously so, metastasizingly so, a tremendous mutant thing that stood astride
every argument against it.” (C10) Like his “overdeveloped chest,” his personal
Cosmopolis 79
possessions fill a space that may hardly be exceeded, likewise, they have
attained a dimension and manifestation where they aggressively go beyond
their physical size. They make a “statement”: Like a cancer or gene mutation,
they will have their way and will prevail, whatever the argument. The objects’
surfaces are, of course, conducive to this effect. They are opaque, the tower
has “an aura of texture and reflection,” (C 9) like so many glass or aluminum
facades of the neoliberal era. Apart from a heliport about to be built on his
roof, there is (besides food and sex and money) one material thing (with an
auratic surplus of course) he insistently asks for, namely the Rothko Chapel
(which is not for sale) with 14 paintings located in Houston. A single Rothko
will not do for him. He is convinced he will get it all: “There is sufficient
space, I can make more space,” he assures his art dealer and lover, Didi
Fancher. (C 27) “I want everything that’s there. Walls and all.”
This may be a grandiose overestimation (the Menil foundation has
become a public charity foundation now, according to Wikipedia), yet his
adamant choice also points to an inclination, that is “receptive to the
mysteries.” (C 30) Eric has his apartment already furnished with abstract
color-field paintings that suggest a “prayerful hush.” (C 8) The paintings
in Rothko’s Houston chapel consist of dark brown and grey monochrome
canvasses. They may suggest some structural processuality, yet most of all
evoke meditative focus and pause. Like all of Rothko’s late non-figurative
works they are meant to convey (and, to my mind, really do) a spiritual
or “transcendent” experience. That is, your (causal, functional and material) principle of identity is suspended for the time being. Schopenhauer’s
“Veil of Maya” is torn apart. Rothko pointed out in 1956 that he was not
interested in the relationships of color or form or anything else. […]
I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy,
ecstasy, doom and so on — and the fact that a lot of people break
down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate those basic human emotions. […] The people who weep
before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had
when I painted them.13
The later Rothko is not interested in “Abstractionism,” whose representatives are occupied with the materiality of form, space and the mutual relationship of color and those spaces. He is into a religious or mystic experience
that comes down to the dissolution of the coordinates of one’s spatio-temporal and categorial being-there: “ecstasy,” and possibly also, “doom.”
Human beings cannot but weep (or resort to either unmotivated laughter
or blind violence), when confronted with something – such as “doom” or
“death” – they fail to rationally understand. Rothko was an admirer of
Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, which tries to redefine art out of the dialectic
interplay between a Dionysian and an Apollonian principle.14 Rothko’s
emphasis was more on the Dionysian pole – the “ecstatic.” Dionysian rites,
80 Cosmopolis
lacking the formative sublation in and through Apollo, could well end in
de-individuation, self-dissolution or disembodiment and death. In 1958,
Rothko named a number of “ingredients” for “a work of art,” the first was
the following: “There must be a clear preoccupation with death – intimations of mortality […] Tragic art […] deals with the knowledge of death.”15
Assuming an intensely focused reception, one may well conclude that
Rothko’s non-figurative art functions as an exercise into the pre-discursive
abyss of death. Packer, highly educated as he is, must have been aware of
the “intimations” Rothko associated with his art.
He subcutaneously yearns for an archaic ritual which pivots on death
and killing as essential elements. Hearing “the swell of blowing horns,” a
fantasy crosses his mind which
he did not choose to wish away. It was the tone of some fundamental
ache, a lament so old it sounded aboriginal. He thought of men in
shaggy bands bellowing ceremonially, social units established to kill
and eat. Red meat. That was the call, the grievous need.
(C 14)
Packer’s psyche is moved by desires that appear hardly compatible; they
both come down, though, to the “management” of the terror of death.
On the one hand, he wants an existentially chthonic, a physical, experience of the real, an “ache” so fundamental that it can be called forth only
by killing and red meat. This denotes a primordial society that lives
through an unmediated, yet symbolic, “ceremonial” and socially organized exchange with nature. Reproduction is still directly related to killing and death. The death of the game (or hunting competitor) guaranteed
life, the more killing, the more power, the longer one’s life. The digital
cosmopolite, on the other hand, wants “to leave behind the inertia of the
material world, the realm and state of property and the physical.”16 He or
she seeks to find a mystic self-loss (in parareligious art) or, more significantly, transcend the physical to become undying in cyberspace. Packer
pursues his atavistic fantasy through his greedy, sexualized and highly
physical rampage through New York. The moribund journey stands in
stark contrast, but nevertheless constitutes a response, to his desire for a
digital dematerialization or disembodiment.
Packer’s world-weary aspirations to go beyond the materiality of beingthere are evident. They do not exclusively concern “touchless” information
on screens, which his techno-nerd Shiner calls “our sweetness and delight,”
giving “meaning to the world.” (C 13–4) He contemplates Platonism, imagining (of all things) his monstrous car (in his world all stretch limousines
look alike) as “a platonic replica, weightless for all its size, less an object than
an idea.” (C 10) Plato’s Idea is, of course, the ideological core of the much
and rightfully criticized philosophy of presence (which is indeed virtual and
surely not meant in a spatio-temporal sense). Even Packer’s poetic
Cosmopolis 81
predilections are characterized by a kind of world withdrawal or, respectively, the subjectivity that arises out of the gaps or silence “in the white space
around the lines […]. The white was vital to the soul of the poem.” (C 66)
This is in accordance with his painterly mysticism, which purports to
renounce semantic referentiality. As with abstract expressionism, the white
gaps allow for an egocentric projection into and absorption by a field of
interpretative openness, which may engender (a very modern) process of
individual self-loss in a blank perceptive field of amorphous generality.17
Data, Acceleration, and the Disappearance of the Presence
Yet, more than anything else, he is fixated on digitalized data in which the
stubborn “structures” of the outdated life-world can be neutralized,
Packer surmises. It is most of all his body he wants to transform, even
though and ironically he excessively shapes it with “barbells and weights”
to permanently expand his physical being-in-the world. As with his
stretch limousines, he remains stuck in the duality of res extensa and res
cogitans. When he has his daily health check in his car, he realizes:
He was here in his body, the structure he wanted to dismiss […]. He
wanted to judge it redundant and transferable. It was convertible to
wave arrays of information. It was the thing he watched on the oval
screen […].
(C 48)
The especially postmodern obsession with health – frequent health checks
and workouts – is, as we saw, a common strategy to manage the fear of
death. Yet a postindustrial society that, in addition, tries to objectify its general knowledge, individual performance and efficiency by converting them
more and more into “arrays of information” on “screens,” will find itself in
a contradictory situation. Digitalization allows for an increasing number of
parametric data about our body and its correlation with what we get as an
input from our environment. Data may be influenced, the body is not,
though, at our disposal. The intuitive relation with our body is replaced
with second-order information and the more physiological and objectified
data one receives, the more the body eludes one’s subjective and practical
disposability.18 The ersatz religion of the body leads in fact to a growing
distance from our body, a form of disembodiment. Packer is still mystified,
almost sublimely (“dwarfed”), but also slightly unsettled, uncertain
whether he was watching a computerized mapping of his heart or a
picture of the thing itself. […] The image was only a foot away but
the heart assumed another context […]. There it was and it awed him
[…] outside him.
(C 44)
82 Cosmopolis
“The technological extension of man,” according to Hartmut Rosa,
“undermines our self-efficacy, rather than enlarging it.”19 The latitude of
subjective action becomes in fact smaller, self-alienation a consequence. To
be sure, any use of media implies a shifting of my communicative action to
the exterior, a turning away from my body. Especially digitalization leads
to a restriction or even loss of one’s relationality with the world. Heidegger’s
things (“Zeug”) at hand become mere objects.20 Things are no longer
toward him or her; they lose their presence (“Gegenwärtigkeit” or “beingthere”). Likewise, Packer’s tools are no longer “at hand;” he talks his “systems into operation” or waves them “go blank.” (C 13) Their magic is so
charming that Packer apotheosizes data: “In fact data itself was soulful and
glowing.” Data are “eloquent”: “the digital imperative that defined every
breath of the planet’s living billions.” (C 24) Rather than the Holy Ghost,
it is zeros and ones that today inform and animate the pneuma (old greek:
pneũma, i.e., spirit, breath) of humanity. The digital data are our bodies
and oceans incarnate: the transubstantiation of our being-there into the
virtual. Only here the totality of the world reveals itself: “knowable and
whole.” As in the Eucharist, no visible data about the substance is discernible, only the accidence and the purely sacred is left: “pure spectacle, or
information made sacred, ritually unreadable.” (C 80) The generation
“Packer” does not “need God or miracles” (C 95) anymore. Digital technology holds a more feasible promise of immortality than once the miraculous Eucharist did, the disk has taken the place of the wafer. “People,”
Kinski expounds, “will not die.” They “will be absorbed in streams of
information.” (C 104) As a matter of fact, transhumanists still ask the same
question: “Why die when you can live on a disk?” (C 105)
Consequently, Packer is placed in a narcissistic panopticon of himself.
Like the Highway Killer in Underworld (or Oswald in Libra), he is only
through the image on the screen. (C 22) Videocams stream his image continuously “worldwide,” for his health and security a nurse and two guards
watch him constantly, (C 15) so does he himself. (C 22) Yet even though his
image constitutes his identity, it diverges from what he expects to see at
present, anticipating future states, the image is “saturated” by protention,
retention is more or less (never completely) blanked out.21 He wonders
why he sees his face – videotaped in real time – with “eyes closed, mouth
framed in a soundless simian howl.” His image is “independent” and only
later on he feels his “body catching up.” (C 52) In terms of psychology, this
could easily be explained, yet DeLillo’s realistic text does not indicate selfdelusion or autosuggestion here. (As respects the Yen he is deluded, but his
failure in predicting the currency trends has obvious reasons.) A similar
incident takes place when his car gets into the anti-globalization demonstration. He sees himself live recoil in shock, but the detonation occurs
after that. His chief of theory, who witnesses (so she says) the same asynchronicity (philosophically speaking, the non-simultaneity of the simultaneous), has a lofty but not completely wayward, explanation: Packer “the
Cosmopolis 83
true futurist,” with a “hypermaniacal” consciousness, “may have contact
points beyond the general perception,” altering “the terms of” his “habitat.” The hysteron proteron that confuses Packer’s sense of temporal
sequentiality22 may well be interpreted as a satirical device to hyperbolically stress the degree to which Packer (as a technological exemplum) has
been interpellated (L. Althusser) and alienated by the digital medium and
its temporal mode. In accordance with the requirements of cybercapitalism, algorithms have been programmed to calculate what is most likely
going to happen, scanning respective environments as regards all possible
events. On the basis of that, algorithms are not only predicting future
(financial) market trends for speculation purposes, they “alter” the terms of
the “habitat,” they make the future. Google or Amazon have long been in
a position to extrapolate your future decisions determining recursively
those very decisions. As Packer’s consciousness has become that of the
media, his mind may thus anticipate and perceive (likely) future scenarios,
or, reversely, media, on account of the extensive data they have collected
about him, know and screen beforehand what is going to happen to him.23
Yet, the most conspicuous leap ahead is, after all, when Packer watches his
own death and corpse on the monitor of his “almost metaphysical” smart
watch, which is also equipped with an “electron camera.” (C 204) He can
see his corpse being taken to the hospital morgue, “dead inside the crystal
of his watch but still alive in original space.” (C 209) Packer’s death is
within the logic (i.e., digitally predictable) of his own spatial evacuation,
his “fallenness” and oblivion of being (“Seinsvergessenheit,” Heidegger).
Temporal Alienation
Packer’s habitat (his person included) is geared to contract or shrink the
present: “The present,” Kinski explains, “is harder to find. It is being
sucked out of the world to make way for the future of uncontrolled markets and huge investment potential. The future becomes insistent.” (C 79)
But what does a “new theory of time” (C 86) implicate which takes
account of a present that is “being sucked out of the world”? Benno
Levin, Packer’s eventual angel of death, used to analyze currencies for
Packer’s company but could not keep pace, was “demoted,” became
“generic labor” and was dismissed “without notice or severance package.” (C 60) Benno may have had previous psychological problems, but
the temporal conditions of his work have certainly contributed to his
“extreme confusion.” This is what he tells Packer:
I loved the baht. But your system is so microtimed that I couldn’t
keep up with it. I couldn’t find it. It’s so infinitesimal. I began to hate
my work, and you, and all the numbers on my screen, and every
minute of my life.
(C 191)
84 Cosmopolis
Benno was dispossessed of his present time and therefore of his presence
as “being-there” (“Da-Sein”) or “being-in-the-world.” Having lost his
identity, he “can only pretend to be someone.” Run-down, he squats in a
derelict factory building. He is completely on his own and removes, notably, walls for more space. Here he tries to regain his individual time without a clock: “I think of time in other totalities now. I think of my personal
time-span set against the vast numeration […].” (C 59–60) He will however perish just as well; technological time or acceleration forms the
inbuilt momentum of social and economic modernity.
The alienation from space, time and others is not only true for Packer’s
former slave Benno, it also affects the master. For Packer, the point is the
ever faster, “urgent and endless replenishment of data,” dissolving and
recurring at a speed the eye can hardly follow: “This is the point, the
thrust, the future.” (C 80) It is notable that not only “microtimed” financial data compress (or suppress) Packer’s present, he receives updated
data from virtually everywhere, his body and watch included. He is a
multitasker, continuously meets his consultants, and responds intermittently to various stimuli outside his car, indiscriminately gobbles food,
has sex repeatedly and quickly and so on. Packer, consciously or unconsciously, has become subject to the vast illusion of late capitalist consumer and media society that the more options and actions your day
holds and comprises, the more fulfilled your life; the more data or experiential units one compresses into increasingly smaller time slots, the
more the plus or gain in time, in experience and competitive edge. The
existential motive behind that is, in principle, an infinite extension of
your life. As the world always offers more options than can be realized in
a lifetime, one has to cram as much as possible into this life and speed up
or accelerate the “pace of life.”24 If one can multiply and speed up options,
acts or experiences (in terms of making money, having sex, consumption,
travel, etc.), you can act out and accomplish proportionally more in your
lifetime, and thereby prolong your life or live multiple lives in the course
of your given life – ad infinitum, as it were. In our post-religious age, the
(above mentioned) disconcerting divergence or gap between one’s individual “lifetime” and “world time” thus appears to be amendable. Social
(economic and communicative) acceleration, in other words, seems to be
fit to manage the terror of finitude and death: “Clock time,” Vija Kinski
explains, “accelerated the rise of capitalism. People stopped thinking
about eternity. They began to concentrate on hours, measurable hours,
man-hours, using labor more efficiently.” (C 79)25
However, there is a category mistake that results not only from a confusion of quantity and quality but more fundamentally from a misunderstanding of our time and temporality. First of all, investment capital and
the growth imperative (along with technology) are bound to create always
more options (in proportion, of course, to his or her income). The faster
the processor and the means of transportation, the larger the range of
Cosmopolis 85
goods, the increase of information, messages or financial platforms and
providers, the more time it will take to plug into these options and take
account of them26: “[T]he proportion of options realized and experiences
made to those missed does not rise, but falls incessantly.”27 In fact, since
the pressure to use all of these offers gets stronger, the growing varieties of
possibility lead to a temporal and mental overload; that is, rather than to
individual freedom, they lead to self-alienation. An increasing variety of
financial papers are not only dealt with for 24 hours in one “billionth of a
second,” as the hyperbolic Packer claims (C 79). Financial platforms, supply and demand, virtual currencies multiply. Although trading is mostly
done by computers, humans are still permanently involved (observing the
data on monitors). Since many others are in the business, rates are moved
from pillar to post (in accordance with the economic code of have/have
not). And since no one is ever up-to-date, trading is a continuous process.
It propels the market by virtue of a perpetual iteration of the same numbers, borne only by the prospect of a competitive advantage, which is the
other’s disadvantage (or the other way round). It alters in terms of quantity, but there is no real development; things do not “go anywhere.”28 To
forego the impression of a standstill, and to not fall into depression, “we
create our own frenzy.” (C 85)
One must indeed be extremely “rigorous” to be able “to take adequate
measure of the world around us,” Kinski remarks. Packer’s life is crammed
with isolated, disconnected activities or encounters with things, people
and episodes. He does not take or have the time for an authentic and
sustained experience. The spaces of his life-world, his car, his wife, and his
consultants are means to a fleeting transaction, a matter-of-fact settlement; they remain external and indeed alien to him. He has no inner relationship to his apartment or to his job, or his wife. Packer lives outside a
world characterized by a mutual relationship of resonance with his environment. This comes down to nothing but a severe form of self-alienation.29
Packer’s (eventually failing) desire to get a haircut at the place of his childhood is symptomatic. Anthony, the hairdresser, was a close friend of his
father, who had died when Packer was five. The benevolent Anthony resonates with authenticity and reminds Packer of a time of innocence. Packer
is not nostalgic in the usual sense of yearning for the past, he wants to feel
“what his father would feel” (C 159) in this place. It is indirectly by identifying with his father that he can evoke an atmosphere of familiarity or
nearness he has lost elsewhere: “This is what he wanted from Anthony.
The same words. The oil company calendar on the wall. The mirror that
needed silvering.” (C 161) Packer feels at home so much that he trusts and
confides in this “particular place, where elapsed time hangs in the air, suffusing solid objects and men’s faces. This is where he felt safe.” The insomniac even falls asleep. Eric feels in his bones that the elapsed time here has
been a lived or unalienated time of being-there. However, the visit to his
childhood remains only another episode. He discovers that the threat (by
86 Cosmopolis
an assessor) has not yet “taken material form” and feels stuck in a “suspended state,” that is, a time of no immediate consequence. Thus, he leaves
abruptly with only the left side of his hair done, in order to face a “culminating moment ahead,” (C169) “eager for action, for resolution.” (C 171)
Packer’s backward-looking desire for a world in which people and
objects resonate with time is only indicative of the alienated touchless
technological bubble in which Packer now moves, in which only the
future counts. The past, determined by the analogical world of tools and
the correlating language, is denounced. The absolutely flexible and mobile
professional finds the word “office […] outdated now. It had zero saturation.” (C 15) Even the advanced walkie-talkies are “already vestigial” and
“degenerate structures.” (C 19) Automated teller machines are “antifuturistic […] even the acronym seemed dated.” He explains their obsolescence, interestingly enough, by the burden of “historical memory” and
“the inference of fuddled human personnel.” (C 54) When they move
(always slower) through the diamond district (or Jewish Quarter), he is
again disconcerted about the real exchange of gems or watches and physical money that takes place here, “so obsolete Eric didn’t know how to
think about it.” (C 64) “The street,” he thinks, “is an offense to the truth
of the future.” (C 65) Incredibly, people negotiate and speak about real
things (but have also stopped to “touch each other.” C 66). Not only this
particular street, streets in general are redundant, impeding a further
acceleration of his cybercapitalist society (Packer is looking forward to
the flight basis on his apartment building). Even the president is an outdated figure that belongs to the pre-cybercapital era, existing “in some
little hollow of nontime.” He is the “undead.” For Packer, the president,
although “omnipresent,” just occupies space sitting physically and inertly
“in quotidian stupor.” (C 76–7) His appearance is incompatible with
Packer’s idea of post-analogous speed of action. Ironically enough, the
car stops dead more than once on his route. Packer’s fast-paced, yet directionless existence comes to a halt precisely because he cannot help being
on the move (he was warned beforehand). In DeLillo’s novel, Paul Virilio’s
metaphorical “polar inertia” attains quite a literal exemplification.
Lacking any historical consciousness, Packer detests the traditional
“thing-world” and therefore continuity. His rejection of the past debases
everything to mere commodities present-at-hand. This is true also for his
attitude toward his fellow human beings. When he happens to see his
former employee Levin in the street, he does not “care whether this was
someone he’d once known. There were many people he’d once known.
Some were dead, other in forced retirement, spending quiet time alone in
their toilets […].” (C 54) As indifferent as he is to the memory of things,
as callous is he to his former employees, whom he uses only as a means
to an end without any compassion.
An episodic life that consists of mere sequences of isolated and, therefore, detached events has an enormous and disastrous impact on the
Cosmopolis 87
future but does not allow for tradition. Ideally, the present is or should be
a fusion of the (hermeneutic) horizons of the past and of the horizon of
expectations. The dialectic mutuality guarantees both personal and social
continuity and stability. Yet oblivious of the past as he is, Packer’s mind
is only on the future (and the satisfaction of imminent physical needs),
which he wants to draw, as it were, into the contracting present, the latter
diminishing to ever shorter intervals. The interim between now and then,
here and there, becomes not only insignificant, it appears a nuisance. Yet
it is the contemplation of the past in the present interval that provides not
only a period of self-understanding, it also “protects the future of the
violence of untimeliness.”30 But Packer acts erratically and discontinuously. He lets himself be carried away by mere moments in time, the
quick alterations of data. He is unable to arrive at a thoughtful conclusion, because there are always more connectivity options which ask for
some, albeit directionless, action.31 Completely under the delusion of currency, his decisions are born instantaneously out of an inconsiderate present, thinking no longer about the consequence for the world and his
environment. Packer, thereby, forgoes the autonomy which can only be
achieved with regard to and acceptance of the past and the other. He does
not listen to his advisers who warn him; they only serve as entertaining
episodes. The present, if only compressed to the discontinuous moment,
reverses into the feeling of empty time, and fears of nothingness and
death, especially in the silence of the night when not much seems to happen. Packer’s insomnia, then, is due to his frenzied existence, as it is to the
unbearable experience of an empty time and pure duration. Driven as he
is, his episodic actions do not allow for contemplation, only for other
options without end. He just hurries on to the only despairing conclusion
of real consequence, namely murder and suicide.
Monetary Alienation
Analogies between money and God and wafer and money have often
been drawn.32 What they share is that they function by virtue of symbolic
generalization, context independence and what Alfred Sohn-Rethel called
“Realabstraktion” or “Reality Abstraction.”33 Wafers, (ritual) words of
institution or money have no intrinsic value. They, thereby, attain a quasitranscendental index and thus make the impossible possible: [W]afers
become God, words flesh or the Holy Ghost (Pneuma), money may be
converted to commodities and, potentially, anything else. They appear to
reconcile the most dissimilar experiences and perceptions. Money and
God (like language) are media that hold an imaginary promise and claim
general validity. They work as supratemporal stores of unlikely equivalences and value assignments that can be realized anywhere anytime.
Money, like God, synthesizes beings (or being and consciousness) and
transcends the contingency and complexity of objects guaranteeing
88 Cosmopolis
continuity. It creates unity, motivates action,34 and at the same time positions the subject, on the basis or code of to have/to have not. “Money for
anything,” Didi Fancher says, “It helped me be a person.” (C 29) It thus
both individualizes and separates subjects by virtue of the dialectics of
inclusion/exclusion.35 Packer, within a communicative cluster (of finance
and his company), constantly displays his difference and superiority: “It’s
mine if I buy it.” (C 28) If money, according to Sohn-Rethel, provides the
“explanation for the ‘a priori’ of understanding,”36 mediating between
being and thinking, it constitutes the transcendental signifier which
relates to God in a metonymic rather than metaphoric way. It organizes
thought, psyche and society in the way God, or, more precisely, theology,
used to organize thought. People in monetary societies may still profess
some credo but actually believe in credit.
The “god-term” money has equivocal implications, though. Pre-secular
times had a narrative and teleological imprinting, with the transcendental
signifier God still leading the way, the telos being eternity, a timeless time
beyond time. Now, Kinski asserts, it is “[m]oney” that “makes time. […]
Clock time accelerated the rise of capitalism. People stopped thinking
about eternity. […] It’s cyber-capital that creates the future.” (C 79) In
fact, money “has lost its narrative qualities […] Money is talking to
itself.” (C 77)37 Unlike theology, money has no clear beginning and no
end (coins seem to have been invented in 680 BC, other forms of exchange
value are certainly much older). It has become a self-referential process
with its own dynamics. The consequence is that money not only becomes
an end in itself, it absorbs or casts a veil of secondary reality over the
world. As with King Midas, “money as the medium of secondary coding
of the world becomes primary itself.”38 Money leads to a global simulation, the symbolic and real indistinguishable. “The market culture is
total,” (C 90) Kinski asserts. The enormous sums people (such as Packer)
spend on luxury apartments, boats or planes no longer serve “traditional
self-assurances,” or “personality.” (Likewise, there is nothing “wickedly
expensive” anymore.) “The only thing that matters,” she tells Packer, “is
the price you pay.” Packer has paid the money “for the number itself. One
hundred and four million [for his apartment]. This is what you bought.
[…] The number justifies itself.” Yet Kinski’s crucial point is, “property”
[…] no longer “has weight or shape.” (C 78) Money has concealed the
categorial qualities whereby we make out the world. Money leads, in
other words, to an inexorable alienation from being that may be only
momentarily broken through sheer and thoroughgoing profligacy.
Trust forms another problem. Both money and God are founded on
trust (the more so with fiat money): “In God we trust,” the one-dollar bill
proclaims. But if God or monotheism, in general, have shown to be able
to cope with the renunciation of individuals, financial capitalism can be
thrown into a liquidity crisis if only a few creditors lose confidence and
withdraw their credit, bonds or securities. A precarious psychological
Cosmopolis 89
response to either system is doubt, which in Puritan thought could be
sinful in itself. (God is beyond our faculties, but omniscient and noncontingent.) However, the complete absence of doubt and too much selfassuredness would also indicate the sin of hubris. The dot-com bubble in
2000 or the real estate bubble in 2006/7 was indeed the result of too
much of a lack of doubt.39 (Money as opposed to God is contingent.)
While Didi Fancher seems to recognize “an element of doubt” in Packer,
he declines: “Doubt? What is doubt?” He said, “There is no doubt.
Nobody doubts anymore.” (C 31) Packer goes on to leverage the yen
against all advice and evidence. (See, e.g., C 84) His hubris will contribute
to his utter self-estrangement and downfall.
Another ambiguity of money (which is of course also its advantage as
a generalized medium of communication) is its complete insensibility or
indifference to individuals. God may listen to the believer; money does
not. Money is a “cold” medium which produces cold-heartedness (a
familiar romantic and post-romantic topos) in “money-grubbers.”
Dickens’s Scrooge is, of course, the best-known example. Scrooge is
saved, Packer falls.
Money is moreover not only subject to the code of to have/to have not
(credit/debit), it creates a sense of scarcity (among the few moneyed) and
real scarcity and social deprivation (among the many poor). Withdrawing
money from circulation will lead to financial straits (or, e.g., unemployment); pumping too much into an economy may lead to inflation (and,
e.g., to unpayable prices for necessary imports). Packer borrows yens in
large quantities, hoping for falling interest rates. He throws the money
onto the market, buys out (leveraged) company shares and expects a twofold profit. This worked well in 1997, when boomers speculated on the
fall of the Thai baht. The baht underwent a massive depreciation, the
loans went down in value and the speculators could repay the credits
easily and with profit. The consequences were an equally massive withdrawal of lenders – for whom even smaller margins of interest are a matter of scarceness – and bankruptcies of banks as well as in the private
sector. The outcome was disproportionately many have-nots or, more
generally spoken, scarcity on a large social scale. Poverty spread into
small rural villages. For the (fictional) Packer, we may assume a different
situation. The yen, backed by a much sounder economy and foreign currency deposits, did not become cheaper, but rose (perhaps also responding positively to growing demand). Consequently, Packer lands on the
negative side of the balance sheet. The scope of his speculation is yet of
such a vast degree that he nevertheless arouses mistrust to effect debit,
have-nots or scarcity worldwide. “There were currencies tumbling everywhere. Bank failures were spreading.” (C 115) Even speculative bubbles
(feigning fullness and bounteousness) are always at risk to overturn into
what an expansive monetary society is based on, namely scarcity. The
highly ambivalent character of money is, after all, that the more of it is
90 Cosmopolis
around the scarcer it seems to become. Late- or post-capitalist societies of
affluency are still stuck with lack or want of money (and social inequality.) There are necessarily those who are on the losers’ side, or in the
drastic words of Kinski: “The force of cyber-capital that will send people
into the gutter to retch and die.” (C 90)
The structural similarity of God and money ultimately expresses itself in
its apparent management of or defense against death. Cybercapital may
effect impoverishment to the point of starvation, but to those on the side of
the haves, it nurtures the hope for immortality. If money has transcendent
connotations and a transcendental form, changing everything into something else, then it is suitable for expanding one’s possibilities indefinitely.
One argument against death was its curtailment or limitation of experiential possibilities. The accumulation of money may then be felt to potentially
extend one’s life infinitely, ultimately granting immortality. One bolsters up
one’s existence with as many nest eggs as one can acquire for averting the
worst. The secondary (or virtual or second-order) status of money engenders and advances precisely the false (sub-)consciousness of this: The more
you possess, the less you will die. The early modern sale of indulgences in
Europe was already indicative of that fantasy. The Christian creditors
bought the forgiveness of sin, salvation and hence eternal life. Capital accumulation and, by implication, the imperative of economic growth work as
antidotes against “absolute loss. Death generates the compulsion to production and growth.”40 The American ethnologist Edward Smith Craighill
Handy made similar anthropological observations in Polynesia that may
account for the modern compulsion to amass money. Warriors, one
assumed, incorporated the “mana” of all their victims. The mana of his
spear increased; he ate from the dead and wore parts of his enemies’
remains on his body (such as a dried hand, or skull). The aboriginal practices appear to continue in a sublimated manner. They come down to what
we saw above, the hoarding of (superfluous) consumer goods, exchange
value and, today, of data. We buy assets, bonds or shares (together with the
data); fuel growth and cherish the illusion to buy more lifetime. Time solidifies in (moneyed) liquidity. Han also points to archaic violence rites that
might have paved the way for the modern urge for accumulation. One’s
power within societies that exerted blood vengeance grew the more, the
more you compensated for a death of your kin by killing enemies. Also, the
sense of power had to be restored. Achilles avenges his friend Patroclus by
killing indiscriminately. Money also refers, according to the historian of
religion Georg Baudler, to ritual sacrifice. It is at its roots in: “[D]eep frozen
sacrificial blood, as it were. To throw money around, to make it and see it
flow engenders a similar effect as the flow of blood in a fight or on the altar
of sacrifice.”41 The carnivorous accumulation as well as the excessive overspending of money “immunizes […] against death.”42 Packer’s financial,
eating and sex rampage through New York may well be indicative of a
regression into archaic rite.
Cosmopolis 91
Physical Alienation
Yet, Cosmopolis, like Underworld, White Noise, or the later Point Omega
and Zero K is nonetheless a materialist novel, in the sense that it refers to
the ineluctable materiality of our being. I think it is reasonable to read it
also as a parable about the inevitability of the body, reshaped and
estranged from itself in a society in which everything is encoded by
money. Packer has reached an existential point, where, like Adelbert
Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl, he realizes that his life lacks what existentially belongs to life, namely both the shadow of his body and death.
Packer’s obsession with health and fitness, the attempt at escaping death,
comes down in fact to the reification of his body, an object being “ready
to hand,” but nonetheless “death-in-life,” “insubstantial” (C 9) and
incomplete (see C 140). The quasi metaphysics of data and money and
the attention to his body are objectified means to repress or ban death
from his life-world. Yet by the same token he becomes only the more
determined by death, ex negativo. Life is reduced, according to Baudrillard,
to the illusion of “an absolute surplus-value,” while, in fact,
the indestructible logic of symbolic exchange re-establishes the equivalence of life and death in the indifferent fatality of survival. In survival,
death is repressed; life itself, in accordance with that well known ebbing
away, would be nothing more than a survival determined by death.43
In an interview with John Barron, DeLillo asserts that Packer, from the
outset, “is feeling a certain imitation of mortality.”44
The negative and mutual relationship between “survival” and death is
enforced by the subordination of Packer’s living space and time to the
abstraction of capital, and heightened by the corresponding objectification of the body.45 This is only too obvious in one of his daily medical
checks in his car. When his chief of finance, Jane Melman, asks him
whether he undergoes the same “routine every day,” she learns that on
weekends the doctor comes to his house: “We die, Jane, on weekends.
People. It happens.” And he reiterates a little later: “We die every day.” (C 44–5)
Packer’s hypochondriac obsession with his health transforms his body
into a potentially mortal enemy, a malign object likely to disintegrate,
rather than an integrated subjective body or “Leib.”46 Even an entirely
innocuous “blackhead” upsets him and makes him ask for treatment, to
“do something about this.” The doctor only replies: “Let it express itself.”
The latter simply trusts the body in itself (its self-regulation), Packer, the
doer, does not. For him, his body appears rather a placeholder for death.
During the medic, he is watching “arrays of information” on some oval
screen. Melham instructs him on the Japanese economy and by implication currency. (She is pleased to tell him about the increase of bankruptcies. (C 46)) Concurrently, his doctor palpates his prostate through his
92 Cosmopolis
anus, which is the climax of the whole procedure.47 The all-absorbing
pain he feels makes him negatively aware of the “fact of his biology,” (C
50)48 yet, likewise, arouses his sexual tension. He realizes that he is “here
in his body, the structure he wanted to dismiss […]. He wanted to judge
it redundant and transferable” and convert it into pure information. On
the other side, he has an erection with the doctor’s excruciatingly probing
“finger up his ass.” While he is looking at Melman with his sunglasses on,
“in a posture of rank humiliation,” (C 50) they reach their climaxes without bodily contact. In psychological terms, the starkly hypochondriac
Packer shows symptoms of a masochistic neurosis, or more precisely, a
form of “self-defeating personality disorder.” His fractious relationship to
his body is only too self-evident.
Packer’s response to an insignificant side remark by his doctor – “Your
prostate is asymmetrical” – is again quite telling.49 The smart Packer is certainly aware of the fact that without asymmetry, matter and antimatter
would have canceled one another out after the Big Bang and no evolution
would have taken place. (See C 52) Yet when applied to his body he begins
“to feel pale and spooked,” deeply “haunted” again, but still with “a perverse reverence toward the word.” (C 52) Sure, most body parts (including
the prostate) consist of two parts that are never alike. Packer, on the other
hand, is not only neurotic. His mind (in spite of his inclination to modern
art) is obfuscated by the metaphysics (and ideology) of symmetry in math
and natural processes.50 Consequently, one of the initial reasons for his bad
speculation is precisely the transfer of apparently symmetric natural patterns onto economic data fluctuations. His executor Benno Levin puts him
right: “You were looking for balance, beautiful balance, equal parts, equal
sides.” Packer should have observed the “misshape,” the “misweave” in his
“body,” of his “prostate.” The advice that Packer had better resort to his
body for counsel and rescue is of course another final irony of the novel. He
trusted the natural beauty of data, yet deeply distrusted his body, his metonymy of death. Levin has proved to be a “worthy assassin after all.” (C 200)
However, it is less the false correlation between money and nature that
precipitates his downfall; Packer’s disintegration is deliberate. From the
beginning, he does not heed his own enshrined data on his screen at home
(“The yen rose overnight,” C 8) nor the analyses and advice of his specialists. Melman warns him emphatically against his imminently looming
crash. His disregard for advice – which runs through the novel – is partly
due to his arrogance. Yet it is telling and no coincidence that he neither
looks at Melman nor listens to her convincing arguments. He rather
watches a slouching and shabby man at an ATM who will turn out to be
his murderer some hours later and also prefers to think about the obsoleteness of the ATM that still needs human “fuddled” bodies to operate.
His desire for immaterial and unbodied functionality is counteracted,
though, by the last sentence of his doctor (which concludes the chapter):
“Your prostrate is asymmetrical.” (C 54)
Cosmopolis 93
The Journey to Self-Destruction and Death: “The Desolation of
Reality” (W. B. Yeats)
From the outset, Packer’s journey through New York is marked by irrationality and waywardness; his fascination with the virtual is increasingly
interfered with, countermined by his albeit painful obsession with the
body. It is, in other words, a bad trip into the real. To the confusion of his
chief bodyguard, he insists on a haircut in the salon of his childhood at
the other end of the precariously congested town. In financial terms, a
haircut can mean a reduction (or debt relief) and financial loss. Yet, trivial
as it appears, it comes to stand for the turning point in his life. Packer’s
(material) self-alienation has reached a point where it can no longer be
compensated for by the accumulation of capital, consumption and power.
“You’ve outperformed it [i.e. the market], consistently.” Packer is saturated up to his throat. If the accumulation of capital works against death,
he has come to a liminal stage. The “more” has become an end in itself;
having scaled a mega- or supermaniac level of accumulation, it becomes
meaningless. Paradoxically, he can find himself now only through willful
waste and self-defeat, which is in line, though, with his masochistic inclinations. In addition, his desire for his transubstantiation to data is a
double-edged sword. Data (any information) needs a material basis and
(still) a human body to make something out of it. The virtual and monied
overcoming of death refers ineluctably back to the hard materiality of the
body. We do not have a body, we are “body.” Packer, steeped in a world
of unsubstantial fiat money, which no longer appears to fulfill its transcending purpose for him, longs for an immediate exchange with the
physical, which he likewise wants to eliminate. The pure presence in time
has as a logical consequence the eventual destruction of one’s spatial or
corporeal existence (which in turn will uproot or probably render impossible any presence of a subject-person). Packer’s desperate answer to
these contradictions is an increased exposure of his material existence to
a process of devastation. He, thereby, gets to experience his (financial and
bodily) being-there more and more intensely, yet damages it at the same
time. The stronger he feels pain and disintegration, the more he feels alive
or immortal, and the more he invites his death and mortality. Pain ruptures the illusion of his virtual existence in front of his monitors, but
brings him closer to self-loss and death, or, perhaps, another illusionary
immortal existence in cyberspace within his monitors. The hypochondriac attention that he normally devotes to his body (against the terror of
death) has tipped over into violence and auto-aggression, furthering precisely what he wanted to evade, namely death. But even auto-aggression
or, if you wish, the death drive can be a form of terror management. It
propels disintegration, yet diverts from the fear of derealization and
death (the more so if there is still a vague hope of digital immortality.)
Born out of these irreconcilable contradictions and deep alienation
94 Cosmopolis
Packer’s self seeks an alternative, even if this means pure negativity, or
negative Dionysian self-laceration. One is tempted (in the wake of
Bataille51) to interpret Packer’s overspending as a form of excess, exuberance and transgression that reaffirms death for the sake of an intensification of life. But Packer’s progress is devoid of all eroticism or love even
when he has excessive sex; he never loses himself completely in the other
and remains (with only some temporary and passing uncertainty) a narcissist to the end. Packer’s day trip is a Conradian journey into the “Darkness”
of the “Real,”52 beyond the Apollonian, the symbolic and imaginary.
He is continuously craving for “red meat,” and “to live in meat space.”
(C 64) He urges his wife to have sex, as it “has an element of cleansing,”
and, quite graphically, wants “to bite her lower lip, seize it between his
teeth and bite down just hard enough to draw an erotic drop of blood.”
(C 72–3) According to Euripides’s The Bacchae (esp. v 2.1) and other
sources, omophagia (the consumption of red meat and blood) was a preferred ritual of Dionysus’s disciples. Nietzsche saw in it an act of reconciliation with the self-alienated individual.53
At Times Square, Packer gets hemmed into an anti-capitalist/anti-globalization demonstration. The uproar appears similarly forceful, multifaceted (and creative, distributing rats for currency, chanting the
modification of Marx’s famous sentence) and as offensive as the one in
Seattle, six months before.54 The demonstrators are about to break into
the Nasdaq Center at Times Square. But Packer is not, as one would
expect, worried or irritated. “He was enjoying this.” (C 89) He asks himself whether he “envies them” (C 92), his “respect” grows and eventually
he finds it exhilarating.55 It is not yet clear whether it is the spectacle he
enjoys (knowing that it will only “re-emphasize” (C 92) the “market culture” (C 90)) or whether he is drawn into a process with an end even
“total” capitalism cannot absorb.
“Rapt” (C 94) as he is, he spends all the money he can get hold of,
against all economic rationality and evidence to the contrary (spending
thereby also himself). It marks the second transgressive response to the
omnipresence and omnipotence of financial capitalism. But immediately
after that Packer witnesses an incident which is indeed exceptional and
terrifying. DeLillo leads into the scene by suggesting a spatial rupture:
“There was a shift, a break in space.” The break is caused by a protester
on fire: “[H]is glasses melt into his eyes.” Eric is intrigued by the selfimmolation and mentally reenacts the suicide; he wants “to imagine the
man’s pain, his choice, the abysmal will.” (C 97–8 and 100) Death and
more so suicide, especially if as unsettling as this one, represents one of the
few56 remaining acts of “starkness and horror” that cannot be absorbed
by capitalism.57 Eric, as opposed to Kinski, eventually acknowledges this
(for his being): “What did this change? Everything, he thought.” (C 99)
When immediately afterward, he is informed about a serious threat to his
life, he feels “a burst of self-realization.” (C 102) The more imminent and
Cosmopolis 95
likely his own death, the more invigorated and tangible his self seems to
become to him. The rising yen (which entails a “lubricious plunge”) seals
his bankruptcy, yet sexualizes him like a “cunnilingual.” He actually feels
and draws in “rain and sky,” along with the “sour reek” of urine, and the
pleasure about the misfortune in the “markets.” Yet he enjoys most “the
threat of death at the brink of night […].” For him this means, after all,
that he now “could begin the business of living.” (C 107) Packer wants to
clear things up. His existential self-contradictions ask to be solved. In
doing so, he seeks the proximity and possibility of death, which yet
implies another contradiction.
He has sex with Torval’s lover, makes her pour vodka on his genitals,
stun him with a 100,000 volts, and “jellify” his muscles, which leaves him
for some time on the floor “electroconvulsive and strangely elated,
deprived of his faculties of reason.” (C 115) Once more, he attracts real
pain self-destructingly but overcomes the “principium individuationis” of
reason.
Packer is now intent on letting “it all come down.” (C 123) That is, he
even squanders the entire fortune, his wife had offered to support and
save him: “all air anyway.” (C 124) When he becomes involved in and
deeply moved by the Rapper Brutha Fez’s funeral ceremony, he delights
the more in his own fall. “Emptied of everything,” Packer comes to terms
with himself, feels “blessed,” “disinterested and free.” (C 136) Remarkably
enough, he is also “tired of looking at screens” now. (C 140) In the following, Eric becomes more and more alive to his physis; his “body awareness,” (of, e.g., his “nasal mucous membranes,” 140), however, goes hand
in hand with his disintegration. He is hit by the notorious “pastry assassin,” uses his hanky to wipe his face, but smells and tastes it, “soured by
his own secretions of the testes and seminal vesicles and various other
glands.” (C 141) With the cream all over his body, a wound on his forehead and the need for “a leak,” Eric feels “great.” He punches back, feels
his stinging fist, “quick and hot. His “body whispered to him. […] He was
brass-balled again.” (143–4) He then shoots Torval, which in moral terms
is surely abominable, especially when he comes up with an aesthetic justification. (Torval had “no true fluency of movement.”) Yet Eric finds also
a (no less disturbing) logical reason for the murder. Torval stands in his
path to “deeper confrontation,” to ruin. “Torval was his enemy,” paid to
keep him “alive.” (C 147–8)
The visit to the for decades unchanged barbershop is to re-collect his
father, with whom, along with the owner of the shop, he associates an
authenticity his life is now utterly lacking. His father died when he was
five. Not surprisingly, the evocation only half works out even if he falls
asleep, dreams of his father and feels safe. He leaves abruptly with only
one side cut and a gun left to him by the old barber, his father’s old friend.
What strikes him for the first time, though, is his driver Ibrahim’s blind
and scarred eye “twisted away from the nose.” (C 164) Eric fantasizes
96 Cosmopolis
about the possible torture and violence the man might have suffered in
his Arabic homeland and feels the “depth” of his driver’s “experience […]
He respected the eye.” (C 170) The body, marked, injured and scarred for
life, impresses Eric.
The following scene is quite absurd, although it symbolically fits the
picture of Packer’s downward development, in a novel which is indeed a
negative Entwicklungsroman. On his way to “resolution,” he comes
across three hundred naked people motionlessly scattered in the street. It
is a film set, but the “bodies were blunt facts,” powerful phenomena in
and for themselves, “sad,” and “more naked than ever.” (C 173) Eric
undresses and lies down among them, taking in the intense and immediate olfactory and tactile stimuli of “oil leaks,” of the “pearly froth of
animal fat,” as well as of the “body breath,” “heat” and “blood” of all the
other bodies, “now alike, amassed, heaped in a way, alive and dead
together.” Packer is spellbound: “he could barely think outside it.” (C 174–5)
As it happens, Elisa Shifrin has also joined the setting and lies next to
him. To her question whether they should feign death, he replies “Be dead
then.”58 Yet Packer becomes more and more engrossed in the unreal
atmosphere which nonetheless merges him into and with the bare facts of
the real, the other and the many. “He wanted to be here among them,
all-body, the tattoed, the hairy-assed, those who stank.” DeLillo graphically details too many body features to be quoted here in full. Packer
thinks about the “raised veins,” “bump,” “wasting diseases,” “skin flaking away,” “morbidly obese,” all in close proximity. (C 176–7) He has
found his way into “all-body,” a universal individual existence in its mere
creatural being-there, both alive and decaying and, therefore, subject to
time and mortality. He has descended from the virtual heights of his
apartment tower to the mire at street level. Reduced to his very bareness,
“in the stone odor of demolition,” he makes love for the first and last time
to Elisa in a manner that is not merely consumptive, and beyond mercantile “refinancing.” They are lovers, “free of memory and time.” (C 177)
But the instant he realizes that he loves her, she disappears. (C 178) Still,
back in his car, the desire to feel space in its delicate look and feel – “the
flow of space” – has come back to him.
Packer, lying in the street and sincerely in love, appears to have temporarily overcome his alienation from others and the space he lives in. Yet
this only happens in a run-down state of degradation, which, moreover,
represents a scenery of death. This is another instance of the fateful process Packer is engaged in: to come into his self by way of (bodily, socially)
devastating that very self.
It is, eventually, his executor Benno Levin (squatting on a floor of a
derelict industrial building in Hell’s Kitchen) who has figured out Packer’s
mind: “Your whole waking life is a self-contradiction. That’s why you’re
engineering your own downfall.” (C 190) Levin once worked for Packer,
was fired and is since obsessed with killing the billionaire. Packer could
Cosmopolis 97
have escaped the forlorn man, could have shot him first (reckless as he is)
and could, moreover, have averted his killing during the conversation
when they are facing one another. Levin is fixated on killing Packer, but,
even so, wants some kind of spiritual salvation or respect from the man
who has determined his fate (“I wanted you to save me.” C 204). Packer
remains relentless and arrogant. When he is nonetheless seized with some
remorse (on behalf of Torval), he shortly thereafter fires his last bullet
right through his hand. Overwhelmed, his hand “pervertedly alive in its
own little subplot,” (C 197) it is the pain that becomes his “world.” It lets
him feel himself inwardly and outside: “being himself and seeing himself.” (C 201) At one point, he considers telling Benno about his changed
thoughts and situation. But refrains yet again.
A “Smart” Epiphany of Death
The novel does not end with Packer’s redemption. After having ignored
Levin’s helpless and “retroactive” pleas, he happens to look at his watch
that was programmed to film and display his immediate environment. It
first shows his face and eventually a prone body, “facedown on the floor.”
Even though the phenomenon anticipates the future (as before), which is
or was one of his presumptuous desires (for technological novelty and
speculative advantages), he cannot make out whose body it is. On the one
hand, his body is still outside, apart from his self, and keeps on staying
“on-screen.” (C 205) On the other, he is upset by the shift of temporal
levels: “Whose body and when? Have all the worlds conflated, all possible states become present at once?” If this comes down to what he wanted,
a presentative communion or prolepsis of his future into the present, then
it occurs only in the moment of his perishing. Recognizing a tag reading
“Male Z,” attached to a man in a hospital morgue,” he realizes: “O shit
I’m dead.” (C 206) His old technological fantasy about being immortalized on disk – “the master thrust of cyber-capital” returns. Yet “his pain
interfered with his immortality. It was crucial to his distinctiveness.”
There is no apotheosis or ascent into cyberspace (as with Sister Edgar in
Underworld). His very own being is not subject to exchange value, it
remains insurmountably “untransferably” (C 207) his. There is no reconciliation but only the self-knowledge that his identity is, after all, forever
made up of the ineluctable materiality of his being-there and his irreducible disparity of his psychosomatic existence. “He’d come to know himself, untranslatably, through his pain.” (C 207) As a road to
self-understanding, for Packer, pain has led on to the knowledge that his
pain is necessarily toward his death. Thoroughly alienated (from his
body, his human and non-human environment) as he is, his journey to
himself ends in nothingness. At the end, he is “waiting for the shot to
sound.” (C 209) Packer has been “Ravening, raging, and uprooting that
he may come/Into the desolation of reality.”59
98 Cosmopolis
If White Noise, Underworld, The Body Artist (as Falling Man or Zero
K do) end with a secular epiphany, Cosmopolis ends at best with a parody
of an epiphany. The protagonist’s appearance on his smartwatch has
nothing of a felicific moment in time.
Notes
1 The otherwise very informed essay by Jerry Varsava tends to somewhat overmoralize and strongly personalize capitalism as “rogue capitalism” and Eric
Packer as a “rogue capitalist.” There are, of course, individual agents, led or
possessed by greed – one of the dominant descriptive categories during the
2007–8 crisis – but I think collective and systematic factors, owing to the very
abstraction of money and the irrational principle of indeterminate accumulation, are more conducive to the understanding of the ongoing capitalistic
proliferation of investment and consumption. Jerry A. Varsava, “The
‘Saturated Self’: Don DeLillo on the Problem of Rogue Capitalism,”
Contemporary Literature 46, no. 1 (2005): 78–107.
2 A number of critics have stressed and elaborated on this relation. See Varsava,
p. 88, 90, on the “disembedding” of cybercapitalism, p. 99. Alison Shonkwiler,
insisting on the representability and persistence of the material basis of a mystified cybercapitalism, questions “the sublime aesthetics of abstraction and
global connectivity.” (253) See Alison Shonkwiler “Don DeLillo’s Financial
Sublime,” Contemporary Literature 51, no. 2 (2010): 246–82. Cf. also Matt
Kavanagh’s “Collateral Crisis: Don DeLillo’s Critique of Cyber-Capital,” in
Don DeLillo after the Millennium, ed. Jacqueline A. Zubeck (Lexington
Books: Lanham, 2017), 27–44. Kavanagh has a strong and enlightening chapter on “The Cosmology of Cyber-Capital” and, similarly to Shonkwiler,
focuses on the insuperability of the “reality principle” precisely because of our
technological urge to “shape reality in our own image” along with “a debilitating loss of reality.” (38–9) Mark Osteen’s “The Currency of DeLillo’s
Cosmopolis” in the same volume (45–64) offers a very impressive account of
the socio-psychology of money “as an expression of human psychology and
social life” (51) and the “rat,” that is, the body or human mortality as a “counterforce” that “inspires Packer’s plunge into self-destruction.” (52)
3 Cristina Garrigós, “Death Drive and Desire in Cronenberg’s Adaptation of
DeLillo’s Cosmopolis,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 56, no. 5
(2015): 519–30: “The journey from being a homo economicus […] to being
nothing but a corpse, an empty carcass, is thus symbolic of the death drive of
the system itself.” (519)
4 Even the most devastating crisis so far in 1929 (which was aggravated by
state policies of retrenchment) was contained – in European countries, however, by fascist governments acting in unison with major agents of fascism.
5 Sure, the exploitation of resources, climate change and general pollution may
restrain its progress. Yet there is no evidence of that. Capitalism may even be
put to good use, working against the destruction of our environment.
6 The Puritan spirit, according to Max Weber, took a successful capital accumulation (not consumption) as an evidence of one’s chosenness for eternal life.
7 I owe this sententious formulation to Byung-Chul Han. See http://www.
byungchulhan.de/. The German reads “Totalisierung der Zeit des Selbst.”
8 I am aware of the fact that my statements in the following would need more
empirical evidence. Yet there are, apart from Han’s work, quite a few academic books – in the tradition of the Frankfurt School – to confirm my
Cosmopolis 99
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
generalizing remarks. See the work of Horkheimer and Adorno, Erich
Fromm’s Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, 1973); critically: R.C. Smith, Society and Social Pathology: A
Framework for Progress (London and New York: Routledge, 2017). I also
sketch only exemplarily extreme effects in order to account for the type specimen of Eric Packer.
See Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy. The Moral Limits of Markets
(London: Allen Lane, 2012), for the scope of commodification.
See above.
See J.E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: W.W. Norton,
2002). For short overviews: Matthew Eagleton-Pierce, Neoliberalism: The
Key Concepts (London/New York: Routledge, 2016), entries: “adjustment,”
“development.”
The monetary intervention in Greece, following the Eurozone crisis in 2010,
was in fact aimed at warding off speculations about the fall of the euro
against the dollar.
Mark Rothko, Writings on Art, Ed. Miguel López-Remiro (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2006), 119–20 [“Notes from a Conversation with
Selden Rodman 1956”].
See my chapter on Nietzsche in Philipp Heinz-Walter Wolf, Die Ästhetik der
Leiblichkeit: W.B.Yeats, die Moderne und das Andere der Vernunft (Trier:
Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 1993), 56–76.
Achim Borchardt-Hume, ed., Rothko (London: Tate Gallery, 2008), 91.
Joseph Vogl, Das Gespenst des Kapitals (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2010), 11 (my
translation).
The reader’s response theory, which I do not want to dismiss as such here, was
developed by the conservative literary theorists Roman Ingarden, HansRobert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser, David Bleich or Norman Holland. It surely
reflects modernist tendencies to individualization.
I draw here on my essay “Über die Unvermeidbarkeit der Modernisierung.
Oder warum wir uns mit Transhumanismus und neuen Technologien beschäftigen müssen: Neue Perspektiven und alte Vorbehalte,” in Transhumanismus,
Posthumanismus und neue Technologien, ed. Philipp Wolf (Leipzig: Leipziger
Universitätsverlag, 2020), 1–37.
See Hartmut Rosa, Unverfügbarkeit (Wien/Salzburg: Residenz Verlag, 2019),
127 (my (loose) translation).
Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2001), 66 ff.
To be sure media images are always imbued with notions of what one ideally
wishes to be, could or should be. But Packer’s anticipation does not consist of
an idealization, it is temporal or, at most, an expression of his death drive.
For Packer experiencing “an effect before its cause” (“hysteron proteron”),
see also Joseph M. Conte, “Conclusion: Writing amid the ruins: 9/11 and
Cosmopolis,” in The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, ed. John N.
Duvall (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008), 179–92, here: 186.
Kinski’s diagnosis of hypermania, better known as bipolar disorder, may be
another clue (but, nota bene, she claims to have seen it herself on the screen).
Bipolar people can project entirely into parallel, or for that matter, future
worlds, manipulating the given to a degree that it appears to have come true.
Hartmut Rosa, Alienation and Acceleration (Copenhagen: NSU Press, 2010), 30.
See Rosa 2010, 30: “The eudaemonistic promise of modern acceleration
therefore lies in the (unspoken) idea that the acceleration of ‘the pace of life’
is our (i.e. modernity’s) answer to the problem of finitude and death.” (Italics
in original text.)
100 Cosmopolis
26 Technology could save us time yet engenders a whole range of new social
communicative practices. Twenty years ago, one wrote maybe four letters per
week and used the phone perhaps twice a day. Today one posts dozens of
messages per day and receives many more.
27 See Rosa 2010, 30.
28 Ibid., 41.
29 For the connection between resonance and alienation, see Rosa 2010, 97.
30 Byung-Chul Han, Duft der Zeit: Ein philosophischer Essay zur Kunst des
Verweilens (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015), 14.
31 Referring to Walter Benjamin, Rosa distinguishes between “Erlebnissen (i.e.
episodes of experience) and Erfahrungen (experiences which leave a mark
[…] touch or change who we are),” 2010, 94–5. Packer’s life surely consists
merely in “Erlebnissen.”
32 I have dealt with the semantics of money and the Eucharist both historically
and systematically in detail in Philipp Wolf, Einheit, Abstraktion und literarisches Bewußtsein (Tübingen: Narr, 1998), 274–77.
33 Philipp Wolf, “The A Priori of Money: Alfred Sohn-Rethel and Literature,” in
Tropismes No 9: “L’Argent” (Nanterre: Université Paris X, 1999), 179–91.
34 For the cultural historian Kenneth Burke, the “displacement” of God by
money is even something positive. Burke sees in money the “god-term,” since
it “transcends” the complexity of life to achieve unity. (Burke 1969, 93)
35 See Jochen Hörisch, Gott, Geld, Medien (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004), 113.
Hörisch draws here on Simmel’s famous Philosophie des Geldes, as on
Sohn-Rethel.
36 Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Das Geld, die bare Münze des Apriori (Berlin: Wagenbach,
1990), 22.
37 See also 84: “The yen itself knew it could not go higher. But it did […].”
38 Hörisch 2004, 117. Here Hörisch draws on Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange
and Death.
39 The NASDAQ rose within four years from 1,000 points (1996) to 5,000 in
March 2000. Cosmopolis is set in April 2000.
40 Byung-Chul Han, Kapitalismus und Todestrieb (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz,
2019), 14.
41 Georg Baudler, Ursünde Gewalt. Das Ringen um Gewaltfreiheit (Düsseldorf:
Patmos, 2001), 116. Also quoted in Han, 14.
42 Han 2019, 14.
43 Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, Rev. Edition, trans. Iain
Hamilton Grant (Los Angeles et al.: Sage, 2017), 148.
44 Don DeLillo, “DeLillo Bashful? Not This Time,” interview by John Barron,
Chicago Sun-Times, March 23, 2003. Quoted in Matt Kavanagh, “Collateral
Crisis: Don DeLillo’s Critique of Cyber-Capital,” in Don DeLillo after the
Millenium, ed. Jacqueline A. Zubeck (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017), 39.
45 It is quite revealing that Packer in his “meditation cell,” bypassing sleep, reaches
only “the briefest of easings” upside down, “rounded in counterpoise.” (C 5–6).
46 The German language distinguishes between “Leib” and “Körper,” the former
as an entity which is fundamentally, intuitively and intrinsically mine as
opposed to the body as an object of functional-pragmatic exteriority.
47 This examination is rather painful and usually only recommended to men
over 50 or 60 once a year.
48 The reduction to prostate and bladder makes him even ask questions about
his self-relation: “Does he love himself or hate himself?” (C 51)
49 He actually anticipates the remark, having previously heard it from his regular doctor, Nevius, see C 8.
Cosmopolis 101
50 Interestingly enough, a “scientific” criterion for the “theory of everything,”
the “world formula,” is still symmetry.
51 Georges Bataille, Eroticism (London: Penguin, 2012), see esp. Ch. V and IX.
See also Byung-Chul Han for his anti-capitalist interpretation of Bataille’s
affirmative concept of death and excess. (21–2)
52 I use Lacan’s term here, which is not to be confused with reality, it is rather
the unimaginable beyond symbolic representation: the rest that cannot be
signified, death being only one of its placeholders.
53 See my Die Ästhetik der Leiblichkeit and of course Nietzsche’s The Birth of
Tragedy.
54 Cosmopolis surely denotes political ways of responding to advanced financial
capitalism. There are (or were), on the one hand, the civil society’s attempts
at attacking (more or less symbolically) political and economic institutions
behind the global financial sector. The anti-WTO demonstration in Seattle in
November 1999 struck a chord, not least because there was considerable
violence on both the side of the state power and the demonstrators. The last
spectacular movement, the Occupy Movement, is today (in 2021) hardly
noticeable anymore.
55 “It was exhilarating, his head in the fumes, to see the struggle and ruin around
him, the gassed men and women in their defiance, waving looted Nasdaq
T-shirts, and to realize they’d been reading the same poetry he’d been reading.” (C 97)
56 Others may still be: giving away all property, disregarding all value added, or
simply to cease working as Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener did: “I would
prefer not to.”
57 I do not think, though, that death and especially suicide form such a challenge
to the capitalist system that it will bring about its ruin. See Baudrillard’s
Symbolic Exchange for the corresponding theory. During the Corona crisis, it
became apparent that one would accept the reduction of economic production only for a limited time, the number of corona deaths notwithstanding.
58 The film shooting, notably, will be finished prematurely. Probably as a consequence of Packer’s financial action, they are out of money.
59 William Butler Yeats, Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1985), 333
(“Meru”).
6
Falling Man
Relating Unspeakable Loss
A desire for slowing down (or conversely speeding up) time – to the point
of halting time and abandoning it to space – seems to capture Don
DeLillo’s characters in his later work (including Underworld’s Nick Shay).
This consciousness of temporality is owing to a sense of late modern alienation and is always infused with a premonition of mortality, which no less
permeates the novels. Whereas in The Body Artist or Point Omega (as we
shall see) individuals are concerned with time and death, in Falling Man it
is society if not civilization at large that is affected. An unheard-of disaster
and unprecedented incursion from outside bring time to a halt, arresting
people in a spatio-temporal vacuum: “as if all of this […] might be placed
in a state of abeyance.” (F 4) Even though the focus is on Keith Neudecker,
one of the traumatized survivors of 9/11, Don DeLillo delineates a tableaux vivant of all-encompassing apocalypse in his first chapter: “It was
not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near
night.” (F 3) However, what we subsequently get is not the broad and allinclusive painting of a society in shock and awe, but the narrative of a
handful of individuals. To the dismay of many critics, DeLillo refused “the
massive spectacle,” which would not only have infringed on the dignity of
the victims but also disregarded the fact that a historically all too real and
singular event of extreme suffering simply refuses comparison and repetition in a panoramic fictional work subject to the codes of entertainment.
Given the fact that there is the need for a mimetic treatment and representation of the traumatic experience, “the practiced response” can only be
given on a small and individualized scale. There is, in addition, the mnemonic necessity for a relation of the “marginal stories,”1 as well as a
“counter-narrative” to the terrorists’ attempts at dominating the transmission history of the attack together with our consciousnesses.2
Something must be set against their “management” and interpretation of
death (their admirers and followers, though, will never read Don DeLillo).
By concentrating on the marginal, DeLillo manages to delineate a variety of responses to the traumatic confrontation with death, including,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003289937-6
Falling Man 103
ex negativo, that of the media. Yet the remarkable thing about Falling
Man is that it points both to modes of coming to terms with the inconceivable (or forms of “terror management,” to use again the here not
quite appropriate term of Solomon et al.) and that it leaves no doubt that
the rupture it inflicts can never be fully mended, Lianne’s final impulse of
relief – another of DeLillo’s concluding epiphanies – notwithstanding.
(Lianne is Keith’s estranged wife.) The interminability of grief is commensurate to the singularity of the event. For the survivors it resists closure. The terrorists, on the other hand, are obviously able to make up a
final narrative, which allows them to manage their impending demise.
DeLillo does not need a lot of space to signify impressively the apocalyptic ubiquity of death after the fall of the towers. The language and
imagery (focalized through Keith Neudecker) are telling enough. The
prose is, on the one hand, marked by a dark, dimmed-down, even sepulchral tone and, on the other, by paratactic sentences alternating with sentences compounded with present participle constructions. The breathless
people appear unhinged and distraught, smoke and objects, pieces and
fragments go adrift and take on an unreal, even surreal aspect: “This was
the world now. Smoke and ash came rolling down streets and turning
corners, […] with office paper flashing past, […] otherworldly things in
the morning pall.” (F 3) There is one sentence in this first chapter that
refers to the actual casualties: “The world was this as well, figures in
windows a thousand feet up, dropping into free space […].” (F 4) Surely,
the utter desperation of the victims faced with conflagration and collapsing walls made them jump into the void. It also denotes one of the novel’s
leitmotifs, the “dropping” or “falling” into “free space.”
As always, DeLillo’s counter-narrative includes more or less incidental
perceptions of objects concomitant or correlative with the major subject of
the novel (the attacks and the sociopsychological resonance). The objects
linger in the memory and thereby take on a symbolic and cognitive meaning.
A fleeting garment, “shrapnels,” two paintings and a public performance act
may then help to better comprehend, if not necessarily to process the fact of
death. They prove to be manifestations of the insuperability of the disaster
and inconsolability of the survivors more or less immediately affected.
I will first focus on the metaphorical correlatives, then, in an exemplifying way, on the sociopsychological impact (of death) on Keith and Lianne,
and, finally, in contradistinction, on the “terror management” (or the fundamentalist way to cope with of their imminent death) of the “Jihadists.”
Images of Loss, Two Victims, Two Terrorists and Death Dealers
Shirts
Apart from its existential enormity, the falling to death of the victims
signifies a (present) continuous fall into a space that does not yield a
104 Falling Man
concluding grief work. The people continue to fall in the memory of the
survivors. The image of falling is figuratively extended by a shirt3 that
comes down. It is worth quoting the entire passage:
There was something else then, outside all this, not belonging to this,
aloft. He watched it coming down. A shirt came down out of the high
smoke, a shirt lifted and drifting in the scant light and then falling
again, down toward the river.
(F 4)
The metaphor or rather metonymy of the shirt conveys an inconsolable
sadness. Like the remains of the victims in the German concentration
camps (shoes, glasses), the shirt points to an irredeemable loss of lived
lives. By associating something very individual, personal and intimate, it
heightens the sense of absence. The “drifting” and “falling” of it out of
the smoke and into the river creates an expressive filmic image, whose
melancholic effect will last.4 For this very reason, DeLillo also ends the
circularly structured novel with the image of the – now “waving” – shirt:
“He walked and saw it fall, arms waving like nothing in this life.” (F 246)
The arms go on beckoning to us in the air, the man or woman to whom
it belonged is still there and not there. The singularly lamentable sight
will always remain with Keith.
Shrapnels
The omnipresence of death after 9/11 is nevertheless tantamount to an
incubus that remains inconceivable and impossible to come to terms
with. Trauma means, after all, recurrence of the injury and the ongoing
experience of loss. It is moreover impossible to block out the images of
the deceased and their mnemonic presence. Long afterward, they can be
felt even in a tactile way. The gruesome (and macabre) effect of the detonation was the physical fragmentation of both the terrorists and their
many victims into small particles. They were virtually blown into the
environment.
The dead were everywhere, in the air, in the rubble, on rooftops nearby,
in the breezes that carried from the river. They were settled in ash and
drizzled on windows all along the streets, in his hair on his clothes.
(F 25)
This went so far that the doctor, who treats Keith, spreads the (rather
unlikely) theory that “tiny fragments of the suicide bomber’s body” (who
obviously were in the most forcible center of the explosion) might have
even entered the bodies of the survivors. After months, the “organic
shrapnels” are said to come to the surface of the skin creating “bumps.”
Falling Man 105
(F 16) If this is a myth which mirrors primal fears (see, e.g., the film
Alien), it is yet true that, owing to the intensity of the conflagration, more
than 40% of the casualties could not be identified up to date. No remains
of a large number of victims could be found (and no definite number
ascertained). This certainly contributed and still contributes to the feeling
that the whole matter can never be brought to a close. The experience of
death is going to permeate life throughout. The death, moreover, that hit
the people (their kin, partners, friends) by surprise, is not what one calls
a “natural death.” In the latter case, many people find a way to sort out
their lives and to cope, more, less or not at all. These deaths were, after
all, utterly meaningless and a terrorist humiliation.
Still Lives
Don DeLillo employs ekphrases (partly in rudiments) in Underworld
(Brueghel), Cosmopolis (Rothko), the short story “Baader-Meinhof”
(Richter)5 or the (fictional) stone sculpture and still lives in Zero K. In
Falling Man, we meet with paintings by Giorgio Morandi, two of which
are hanging in Nina Bartos’s apartment,6 the art historian and mother of
Lianne Glenn (the estranged wife of Keith Neudecker). Nina, who is in
frail health (her demise is looming, and she will die in the course of the
novel), got the Morandis as a gift from her lover, the art dealer Martin
Ridnour. Lianne, already scarred by the suicide of her father and, of
course, 9/11, also faces her mother’s death.7 The reception of the paintings is interwoven with the experience of mortality, although, on the representational surface, they display only mundane kitchen objects:
These were groupings of bottles, jugs, biscuit tins, that was all, but
there was something in the brushstrokes that held a mystery she
could not name, or in the irregular edges of vases and jars, some
reconnoiter inward, human and obscure, away from the very light
and color of the paintings.
(F 12)
It seems reasonable to see the paintings (most likely the 1949 or 1962
Natura Morta versions) in terms of the subjective states of mind of the
viewers, that is, of Nina, Lianne and Martin. To be sure, any work of art
is always also constructed in the (imaginary) perspective of the recipient.
And it is not surprising, if highly significant, that on one occasion Martin,
and subsequently Lianne, “keep seeing the towers in this still life.” (F 49)
On another occasion, Nina perceives mortality in the painting: “It’s all
about mortality, isn’t it?” (F 111) After the death of her mother (who has
returned the paintings) Lianne goes to a Morandi exhibition in New
York. Now she blends in “Nina’s living room […] memory and motion.
The objects in the painting faded into the figures behind them.” (F 210)
106 Falling Man
The paintings mirror what occupies the protagonists most: the towers,
death and her mother’s memory together with the now-vanished space in
which she lived.
However, it is equally immanent to the appropriately named Natures
Mortes, in themselves, to effect a sense of mortality and mourning. Lianne
identifies the bottles etc., yet, moreover, “something in the brushstrokes
that held a mystery she could not name, or in the irregular edges […].”
(F 12) The “things” or “equipment” (to use Heidegger’s terminology
again) in the paintings are “mysterious” because they are precisely not
objects “present-at-hand.” In fact, Morandi’s work draws on Cubism; his
interest pertains to form and materiality, shade, color and space and the
interplay of those elements. The things in the painting may morphologically be associated with towers, but unlike the (former) World Trade
Towers they are detached from a functional purpose. The abstraction
from the purposiveness (as tools, boxes, etc.) engenders what Heidegger
calls a strife between world and earth, between what may be categorized
and what forever escapes definition. The strife leaves a surplus of unfathomable meaningfulness in and on account of the “self-seclusion of earth.”8
By letting shine forth the very materiality, or “earthiness” of the material,
the work of art creates a sense of beauty, yet also of obscurity, the ominous
and awe. Like hardly any other artist, Morandi makes visible this “selfsecluding” beauty of the “earth” and, by the same token, our own finiteness. The pale light that tinges the shaded pastel colors evokes thereby
their evanescence. The thingly shapes “jut,” protrude and fade into an
empty, open and undefined space which suggests metaphysical forsakenness. Some of the vessels and boxes either blend or grow into a somber
darker background. (In other paintings the items cast a shadow.) Stilled,
silenced and somewhat forlorn as they seem, they point to their own disappearance and absence or, as Martin and Lianne saw, the towers in
absentia. In one painting in Nina’s room, “[t]he full array, in unfixed perspective and mostly muted colors, carried an old spare power.” (DeLillo
possibly refers to the 1949 “Natura Morta.”) There are two rectangular
shapes (vaguely resembling irregular vases) “set against a brushy slate
background.” They are “dark and somber, with smoky marks and
smudges.” By virtue of their very indeterminacy or “self-seclusion” (“too
obscure to name”) a cognitive withdrawal (gap or abyss) occurs. They
“thrust[…] up the awesome.”9 They thereby may come to signify the
disaster that befell the towers. (F 49) The loss of comprehension in this
context of beauty may lead to the feeling of an existential loss, which in
turn makes us realize that we “care” (Heidegger’s German term is “Sorge”),
not only for ourselves but also for others. We are reminded of our dependency on and responsibility for the other. The oxymora Natura morta or
Still Life express what the paintings perform: the weak effulgence of lived
beauty passing into the melancholy of absence. Transience and mortality
are maintained and equally suspended in the inner texture of the work of
Falling Man 107
art, which always constitutes a process. The paintings entail a momento
mori, which means, in ethical terms, that the dead have placed the duty on
us to remember and to acknowledge that, even if they have gone, they are
still somehow present, still alive, or, to use Lauren Hartke’s description of
her body performance: “a still life that’s living.” (BA 107)
Indeed, for Lianne, the Natures Mortes harbor the memory of her loss.
When she finally visits the Morandi exhibition, she is overcome by the
desire to become one with the pictures. This time, it is not, as we will see
with the anonymous man in Point Omega, the psychotic drive to assimilate into a representation. She simply wants to absorb and keep alive in
herself what the paintings have come to mean for her identity, namely the
mnemonic presence of the dead:
She was passing beyond pleasure into some kind of assimilation. She
was trying to absorb what she saw, take it home, wrap it around her,
sleep in it. There was so much to see. Turn it into living tissue, who
you are.
(F 210)
Falling Man: Performing Death and Mourning
Falling Man is the title and leitmotif of the novel. David Janiak turns up
thrice in the novel, twice in the coincidental presence of the focalizer
Lianne and finally posthumously, three years after the attacks, when
Lianne comes across his obituaries: “Dead at 39, apparently of natural
causes.” (F 220) It is very likely that his early death was a consequence of
his numerous falls, which caused a “heart ailment” and “chronic depression due to a spinal condition.” (F 220, 222) Janiak had deliberately
sought out what the existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers has called the
“ultimate situation.”10 A “Grenzsituation” occurs when a human being is
thrown (or throws him- or herself) into a situation of fundamental hazard and existential exposedness (birth, death, destitution, affliction, disaster, etc.). When one is accordingly subjected to an overwhelming force
and, notably, guilt, one is bound to experience what it really means to be
human. (This is not to be confused with what some extreme athletes on,
e.g., Mount Everest are looking for.) The physical comment of an anonymous journalist following the Falling Man’s death may also attain a symbolic and, for that matter, all too literal meaning: “subject only to the
earth’s gravitational field.” (F 221) His acts were mimetic, yet each time
he exposed himself anew to an extreme existential risk or “Grenzsituation.”
In fact, his final jump was planned to be the ultimate one, without the
strand of a simple safety harness he used. The safety harness (no “pullies,
cables or wires […] no bungee cord,” F 220) was, not least, to stop his fall
midair and leave the man upside-down, dangling in the air (the reiteration in various places was also of tantamount importance, to be sure).
108 Falling Man
Janiak’s performances are reminiscent of the action artists of the US
Happening and Fluxus movement or the 1960s Vienna school who
craved for public attention (moral indignation and outrage) through the
violation of taboos. Janiak surely aims at a shock effect, but not at media
attention or even becoming a (negative or positive) media celebrity. His
falls occur where people come together, but unannounced and spontaneously; he declines an invitation by the Guggenheim Museum and other
institutions of the culture industry. (F 222) The Falling Man’s identity
remains obscure (there is no immediate press coverage, the performances
“were not designed to be recorded,” F 220), he thereby directs the bypasser’s (or resident’s) attention to the performative process itself and, more
importantly, to the suffering and dead individuals whom his action is to
bring back into the consciousness of an oblivious public. He acts anonymously, but always on behalf of the individual victim. The one relevant
external background, then, for the form and structure of his performances
are the people that out of utter despair threw themselves to death from
the Towers. The other motive is the notorious photo by Richard Dew
depicting the “man falling, the towers contiguous […] behind him.”
(F 221–2, through Lianne we get a detailed ekphrasis.) Janiak dresses
similarly (“business suit,” F 33) and adopts the same position: “headfirst,
arms at his sides, one leg bent.” (F 33, 221) I do not have to discuss here
whether Dew’s beautiful photos violate the dignity of the victims.11 But
DeLillo’s “Falling Man” certainly shuns aestheticization (and spectacularizing) of his mimetic acts. Rather than (aesthetic-reflexive) distancing,
his intention is to create an immediate and sudden psychosomatic impact,
which will go lastingly deeper than apparent beauty (on a superficial
level, though, Dew’s catching and globally disseminated picture may outlast any other impression).
Time and again David Janiak interrupts the daily routine, to which the
New Yorkers, so used to dissipation and distraction, are inclined to return
all too quickly: “he brought it back of course.” (F 33) Janiak evidently
succeeds in unsettling, even unhinging people, and breaking through
indifference. Bystanders and bypassers see “something elaborately different,” (F168) “all jarred out of their reveries,” (F165) they are “outraged
[…]” at “the puppetry of human desperation.” (F 33) A puppet theatre,
through its effects of alienation, may well convey a disconcerting sense of
eeriness. He is arrested for “criminal trespass, reckless endangerment,”
(F 220) for “creating a hazardous or physically offensive condition”
(F 223) and, not least, is “beaten up.” (F 220)
Lianne’s response (to the general and her own reaction) is more subtle,
thoughtful, and sensitive: “There was the awful openness of it, something
we’d not seen, the single falling figure that trails a collective dread, body
come down among all of us.” (F 33) She realizes what is so important
about the performance. It opens up, lays bare and affects the more or less
covert trepidations people are afflicted with after 9/11. An individual
Falling Man 109
figure hits both the collective consciousness (and unconscious), and that
of the individual. Her individual encounter with the Falling Man (36 days
after the attacks) occurs on her way home after a session with her
Alzheimer’s group. His plan is to jump from a maintenance platform in
front of an incoming train. Heavily confused by what appears thoroughly
“irrational,” she desperately looks about to meet the understanding or
confirming eye of another person. The disruption creates the desire for an
intersubjective need of affirmation and acknowledgment. In contrast to
the more subjectivist reception of the Morandi paintings, the experience
with the Falling Man has much more of a physical and social impact.
This distinguishes the latter fundamentally from the first. Yet to be “too
near and deep, too personal” (F 163) is an integral part of the act. The
action performs a double movement; it touches “us all” (F 33) in our
innermost and defies at the same time communication and rationalization. From her position, almost below the dangling man, she “could have
spoken to him but that was on another plane of being, beyond reach.” (F
168) And even after his death (and her research) the Falling Man remains
beyond grasp: “The man eluded her.” (F 224) Whereas some react to this
with an aggressive defensiveness, Lianne is transfixed and compelled to
watch. She perceives “her husband somewhere near” and “his friend” in
the smoke-filled tower. When Janiak jumps, “drawing a rustle of awe,”
her body goes “limp.” (F 168) She sees the fallen body suspended in midair and finds herself running, while prompted to think involuntarily
about her dead father: “Died by his own hand.” (F 168) Janiak’s performance is, therefore, not mimetic in the sense of imitation; it comes down
to a physical assimilation or adaptation to the previous event (in Adorno’s
sense of “making oneself equal”),12 inducing the recipient to see from up
close. “Janiak’s art,” Duvall observes, “allows his viewers themselves to
become witnesses of the horror.”13 Whereas Dew’s photograph remains
an exterior medium and depiction, Lianne herself, or, for that matter, her
body, becomes the medium: “She was the photograph, the photosensitive
surface. The nameless body coming down, this was hers to record and
absorb.” (F 223) In Lianne the performance effects physically, into the
depths of her person, what it is meant to effect: to call back the dead.
What is eventually most striking – and significant in ethical terms – is
a doubleness that is structurally compatible with the oxymoronic still
lives of Morandi. The haunting and crucial momentum of the performance is the “jolt,” the “midair impact and bounce,” and subsequently
“the worst,” the “stillness itself.” The man himself is suspended in the
process of falling, remains motionless, but keeps dangling for some time
in stillness. (F168) Especially the word “dangling” is repeatedly used to
describe the man’s dire position. (F 33, 219–20)14 The aporetic correlation of “falling” and “suspension,” “dangling,” “stillness” and “motionlessness” points symbolically to what an ethical responsive memory
should mean. The headlong fall is suspended, yet at the same time it never
110 Falling Man
comes to an end, and it is never supposed to come to an end in our perception. The man is “set forever in free fall.” (F 221) Janiak reminds us of
the interminableness of the fall. The person is bound to die, maybe gone
already, but his or her demise is at the same time suspended in our remembrance and continues to be so. The two levels (motion and stillness) interminably cross-fade into one in our consciousness. It tells us to keep the
dead in their very stillness alive, that is, not to terminate their memory.
How, then, do individual survivors deal with the “ultimate situation,”
the experience of death, and, in contrast, how do the murderers?
Keith: Trauma and Lethargy
Devastating as the disastrous experience itself was, many survivors had to
moreover cope with feelings of guilt. Keith Neudecker had only just managed to get down through the staircase from his office in the north tower.
He is taken to the hospital by Lianne, who he had returned to immediately
after the attack despite their separation. He receives a strong sedative shot,
which was supposed to black out his memory, but the “waking image” of
his friend Rumsey “in the smoke, things coming down” (F 22) persists. He
had tried to take him along downstairs, yet Rumsey falls “away from
him” and dies. (F 243) Rumsey was one of his poker pals, another one had
also died and a third severely injured. The weekly poker game with his
friends in his apartment had marked an “uncomplicated interval,” a ritual
that meant a time-out or hiatus in a day-to-day life “of severed connections.” When he goes back to his apartment (near the now wrecked towers) to pick up some clothes, he has a long close look at the card table,
realizes that the “poker table mattered,” but also that he “wouldn’t need
the table, two players dead, one badly injured.” (F 27) Poker used to be
“the code they shared.” (F 129) In a kind of mimetic repetition or, rather,
re-enactment, he will dedicate his future life to poker.
It is not with his wife Lianne that Keith talks about what he had to go
through, but another survivor, Florence Givens, whose briefcase he happened to pick up in the burning tower. After a few days, he decides to take
it to her and meets a similarly unhinged person. They sit down together and
it seems as if their shared memory and his presence enable her to express the
traumatic experience: “I’m still on the stairs. I wanted my mother.” (F 57)
She talks incessantly, he listens attentively. For Florence, this seems to have
a tentatively releasing effect, whereas Keith still ‘tries’ to “find himself in the
crowd.” (F 59) His “body in raw motion,” he cannot help being further
caught up in “some dim space that bears his collected experience.” (F 66)
Yet her confidential openness toward him does not hide the fact that she,
like Keith, is too much occupied with her own calamity. Despite their shared
vulnerability,15 they will not get together. She only needs to hear her own
voice and talk to herself to “confirm the grim familiarity of the moment.”
(F 91) Even if, or precisely because, they both went “down through the
Falling Man 111
smoke,” they eventually are only “someone else” (F 138) or “still figure[s]”
for each other. (F 158) (The “still lives” by Giorgio Morandi have a similar
function for Lianne and her mother Nina after 9/11.) The experience of the
void makes it impossible for them to form a relationship. They both somehow know “together” what it means to be caught “in the timeless drift of
the long spiral down.” (F 137) Yet the “timeless drift” affects existential
layers of personality that are beyond sharing.16
Keith cannot maintain the relationship with Lianne either. Instead, he
decides to play solely professional poker, a game which previously only
meant a jaunty weekly pursuit with his friends. For Lianne, who joins
Keith and Justin watching a tournament in Las Vegas, the game itself
means no more than “anesthesia,” “tedium,” “nothing.” In the players,
she sees, more interestingly, “deadpan […] slouched souls in misfortune,”
struggling souls, stuck in a “continuing dilemma.” Without telling her
husband, she rather appropriately describes what Keith is heading for.
Keith, on the other hand, makes it a point to “alert” his son to the camera
shot of the “hole cards,” revealing “in the making” that the player would
soon be dead: “[H]e’s dead.” (F 118) Poker, therefore, comes to be both
an “anesthetic” escape and endless mimetic repetition of his traumatic
experience – although with a remarkable variation.
Keith is not interested in taking up employment in New York; instead,
he spends most of his time in Casinos, intermittently visiting his family. In
those locations, mainly in Las Vegas, he finds an environment that is suggestive of that in the tower after the crash. Keith is psychologically
steeped in and deeply marked by an un-heard-of situational condition to
which he was fatally and helplessly exposed. 9/11 has become a constitutive part of his psychological structure and an ongoing reality of his present experience. He has, therefore, sought out a place that corresponds
with his psychic disposition. Here he feels “hemmed in […] enclosed by
the dimness […] and by the thick residue of smoke that adhered to his
skin.” (F 188) The spaces appear “to be made to his shape,” and there are
times when the game absorbs him fully: “[T]here was nothing outside, no
flash of history or memory.” (F 225) In his new environment, on the other
hand, he seeks something he can fast hold onto. Therefore, it is not for
(the abstraction of) money he wins or loses, it is the material, tactile and
sensuous steadfastness of the poker table that provides the security that
was profoundly shattered when faced with the deadly collapse of the
tower:
He was playing for the chips. […] It was the disk itself that mattered,
the color itself. […] There was the fact that they would all be dead
one day. He wanted to rake in chips and stack them. The game mattered, the stacking of chips, the eye count, the play and dance of hand
and eye. He was identical with these things.
(F 228)
112 Falling Man
Whereas the anonymous man in Point Omega wants to disappear in an
imaginary space, Keith is driven by the mimetic desire to assimilate into
the material atmosphere of the casinos. By merging into the sounds (the
“clink,” “toss and scatter,” 229, see also 211), colors, air, he half consciously wishes to blot out the person that is still caught in the noise and
smoke of the tower: “He was becoming the air he breathed. He moved in
a tide of noise and talk made to his shape.” His existence is confined to
the games in the halls: “There were no days or times except for the tournament schedule.” The manifest purpose consists in deadening his feelings and becoming insensible and insensitive even, or precisely, to the
“bleeding” of others: “The point was one of invalidation. Nothing else
pertained. Only this had binding force. […] Make them bleed. Make
them spill their precious losers’ blood.” (F 230)
If Keith abandons himself to a numbing mimesis of his traumatic experience, he still maintains the illusion of autonomy, which makes the most
conspicuous difference. 9/11 also meant an accidental or fatal incursion
into a seemingly safeguarded life. The disruption confronted people with
death and an existential thrownness beyond intentionality and control.
At the poker table, Keith is, to a degree, at the mercy of fatum (as he was
defenselessly in the tower), but in the game he is, or assumes to be, in
control: “The cards fell randomly, no assignable cause, but he remained
the agent of free choice.” (F 211) This is Keith’s self-centered, if not narcissistic, method of “terror-management”: He gives himself up to the aisthetics of the poker hall and the belief in the freedom of his decisions. His
psychological wound, however, will not heal thereby: “These were the
days after and now the years, a thousand heaving dreams, the trapped
man, the fixed limbs, the dream of paralysis, the gasping man, the dream
of asphyxiation, the dream of helplessness.” (F 230)
Lianne: Mourning, Care and an Epiphanic Moment
Lianne takes another, ethically more appealing, path in confronting
death, grief, loss and perishing. She is not only personally affected by
9/11 (Keith’s disturbing return home; her son Justin continues to scan the
sky for possible planes), she is also haunted by the suicide of her father,
who shot himself after he was told about his beginning Alzheimer’s disease. “Died by his own hand.” (F 169, 218) Lianne fears she might have
inherited this disposition to forgetfulness. She is troubled, moreover, by
the increasing frailty of her mother Nina. Yet Lianne does what can be
done, albeit never conclusively, when one is all too aware of death and
vanishing. Whereas Keith wants to escape memory, she tries to re-­member,
salvage and represent. As a sort of an exposure therapy (or “cognitive
behavior therapy”), Lianne had started to conduct meetings with
Alzheimer’s patients, suggesting that they write about topics such as “[r]
emembering my father.” (F 29) After 9/11, owing to her own bewilderment,
Falling Man 113
she wants to increase the frequency of meetings. The responsible consultant Dr. Apter warns her that the disease is “all about loss” and the therapy should be for the patients, not for her sake. And indeed, she “needed
these people.” The reason is remarkable: “These people were the living
breath of the thing that killed her father.” (F 61–2) Alzheimer’s is an irreversible illness, progressively annihilating precisely those faculties and
abilities that allow for “a living breath.” The longer and more it breathes,
the closer it is to death. To attribute “living breath” to Alzheimer’s is,
therefore, in line with the other self-contradictory motifs in the novel
undermining themselves. It only makes one realize the more what one
wanted to come to terms with, namely loss and grief.
She is scared by the cognitive fading of her patients, which manifests
itself in the failing handwriting and reading of their texts. But “the act of
writing” nevertheless releases moments of recognition at “the crossing
points of insight and memory.” (F 30) A woman called Rosellen S. sees
“her father walk in the door after a disappearance lasting four years.”
The patients rejoice in their narrative and, more so, the sessions become
religious congregations: “This was their prayer room,” a man called
Omar R. remarks. Writing becomes “revelation.” (F 30–1) Indeed the
participants are both “authors” of their own stories and “characters” represented in those stories. That is, by means of prosopopoeia, they give a
face and presence to someone absent, they can – fictionally – bring back
not only what has been lost but also hold on for a moment to what is
about to go. Not long before the definite extinction of their identity, they
have the “final authority” to evoke a “Real Presence,” which is, as noted
above, the provisional antidote against death. When they decide to write
“about the planes,” it is no wonder then that they settle on the subject of
God and, almost inevitably, on the question of how “God could let this
happen.” (F 60) Lianne wants them to write about the terrorists and
express their anger. Yet in an existential state in which demise is foreseeable, first and last questions are more urgent. However, as everywhere
else, questions of theodicy also here come to nothing. A woman, finally,
named Anna C. makes the appropriate comment about the entrenched
and dutiful, nonetheless shallow custom of assigning blame after the
attacks, which only serves as an inexpensive and populist solution in
order to return to business as usual. She refers primarily to the terrorists,
the context, though, may also suggest God: “But this, what happened, it’s
way too big, it’s outside someplace, on the other side of the world. […]
You don’t know what to do.” (F 64) Of course, the murderous culprits
must be identified, and their deeds must never be justified, yet the enormity of the act defies easy assignment of guilt; the suffering is outside our
imaginative powers, as it is beyond the closure of grief work. Admitting
to one’s helplessness is one appropriate response to the unspeakable.
After a subsequent meeting Rosellen could not find her way home and
thus never returns. Lianne becomes painfully aware of what is going to
114 Falling Man
happen or has happened, “the breathless moment when things fall away,”
and recalls one of the final sentences Rosellen could write: “Do we say
goodbye, yes, going, am going, will be going, the last time go, will go.”
(F 156, italics in original) The sentence vacillates between present continuous, future continuous and future. It expresses the state of uncertainty or “abeyance” that permeates the whole novel. She is “inscribing,”
Linda S. Kauffman remarks, “her own epitaph,”17 but she still clings to
her being-there, her “Dasein.” She takes her leave, is leaving yet holds on
to being present and still is present. Therefore, it “is a demand, a command, and a lament against oblivion.”18 The imposed and unwanted
departure of the other always defies, for the sake of the dignity of the
departed, a resolution of mourning.
In fact, Lianne repeatedly reveals an ethos of remembrance and thereby
resistance to death. In one of her Alzheimer’s sessions, as the remaining
members write about the now-absent Rosellen and the “inevitable,” she
contemplates the old sepia passport photos Martin had collected. She
sees “faces […] lost in time,” blends in her patients and, proleptically in a
way, recognizes them in these old photos. For the anonymous people, she
invents a context (“human ordeal set against the rigor of the state”) to
bring herself narratively “into the lives of the subjects.” She discovers
“innocence and vulnerability […], people on long journeys, people now
dead. Such beauty in faded lives […].” (F 141–2)
This is a very personal and subjective act of commemoration, but nevertheless a retrieval of those long gone and due to go soon. It is a way to
demonstrate respect for the dead. To think about the deceased and to
realize, or at least imagine, who they were is a moral imperative that
holds the more for the victims of 9/11. Lianne reads all their newspaper
profiles without exception: “Not to read them, every one, was an offense,
a violation of responsibility and trust.”19 Months after Nina’s death (three
years after the attacks), Lianne still senses her mother (who treated her
daughter condescendingly) all around her, “her face and breath, an
attending presence.” (F 190) The ongoing nearness of death marks
another argument, if only a subjective and phenomenological one, against
forgetting. Mourning is a state, not a process one accomplishes.
Lianne had retained an affinity to transcendence (from her father) and,
still troubled after three years, seeks some comfort by regularly going to a
church. Even though she is too much of an enlightened skeptic and a
deliberate disbeliever, she is, despite her doubts and her resistance to the
overwhelming idea of God, somehow attracted. (See 232) So she decides
upon a God who is absent, a deus absconditus: “God is the voice that says,
“I am not here.” (F 236) This is remarkable, since if not for God (the ritual,
congregation, aesthetics), for what else should one go to church? Lianne
comes to feel “a sense of others. […] She felt the dead, hers and unknown
others. […] It was a comfort, feeling their presence, the dead she’d loved
and all the faceless others who’d filled a thousand churches.” (F 233)
Falling Man 115
Lianne has found a way to pay silent tribute to the dead; she gives her
time and shares her time with them. She resists God, but she also resists
death, not, however, the dead. The dead never cease to lay claim on those
to whom they have left their remembrance and legacy. Hence, the socalled “work” of mourning will never end.20
After her communication with the dead, but inconclusive approach to
God, Don DeLillo has Lianne have an albeit ephemeral moment of epiphanic awakening. Late at night, she pulls a shirt over her head, and with
that her body comes back to her: “just her, the body through and through.”
She comes to herself, recovers a sense of herself and what she thinks made
up her old being: “It was something she’d always known. The child was
in it […].” But as all (secular) epiphanies, this is only a momentary revelation, not a perpetual release from responsibility to what has happened:
“It was a small moment, already passing, the kind of moment that is
always only seconds from forgetting.” (F 236)
Lianne’s revelatory moment precedes, in DeLillo’s narrative construction, the minutes before and when the planes actually hit the towers (“In
the Hudson Corridor,” 237). The novel thus returns to the beginning,
describing the devastating minutes prior to Keith’s walk through the
swath of destruction. The narrative comes, as it were, full circle. But
the circular construction also reminds us of the never-ending impact of
the disaster on our consciousness and the memory we owe to the victims.
Lianne is now “ready to be alone” with Justin, as “before the planes,” but
the planes will nonetheless remain. (F 236)
Hammad and Amir: Terrorist Cult of Death
In terms of Solomon’s, Greenberg’s and Pyszczynski’s “terror management,” it is only the terrorists that (eventually) seem to feel absolutely
confident about the management of death. Martin (the possible former
German RAF terrorist Ernst Hechinger) may well be right. Hammad and
Amir (Atta) did not “die only for God.” (F 116) On a deeper level, there
surely were political, economic and socio-cultural motives (as focalized
by Hammad, see 79, 80, 173, 175), particularly a more or less diffuse,
more or less justified, hatred of the United States and the West in general.21 However, their self-understanding or ideological basis is couched
in religious terms. They feel called upon. Initially, Hammad is not free
from doubts, yet Amir (and other men in Afghanistan and a Hamburg
Mosque) succeed in convincing and radicalizing their spirit brother “to
close the distance to God.” (F 172)
Their rather religious cult of death and martyrdom includes all those
ingredients that make (as Hammad learns in the Afghan training camp)
“death stronger than life.” (F 172) Putting sacrifice and death above life
provides a most efficient ideology not only to suppress the fear of dying,
it also encourages homicide. Their readiness for holy death feeds on
116 Falling Man
binary and clear-cut values. There is the collective singular in which the
“We” (F 173) is spelled with a capital letter. Brotherhood (women are
perceived, if at all, as prostitutes) binds them closely together in a plot,
which exerts a “magnetic effect” on them. Plot can mean conspiracy, the
process of their planned action and, notably, a grave. On the one side, the
“unbelievers” who are doomed to perdition and, on the other, “they”
who were chosen by the “claim of fate.” But the “strongest claim of all”
was “the statement that death made.” (F 174) Hence, they can also justify
what the Islam actually prohibits, namely suicide: “We are finding the
way already chosen for us.” (F 175) It seems, according to Falling Man,
that the Jihad against infidels is only secondary. The primary fascination
is indeed death, as an end in and for itself. Death has become their definite “Existential,” and surely not, as in Heidegger’s sense, as awareness of
the temporality of life. It is an imaginary figment born out of a Manichean
bubble. They do not spare a thought for the lived lives they will arbitrarily take (many of them Muslims): “Those who will die have no claim
to their lives outside the useful fact of their dying.” A masculine and
“raptured” heroism of the definite, all-consuming and all-empowering
shock (“We die once, big time.”) has seized them. One is reminded of the
male fascination with death in the Storms of Steel (by the German
“Decisionist” Ernst Jünger) and the Japanese Kamikaze or Samurai cult
as nurtured, e.g., by Yukio Mishima. The “magnetism” of the event
occludes entirely the “purpose of their mission. All he saw was shock and
death.” (F 177) This surely raises them above the rest of mankind, the
“shameless dogwalkers” not “willing to die.” (See F 177–8) Shortly before
the end (“In the Hudson Corridor”) the religious surfaces again, although,
perhaps only in self-affirming formulae. Hammad gathers strength by
thinking about the Iranian child soldiers who wore plastic keys “to open
the door to paradise;” he tells himself to recite “the sacred word” and
assures himself that “every sin” will be forgiven and “eternal life” soon be
won. (F 238–9)
It is apparent that the terrorist speaks the language of religious martyrdom, which has been used often enough by martyrs on the brink of their
demise. If one takes a look at martyrologies such as John Foxe’s 16thcentury Act and Monuments, culminating in the reign of Mary Tudor,
one can easily see that the prospect of forgiveness, paradise and eternal
life in heaven had such a strong appeal that the martyrs not only welcomed death, they appeared to feel no pain and embraced the fire and
faggots which were soon to end their lives. Thomas Hokes, Thomas Watts
and Anne Askew were “all dying full of the glorious hope of immortality,” Laurence Saunders welcomed “everlasting life!,” John Hooper
prayed: “For God’s love, good people, let me have more fire!” John
Bradford “embraced the reeds, and said, ‘Strait is the gate, and narrow is
the way, that leadeth to eternal life, and few there be that find it.’ He
embraced the flames.”22
Falling Man 117
There are yet two differences between the old protestant martyrs and
the new Islamic Jihadists. The first, even if firmly convinced of their martyrdom and the righteousness of their faith (in contradistinction to the
“Popish Babylon”), were still in doubt about the forgiveness of their sins.
The Jihadists, on the other hand, seem to be absolutely sure of their deeds.
One may also assume that not many people (including their own kin) have
been mourning for “Amir” and “Atta.” Their sympathizers believe, after
all, that the terrorists, or rather, martyrs, are justly destined for a better
place in heaven. Their victims, however, will be mourned for a long time.
Notes
1 Thus, Don DeLillo in an essay he published shortly after the attack: “In the
ruins of the future: Reflections on terror and loss in the shadow of September,”
Harper’s Magazine, December 2001, 33–40, here: 35.
2 There is great amount of critical response to Falling Man. A number of the
comments focus on DeLillo’s account of the protagonists’ process of coming
to terms with the attack, including its processing by the media and the “Falling
Man” David Janiak, as well as DeLillo’s representation of the terrorists. One
of the “traumatological” examples is Silvia Caporale Bizzini’s “Grieving and
Memory in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man,” in Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics
of Fiction, eds. Peter Schneck and Philipp Schweighauser (New York/London:
Bloomsbury, 2010), 40–50. I cannot agree with Bizzini’s interpretation of
Keith’s escape into the poker casino. She sees it as “a search for a new spirituality” and an “homage to all his poker mates that died in the attacks.” (49)
Keith abandons himself to the “clink of Chips” (F 229) and shuns his old
poker mate Terry Cheng, who also becomes a professional player. For Falling
Man as a “counter-narrative,” as well as on loss, mourning and trauma, see
the illuminating essay by Ronan McKinney “Staging the Counter-Narrative
in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man,” in Don DeLillo: Contemporary Critical
Perspectives, eds Katherine Da Cunha Lewin and Kiron Ward (New York/
London: Bloomsbury, 2010), pos. 2494–817.
3 On the image of the shirt in comparison with Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, see
Peter Boxall, “Slow Man, Dangling Man, Falling Man: DeLillo and the Ethics
of Fiction,” in Terrorism, Media, and The Ethics of Fiction: Transatlantic
Perspectives on Don DeLillo, eds. Peter Schneck and Philipp Schweighauser
(NewYork/London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010), 173–83, here: 182.
4 When Keith arrives at Lianne’s flat, it is almost the first thing he says: “He
said there was a shirt coming down out of the sky.” (F 88)
5 See my essay “Memory and Ekphrasis in Early Modern, Modern and
Postmodern English and American Literature,” in Anglistentag 2003
München: Proceedings, eds. Christoph Bode, Sebastian Domsch and Hans
Sauer (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2004), 422–4.
6 Ronan McKinney offers an interpretation of the Morandis (as well as of
David Janiak’s performances): “The paintings both stage and mitigate that
loss [of Lianne’s father, husband and mother], summon its pain and enable
Lianne to mourn.” pos. 2576. McKinney also takes into account Judith
Butler’s theory of relational mourning.
7 “Her mother wasn’t dying, was she?” (F 48)
8 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Martin Heidegger,
Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (London et al.: Harper Perennial, 2008),
173, see also 172, 180 (or in German: Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks, 53ff.).
118 Falling Man
9 Heidegger, “Origin,” 200. According to Roman McKinney, the “experience of
art” provokes the “disruption” of Lianne’s “psychic interiority.” pos. 2633,
see also 2728.
10 The German philosophical or existentialist term “Grenzsituation” (as, e.g.,
the confrontation with death) means literally “border or limit situation,” the
more literal translation “borderline situation” would be misleading, though:
“Ich muß sterben, ich muß leiden, ich muß kämpfen, ich bin dem Zufall
unterworfen, ich verstricke mich unausweichlich in Schuld. Diese
Grundsituationen unseres Daseins nennen wir Grenzsituationen. Das heißt,
es sind Situationen, über die wir nicht hinaus können, die wir nicht ändern
können.“ Karl Jaspers, Einführung in die Philosophie. Zwölf Radiovorträge
(München: Piper, 1971 [1953]), 18. (“I must die, I must suffer, I am subject to
accidence, I inevitably incur (literally: become entangled in) guilt. We call
these fundamental existential situations ultimate situations. With this we
mean situations which cannot be overcome or (literally: we cannot go
beyond), we cannot change.” My translation.)
11 For the debate and further references see Linda S. Kauffman, “Bodies in Rest
and Motion in Falling Man,” in Don DeLillo: Mao II, Underworld, Falling
Man, ed. Stacey Olster (London et al.: Continuum, 2011), 135–51, McKinney,
“Staging the counter-narrative,” and, very nuanced, John N. Duvall,
“Witnessing Trauma: Falling Man and Performance Art,” in Don DeLillo:
Mao II, Underworld, Falling Man, ed. Stacey Olster (London et.al.:
Continuum, 2011), 152–68.
12 See Adorno, 1997 (Aesthetic Theory).
13 Duval, “Witnessing Trauma,” 161.
14 For an interesting comparative study of the “Dangling Man,” see Peter Boxall,
“Slow Man, Dangling Man, Falling Man: Don DeLillo and the Ethics of
Fiction,” in Terrorism, Media, and The Ethics of Fiction: Transatlantic
Perspectives on Don DeLillo, eds. Peter Schneck and Philipp Schweighauser
(New York/London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010), 173–4.
15 Keith has become so sensitive to possible injuries that he furiously attacks a
man who assumedly insults Florence: “Keith was ready to kill him.” (F 133)
16 For the relationship between Keith and Florence see also Linda S. Kauffman,
“Bodies in Rest and Motion in Falling Man,” in Don DeLillo: Mao II,
Underworld, Falling Man, ed. Stacey Olster (London et al.: Continuum,
2011), 135–51: “Florence and Keith are both stuck, fixated on a moment
neither of them can transcend.” (138)
17 17 Kauffman 2011, 145: “Falling Man portrays Alzheimer’s as a metaphor for
the post-September 11 condition.”
18 Ibid.
19 Other motives may also play a role, the self-affirmation of the one who got
away or a need to understand Keith better. (See F 106)
20 The vast bulk of pertinent 20th-century literature from Freud to Kübler-Ross
aims at “coping,” “overcoming,” “accepting” or “severing” grief and mourning and their “objects” in order to restore the mourner to life, to make her “fit
for life” again. Hence, the fifth stage in Kübler-Ross’s therapeutic process of
mourning is dedicated to “Acceptance.” See Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David
Kessler, On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the
Five Stages of Loss (New York et al.: Scribner, 2005), ch. 1, 7–28. Sigmund
Freud, in his seminal essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” evidently privileges
the first to the second, which is hardly surprising from his therapeutic (and
economic-utilitarian) point of view. Mourning – as against melancholia –
passes the “testing of reality,” carries out the “behest of reality.” The successful
Falling Man 119
mourner, having realized that “the loved object no longer exists,” manages to
withdraw “all the libido […] from its attachments to this object,” “hypercathects” “each single one of the memories” (126) and transfers his or her
libido to a “new” object. (131, see also 136–7) Melancholia, on the other
hand, is “pathological.” (132) The melancholic mourner “incorporates” and
identifies with the “abandoned object” resulting in “a loss in the ego.” (131)
The narcissistic melancholic takes revenge on the lost object “by the circuitous
path of self-punishment.” (132) Melancholia, then, drains the ego “until it is
utterly depleted.” (134) Freud offers only one alternative: either one is sound
and declares “the object to be dead,” “as no longer of value,” or one regresses
into a kind of self-destructive or “manic” fixation, losing any hold in the outer
matter-of-fact world. Yet this simple opposition not only disregards the psychological benefits, one may attain through an ongoing mnemonic occupation
with the deceased. One may well gain in clarity about one’s own psychological
inheritance, one’s relation to others, past and future responsibility for others.
Melancholia need not come to a deadlock in an unproductive fixation on narcissist sameness; the melancholic knows, after all, “whom he has lost but not
what he has lost in him.” (127) The image or “memory trace” of the other is
never identical with itself. If the ethical and literary mourner cannot help
replacing or going on re-presenting the “object” of mourning with symbolic
substitutes (as Freud would recommend for successful mourning), he/she may
well remain in a state of melancholia. But thereby the mourner not only
accepts her own finitude “which is also that of memory” but also “the trace of
the other in us, the other’s irreducible precedence.” (Derrida, Memoires, 29)
Ethical mourning is marked by respect (or, if you wish, love) for the other,
rather than by narcissism and (introverted) hate. For an ethics of mourning the
other is not at our disposal, their death and memory rather a “gift” (Jacques
Derrida) left to us. Responsive memory defies obliteration and closure. Other
than stagnating in a state of mute narcissist sameness, the mourner could welcome the departed as another benevolent and productive person to talk to.
21 See my “Die neue Weltunordnung: Geopolitik, Internationales Recht,
‘Realismus,’ Neoliberalismus,” in Die neue Weltunordnung: Krise, Chancen
und die Rolle Europas, ed. Philipp Wolf (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag,
2018), 1–34. For a decisive criticism of DeLillo’s not sufficiently complex,
“binary” and “orientalist” representation of the terrorists, see Sascha
Pöhlmann, “Collapsing Identities: The Representation and Imagination of the
Terrorist in Falling Man,” in Terrorism, Media, and The Ethics of Fiction:
Transatlantic Perspectives on Don DeLillo, eds. Peter Schneck and Philipp
Schweighauser (New York/London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010), 51–64.
22 Among the easily accessible sources: https://www.ccel.org/f/foxe/martyrs/
fox116.htm.
7
Point Omega
“When Time Stops, so Do We”: The
Aesthetics of Disappearance
Temporality and Death
Cosmopolis was about acceleration, the compression of the present to
make the future happen now. The protagonist was driven by an urge for
ecstasis drifting toward death. The Body Artist was about the deceleration of time to allow for commemoration and mourning as a resistance to
death. Lauren Hartke is led by the desire to focus on and attend to the
processuality of temporal experience and presence. Point Omega is about
the slowing down of time to a point close to utter stasis; the protagonists
are merging or hoping to merge with an object or state beyond time1 and
processuality, which is tantamount to absence.
Whereas in Cosmopolis and The Body Artist death (murder and suicide) is an evident and motivating element of the narrative, in Point
Omega it forms, no less dauntingly, a background noise or horizon
against which the narrative unfolds. The incipient and closing parts,
called “Anonymity” and “Anonymity 2,” focus on the 24 Hour Psycho
installation by Douglas Gordon in the MOMA, or rather the reception of
the significantly slowed-down Hitchcock film by an anonymous man in
the museum. The iconic film deals, of course, with the psychopathic murderer Norman Bates, whose bloody stabbing of Janet Leigh in the shower
seems to be in the focus of the man’s interest, or for that matter, DeLillo’s
rendering of the man watching. The man’s attention is on the phenomenology of motion, or more precisely, on the perception and experience of
objects beyond the engrained linearity of time. If this does not immediately suggest a connection between temporality and death, there is one in
psychoanalytical terms. The man’s obsession with the identification of
(and with) ever-smaller percepts in a succession of perceptive contents
(approaching stasis), his concomitant fantasies of violence (P 112, 116)
as well as his imaginary dissolution into Norman Bates have at the least
an uncanny if not psychotic ring to it. Death looms more evidently in the
four central chapters of the novel. Elster, the main figure of the novel, has
contributed to the killing of Iraqis (or Afghans) in the Bush war against
terrorism. As a “defense intellectual” (P 28) at the Pentagon, he was “to
DOI: 10.4324/9781003289937-7
Point Omega 121
conceptualize […] matter as troop deployment and counter-insurgency.”
(P 19) His job obviously was to discursively frame and hence legitimize
military action. Frustrated and disillusioned, and still rather full of himself, he leaves the military (not though his belief in war) behind for the
“distances,” the space and geological time (P 19) in an Arizona desert,
where he owns a remote house with a corrugated roof. “Extinction was a
current theme of his,” (P 20), the narrator Jim Finley remarks. The young
filmmaker has joined Elster to produce a portrait of the war theorist.
Also, Elster’s daughter Jessie, quite unexpectedly, comes for a visit and
disappears all of a sudden. She is not found or salvaged in the course of
the novel; Finley looking for her only discovers a knife, without any
traces, however, that may point to Jessie.
Between the framing episodes at the museum and the main narrative in
Anza-Borrego, there is one obvious connection and one only hinted at. As
noticed by the (focalizing) “man,” Finley and Elster had also briefly visited the Gordon installation. Elster, though, resists the “[s]tillborn images,
collapsing time.” The concept behind the slowed-down film “left him no
clear context to dominate.” (P 47, 61). During “Anonymity 2,” a young
unnamed woman (perhaps Jessie, who was actually there, see P 47) also
comes to the installation. The “man,” who “dissolves” into Bates (P 116),
manages to get her phone number.
Yet more interesting are the spatio-temporal transformations the
“man” and Elster strive for. Even if (or precisely because) Elster pretends
to think in geological and cosmological dimensions, they both want to
overcome their evanescent self to be suspended in a spatial entity,
­representation, or object out there, driven, as they are, by the psychotic
desire to sever their connection to the world, to be depersonalized and
de-­subjectivized by assimilation into an external object.
The Anonymous “Man,” Caillois and Lacan: “But Imagination
Was Itself a Natural Force, Unmanageable.” (P 81)
The rather extraordinary wish to become “non-time space”2 may be
accounted for by the mimetic (or, more precisely, mimicry) theories of
Freud, Lacan, Adorno and, perhaps most originally, Roger Caillois’s concept of “le mimétisme.”3 The fact that a person spends six straight days in
a dimmed-down gallery to watch an extreme slow-motion film and to
wait until “the film’s time scheme absorbed his own” (P 6) wants some
explanation. This also holds for the other protagonist of the novel who,
staring out into the desert, wishes “time to fall away,” (C 72) looking
forward to “become the dead matter we used to be.” (P 50) It is worth
dwelling on Caillois’s and Lacan’s theories for a while.
Caillois first turns against the traditional view of “mimicry as defensive
action,” particularly among insects. Predators will still find and devour
their prey, the latter’s homomorphy or homochromy notwithstanding.
122 Point Omega
As it may even be disadvantageous to the survival of animals,4 mimicry –
the assimilation into environment or “lure of space” – should therefore
be put down, Caillois claims, to “a disorder of spatial perception.”5
Interestingly enough (and perhaps a little daringly), Caillois recognizes a
similar behavior in human magic or incantatory practices (“like produces
like”), and also in what he calls “legendary psychasthenia,”6 meaning
psychosis, from a distorted perception or processing of reality to depersonalization. In this state, people do not wish to preserve their selves;
rather, they abandon themselves to spatial representations outside of
their selves. He diagnoses a “widespread instinct d’abandon,” which may
lead to the inertia of the elan vital.”7 It is notable that Caillois sees the
reason for an increase of this disposition in the “human organism’s shifting relationship to space in modern mass media culture.”8 Caillois differentiates between a vertical and perceived space determined by,
comprising, and changed by, the perceiving persons themselves, and a
represented space, in which “the organism […] is no longer located at the
origin of the coordinate system but is simply one point among many.”
“Modern science” has confusingly multiplied those spaces (“hyperspace,
abstract spaces” et al.) in which a being “no longer knows what to do
with itself.” Modern media are surely paramount to the permanent reformation of the intuitive forms of space and, by implication, time. The
ongoing shifting and succession of spatio-temporal experience and everfaster alteration of perspectival scenes will surely exacerbate the ability to
situate oneself, to form an identity of one’s self and thereby a coherent
image of one’s self. Psychologically vulnerable person might then be susceptible or “lured” to not only obliterate the boundaries between inside
and outside space, they might lose and even wish to lose themselves in
external objects: “Under these conditions, one’s sense of personality (as
an awareness of the distinction between organism and environment and
of the connection between the mind and a specific point in space) is
quickly, seriously undermined.”9 The effect amounts to forms of depersonalization, an extinction of one’s being-there and Freud’s death drive.10
Jacques Lacan, who received Caillois favorably, is helpful in substantiating the psychological process in question. In his essay on “The Mirror
Stage as Formative of the I function,”11 Lacan famously states that human
identity forms itself between the 6th and 18th month by virtue of an
outside spatial, or for that matter, media representation in a mirror (or
the eye of the mother). The child, still “trapped in his motor impotence
and nursling dependence” receives this “specular image” with a “jubilant
assumption,” which is foundationally reaffirmed by the psychological
parent, who in most cases is still the mother. By virtue of this “homeomorphic identification,”12 the child perceives itself as an (albeit imaginary) whole which from now on will ground his or her subject status. Yet,
the body, in its fragility, incompleteness or deficient coordination, subsists. The represented identity is, therefore, precarious; it is illusionary
Point Omega 123
and depends on the approving glance of the other (the mother or a third
person). Narcissus becomes suspended between an idealized but inexorably
extrinsic self, which is in fact not his self, and the instance who perceives this
self. This fundamental discrepancy may induce the narcissistic subject to
develop acts of auto-aggression and/or to merge with its imaginary other.
That is, the conflict can only be overcome through the dissolution or selfdestruction of one of the poles, unless the symbolic order, “law” or “name of
the father,” intervenes. The latter (which hopefully comes down to a negotiation of Freud’s ego and superego) offers more socially compatible links or
references, which can evolve different identificatory spaces for the self, or in
Lacan’s words, “elements representing the diversified images of the ego, and
these are so many points of anchorage, of stabilization, of inertia.”13
However, if the person in question only unsatisfactorily manages to compensate for the mother’s absence (which is to happen sooner or later) by
(painfully) developing a language along with a sense of difference (Freud’s
Fort-Da, one after the other),14 the mentally unstable self is bound to fail to
situate him/herself in the symbolic world. The “picture of the relation to the
world” is likely to be de-realized, that is, a “heteromorphic identification”
occurs, a “morphological mimicry” due to “an obsession with space.”15
The subject lacks a social identity since it is devoid of points of contact,
“points of anchorage” in the view of the other social person. Significantly,
the “man” in the MOMA gallery is an “Anonymity” (P 3, 101). It points
to both his existential past (as a person) and the state of being, which he
strives for through mimicry. Names are tags, after all, through which we
are given an identity. Identity is furthermore obtained through the way
one looks like to others. Yet he
had no idea what he looked like to others. He wasn’t sure what he
looked like to himself. He looked like what his mother saw when she
looked at him. But his mother had passed on. […] What was left of
him for others to see?”
What, he asks himself, would the woman “be seeing when she looked
at him?”
(P 8, 108)
This is the typical Lacan-Freudian constellation. As he was, and narcissistically continued to be, only through the eyes of his mother, he was
unable to find other points of contact without her glance, and evolve a
differential sense of his personality. Caught up in his represented, but
potentially self-disrupting and psychotic space, and, in addition, devoid
of and evading extrinsic social resonance,16 the anonymous “man” literally “no longer knows what to do with itself,” (Caillois, 99) falls prey to
“legendary psychasthenia” and attempts at mimicking and eventually
assimilating into his environment.
124 Point Omega
The introduction of the man is already indicative of his psychological
confusion: “There was a man standing against the north wall, barely visible.” The “darkness was nearly complete and the man standing alone
moved a hand toward his face, repeating, ever so slowly, the action of a
figure on the screen.” (P 3) Animal-like he inches along the walls, compelled
to perceive and confirm visually what he knows already, the fact, namely,
that Anthony Perkins uses “the right hand.” He “needed to see it.” (P 5) The
man himself has already become so much part of the interior of the gallery
that the guard does not seem to take notice of him: “[T]he guard did not
count him as a presence any more.” (P 7) If the darkened space therefore
already allows for a mimicry, it is dependent on him and his body. His
frame would still be present, even if hardly distinguishable from the surroundings. Caillois’ mimesis (“mimétisme”), on the other hand, would
mean assimilation into an environmental space, and thus disappearance or
absence. Only “mimétisme” would allow for the overcoming of the
unsolved discrepancy between the fragmented body and the imaginary, but
alien, representation. Narcissus had to pay with his life for this.
Given the man’s predisposition, the aesthetics of the filmic installation
in the darkened and hermetic space virtually invites mimetic behavior. It
requires extraordinary perceptive abandon to the extremely (artificially)
alienated temporal-spatial mode, unless one gets irritated, even repelled
(like Elster in front of the performance does; he desires a geological
spacetime). The man, therefore, watches as closely and intensely as he
can, exerting “total concentration,” “watchfulness” or “absolute alertness.” “The closest watching” does, after all, not aim at synthetic experience, narrative recognition, the maintenance of the unity of consciousness
and recovery of emotional balance (which is the eventual reward one
gains through watching suchlike dreadful films). “Anonymous” strives,
on the contrary, for the very dissolution of the “unity of his inner sense”
of time by dissociating content from form in order to aisthetically morph
into the latter. Ironically, the man’s wish “to feel time passing, to be alive
to what is happening in the smallest register of motion,” is undercut by
the retarding dissociative temporality, which will absorb his own “time
scheme” (P 6) and thereby his very identity. “Continuous motion” is split
up into “incremental movements.” The latter appear like distinct “bricks
in a wall, clearly countable” and no longer inserted into a continuous
process: “the flight of an arrow or a bird.” However, if the successive oneafter-another transforms into a juxtapositional side-by-side, one still or
shot beside another, coherence, continuity and meaning drop away:
“Then again it was not like or unlike anything.” From up close he sees
“snatches and staticky fragments,” (P 6) from a distance “abstract
moments, all form and scale.” (P 101)
The incisive slowdown is tantamount to a (surely never total) spatialization, which absorbs the mentally instable observer “beyond the usual
assumptions” (as the artwork was probably meant to, P 7). He is
Point Omega 125
mesmerized, (P 13) and increasingly willing, on the sixth consecutive day,
to “transmigrate,” “passing from this body into a quivering image on the
screen.” (P102) He wants “complete immersion,” “the thing he sees” to
share “consciousness with him,” imagines “all motion stopping on the
screen,” and eventually assimilation and dissolution: “The man separates
himself from the wall and waits to be assimilated, pore by pore, to dissolve
into the figure of Norman Bates.” (P 115–6) This process of encompassing
self-abandon to an imaginary space comes down to the (self-)obliteration
of the subject, which is constituted and reaffirms itself by temporal categories (future, present, past), by memory, language and relationality (causality). The detached and disjointed components, which make sense only in
relation to action, isolate the watcher “from every expectation.” (P 8)
Protension, so elemental to orientation and identity, is canceled. The experience becomes “drugged,” eludes language (P10), involves an “element of
forgetting.” (P 11) He thinks of the gallery as a “hushed tomb,” and wonders if he would be able to walk out “after living in this radically altered
plane of time.” It is noteworthy that he uses a spatial metaphor for time.
(P 12) More significantly, he asks himself if he would eventually be “forgetting who he was and where he lived,” when he walked out, and, finally, if
he could return here for some more time: “[W]ould it be possible for him
to live in the world? Did he want to? Where was it, the world?” For the
nameless man, both depersonalization and derealization (in Caillois’s
sense) have taken place. He therefore feels that, rather than the original
film, “this was real.” (P 13) He is drawn to “stillness,” and stasis, where
almost nothing happens, and to a “reality” where “cause and effect [are] so
drastically drawn apart.” (P 14). Indeed, the stills or shots he takes in are
“outside all categories,” and, as a logical consequence, “open to entry.”
(P 102) The “man” has moved beyond (the Kantian) categories, whereby
we necessarily and a priori structure and order our perception of the world,
assuming we want to act sensibly and comprehensibly in this world.
By abandoning those categories (which permit memory and relationality), the “man” will divest himself of his self-reflectiveness, and hence his
identity. His (imaginary) assimilation into space will then mean utter
alienation from his self, while the dissevered continuity of time will also
entail cognitive, moral and social disconnectedness. Rather than an aesthetic attitude, the man’s reception of the film corresponds with an
archaic and – still non-conceptual – behavior, with the consequence that
“what makes itself like itself, does not become truly equal.”17 There is,
after all, no reflexive self left. Absolute mimicry amounts to absolute selfestrangement; he or she literally “exists” no longer.18 The price for the
regressive natural assimilation to the respective imaginary object is that
“the subject himself becomes an object,” incapable of establishing an
inner relationship.19 Eventually, this comes down to a state of non-being:
“Life withdraws to a lesser state.” Depersonalization means a “kind of
diminished existence,”20 but, in the long run, a return to an “original
126 Point Omega
insensate condition” and the Freudian “inorganic” and “inanimate.” It
entails, in other words, the death of the subject.
Murder or Not?
Critics have been reluctant to identify the “man” as the murderer of Jessie.
The reason for her sudden disappearance remains indeed in the dark. Yet
there is some evidence that points to the “man.” Like Norman Bates’s, his
imaginary has remained that of his mother. He wishes for a woman but is
highly confused when she speaks to him “changing every rule of separation.” (P 105) After the confrontation he has to check his appearance in a
mirror (P 108): “What would she be seeing.” She becomes part of his
represented “heteromorphic representation” regarding her as “a shadow
unfolding from the wall.” He asks her (after thinking about “Norman
Bates and Mother”) if she can imagine “living another life” (which she
does not reject outright). (P 111) He develops fantasies of violence, “pinning her to the wall,” follows her and manages to get her phone number,
before he dissolves “into the figure of Norman Bates.” In psychoanalytical
terms, he might have reasons to eliminate the invasive and consternating
Other – an attractive woman. She is not identified as Jessie, but she visits
the gallery at about the same time as the unnamed woman. (P 47)
Jessie’s “authoritarian” mother, with whom alone she shares an apartment, sends her daughter to Elster because she distrusts the “manner” or
“appearance” of the man Jessie now sees. (P 57) Jessie moreover displays
some characteristics that might explain the mutual, if unsettling, attraction. She listens, according to her father, to “words” from “some interior
presence” (which suggests some form of borderline condition). At times,
she seems “deadened” to any external “response,” completely turned
inward: “She was missing, fixed tightly within” (P 59–60, this again points
to depression). She ignores Finley’s warnings about sitting in the sun
(“You’ll die”), and does not know where she is staying. (P 65) As a child,
Jessie had to touch her body to realize who she was: “She was imaginary
to herself.” (P 71) Finley tries to come closer to her, but she remains elusive
and non-committed, rather a disoriented and airy woman. After her disappearance, she seems to have passed “into air.” She leaves all her belongings
and the two men completely baffled behind. Finley wonders whether she
has gone “past the edge of conjecture” but cannot help the worst imaginings. (P 81) After Jessie has left New York, the anonymous phone calls,
according to Jessie’s mother, cease. Rangers find a knife in the not too far
away “impact area.” (Janet Leigh, as Marion Crane, nota bene, was also
stabbed to death.) But the knife shows no traces of blood.
When Finley goes to search for Jessie on his own in the desert area, he
gets lost between the “cliff edges” but has one of the unlikely epiphanic
moments that are so characteristic for the endings of DeLillo’s later novels. Almost blinded by the “tides of light and sky,” (P 93) he is “crushed”
Point Omega 127
by “the heartbreaking beauty” and “the indifference of it.” He cannot
imagine someone “dead” in here, yet believes he will never have the
answer. Interestingly enough, he becomes immersed into an atmosphere
(his hands to a “cliff wall,” a geologically significant stone formation)
which evokes the stillness, timelessness, and nothingness, Elster, and, in a
different way, the “man” sought after. In Finley’s daydream, an erotic
reverie blends in, however:
I closed my eyes and listened. The silence was complete. I’d never felt
a stillness such as this, never such enveloping nothing. But such nothing that was, that spun around me, or she did, Jessie, warm to the
touch. I don’t know how long I stood there, every muscle in my body
listening. Could I forget my name in this silence?
(P 94)
Finley unexpectedly undergoes a profane transcendent experience of selfforgetfulness. He feels a “nothing” that “is”; he can almost break through
his identity and attain something like the Buddhist Nirvana (the paradox
of a nothingness that “is” in being). But for all that, he fully maintains his
physical receptivity (“warm to the touch,” “every muscle”), which magically includes even the deceased Jessie, who had “passed into air.” However,
one should at least mention in passing, that Jessie might have committed
suicide, merging into the desert and thereby virtually acting out Elster’s
fantasies. It would be an ironic realization of her father’s exalted ideas.
And yet, the idyllic desert scene is soon interrupted and counteracted
by a buzzing fly: “It had found me and come near, in all this streaming
space, buzzing.” (94) The symbolism of flies is manifold, they are associated with death (in the Bible), or with spirit ancestors (Navajo mythology).21 Yet it might just as well be an ironic turn in the narrative,
preventing it from sliding into shallow mysticism. It is obvious that Don
DeLillo holds the case in abeyance. In a good postmodern manner (or as
in a good detective novel), he lays traces, makes metatextual allusions
(the knife, “impact area,” the fly, the later blocked phone call, “imagination is a natural force,” “[h]e (Elster) wanted pure mystery,” P 83), only
to revoke or cross out these traces. It is the outstanding art of DeLillo
(not least in Point Omega) to construct literary indeterminacy, ambiguous places or gaps, to open up manifold points of imaginative contact for
the reader.22 DeLillo’s novels are virtuoso open works of art.
Elster, Teilhard, “Dead Matter” and the Epiphany of a “Handful
of Mucus”
Whereas Finley may have found some timeless elatedness in a “streaming
space” and the anonymous “man” some redeeming (yet imaginary and
psychotic) transformation in a heteromorphic space, Elster will tragically
128 Point Omega
and ridiculously fail. Elster, as opposed to the “man,” seeks his temporal
redemption not through his projection (from hermetic darkness) into an
almost distinct space on a screen, the pompously self-conscious intellectual projects himself from a wide desert opening into immeasurable earth
history. Especially during his hushed hours, he is located on his deck
tucked onto his house. It is his “vertical plane,”23 from which he looks into
his “represented space”: “nothing but distances, not vistas […] but only
distances.” (P 18) Elster is strongly suspicious of human subjectivity, intentionality, and their externalizing media, the “spoken or written” word. He
mistrusts a categorial consciousness diverting from what he calls “the true
life.” This happens, he claims, in “the submicroscopic moments,” when
“staring at a blank wall.” It takes place “beneath the running thoughts and
dim images, wondering idly when we’ll die.” (P 17) Even an 800-hundredpage biography would be wholly incongruous (“dead”) to the inner train
of prereflexive impulses. Only when the cerebral basis is left to itself, producing involuntarily and autogenously what comes to pass, he thinks he
“becomes himself.” This is in line with his (rather unstrung) relation to his
body, where, rather than through his mental acts or products, he thinks his
identity is founded and formed. Elster (like the nerd in Cosmopolis) is in
the habit of biting off the dead skin of his thumbnail: “Not my books,
lectures, conversations, none of that. It’s the goddamn hangnail, it’s dead
skin, that’s where I am, my life, there to here.” (P 43)
Elster has fled the temporal unsteadiness of the media- and trafficpervaded city life of New York. The broad expanse of the desert may (or
may not) convey the relieving impression of temporal opening and continuity. More important is the occupation he “left behind.” (P 18) He had
been hired by the Pentagon for more than two years to “conceptualize.”
That is, he was supposed to develop “overarching” notions and ideas for
“troop deployment and counterinsurgency.” (P 119) His job, in other
words, was to give ideological and practical guidelines to the American
military to wage their asymmetric war in Iraq and possibly Afghanistan.
As a university professor and “defense intellectual” (P 28), he had to take
care of the framing of a war the legitimacy of which was doubted and
which claimed many victims. If (following Kant) conceptualizing means
structuring potential experience and actions according to temporal, spatial, modal and relational or causal categories, Elster’s job was to render
killing as rational and convincing as possible. Yet his aversion against
conceptualizing does not seem to have a moral ground; he simply seems
to have been weary of the “tight minds” and the general “background
noise” in the “closed world” of the “methodological” war “plotters.”
While he affirms the constructive and projective – unreal or fake –
­character of the new realities the war strategists devise,24 his approach to
the production of the perception of war was not one of “force levels or
logistics,” (P 29) he rather wanted to create something aesthetic, furnished with a good portion of ontology. He wanted a “Haiku,” the effect
Point Omega 129
of which he understands as “human consciousness located in nature.” A
“haiku” he thinks is appropriate for representing war, because the (often
pointillist) three lines are suggestive of transience. It makes us see something, only to prepare us “to watch it disappear.” (P 29) The haiku, then,
is to signify disappearance and death through its very form. The fact that
this, understandably, did not click with the war planners, their “statistics”
and “rationalizations,” does not dissuade him from his affirmation of
war: “The force of will, the sheer visceral need.” (P 30)
Elster’s philosophy of life sounds materialistic and physiological. The
subtext is a cultural pessimism, which is backed by an organicist-teleological dimension, reminiscent of the tragic vitalism and fatalism of philosophers (and physiologists) such as Nietzsche or Schopenhauer. The
opening of the barren desert, in which space and time seem to purely
unfold, thus serves as an antithesis to the spatio-temporal corruption of
civilization, especially in cities. These, he feels, are ruled by the “usual
terror” of “the minute-to-minute reckoning.” (P 44) The objective of cities is to “measure time, to remove time from nature,” producing thus
“dimwit time, inferior time.” (P 45) For Elster, “city street” means “conflict,” just as any “other people” do. (P 23) Elster’s dislike of city life is
typical of a cultural antipathy which is as old as urbanization itself. Georg
Simmel, in his Cities and Intellectual Life (Die Großstädte und das
Geistesleben), diagnosed as early as 1903 an intensification and aggravation of the neural or psychological life (“Nervenleben”) among intellectuals due “to the rapid and perpetual change of outward and inner
impressions.”25 While, on the one hand, modern (mass) city life induces
the intellectual to distinguish himself as an individual, his or her heightened “sensitivity” causes him, on the other, to develop a kind of blasé
attitude or arrogance. This surely fits Elster.
The opposition Elster cultivates is rather stale, setting chronological and
measured (if contiguous) time, tantamount to technological progress and
modernity, against a supposedly organic and overarching time, unimpeded
by time management: “Time that precedes us and survives us.” (P 44) This
notion of “enormous” time is, of course, strongly metaphysical and, in spite
of Elster’s resentment, a conceptual brainchild. Remarkably enough, his
subjective sense of time shrinks in the desert: “Time becomes blind.” (P 23)
No longer bound by chronometric time, he feels unrestrained to “absorb”
“the force of geologic time,” and “weathered bone,” (P 19) to descend into
the “protoworld” and ponder “the nature of later extinctions.” In fact, it is
the spaciousness of the landscape (into which he immerses himself) which
inspires his “current theme” of “extinction,”26 along with and in contrast
to “claustrophobia.” Evidently, this was caused by his pentagon work as a
“war intellectual”: “War,” he claims, creates a “closed world” for all, the
“plotters” and “strategists” included. “In those rooms, with those men” a
hermetic and auto-poietic world of “rationalizations” (P 30) prevailed over
the visceral haiku-war he wanted to wage. Elster’s claustrophobia may also
130 Point Omega
point to his occupation with the term “rendition,” on which he has written
an essay. In this, he analyzed the diachronic and synchronic semantics of
the word to focus particularly on two or three of its meanings, the rendering (or plastering) of a wall of a “walled enclosure” and the “enhanced
interrogation techniques” (P 33) within those “covert prisons.” People are
forcefully badgered to “surrender” (also a meaning of rendition). The historical context is well-known. During the “war against terrorism” the
United States maintained for legal reasons “rendition prisons” or “black
sites” outside of its territory, most notoriously in Guantanamo: “Within
those walls, somewhere, in seclusion, a drama is being enacted […] actors
naked […] the renderers […] a revenge play that reflects the mass will and
interprets the shadowy need of an entire nation, ours.” (P 34)
The essay is informed by an apodictic tone of inevitability: “In future
years, of course, men and women, in cubicles, will be listening […].”
(P 33) Accordingly, he interprets the staunch American war on terror as a
fateful drama in which all actors are inexorably driven to accomplish
their gruesome part. The determination to take revenge at all (legal) costs
(for the certainly barbarous attacks in 2001) can indeed be interpreted as
a premodern political response to an archaic and irrational desire, which,
without alternative, had to be satisfied. Finley is not sure whether Elster
means it, romanticizing “the shameful subject,” or whether the semantic
exercise on variations of “rendition” is an ironic whim.
Yet Elster’s teleological (and morbid) weltanschauung is based on a
regressive naturalism. By comparing “the evolution of a word to that of
organic matter,” (P 34) language and consciousness become material facts
and processes that evolve autonomously on their own. “Rendition,” then,
materialized in military torture and destruction – and human consciousness heading for its own extinction at large, or dissolution in timeless
space, cannot be helped.
It is rather enigmatic why Don DeLillo has Elster quote Teilhard de
Chardin as his crown witness. (P 51)27 Perhaps, Teilhard’s all-encompassing
(and eccentric) super-theory, which purports to reconcile science and religion, may have seemed the only construct befitting the self-important war
intellectual. The linchpin, however, of Teilhard’s theory, besides evolution
and Christology, is consciousness (or, rather its apotheosis), that is, the
human ability to go beyond or transcend oneself and to thereby create all
kinds of reflecting and reflective cultural artifices. Taking the (indeed mysterious) emergence of consciousness out of matter as a starting point, Teilhard
proposes a progressive coming-into-itself of consciousness: “The consciousness of each of us is evolution looking at itself and reflecting upon itself.”28
After the evolutionary phases of “geogenesis” and “biogenesis,” grown into
“psychogenesis,” we live in an increasingly complex state of “noogenesis.”
The noosphere then forms “a thinking layer of the earth” or “circumterrestrial layers.” The teleological function of the noosphere and Teilhard’s central point is “Survival” – as opposed to Elster’s “extinction.”29
Point Omega 131
The noosphere unites or hyperlinks the individual with the general
(converges all consciousnesses and all the conscious) in a “super-consciousness” which culminates in the “Hyper-Personal – at the Omega
Point.” At the Omega Point, the universe reflects upon itself, transcends
time and space, and becomes “independent of the collapse of the [evolutionary] forces.” Accordingly, “something in the cosmos escapes from
entropy.” The mutually energetic momentum among consciousnesses,
and here Teilhard’s Christian belief comes in, is love, and, eventually, an
“extra-human energy,” namely the Christian phenomenon. When the
omega point, the complexity and centralization of all consciousnesses,
reaches its endpoint, and, concomitantly, the material world perishes; all
will be sublated in “God-Omega.” In Christ, who not only presents the
most sublime form of love but also the oneness of the spiritual and the
material, the telos of Omega fulfills itself. Survival is maintained.30
This is incompatible with Elster’s statements. For Teilhard, noogenesis
is an ontotheological reality. Elster, in contrast, does not see in God and
consciousness the prime movers and telos of being, but in matter: “Matter
wants to lose its consciousness.” He actually believes civilization is driven
to rid itself of “the burden of consciousness.” This he can claim because
his anthropology is fundamentally materialist, and consciousness only a
burdensome and contingent epiphenomenon: “We want to be the dead
matter we used to be.”
Teilhard’s panentheism wants to overcome time and space; evolution
for him is essentially the movement toward eternal life in Christ. It constitutes a positive eschatological (or millenarian) apocalypse. Elster’s evolution comes down to an abandonment to space (i.e., movement toward
death). Teilhard, who fought in the First World War, wants to salvage
mankind in the face of the possible destruction of the earth, Elster appears
to welcome the end: “Time to close it all down.” The Iraq war and
“nuclear flirtations,” he brags, are “[l]ittle whispers” (P 50) in comparison to what he expects to come. Elster, the urban neurotic and frustrated
war designer, is deeply pessimistic about the “condition humaine” and
tired of civilization to the degree that he appears to wish for “the last
flare.” When he thus gives Teilhard a Freudian twist, he entirely misconstrues the Jesuit’s intentions: “Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to
inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in field.”
(P 53) This is Caillois, rather than Teilhard. In the above-mentioned essay,
Caillois quotes from Gustave Flaubert’s “La Tentation de Saint-Antoine”:
Anthony wants “to descend into the heart of matter – to be matter.” It
evokes in Caillois’s Freudian interpretation: “the return to an original
insensate condition and prenatal unconsciousness.”31
Elster’s Anza-Borrego desert forms the ideal space for the frustrated life
philosopher to give in precisely to what Caillois diagnoses (against
Bergson) as “the inertia of the elan vital,” exhausted as human progress
seems. Here he can nurture his obsession with transience and perishability.
132 Point Omega
True life, he thinks, takes place in the subconscious “moment” in which
the self knows “that it will not live forever.” (P 63) Thus, feeling that time
is “falling away,” (P 72) he reasserts his theory of an intentional will not
to power but to extinction: “We want it to happen. Some paroxysm. […]
We pass completely out of being. Stones.”32
What follows, though, is a deeply ironic deconstruction of Elster’s selfpleasing apocalypticism. His daughter, vanishing without a trace in the
desert, seems (although mysteriously) to individually fulfill his conception. The fact that she is not found in the space, Finley’s experience of
stillness and nothingness among the rocks, and more significantly, a knife
lacking any residue of blood or fingerprint, are, if vaguely, suggestive of
her disappearance in the vastness and depth of the place. But in the face
of the real – of death – Finley brings the speculation back down to earth:
“The omega point has narrowed, here and now, to the point of a knife as
it enters a body. All the man’s grand themes funneled down to local grief,
one body, out there somewhere, or not.” (P 98)
The irony manifests itself in Elster’s utter personal disintegration and
depersonalization. It begins with the spatial and perceptual disorientation of the theorist of geological space. He becomes insecure about his
immediate environment, develops “a fear from one step to the next,” and
sees things that are not there and speaks in “fragments.” (P 87) He “no
longer knows what to do” with himself, to use Caillois’s language again.33
His apparently (spatiotemporally) unlimited desert now bears him down
and tightly “hems” him in. What he is “left with” are “lost times and
spaces.” (P 88) He turns inwardly and actually reaches a state in which
his consciousness, yet not in the way he has hoped for, is about to wane.
To Finley, he now appears “beyond memory”: “One man past knowing.”
(P 99) Along with a “diminished sense of personality and vitality,” and
“inertia of the elan vital,”34 he shrinks physically. His face “sinks” into his
head, he loses weight substantially, and looks like an “x-ray.” The degenerative process he undergoes does not terminate in “paroxysm,” or the
end of consciousness, but in a handful of phlegm, which in classical
humorism was associated with senectitude and the brain. The scene is
singular and proves once more DeLillo’s great art of description:
He ejected the mass finally, hawked it up and spewed it into his open
hand. Then he looked at it wobbling there […], a thick stringy pulsing thing, pearly green. […] I didn’t know what he saw in that handful of mucus but he kept looking.
(P 97)
In T. S. Eliot’s “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” (“The Waste Land,”
1922) the immediate context of the line is indeed a “waste land,” with a
“stony rubbish,” a “dead tree,” a “dry stone.” There is also the “shadow” of
death.35 The larger reference is Ecclesiastes 3:20: “All go to the same place;
Point Omega 133
all come from dust, and to dust all return.” The biblical phrase may have
suggested Elster’s initial geological teleology, as it may have influenced
Freud’s death drive. We don’t know what Elster thought when contemplating the mucus, a product of his very own body, self-engrossed and reduced as
it is. If he saw no foreshadowing of his own death, he may have realized how
much, in the real face of death, his “Point Omega” has become “dead echo
now.” Finley takes Elster back to noisy New York to Jessica’s mother, who he
hopes will take care of Elster. The sublime is never too far removed from the
ludicrous; this is one of the many things the novel shows us.
Notes
1 This, in the phenomenology of inner time sense, may well be experienced as
“pure time.” (P 6)
2 See Catherine Gander, “The art of being out of time in Don DeLillo’s Point
Omega,” in Don DeLillo: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, eds. Katherine
da Cunha Lewin and Kiron Ward (London and New York: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2018), pos 2887: “narratively and historically suspended, the
novel crafts a pocket of ‘non-time Space’ that both escapes and enacts the
transitional disorientation produced by shifts in era, or changes of phase.”
Gander quotes Hannah Arendt here.
3 Roger Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” in The Edge of
Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, ed. Claudine Frank (Durham/London:
Duke UP, 2003), 91–103.
4 Ibid., 96.
5 Ibid., 99.
6 Ibid., 97, 100.
7 Ibid., 102.
8 Mark Meyers, “Secret Societies, Animal Mimicry, and the Cultural History of
Early French Postmodernism,” Journal of the Western Society for French
History 42, (2014): 126–34, here: 130.
9 Caillois 2003, 99–100.
10 It is noteworthy that Freud, on a more fundamental biological level, puts
traumatic neurosis down to “an extensive rupture of the barrier against stimuli.” “Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920),” 155.
11 Jacques Lacan, Écrits, Trans. Bruce Fink (New York/London: Norton, 2006), 75–81.
12 Lacan, Écrits, 76–77.
13 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II. The Ego in Freud’s
Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–1955, ed. Jacques-Alain
Miller (New York/London: Norton, 1991), 166–7. I am here indebted to
Peter Geble’s clarifying essay “Der Mimese-Komplex,” ilinx 2, (2011): 185–
95, 183–4.
14 I am referring here again to Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.”
15 Lacan 2006, 77.
16 When the woman, who may turn out to be the victim of his psychotic mimicry, is speaking to him, he is utterly confused: “that was sort of never supposed to happen. Being spoken to. This woman standing somehow next to
him was changing every rule of separation.” (P 105)
17 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London:
The Athlone Press, 1997), 111. The German original is more straightforward
and clearer: “daß, was sich gleichmacht, [wird] nicht gleich,” Ästhetische
Theorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973), 169.
134 Point Omega
18 See also Max Horkheimer and Theodor. W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1990), 180. Cf. Josef Früchtl,
Mimesis, Konstellation eines Zentralbegriff bei Adorno (Würzburg:
Könighausen & Neumann, 1986), 33.
19 Früchtl 1986, 34.
20 Caillois 2003, 103, 102.
21 See https://www.worldbirds.org/fly-symbolism/
22 I refer here to the Reception Theory (Ingarden, Iser).
23 Caillois 2003, 99.
24 “We tried to create new realities overnight, careful sets of words that resemble advertising slogans in memorability and repeatability.” (P 28–9)
25 Georg Simmel, Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
2006), 9 (my translation).
26 Elster was called by the Pentagon, when lecturing on “what he called the
dream of extinction” in Zürich. (P 36)
27 David Cowart recognizes in Elster’s speculations “the denial or mockery of
Teilhard’s thinking.” See his “The Lady Vanishes: Don DeLillo’s Point
Omega,” Contemporary Literature 53, no. 1 (2012): 47.
28 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper,
1959), 221, 226, passim.
29 Ibid., 181, 226, 235.
30 Ibid., 251, 260, 270, 271, 288.
31 Caillois 2003, 101–2.
32 Notably, he briefly contemplates the “mystical” possibility that “stones have
being.” (P 73) Stones in their relative persistence have always been objects of
mystical, mythological, esoteric, and aesthetic attributions. Through their
simple and often beautifully complex presence, they have shown to be suited
to philosophical meditations. Don DeLillo will elaborately thematize an
(exhibited) stone in Zero K. See also Roger Caillois, The Writing of Stones
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1985).
33 Caillois 2003, 99.
34 Ibid., 101–2.
35 T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems (New York: Penguin, 1998),
55–6.
8
Zero K
The Ideology and Aesthetics
of Immortality
Cryonics and a Tale of Two Worlds
Cryobiologists (in action) or cryonicists (in theory) are technocratic optimists, of course, only where their own future is concerned. For them,
“Death” is merely due to some medical dysfunction which may be sorted
out any time soon. “The body,” according to the founder of the movement, Robert C. W. Ettinger, “can be thought of as dead, but not very
dead.”1 This may sound a little unsettling, but the body, one should presume, must indeed not be very dead before it is put on or, rather, in ice. A
body already passed into advanced putrefaction would be rather difficult
to restore satisfactorily. But if one adds cryoprotective agents (to inhibit
the cell-damaging effects of ice), cryonicists believe the “not very dead”
and “vitrified” body may then be preserved for decades or centuries until
thawed and restored to youthful health.2 In some not-too-distant future,
nanotechnology, genetics or AI will cure all (hitherto malignant) diseases,
one hopes. Yet, since the body is at one’s technological disposition (and
death no longer a relevant category), it is only of secondary interest. What
is more important is the brain. The neurological hardware with its individual information imprinting must be intact when frozen, hence taken
care of in good time. “Reawakening” without personality and identity
would be pointless.3
Against this background, cryobiologists – as in Don DeLillo’s novel
Zero K – have no ethical problem cryoconserving a human being, whether
dead or alive. Nor have they any difficulty in severing trunk from head
and freezing it separately – hoping, as they credulously do, to overcome
mortality in principle. Yet however optimistic cryonicists may be in technical terms, they are still at odds with current socio-cultural and legal
attitudes toward death as well as a certain skepticism about the medical
promises and larger (individual and collective) consequences. Especially
in a frozen state, one is bound to have no influence on the future; even for
technocrats, it is a highly indeterminate matter and contingent on numerous incalculables.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003289937-8
136 Zero K
DeLillo’s cryonics institute in Zero K – tellingly called “Convergence” –
has been devised to clear up and remove precisely all those conceivable
barriers and doubts still surrounding the cryonics immortality project.
Technologically, the “Convergence” commands “the science of present
and future.” (Z 74) The bodies, according to two of the dynamic communicators of the institution, are “[e]ncased in vitreous matter, refashioned cell by cell, waiting for their time.” (Z 75, see also Z 71) They are,
or pretend to be, rather advanced: “Our devices enter the body dynamically and become the refurbished parts and pathways we need in order to
live again.” (Z 128) For good reasons, the place is located in the remote
and uninhabited steppe somewhere in the southeast of Kazakhstan, near
the border of Kyrgyzstan: “There was nothing else, nowhere else.” (Z 4)
In this isolated wasteland, one does not have to grapple with legal problems and ethical questions about the definition of the time of death, about
reverence or piety for the dead. In the United States, the freezing process
(which in most other countries is generally prohibited) may only be
started if the demise of the person in question has been officially certified.
The criterion is brain death, for the simple fact that a few minutes after
the cessation of the supply of oxygen, the cells become irretrievably damaged and the person discontinues to be one. Yet, as we saw, a somewhat
functioning brain is paramount to successfully “reawakening” the
“patient.” Thus, DeLillo’s compound has been set up in a normative
nowhere land: “beyond the limits of believability and law,” (Z 254) as
Jeffrey Lockhart, the homodiegetic narrator of the novel, remarks.
Yet there is much more to the “Convergence” than technology4 or legal
aspects. The ambition of the enterprise is to set up and promote immortality (via cryonics and biotechnology) by means of an ideological superstructure that goes far beyond material questions. Designed as a total
Gesamtkunstwerk in which aesthetics, architecture, philosophical or psychological discourse, religion and technology converge, the “dome” is to
“make the future” now: “This future, this instant.” (Z 30, 128) The
“Convergence” is an ontological project.
The massive facility was built “with every conceivable safeguard
against system failure,” (Z 129) that is, mostly underground and fortified
in order to withstand all possible geological insecurities, as well as social
or political challenges. “The site is fixed, we are fixed,” (Z 129) another
representative of the “Convergence,” named Ben Ezra by Jeff, explains.
Its buildings are “in hiding, agoraphobically sealed,” (Z 4) Jeff observes.
Agoraphobia denotes a fear of open places, as well as a neurotic defensiveness against gatherings and the public. Under exclusion of the public
and beyond our “risk society,” the immortality project can be implemented and carried out from scratch, unimpeded by the course of time
and history. “History,” Jeffrey’s father Ross explains, “is buried here. […]
We’re outside the limits. We’re forgetting everything we knew.” (Z 30–1)
Rather than to “liminality,” the “Convergence” amounts to an absolute
Zero K 137
crossing of the boundaries of what constitutes human and humanist identity in principle. Thus, total isolation is crucial to the overall scheme of
the Convergence, which, more than the physical elimination of death, is
about the rescindment of “death as a cultural artifact.” (Z 71) As there
has (hitherto) been nothing that determines the human condition more
than death, Ben Ezra is right when he reasserts: “We have fallen outside
of history.” (Z 129)
In order to enforce its transhumanist project, an alliance of the superrich has erected a historical vacuum in which the experience of temporality and contingency – fundamental to our cultural idea of death – can be
dispelled. In a kind of synergetic interplay with the experiential or aesthetic quality of the building and its exhibits, it brings to bear both in
discourse and video the old fear of apocalypse, juxtaposing it with the
mythical desire for eschatology. In contradistinction to a disastrous past
and present, one anticipates a salvific time in which all history and contingent temporality come to our or my end, that is, the end of the chosen few.
We partake of all this through the skeptical eyes of Jeffrey Lockhart
(see, e.g., Z 94), who was asked by Ross to visit the “Convergence” and
see off his frail stepmother (and former land artist) Artis, Ross’s second
wife. Two years after the first visit, he returns, this time to keep Ross
company, who wishes to follow Artis to an adjacent freezer pod. He is
both socially and ideologically a “non-committed” drifter, who lives from
“week to week, year to year […] Job to job, city to city,” (Z 115, see also
209, 218, 220) to put up with the “plotless days and nights” that “had
begun to define” the world “folding up around him.” (Z 187) Mentally
uncertain about his identity and with a somewhat limited self-assuredness, he checks compulsively on his wallet, locks, keys, zipper, or, pedantically, “the expiration dates on bottles and cartons.” (Z 183, 222, 270,
267) Yet his most salient characteristic is his obsession with names.
Obsessively he tries to sort out the identity and narrative of places
(Z 187–8), of the people in the “Convergence” (as of the “Stenmark
twins”) as well as of random people in the streets of New York.5 (Z 210)
Whereas he takes the arbitrariness of naming for granted (disregarding
naming’s identity-establishing power, see Z 82, 95), the “Convergence”
linguists seriously believe they can manufacture the definite scientific and
univocal language, as the quondam Royal Society did: approximating
“the logic and beauty of pure mathematics.” (Z 130)
Jeffrey’s father Ross left his mother Madeline when Jeff was 13. This
may partly explain why the son, now in his 30s, is very critical about his
father’s undertakings (he declines his father’s inheritance); it may also
account for his uncertainty, doubts and questioning. At 14, he develops a
fake limp to make himself “visible” (Z 102) to “recognize” and “define”
himself. (Z 103) As we learn in detail about his ordinary life, especially
when he abandons himself to the fleetingness and vicissitude in the streets
of New York, he serves distinctly as a contrasting background to the
138 Zero K
totalitarian definitude of the “Convergence.” He is given to the unspectacular, “the ordinary moments” that “make the life,” (Z 109, 209) to
temporality and memory: “and we [i.e. Jeff with his sometime lover
Emma] watched a barge being towed downriver, inch by inch, discontinuously, with a few tall structures fragmenting our view.” (Z 193) When
he thinks about his deceased mother, he remembers most of all her devotion to the (seemingly) most trivial household jobs (as removing lint from
cloth, Z 109), which she does minutely along “the simple timelines that
shaped the day.” (Z 106)
The narrative constellation of the novel appears rather simple: here the
temporally open, fleeting and contingent everyday world of Jeff, who
accepts the passage of time and public space, and there the closed world
of the “Convergence,” which aspires to a state beyond temporality. But
there are, however, moments in the institute when Jeff begins to falter
about his rejection of cryonics, which yields a more nuanced picture. In
the hospital section of the “Convergence,” Jeff comes across a fearfully
ravaged boy, his body twisted to a degree that he is unable to speak or
move except mouth and eyes. Jeff feels genuine pity for the creature and
ponders on the chance that someday technology might nevertheless
enable the boy to lead a life worth living: “How could I fail to consider
the idea, even in my deep skepticism?” (Z 94) Even the doubtful Jeff cannot rule out (the contingent moments of) future possibilities. The relativization of his doubts makes Jeff not only a more reliable narrator, it also
attests to Don DeLillo a non-biased approach to the subject.6
In the New York world of contingency, existentially devastating events
may unexpectedly and unnecessarily occur. There are indications of terror in the streets of New York. (Z 179) Jeff’s partner Emma’s adopted son
Stak bets on terrorism and disaster, (Z 194) gets gradually absorbed in a
mentality of martial (self-)sacrifice and runs away to die in the war in the
Eastern Ukraine. The video transmission of Stak’s death in the halls of the
“Convergence” is part of its manipulative strategy, but the intertwining
of the two worlds adds to the irony and complexity of the whole novel.
Yet the “Convergence” is supposed, above all, to eliminate complexity.
Immortality and salvation do not get along with ambiguity and doubt.
End Time: Apocalypse and Eschatology
In Underworld, an anonymous American, or the allegorical American
voice (ostensibly by the matchday announcer) sets the tone for an epic
narrative that is imbued with apocalypse and death. Similarly, Zero K
begins with a sentence that resonates like a thunderbolt motto through
the rest of the novel: Everybody wants to own the end of the world. (Z 3,
italics in original) The remark, which Jeff remembers during his first visit
to the “Convergence,” is Ross Lockhart’s, who had “conjured” it “from
this same stark terrain.” Ross, a prominent financial billionaire, acts as
Zero K 139
the chief backer of the “Convergence.” He has made his money by investing (i.e., betting), among other things, in risk management and natural
disaster. (Z 14)
Ross’s apodictic statement should not be understood in a spatial sense
only. It is much more about the desire to command and possess the temporal end of the world. The “Convergence” is about “money and immortality,” (Z 76, my italics) with the emphasis on the latter. It proves to be a
focal point for post-capitalist profiteers with – almost – unlimited global
possibilities but one, namely the hegemony over human finitude. This
desire is due to the realization of the scandalous discrepancy between the
brevity of an individual human life and the length of everything before
and after that: “Think of your life span […] Think of the age of the earth
[…] Think of […] the age of the universe. […] And us, you and me. We
live and die in a flash.” (Z 34) Ross’s anaphoric use of “think,” the climactic rhetoric and the opposition of “billions of years” and “a flash” stress
the indignation about his own tininess and insignificance. Thus, in Zero
K we come upon the same figure of thought as in White Noise. Modern
humans are in the metaphysical position to realize the vast disparity
between their life-time (“Lebenszeit”) and world-time (“Weltzeit”). For
Hans Blumenberg, this led, as we saw, to a profound anthropological
offense. Especially for those who can afford everything, the knowledge
that their spheres of action may be curtailed is very difficult to bear. In
respect of their death and after, they are denied ever more7 spaces of
effectiveness built to last against the very terror of death. Instead, these
spaces will subsequently go to someone else who will then benefit and
even supersede their legacy.8 History or the way of the world may well be
indifferent to them; the banal quotidian events will take their course,
irrespective of individual lives. They may just as well have not existed.9
This aspect (the prospect of ontological nothingness) surely also accounts
for the endeavors in the desert of Kazakhstan. They are to enforce a “convergence” of one’s individual and definite life span and the time of what
exists (in all indefinite future) apart from me.
Against this background, the anticipatory theorizing in the “Convergence”
is quite understandable: “Are we adjusting the future, moving it into our
immediate time frame?” (Z 66), a man called Miklos Szabo by Jeff rhetorically asks. “We are here,” he continues, “to reconsider everything about
life’s end. And we will emerge in cyberhuman form into a universe that will
speak to us in a very different way.” (Z 67) When the future has been
absorbed by the cryonicists, the universe will be no longer indifferent; it
will turn toward them. The ontic and depressing perspective of modernity
(to be insignificant) will be reversed. Rather than rewriting “the future, all
our futures” and ending “with a single empty page,” the Stenmark twins,
two of the chief theoreticians, clearly favor the other “possibility”: to
be “among those few who altered all life on the planet, for all life to
come.” (Z 71)
140 Zero K
In order to “alter” all future “life” (and no longer to be at the mercy of
contingency), Western culture has come up with time-referenced ideas that
are basically religious. Worldly time is to be superseded by transcendent
time and sacred space (or, in maniac and demiurgic versions, nothingness),
in which the chosen will not die for good. This implies and requires a
status of almightiness, which forms an additional motivation. The mere
prolongation of life will not do. This ambition, according to Blumenberg,
was first spelled out in Adam’s myth of the Garden of Eden. Adam had all
possible options in the paradisal Schlaraffenland, apart from one: “Only
the strongest of all temptations, namely, to be like gods, could outpace the
knowledge of what it means to die; to that end it had to include the expectation to make the time of the world one’s own time.” Only a godlike
mode of being can be imagined to cancel the immense divergence between
“world-time” and “life-time,” the latter ludicrously small in comparison.
The alternative then is either to willfully hasten the apocalypse or, preferably, to not only deliberately prolong lifetime at will but also to be free of
all (natural) bonds and spatio-temporal restrictions.
Accordingly, the “Convergence” is conceived of as a sacred space, which
is to suggest the possibility of a holy time of eschatology (cum salvation and
immortality). This it opposes to contemporary images and evocations of
apocalypse as (non-redemptive) end or final time. “Apocalypse is inherent,”
one of the Stenmarks lectures, “in the structure of time and long-range climate and cosmic upheaval. But are we seeing,” he rhetorically asks, “the
signs of the self-willed inferno?” (Z 243) Given those Manichean scenarios,
it is easy for the cryonic aspirants to look forward to the salvific alternative.
A woman in the audience is full of optimism: “She was eager to slip out of
this life into timeless repose, leaving behind all the shaky complications of
body, mind and personal circumstance.” (Z 244) This is precisely what the
“Convergence” is all about: joyful acceptance of their technological idea of
immortality along with the overcoming of the “complications” of “circumstance.” The Stenmark messages of redemption (based on technology) may
indeed come across more “assured” than those of the “world’s organized
religions.” (Z 74) Accidental “circumstance” (and no necessity to believe)
has long caught up with the established churches.
The Aesthetics of Apocalypse and Eschatology
Video and Corridors
Yet the ideological apparatus of the “Convergence” is not only built on the
rhetoric of its principal evangelists. As in a totalitarian state, its media are
encoded doubly to effectively appeal to and manipulate the sensuous apparatus of the visitors. Videos and the many corridors are to infuse its clients
with the dismal prospect of apocalypse. Architecture and sculpture, including the encased bodies, point at or are supposed to point at eschatology.
Zero K 141
When the newly arrived and “uneasy” Jeffrey Lockhart walks for the
first time the “nearly empty” halls, he sees himself confronted with “a
screen jutting from a niche in the ceiling” that “began to lower, stretching
wall to wall and reaching nearly to the floor.” The screen, much higher
and wider than that of a TV set is to achieve an immediate reality effect
outdoing the customary news program. It shows apocalyptic scenes of
cataclysmic flooding in the wake probably of climate change (to which
the apocalyptic prophets in the “Convergence” also refer). On his “level”
in “front” of him, he sees “temples flooded, homes pitching down hillsides. […] [C]ars and drivers going under. […] a woman sitting life-sized
on a lopsided chair […]. A man, a face, underwater, staring out at me.”
Jeff is overwhelmed and looks for someone in the hall to share the terrifying experience with, yet the “looming” “images” build and cling to him.
(Z 11) During his two stays at the “Convergence,” Jeffrey is repeatedly
assailed by similarly awful end-time scenarios. He has to face tornados
with the casualties “arrayed on many floorboards” and is left with a “[t]
otal wasteland.” The catastrophe is represented both “in slow motion”
and “ultra-real”: the people are coming “this way […] nearly out of the
screen and into the hall.” (Z 36) Another scenario is dominated by an
all-devouring fire that appears “to spring into the camera” and the hallway. (Z 126) The hyper-realistic effect is even augmented and almost
surreal when he observes desperate crowds who try to run away from
some terrible threat, yet actually turn up in the hall. This happens soon
after he has begun to doubt the documentary character of the films. He
suspects that it might be digitally generated. But on a sudden, the runners
come “wheeling around the corner […] images bodied out, spilled from
the screen.” Jeff is bewildered: “They were drenching me, out-thinking
me.” (153) The halls, one should note, are also equipped with surveillance
cameras. Thus, the responses of the prospective patients can be registered
and used for further handling.
The manipulative videos fit well into the overall totalitarian strategy of
the “Convergence.” When reading or watching a film, one usually remains
in a distanced as-if position to receive the related events as fictional and
independent from oneself; we like to watch or read the most horrible
narrative precisely because it does not affect us existentially here and
now. We can relish strong endorphin-induced emotions. In the halls, this
difference is removed. The clients, not yet fully convinced, get absorbed
to the degree that they willy-nilly feel to be part of the disastrous event
itself. They are really frightened. This is totalitarian aisthetics; it aims at
overawing and instrumentalizing its recipients. When Jeff manages to follow a monk into a level where consenting “patients” are finally ready for
cryoconservation, he no longer senses “reverence” and “awe,” but human
“subjects” under disability, “submissive and unstirring […] under the
authority of others.” (Z 93) The screens can be let down or withdrawn ad
libitum. The videos in the halls, with their fast-changing shots, convey a
142 Zero K
world in which the four elements (each video focuses on one) are out of
bounds. Both natural and cultural phenomena are out of control to culminate in a murderous war (in the last video). Jeff, moreover, the recipient, can no longer rely on his perception; even that has become uncertain
for the subject.
The actual fear generated in the hallways is complemented by a more
subcutaneous anxiety or angst that befalls the not yet initiated visitor.
Since the 18th century (paradigmatically since Horace Walpole’s The
Castle of Otranto) corridors or hallways have become a literary topos (a
famous 20th-century filmic example is Kubrick’s adaptions of Stephen
King’s The Shining). This tradition may well have contributed to those
feelings of uneasiness or even eeriness that we connect especially with
empty and darkish corridors in hospitals, castles or hotels.10 But it is also
the architectural structure of the topos or place itself that accounts for its
emotional ambivalence. Usually, corridors, as the ones in the
“Convergence,” are windowless, relatively narrow and confined spaces of
transition or passageways. There are corners, turning into other obscure
corridors. The spatial restriction may cause something like a psychosomatic “constriction” or an existential angst. The confining walls are, of
course, lined with usually closed doors, which may also have an ambivalent emotional effect. Since you do not know what takes place behind
those closed doors (which could open at any unexpected moment), a certain eeriness may arise. Doors, on the other hand, also refer to positive
expectations and possibilities; they may be both passages into an abysmal
future or they may open up a new wealth of choices and freedom. DeLillo
draws on the topos but gives it a Kafkaesque turn. The corridors or “halls”
Jeff must walk consist of “[b]lank walls, no windows, doors widely spaced,
all doors shut.” He feels an “uneasy presence” and tries, without much
success, to locate himself “within the place.” In another hall he finds himself “all alone,” his body “shrinking into the long expanse.” (Z 259) The
walls are “shades of green,” the doors with “slivers of the spectrum.”
(Z 10) But what he finds really unsettling is that there is actually nothing
behind most of the doors: “The halls were pure design, the doors simply
one element in the overarching scheme […] it met the standards of unlikelihood, or daring dumb luck.” (Z 23) Although he was supposed not to
knock he cannot resist (in spite of the cameras). Six doors remain shut,
from the seventh a man appears, telling him: “They are all the wrong
door.” (Z 25) Later on, obviously on another level, he checks again on “ten
or eleven” doors, none opens. He realizes that they are also painted in
“various pastels,” each slightly different from the other (a further one is
“sky-dyed” (Z 234)) and arrives at a discomforting conclusion: “This was
art that belongs to the afterlife. It was art that accompanies last things,
simple, dreamlike and delirious. You’re dead, it said.” (Z 119)
The halls and doors can be read allegorically, reminiscent of the choice
of caskets or doors in the traditional fairy tale. Jeff is reminded of a
Zero K 143
“children’s story.” (Z 235) They are about chance, the vicissitudes of existence or, in other words, contingency. You may be of Fate’s or Fortuna’s
choice, or, more likely, not; perhaps one is among the chosen, but more
probably among the doomed. Fortune offers possibilities but will not
necessarily make them come true. The “Convergence,” physically by way
of its sky-dyed or green and blue pastel corridors, purports to offer
unlimited freedom, the unbound freedom of possibilities at large, through
immortality. But for the transitional passenger (and solvent patient-tobe), the doors or passageways into eternal life do not necessarily open.
The doors may and are expected to open, which is their very purpose and
immanent possibility, but they do not necessarily open. It is contingent on
those who decide upon the very possibility of possibilities; only they can
eventually master contingency and fateful existence. The hopeful passenger, generally disposed to fear, angst and uncertainty in a “risk society,” is
shown quite plainly that the anticipated salvation becomes only a necessity if one submits to their techno-eschatological imperative. Only the
“Convergence” can offer the definite entrance and the prospect of deliverance.
Architecture and Sculpture
Immortalists and all kinds of transhumanists want to cut off human
development from nature, genetics and evolution, that is, the given actuality that hitherto proved uncontrollable and not at one’s disposal. The
fundamental rational is to prevail over the “complexities” of temporality.
Classical aesthetics can be seen as (a more subtle) ideological precursor of
that desire. William Butler Yeats, one of the many modernists haunted by
death and obsessed with esoteric and aesthetic ideas of immortality,11
wanted the Byzantine work of art to break the “Bitter furies of complexity.” “Once out of nature,” he declared, “I shall never take/My bodily
form from any natural thing.” In fact, his ideal was a self-contained and
self-referential work of art beyond the “fury” and “complexity” of
modernity and the contingent transience of natural becoming and passing: “Monuments of its own magnificence.” Yeats’s “form” that “sits
upon a golden bough”12 resembles, as we shall see, very much the corpses
in the freezing plants of the “Convergence.” However, Yeats’s “Golden
Bird,” as Keats’s “Grecian Urn,” is at the same time marked by a troubling ambivalence; they are and remain always also “still,” lifeless and
frozen, as the frozen bodies in their cases. In spite of themselves, they
carry a tinge of memento mori, imbued, as they are, with a premonition
of death.
The “Convergence” moves along that prescribed path and combines
(“converges”) aesthetics with technology and rhetoric. Against the world
of ekstasis, in which, as in the videos, everything is on the move to desperately (and unsuccessfully) escape the Flood, the Armageddon Fire and
suffocation, the Convergence sets an Apollonian world of atemporality
144 Zero K
and stasis. Their clients, having been exposed to the bewildering end-time
scenarios, both natural and political, should be well-disposed to this
eschatological alternative.
The secluded facility is designed as a Gesamtkunstwerk. Its overall
architecture fits well with its interior particulars, with the dominant discourse (especially when it concerns death and technology) along with the
appearance, the voicing and sound, the look and feel of the stored dead.
When Jeff first arrives, he beholds something like a “city to be discovered
for a future time, self-contained, well-preserved, nameless […]. These were
buildings in hiding, agoraphobically sealed […] hushed and somber […]
designed to fold into themselves.” (Z 4–5) The aesthetics of the structure
focuses on form, avoiding as much as possible references to contents of
previous circumstances. It is a “model,” Jeff observes on his second visit,
“of shape and form […] set securely nowhere.” (Z 229) The place is
detached to the degree that even in the present it comes across like a sacred
archeological site, withdrawn and cloistered away from the temporal
world. Ross, referring to his soon-to-be cryopreserved second wife Artis
(the former archeologist and land artist), makes the connection between
art and death explicit. He demands “respect” for the place: “a form of
earth art, land art […] [d]efined by stillness, both human and environmental. A little tomblike as well.” And he reverses Gen. 3:19 (“unto dust shalt
thou return”) adequately: “Return to the earth, emerge from the earth.”
(Z 10)13 In the Old Testament, the original words are, of course, spoken
by God to Adam and Eve, after they have eaten the forbidden fruit. The
consequence was knowledge, including the knowledge about human mortality. Ross and his kind are driven by the concomitant hope of becoming
godlike, and, thereby, to make the time of the world one’s own time.
The tellingly named Artis has internalized the “Convergence” aesthetics to the core. In one sense, she says, she is “leaving,” (Z 50) but in
another sense, she is “[s]taying and waiting. The only thing that’s not
ephemeral is the art. It’s not made for an audience. It’s made simply to be
here. It’s here, it’s fixed, it’s part of the foundation, set in stone.” (Z 51)
Here art is not a social fact; it is self-contained in the sense that it needs
no “audience” or interpretation. Whereas traditional art, “purposeless”
as it may or may not be, attains its communicative significance precisely
from its self-containment, the “Convergence” foregoes the free play of
the recipient’s mind and soul (Kant’s “freies Spiel der Gemütskräfte”). It
has stripped off art’s meaningful relationality in a totalitarian manner.
Aesthetic openness is susceptible, after all, to contingency. In order to not
be “ephemeral,” the “Convergence” must be like a self-referentially closed
system, representing performatively what it does and means; its message
is “foreverness.” Closure and determinacy are to supplant free receptivity
and indeterminacy.
The classical ideology of art, especially sculpture, is to foreshadow an
eschatology of worldlessness. Here, art, in its ideological doubleness, is
Zero K 145
not only to euphemize and lure into a state beyond earthly life, it also
serves as a medium to instill fear of life. Life is to be bodily felt as lifetoward-death. This ambiguity of death in life or life in death permeates
throughout the cryonic institute. Cryopreservation consists, after all, in
first killing a person or nearly killing a person, and then keeping the
person, at least for the time being, in a state of abiosis. Fear of life is to
encourage the acceptance of cryonic torpor. An, albeit trivial, variation
on this form of art is quite plainly shown to Jeff when he first walks the
disconcerting corridors. He turns the corner and unexpectedly comes
upon a “recess” in the wall, which holds, “rooted to the floor,” a “torso,
a thing fixed in space […] a Mannequin, naked, hairless, without facial
features.” On the one hand, the female statue displays – at least for Jeff –
some erotic appeal. He is tempted to touch its breasts, he notices with
some astonishment. Its posture, on the other hand, signals “self-defense”
and “withdrawal,” one foot in a rearward movement, away from the
consternating outside of the hall to the promising inside. Jeff is struck by
“the stillness of the figure” and “the empty face.” (Z 24–5) The strategic
(or manipulative) function of the figure, an (inverted) vanitas figure, is
obvious. It is unsettling and exerts some erotic appeal. Its facelessness
points to depersonalization and anonymity, its fixation and stillness to
timelessness. Devoid of its profane features, it is ready to enter the passage to the realm of the (un-)dead. Here Rilke’s famous line from the
Duino Elegies comes literally true: “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.”
In one of the lecture rooms, an oversized skull is on display, the eyes
“rimmed with jewels,” the teeth silver-colored. Its skullcap is shaped like a
“golden flock” of “many tiny birds.” (Z 63) Even though this is probably
the only piece of art brought from outside, “the skull seemed right at
home.” (Z 68) An “imposing” piece of postmortem art, it presents an
unlikely combination of Damien Hirst’s “For the love of God” and Yeats’s
Byzantium birds – a postmodern-archaic version of the early modern
memento mori and the symbolism of artistic immortality in modernism:
the sensation of the fear of death linked with the diamond hope of being
“reborn,” as Artis puts it, into a brilliantly lit “deeper and truer reality,” in
which “ever after” everything appears “in its fullness, a holy object.” (Z 47)
A peculiar memento mori still life that virtually embodies all the
ambivalence of “Convergence” is located in an entirely homogeneous
room, the walls, floor and ceiling of which are made of smooth white
marble. The bare monochrome site first appears to Jeff as the “stone
cold” work of art itself, until he becomes aware of a small, seated and
living “figure in stillness” dressed in white, one arm raised to the neck,
eyes closed. He cannot make out his or her sex, and only assume that she
is young. It becomes clear that the icy and grand space was solely designed
for this deindividualized figure, which is striking through its conspicuous
inconspicuousness. The plain, yet breathing artwork defies all meaning
146 Zero K
for Jeff: “Meaning was exhausted in the figure itself, the sight itself.” The
“empty method” of the transrational artifice once again comes down to
a certain aisthetic attraction along with cognitive consternation by refusing any extraneous reference, signifying nothing. This is, of course, not
uncharacteristic for (modern) art, but given the overall context and purpose of the “Convergence,” it must leave the recipient dumbfounded and
emptied out. (Z 148–9) In such a place, the refusal of meaning (the relation to world and history) can easily amount to an existential abyss. The
work of art (any artwork) conceals itself to some degree, yet it can unfold
itself only through a free interplay between “concealment” and “unconcealment,” to use the terms of Heidegger. Here there is the mere alternative of life-in-death or death-in-life; there is no knowledge or truth.
The emptiness of the living sculpture becomes more distinct in contradistinction to the children with special needs in a New York school where
Emma teaches and which Jeff comes to visit. Infirm or handicapped as the
boys and girls are, he perceives “lively and engaged” kids, “trying to
absorb a sense of the lives that were in the act of happening.” (Z 189)
One girl in particular engages his attention. She has “a natural blush on
her face, an intent look,” is occupied with a jigsaw puzzle, but needs regular and irregular support. She cannot take a step without attacks of fear:
“Some days are better than others,” Emma explains. He surely has the
“Convergence” in mind when he tells himself: “She was not a metaphor.”
The very imperfection, the existential openness and simple acceptance of
being-there constitute a lived opposite to the cryonics institution.
Contingency here is a matter of fact.
Jeff, however, scarred by the early leaving of his father and, very likely, the
experience of the “Convergence,” cannot be led back “into the life itself.” (Z
190) He leaves early, yet the narrator repeats the heterogeneous temporality
that determines existence proper: “Play a game, make a list, draw a dog, tell
a story, take a step. Some days are better than others.” (Z 191)
Heidegger and the Cryonic Transhumanists: “Man Alone Exists”
Heidegger as Antithesis: Existentialism
The novel’s most memorable and distinctive encounter with art is also set
in New York. Jeffrey and Emma are out in the city with Stak, who, in
some unresolved adolescent crisis, refuses to go to school and appears to
be in want of some care and encouragement. One of Jeff’s attempts to
that effect is, astonishingly enough, through a Heidegger quotation:
“Man alone exists. Rocks are, but they do not exist. Trees are, but they
do not exist. Horses are, but they do not exist.” (Z 213) The statement
(which he continues a little later with “God is, but he does not exist.”)
had only “very recently” come back to Jeff on occasion of a large interior
rock sculpture in a New York art gallery, in which the boulder occupies
Zero K 147
an entire floor. Yet the context in which the anaphoric sentences turn up
is actually not related to art.14 Heidegger’s “Introduction” is concerned
with “man,” as the being “which is in the mode of existence.”15 It serves
as an explanatory note to Was ist Metaphysik (“What is Metaphysics”)
as well as Sein und Zeit (“Being and Time”). The overall subject is the
fundamentally metaphysical state of human beings, their exposedness to
and within being, care, and being-toward-death. Thus, the note does not
actually serve to illuminate the subsequent visit to the rock, which, as a
work of art, has a fundamentally other ontological status as the rock in
the quotation. However, in a novel which raises the most fundamental
questions about our being, mortality and immortality, the reference
should also be taken in Heidegger’s existential sense. The more so since
“rock,” “stone” or “slab” and their semantic connotations are paramount
to the self-concept of the “Convergence,” which takes itself as “a foundation set in stone.” It is appropriate then to deal first with the quote, independently of the “rock” as art, and return to it later.
Heidegger’s existentialist-phenomenological philosophy, as it emerges
from his statement, could indeed serve as an absolute counterdraft to the
transhumanist ideology of the cryonicists. As opposed to the latter, his
analysis of being-there starts out from the premise that there are facts in
the world that are not only given and always already “there,” but also
tantamount to what it means to be human. Jeff, who studied Heidegger
in school, is aware of the implications of the philosopher’s analysis of
being-there. On a trip through New York, he reminds himself and Emma
of the modern “Forgetfulness” of “Dasein.” He realizes that it is “the
minor matters that define us” (Heidegger’s “life-world,” “present-tohand” or “ready-to-hand” things), but complains that “It’s the things we
forget about that tell us who we are.” (Z 172)16 In a marked contrast to
this, the cryonic and other projects to cancel death or willfully manipulate the genome (and therefore birth or natality) would come down to no
less than the radical cancellation of what “Dasein” and Being has hitherto constituted. To sign over one’s mortality to the cryonics would be a
definite case of “inauthenticity” (“Uneigentlichkeit”). “Existentiality,”
Heidegger argues, is “intrinsically (“wesenhaft”) determined by facticity.”17 That is, we are thrown into a world which is always already there;
one can only and must respond to its ontic constitution. The way we do
it is existential.
What, then, does Heidegger want to say by “Man alone exists?” And
what does Jeff want to tell Stak? It obviously means that humans, humans
exclusively, are not only in a position to go reflexively beyond themselves,
they are also ever “held out” and exposed to being-there in, and in relation to, a given situation. On account of this, their “Being-in-the-World,”
“Dasein” is bound to make choices. “Dasein” exists, “stands forth,” in
and through the possibility of itself, to be itself or not to be itself. And
since choices will always concern the future (implicating “opportunity
148 Zero K
costs,” as economists have it), “Dasein” is always ahead of itself.18 We
project ourselves into the future and conceive of ourselves anticipatorily.
Yet any decision involves a non-decision, and guilt in an existential (not
moral) sense. In a contingent world “Dasein” is always in a state of angst
and care, permanently taking care of itself, its environment and others.
And since “Dasein” (or the modern individual) also wants to make a
choice of its own (with not always determinable results) rather than an
another-directed, inauthentic and misguided one (eluding the chatter of
“man”), “Dasein” is called to responsibility and decisiveness. But this
decisiveness (“Entschlossenheit,” vb.: “entschliessen”) attains its existential concern and impact only by virtue of its temporality and finiteness.
“Dasein” assesses and considers its lifespan from birth to death, disclosing (opening up, “erschliessen”) its life – options of its being-there – in a
new and rounded or wholesome way. Death then becomes the outstandingly final possibility against which decisions are made. One, therefore,
considers one’s life and the existential choices one makes in view of the
absolute boundary drawn by death, which will not be someone else’s
death, but one’s very individual death. “Death is the most individual
(“eigenste”) possibility of Dasein.”19 Thereby it summons resoluteness.
While death and, for that matter, contingency may be at the root of
Heidegger’s philosophy, the “Convergence” is all about the promise to do
away with it.
The huge disparity between Heidegger’s thought and the inauthentic
chatter (“Gerede”) of the technocrats, whose feasibility fantasies comprise not only the “thoroughgoing calculability of objects,” but “Dasein”
as a whole, finds a telling expression in one of the Stenmarks’ statements:
“Death is a tough habit to break.” (Z 73) Characteristically, he sees it, not
as an ontic fact, but as “habit” that can be managed: “We want to stretch
the boundaries of what it means to be human – stretch and then surpass.”
(Z 71)20
Yet, there is one person in the novel, Stak, who may be in accordance
with Heidegger’s, certainly ambivalent,21 existentialism. Stak’s fate marks
a highly ironic and ambiguous aspect of the novel, since his radicalization, decision and death are not at all a development that can be morally
endorsed or approved of – even if it forms the most clear-cut alternative
life script or “projection” to the “Forevermore”-scheme of the
“Convergence.” But, as we have already noted, DeLillo’s novels never
lend themselves to simple binary value-oppositions. Stak is a rather
mature 14-year-old boy who was “found” and adopted by Emma in a
Ukrainian children’s home at the age of five. Stak prefers the open, resents
subways and crowds and appears to reject, as Jeff surmises, “all things we
were supposed to tolerate as a way of maintaining our shaky hold on
common order.” (Z 173) Stak, moreover, displays a special attentiveness
to his environment. He listens to the street noise with closed eyes so that
it becomes his sound, scrupulously counts the pigeons, records weather
Zero K 149
data, assiduously learns jujitsu and maintains and cares for the historical
memory of his home, “matching his strong personal recollections of
abandonment with the collective memory of old crimes, the famines engineered by Stalin that killed millions of Ukrainians.” (Z 187) A kind of
frantic revolutionary, he bets on the time frame, number of victims, etc.
of terrorist attacks. The bet, Jeff comments, “makes the event more
likely,” a “force,” Emma adds, “that changes history.” (Z 194) Eventually,
Stak opts out of school and even stops speaking, “ignores faces” and
disappears.
Zero K comprises two climactic scenes, one with almost no action
(Artis’s solipsistic brain in a pod, to which we will return later) and one
(involving Stak) with action in excess, transmitted in a realistic video
footage on one of the screens in a “Convergence” hall. The video shows
the war in the east of Ukraine, a self-defense group fighting the Russiansupported secessionists. Jeff recognizes Stak in a wrecked car, wearing a
headband, yet no helmet. The boy fires but is himself exposed to rapid
rifle fire. He is hit and wanders “out into the open, without his rifle,” he
is repeatedly hit again and “goes to his knees […] shot and bleeding,
stain spreading across his chest, young man, eyes shut, surpassingly
real.” (Z 263) The “kid,” Jeff thinks, “became a country of one.” (264)
Not long before Jeff must witness Stak’s death he had attended one of
the talks in the “Convergence,” which stresses once again the basic difference to Stak’s state of mind: “You [i.e. the ‘Convergence’ residents]
are completely outside the narrative of what we refer to as history. There
are no horizons here.” (K 237) Stak, on the other hand, is the character
in the novel who actively chooses and exposes himself to his historical
“Dasein,” however dubious it may be. He has returned to his very own
historical being, the history of his fateful country Ukraine and grasped
the possibility of “Dasein.” In his resolution he becomes utterly authentic, leaving behind the calculating drabness of “man,” or “shaky hold on
common order.” Opening up his horizon, he comes into his own, he
cares, anticipates and runs ahead toward death. He has made an existential (“existentiell”) choice and therefore history possible. As opposed to
the closed and enclosing “Convergence” he prefers the open, the “unconcealment of being.”22 Stak, notabene, does not represent a preferable
alternative to the “Convergence.” Don DeLillo’s Jeff tells himself quite
clearly that Heidegger had “maintained a firm fellowship with Nazi
principles and ideologies. History everywhere, in black notebooks, and
even the most innocent words, tree, horse, rock, gone dark in the process.” (Z 214) Indeed, historical decisionism has served very well to
legitimize criminal wars and send millions of men and women to
perdition.
Stak’s historical heritage, on the other hand, his displacement and his
early neglect, may have been crucial for his radicalization, but his decision to act is also due to the experience of the rock as art.
150 Zero K
The Rock as Art
The rock sculpture poses a problem both against the background of Jeff’s
quotes and Heidegger’s critical phenomenology of art. If we take a first
look at his thinking about art (in The Origin of the Work of Art), the rock
appears out of place. Heidegger still understood a work of art in the
Greek sense of poiein or poiesis (“to make”).23 DeLillo’s rock has not
been given an artistic form, but, like some objet trouvé (if raw and
unworked), it was found by an artist and placed within a particular space,
“entrissen” or wrested forth from the “earth,” to use Heidegger’s diction.
This artistic act alone (at least in modernism) amounts to a poietic or
transformative act. What matters is that Heidegger not only helps to
understand the work, his language is quite appropriate to stress again the
difference to the “Convergence” ideology, the more so since Heidegger
minimizes and deconstructs the part of the artist or maker.24 While in the
“Convergence” the makers have taken on a megalomaniac, god-like position, in Heidegger the maker becomes a medial subject to the materiality
of being, which is the crucial point. While Heidegger wants to return to
and do justice to (the insuperability of) the “the thingness of the thing,”25
the “Convergence” technocrats think they can prevail over it. The latter
want to penetrate and instrumentalize nature, Heidegger wants to make
clear that nature ever precedes and will eventually defy scientific classification. The first are geared towards a life that “is no longer in transit,”
(Z 123) for the latter transit (change, boundaries, eventualities and necessities) is paramount to life. The “Convergence” people aim at a scientific
logic and pure language “that will not shrink from whatever forms of
objective truth we have never before experienced.” (Z 130) For Heidegger
“objective truth” is one of the most detrimental self-deceptions of the
Western World. The medium of art, interestingly enough, enables us to
re-recognize that notion. As opposed to the Western metaphysics of presence (of which the “Convergence” might be the practical spearhead),
Heidegger puts emphasis on the pragmatic-processual, ever-changing and
perspectival character of our understanding of the world.26 Since understanding is a dynamic act, it is not only dependent on and necessarily
grounded in beings (without which they would be “empty”), one being
may well place “itself in front of another being […],” it may present
“itself as other than it is.”27 What reveals itself to us is simultaneously
grounded in something that denies revealing. Perception is ever prone to
misperception as well as misinterpretation; we cannot take stock of
beings in their entire relationality. Beings then may come forth as unconcealment and likewise as concealment, which may yet conceal and dissemble itself. If there was no simulation (“Verstellen”), “we could not
make mistakes or act mistakenly in regard to beings; we could not go
astray and transgress, and especially could not overreach ourselves.”28
Misunderstanding is intrinsically intertwined with and dependent on
Zero K 151
understanding, understanding on and with misunderstanding. Without
that deceptive grounding, decision-making would not be possible: “Every
decision […] bases itself on something not mastered, something concealed, confusing; else it would never be a decision.”29 Therefore,
Heidegger can pointedly say: “Truth, in its essence, is un-truth.” Truth or
understanding is in a continuous dialectical strife with their opposite,
un-truth (not falsehood, or fake news, to be sure): “Concealing denial is
intended to denote that opposition in the essence of truth which subsists
between clearing and concealing.”
Heidegger puts this mutually dependent and intrinsically intertwined
relation between concealment and unconcealment as an “original” or
“primal” strife between “earth” and “world” – which is paradigmatically
acted out in the work of art. The present continuous is again crucial:
“Setting up a world and setting forth the earth, the work is the instigation
[“Bestreitung”] of the strife in which the unconcealment of beings as a
whole, or truth, is won.”30 Truth comes to happen in the processual mode
of this strife between understanding and its failure, which the work of art
enacts and acts out. It establishes a world – a spatial continuum and
comprehensible context of its own – only insofar as it brings to pass at
the same time its own overdetermined or underdetermined materiality
(i.e., earth), which exceeds conceptual meaning. “The work moves the
earth itself into the open region of the world” and likewise “sets itself
back into it,”31 instigating the never-ending interplay between the effable
and ineffable, the definable and indefinable. The “earth,” or materiality of
being, which is brought forth and at the same time concealed by the work
of art,
shatters every attempt to penetrate it. It causes every merely calculating importunity upon it to turn into destruction. This destruction may
herald itself under the appearance of mastery and of progress in the
form of the technical-scientific objectivation of nature, but this mastery nevertheless remains an impotence of will.32
The technical-scientific self-empowerment of the “Convergence” agents,
and this is no idle speculation, will turn out an “impotence of will,” since
it is bound to fail to definitely penetrate each and every human or nonhuman material at their disposal. They may “exist,” but are made up,
after all, solely by material themselves.33
The fact that rock and stone form a recurrent leitmotif in Zero K is an
important (surely intentional) coincidence. The different modes in which
rock or stone are used and regarded in the “Convergence” and the New
York Gallery sheds a light on the opposing worldviews. In ontological
terms, the rock as a work of art is not a thing. Unlike a thing, the rock is
not just “present-at-hand” and reducible to mere concepts and properties. The rock that forms the work of art is, moreover, distinguished from
152 Zero K
the work material that is used to fabricate tools, “equipment” or “Zeug”:
Equipment, as opposed to art “is determined by usefulness and serviceability,” it “takes into its service that of which it consists: the matter. In
fabricating equipment – e.g., an axe – stone is used, and used up. It disappears into usefulness. The material is all the better and more suitable the
less it resists vanishing in the equipmental being of the equipment.” Its
“reliability” is crucial. In the work of art, on the other hand (in this case,
a rock), no “trace of a work material”34 is left. In the “Convergence”
everything is under the caveat of utilization “present at hand.”
Heidegger would have appreciated DeLillo’s “interior rock sculpture”
(Z 214) in the New York gallery. The “unhoned” (Z 216) boulder, precisely because it has not been worked upon, lets “the earth,” non-objective as it is, all the more “be an earth.”35 Through its displacement, the
rock opens up a singular and primordial world of its very own. It
“worlds,” and is (literally) earth; it displays nothing but – and at the same
time an impenetrably multifaceted – “solid surface, its crags, snags, spurs
and pits.” (Z 216) Don DeLillo’s use of language here is revealing. In his
ekphrastic description of the rock, his prose takes on a mimetic effect.36
At the beginning of the half-sentence, we have the dark vowel “o” ascending (from deep down to the surface) to the high-pitched vowel “i,” which
frames the alliterative repetition of the dark, fricative “s”-consonant.
They, again, frame vowels in one-syllable words. The internal vowel assonance of the “i”s, “u”s and “a”s adds to the poetic effect. The “earth” is
rising into the open of the “world.” The alliterative fricatives may evoke
the frictions of chthonic rock formations, the sound of the “earth” underground. The fricative “crags, snags, spurs and pits” may suggest the geological degradation and abrasion through climate in the course of world
time. This may or may not be, but as in any work of art, the materiality
of literary language carries a sensuously meaningful surplus, which is yet
semantically inexhaustible. “Solid” is derived from the Latin solidus:
“firm, whole, undivided, entire”; it is related to the word “soli,” “single,”
“of, on one’s own”: a solitary rock or “solitaire.” The word “snag” can
also mean “rift” (compatible to Heidegger’s “Riss”) as well as some hidden obstacle one may stumble across; a “spur” can be a small ledge as
well as a spike or trace. A “pit” can be a hole, a fighting space (in which
one pits against something or someone), a trap in which one gets caught
(as in Edgar Allen Poe’s story) or even a scar. The common semantic field
of these words suggests resistance, unruliness and ruggedness. And they
may still point to the ravages of time, the overall transience and perishableness that catches up – even with rocks.
Jeff, consequently, “struggles” to characterize “a chunk of material that
belongs to nature, shaped by forces such as erosion, flowing water, blowing sand, falling rain.” As this material thing “belongs to nature,” it
remains ultimately indeterminable. Yet it nevertheless comes forth to
manifest itself significantly in the “clearing” of the gallery, unfolding the
Zero K 153
immanent intertwining of “earth” (“concealment”) and “world” (“unconcealment” or semantic orientation in the world). It evokes and brings to
bear the world of its natural history, its geographical-genetic evolution
and makes its earthy origin visible only to simultaneously conceal it.
Transformed into an urban space (Z 216), beyond equipmental utility
and purpose, it refers back to its phenomenological suchness. The interplay (“Gegenwendigkeit,” opposition) of cognitive disclosure and material opacity or “self-secluding”37 takes place in a space cleared from
expediency and serviceability. It is the resistance and dialectic relationality of its phenomenal sensuousness and techno-scientific impenetrability
that brings truth to bear. Heidegger refers to the stone material of a Greek
temple, but this may just as well apply to the New York boulder and, by
implication, to the “Convergence” ideology. It is worth quoting at length:
A stone presses downward and manifests its heaviness. But while this
heaviness exerts an opposing pressure upon us it denies us any penetration into it. If we attempt such a penetration by breaking open the
rock, it still does not display in its fragments anything inward that has
been opened up. The stone has instantly withdrawn again into the
same dull pressure and bulk of its fragments. If we try to lay hold of
the stone’s heaviness in another way, by placing the stone on a balance,
we merely bring the heaviness into a form of a calculated weight. This
perhaps very precise determination of the stone remains a number, but
the weight’s burden has escaped us. Color shines and wants only to
shine. When we analyze it in rational terms by measuring its wavelengths, it is gone. It shows itself only when it remains undisclosed and
unexplained.38
When Jeff asks Stak to “[d]efine rock,” the latter betrays an astonishingly
mature conceptual intelligence. Not without irony, he comes up, as a matter of course, with “official” descriptive placeholders or substitutes that
remain external or superficial to the work of art: “Officially let’s say a
rock is a large hard mass of mineral substance lying on the ground or
embedded in the soil.” (Z 216) Yet this objectifying definition is at once
undermined when he enters into a different relation (a “joined form of
object and observer,” Z 215) with the exhibit, addressing the rock as a
person and subject in its own right: “Stak talked to the rock. He told it
that we were looking at it. He referred to us as three members of the species H. sapiens. He said that the rock would outlive us all, probably outlive the species itself.” (Z 216–7) It attains, after all, communicative and
performative properties. Sure, the addressees of his statement may be
primarily the nearby Jeff and Emma. But it is also clear that the rock,
along with its analytical definitory significance, unfolds a sensuous attraction (a random stone in the fields usually does not), a relational-spatial
momentousness and an existential meaning. In comparison to the “living
154 Zero K
sculpture” in the “Convergence,” we see a remarkable ontological inversion. The smooth and undifferentiated exhibit, although somehow
human, “is,” but does not “exist”; the rock does. Thus Stak, to a degree,
disproves the afore statement. The otherwise “elusive” boy cannot help
touching the rock and performs an act of understanding, which is contingent on the being of this very rock.39 It forms a unique specimen; the
“Convergence” scheme consists in deindividualization. The rock engenders resonance, which according to the German sociologist Hartmut
Rosa comprises three steps: touch or affectation, responsivity, and transformation.40 The latter also holds for Stak. The entire space or relationality between time and motion is altered: “The huge gallery area, nearly
bare, and the one prominent object on display lent a significance to the
simplest movement, man or woman, dog or cat.” (Z 217)
One of the most crucial sentences in the novel, though – derived, nota
bene, from a rock – is Stak’s verdict about its temporal relation to the
“species H. sapiens”: The “rock would outlive us all, probably outlive the
species itself.” (Z 216) This is no conceptional truth to be proved right or
wrong, it emerges rather out of Stak’s tactile engagement with the rock.
The crags, striations and furrows of the material boulder in their opposing strife or confrontation with the “knowledge” or “understanding” of
the “Homo sapiens” (who considers rocks as “things” or “equipment”)
bring to bear truth. In itself, Stak’s sentence is surely banal. Yet the
remark, made by a 14-year-old boy, has not only grown out of the close
experience with a work of art. The wider context is American society and
the “Convergence,” which repress or are about to eliminate death and
finitude, forgetful as they are of being. The intuitive perception of an
erosive and slowly eroding stone by a boy makes the reader realize that
the earth, in its “earthiness,” points to a ground that ever precedes us. It
is beyond us and not at our disposal. While geological classification and
objectification remain exterior to any rock as art, in this particular work,
in its relationality with Stak (and strife with the categorizing “world”),
“the happening of truth41 is at work,” art being “the setting-into-work of
truth” as “unconcealment.”42
The narrative context suggests that the rock may well have an existential or “transformational” effect on Stak. Two days after the visit to the
gallery, Emma tells Jeff in despair that “he embraced me and left.” (Z 219)
Stak left, as we know, to join a volunteer self-defense group in Ukraine to
fight against Russian-backed secessionists. He becomes, as Jeff says, “a
country of one” (Z 264) – and is shot dead. We do not know for sure how
far the rock has prompted Stak’s fatal decision. He had long been troubled by the historical suppression and atrocities the Russians had inflicted
upon the Ukrainians. (See Z 187) He had also withdrawn from his
­foster parents. Yet the encounter with sculpture is very likely to have been
the ultimate momentum to act. The transfiguration of the huge space
of the gallery, along with the people inside, attached a new and other
Zero K 155
significance to them. The phenomenological-spatial resonance has clearly
a deeper effect than discursive consideration, however rhetorically clever
it may be.43
Whereas the claustrophobic “Convergence” galleries and spaces exert
a constricting and oppressive impact, the rock gallery resonates lastingly
in a liberating and reassuring way.44 According to Heidegger, “in the
midst of beings, art breaks open an open place, in whose openness everything is other than usual.” Even more than that, it “thrusts up the awesome and at the same time thrusts down the ordinary and what we believe
to be such.”45 What cannot be said of Jeff, is surely true for Stak. Jeff
seeks the ordinary, Stak abandons it, or “thrusts” it “down.” For Stak, the
rock, very much like Heidegger’s Greek Temple, does not “fade away into
the indefinite.” The temple “gathers around itself the unity of those paths
and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing […] acquire
the shape of destiny for human being.” For the Ukrainian boy, the work
of art may signify a “beginning” and “call” to enter “history,” which is
the transporting of people into its appointed task as entry into that people’s endowment.”46 The truth of the stony work of art “is thrown toward
the coming preservers,”47 who Stak felt he had to be a part of. Stak, by
realizing transitoriness, the ultimate death of the human species and the
end of history at large, does what Heidegger has suggested.48 He takes
upon himself the historical responsibility to act – as turgid, politically and
even morally wrong as this may sound.
Art as Untruth
Whereas the resistant rock, “taken out of nature,” resonating through
space, geological and historical time,49 can be said to set up a “clearing”
and “truth,” the “Convergence,” inauthentic as it is, displays trompe
l'oeils, mannequins and pods with vitrified corpses as art or, conversely,
art as encased corpses. Before Jeff continues his nightmarish journey
through the “Convergence,” he sees off his father. Ross, shaved and
stripped of everything “individual,” fades away into corporeal “anonymity.” But even though “all the normal responses” are “dimming down,” he
is still able to murmur, quite tellingly, “gesso on linen.” (Z 251) Gesso is
traditionally used as an oily or acrylic priming coat to prepare a canvas
for further application of paint, inscription, etc. It will adhere more lastingly. There is, of course, some irony here. But Ross’s sub-liminal metaphoric association shows pointedly how successful (self-)delusion through
art as ideology can be even if it aestheticizes death. Jeff is actually not
moved by the absurd spectacle.
Right after that, he is led to a room which feigns an overcoming of
spatial restriction. “All four walls” of the room “were covered with a
continuous painted image of the room itself.” (Z 252) The room, to
increase the expansive effect, is furnished sparsely with “three objects of
156 Zero K
spatial extent,” chairs and a small table. Thereby, the place is to open up
and multiply indefinitely through diminishing perspectivity. We know
this gimmickry from baroque pleasances or the optical-trick drawings of
M.C. Escher; they are at the most a form of decorative art, skillful as it
may be. Art that is not in the service of ideology transcends itself, its location and physical being-there, by resonating on, in the reflection of the
audience, temporally in the ambience and beyond. Here, similar to the
corridors, the visitor is duped into the illusion of endless extension – a
sensuous foretaste of the world to come. But the multidimensionality of
the painted walls is, in terms of aesthetics (as experience), only onedimensional. The “Convergence” idea of “forevermore” is illustrated
only in an obtrusive and blatant manner. The mural plus the (surely
intentionally scant) installation does not affect the visitor, nor does it
effect some transformation. It elicits at most some “phenomenology,” to
which, Jeff thinks, he “wasn’t equal.” (Z 252) The shallow artifice undermines its own high-blown message.
On another earlier occasion of his “random” walks, Jeff comes across
another artificial setting, a “walled garden,” which, prima facie, purports
to be some amenity. It leads, however, as it turns out, to an annexed crypt.
The arrangement is again in accordance with the overall scheme to please
and to frighten by rekindling the “angst” of death and perishing. The
walled garden seems like a fully fledged English garden, but “[N]one of
this was natural,” a breeze leaves the trees and hedges completely “unruffled.” (Z 122) The whole equipment has “museum quality,” yet is fabricated of “plastic or fiberglass.” The mock garden is open to the sky and
one might have grown real plants, but that would not go together with
the ideology of a space beyond earthly contingency. The garden must be
exempt of all resonance, affectation and responsivity; ambiguity and
doubt must be foreclosed. It is Ben Ezra’s “post-apocalyptic garden.”
(125) He is seated like a “still figure” under a tall oak on a bench that
resembles a “church pew.” Ben Ezra, already in a transfixed mood of
otherworldliness, reiterates the binary dichotomy of the apocalyptic state
of the world and an eschatology free of the “flatlines” of history and time.
(Z 130) His insistence on an entirely determinate and unequivocal language, devoid of all figurative speech,50 does in fact betray a basically
hostile and instrumental relationship to art along with an anxiety of difference and the incalculable liminal.
This linguistic attitude is, in accordance with its aesthetics, anti-cultural in principle. For Heidegger, and many other modernists, it is precisely the indeterminacy, ambiguity and uncatchable overdetermination
of art/poetry which, by creating new lanes (“Bahnen”) and relations
between propositions/utterances and ideas/concepts, will engender new
understandings of the world. Art or poetry by virtue of their signifiers
mark an event through which everything may alter. The new “clearing”
will, however, remain indeterminate and (and due to its very temporality)
Zero K 157
subject to “différance”51 itself, thus ultimately revealing to us the finitude
of our mind and, by implication, of our being. At the basis of our cognitions, there is always something else of which we remain ignorant in the
process of cognition.52 Our knowledge is limited, so is our existence.
It is quite in line with this thinking when Jeff replies to Ben Ezra’s
cognitive megalomania:
“‘[…] it’s also true that what we don’t know is what makes us human.
And there’s no end to not knowing.’ […]
‘And no end to not living forever.’ […]
‘If someone or something has no beginning, then I can believe that
he, she or it has no end. But if you’re born or hatched or sprouted,
then your days are already numbered.’”
(Z 131)
In response to this hardly refutable deconstruction of the “forevermore”
ideology, Ben Ezra can only resort to (an albeit beautiful piece of) psychology, Sir Thomas Browne’s observations on “melancholy” which
seizes “man” faced with “the end of his nature.” (Z 131)
When Ben Ezra sets out to fantasize esoterically about the “world
hum,” (Z 132) Jeff leaves the sermonizer behind to encounter in the gated
section of the garden what he takes to be “sentinels.” They turn out to be
featureless mannequins, naked and sexless, firmly rooted figures in a
willed “stillness.” Jeff is intimidated and frightened by the partly incomplete, plastic “strong dumbstruck objects” that seem to belong “here.”
Apparently, they are to pose as guardians and, by the same token, beckon
the yet undecided visitor into an underground crypt of “cracked gray
stone.” The crypt or, rather, “catacomb” is stacked with numerous other
mannequins in niches. Mannequins, we should remember, form a leitmotif of the novel, to bring out the binary division the “Convergence” ideology is based on. The two women in “Chadors. Or burquas” at the
entrance of the complex are mannequins, meant to offer the “first glimpse
of art.” (Z 52) They make a good contrast to the immaculately naked
bodies in pods. The underground bodies here display “features, all worn
down, eroded […] ruined faces […] shriveled hands.” They appear “mummified, desiccated.” When he moves on he is dazzled by a “floating white
light”:
Here were figures submerged in a pit, mannequins in convoluted
mass, naked, arms jutting, heads horribly twisted, bare skulls, an
entanglement of tumbled forms with jointed limbs and bodies, neutered humans, men and women stripped of identity, faces blank
except for one unpigmented figure, albino, staring at me, pink eyes
flashing.
(Z 134)
158 Zero K
Except for the pods in themselves, this is probably the most malicious,
insidious and manipulative ars mortem installation in the “Convergence.”
Jeff, dumbstruck, overwhelmed, daunted, asks himself why these plastic
mannequins have a deeper effect than the display of real corpses embalmed
in century-old churches or charnel houses. He offers a tentative answer
himself: they bring “a faint yearning to the scene, the illusion of humanoid aspiration.” (Z 134)
In Ian McEwan’s recent novel Machines Like Me, the protagonist time
and again rationalizes that his humanoid robot is made of “plastic or
some such,” but often enough he cannot help approaching James like a
human being: “struggling between what I knew and what I felt.”53
Actually, from early on we tend to sense our environment according to
habitualized morphological schemata (such as the “small child pattern”).
Fiction wouldn’t work if it could not undermine temporarily our disbelief
and if we were not disposed to suspend it for a while. The “Convergence”
exploits this propensity.
Mannequins are linked to models which are to promote an (beauty) ideal
one should aspire to. For almost a century, commercial stores have furnished their shop windows to promote their sales. The stark contrast this
(likely) association creates to the rotting and degenerate mannequins in the
catacomb accounts for the forceful impact on Jeff. Underground crypts also
carry, of course, a vast cultural memory. They are reminiscent of Hades, of
gloomy vaults to which the cursed are condemned, Dante’s hell, and the
many crypts beneath Western Cathedrals, which fantasy literature loves to
employ. However, these sites or fictions have been embedded into cultural
practices, memorial and iconographic narratives (Orpheus, Beatrice). They
are supposed to compensate for the irredeemable, console for the “departure” of the deceased and to commemorate. The “Convergence” installation, on the other hand, falsely plays with memory to trigger a subconscious
emotional reaction and fill the visitor with terror. Aesthetically speaking, it
leaves no space for a reflexive and processual reenactment of the exhibit.
Instead, it instrumentalizes and overpowers emotionally only to sell its purpose of cryonics. The aesthetics of repulsion, decay and decline is to
­promote – ex negativo – the aesthetics of immortality. Yet if art is “not
ephemeral,” the plastic “Convergence” art of perishableness (if it is art) will
somehow also remain and thus undercut its own premises. Thus, it gives
itself away as an epitome of totalitarian untruth and betrayal.
Art in Pods
This becomes all the more apparent when, on occasion of Artis’s cryopreservation, Jeff and Ross are led to a gallery in which the already cryopreserved bodies are neatly stored and encased in pods side by side:
“bodies set in assigned positions.” (146) They are, as Jeff realizes, “humans
as mannequins” (as opposed to the mannequins as humans), therefore,
Zero K 159
the artistic fulfillment in and of the “Convergence.” The earlier plastic
mannequins exuded the contingency of uncontrollable temporality; here
the dead appear to be fully under control. Jeff tries to relate to the standing corpses; he wants to see beauty in them, individuality and uniqueness
and, although muted, something that suggests “nonetheless the mingled
astonishment of our lives, here, on earth.” Jeff fails, the “stilled figures” –
torsos – refuse any resonance; instead, he recognizes “[m]annequined
lives.” (Z 146) The “utilitarian,” Jeff astutely notes, is drifting into the
“totalitarian.”
During Jeff’s second visit to the “Convergence” – Ross, after two years
in a dither, has finally decided to join Artis – he is led along a mural with
a math equation54 to the “cryostorage section.” Once again, he is deeply
disturbed: “There were rows of human bodies in gleaming pods […] long
columns of naked men and women in frozen suspension […] uniformly
positioned, eyes closed […] no sign of excess flesh.” But rather than “lives
to think about,” he sees “pure spectacle, a single entity” in the filed exhibition: “It was a form of visionary art, it was body art with broad implications.” (Z 256) If this is a form of visionary art, one must add, it can
only be in compliance with the visions of the above mentioned “totalitarian.” The exposed bodies are bereft of all personhood and character,
brought entirely into line, shaven and trimmed into smooth homogeneity.
Eyes closed and appropriately illuminated they are diminished to mere
skin surface. The spectacle is reminiscent of the German Gunther von
Hagens’s “Körperwelten” (“Body Worlds”) exhibition.55 Von Hagens
stuffs the emptied-out bodies with liquid plastic (“plastination”), adds
some formaldehyde and puts them on display in various poses in galleries
all over Europe and the American continent. He presents the bodies openeyed (the eyeballs are artificially fixed) with “plastinated” and puffed-up
muscles in action (some do sports, play chess, others make love). The
German “Prof. Death” feigns dead people vaguely based on classical
Greek statues as mobile, alive and fit. This probably accounts for the
sensational effect and the commercial success of the show. The
“Convergence” staff also of course makes up and grooms their dead,
turning them likewise into preparation artifacts. Yet their exhibits are
meant to be inwardly focused and motionless, no longer engaged in world
activities. Jeff appropriately associates the artifacts with pre-classical
(Etruscan) and “prehistoric” ages. Clearly, art in history (evidently since
Romanticism) bears the mark of its own contingency, the strife between
what can be contained cognitively, and what cannot.
In ethical terms, both the animated and the stilled presentations are
highly dubious, lacking, as they do, all decent piety. The dead – no matter
if they had consented during their lifetime – are bereft and deprived of
dignity and respect. They cannot defend themselves against the voyeurism of the onlooker. The way the cryonicised are showcased and blazoned
ignores their fundamental right to express shame and their need for
160 Zero K
protection. They are also metaphorically naked. Earlier on Jeff envisions
their utilization “as mainstays in the art market of the future” (Z 232)
very much in the manner antique cars are shown off. When Jeff thinks he
owes his father the “duty to feel a twinge of awe and gratitude” in front
of the encasings, he does so indeed – yet not for the deceased, but only for
the underlying motivation and scheme: “Here was science awash in irrepressible fantasy. I could not stifle my admiration.” (Z 257)
In aesthetic terms, the sensitive viewer is kept from engaging in an
atmospheric or auratic exchange with the bodies as art. They are literally
encased. Their purpose is to be used as mere means to commercial and
ideological ends. Subordinated to something extraneous to them, these
figures of art debunk themselves as art, enacting, as they do, nothing but
concealment or “untruth.” One of the generally accepted basic criteria for
good art is the way the “preserver” treats the material he or she uses. It is
to take on some (processual) life of its own, it is brought forth to come
into its own right. Aesthetically speaking, the New York rock exists, the
pod bodies, although human, are only, but do not exist.
Artis and Ross are given a special room of their own: “stone-walled”
and discreetly illuminated by “faint light.” (Z 257) One of the “streamlined cases” holds Artis (the other is not yet occupied.) More aestheticized than the other bodies, hers seems “lit from within […], erect, on her
toes, shaved head tilted upward.” Yet although “an idealized human,” it
is, as Jeff notes, “also Artis.” Jeff, first unsure about the degree of reality,
is now completely taken in by this particular display: “It was a beautiful
sight. It was the human body as a model of creation. […] And it was
Artis, here, alone, who carried the themes of this entire complex into
some measure of respect.” Artis, he asserts, “belonged here,” Ross, currently in the process of falling “into anonymity,” does “not.” (Z 258) Jeff,
who was emotionally close to his stepmother, is aware, of course, what,
during his first visit, she had said about her way of seeing things and art
in general.56 Apparently, her (highly stylized) posture in the pod matches
(in Jeff’s eyes) very much her previous sense of what beauty and perception (aisthetics) are or could be like. If Jeff feels there is some correspondence or likeness between her stylized (representation, posture)
appearance postmortem and her previous aesthetics, he should be surely
justified in granting a certain “measure of respect” to the “Convergence.”
Artis’s aesthetics in life may be best characterized, after all, as “transfiguration of the commonplace” on the basis of visual aestheticism.57 She
reveled in the memory of a “drop of water,” its unfolding and shapechanging, which had come back “only” to her. (Z 19) At times she saw, or
believed she saw, a “radiance in things.” (Z 46) She firmly thinks she will
be reborn into a “truer reality. Lines of brilliant light” (Z 47) and “enter
another dimension. […] For ever more. […] So beautiful.” (Z 53) If one’s
aesthetic perception of the world is reduced to such a worldless, mere
subjective impressionism, then it may indeed aspire to “transcendence,”
Zero K 161
as Jeff calls it (Z 47–8), “not made for an audience.” (Z 51) This does not
only go together well with the convergence idea of art, Artis, in this manner, is well prepared for cryonics.
In line with the strategy of depersonalization, Artis has come to regard
herself as a kind of simulation or transfigured “artificiality”: “I feel artificially myself. I’m someone who’s supposed to be me.” (Z 52) Naturally,
Jeff will remain the only “witness” (Z 258) to Artis’s transcendence. This
might be or might have been sufficient for the ethereal Artis and perhaps
for Jeff, but the rest of the world will only see a well-lit and made-up
mannequin. And what is more, she, as a person, will have no share in it.
Her senses are blotted out and her “brain” is only “geared to function at
some damped level of identity.” (Z 258)
DeLillo acts out this “damped level” in one of the most formidable and
arresting poetic texts of contemporary prose. It divides part one and part
two of the novel and consists of a monologue within her brain, which is
sometimes accompanied by a third, independent, voice whose origin is
not quite clear. It may be another voice in her brain as in a multiple or
schizophrenic personality, or simply Jeff’s comment on another narrative
level. In any case, there is no communicative exchange between the voices.
DeLillo’s narrative trick is to possibly attribute the monologue to Jeff’s
imagination at the end of the novel: I […] try to imagine, against my firm
belief, that she is able to experience a minimal consciousness.” (Z 272)
If her subjective impressionism was already a form of solipsism, the
turn inward is now complete. Her brain is isolated from her body and all
possible sensory input:
But am I who I was.
[…]
What I don’t know is right here with me but how do I make myself
know it.
Am I someone or is it just the words themselves that make me
think I’m someone.
Are the words themselves all there is. Am I just the words.
Where am I. What is a place. I know the feeling of somewhere but
I don’t know where it is.
I can feel time. I am all time. But I don’t know what this means.
Here and now. This is who I am but only this.
I think I am someone. What does it mean to be who I am.
Does she need third person. [The other voice (in italics) speaks
without a question
mark.]
(Z 157–62)
This ridicules the nanorobot fantasies of the “Convergence” technocrats
to absurdity.58 The “residue” of “Woman’s body in a pod” (Z 160, 162)
162 Zero K
cannot even be considered a person anymore, if this means (as in, e.g.,
John Locke) having a continuous consciousness of what and where one
was yesterday, of what one is today, and (probably or possibly) will be
tomorrow. Artis still possesses some residual “self,” an “I think,” but this
is disembodied, lacking all reference to exterior otherness, and therefore
unable to “accompany” any “representations” (Kant) whatsoever. There is
some spurious self-awareness left to her, but she cannot connect with environmental objects to verify herself, make them and thereby herself real
and feasible. It seems as if only an inner sense of time (“I am all time”) has
remained with her, without, however, the epistemologically necessary correlate of space. The sense of time which she feels “everywhere,” not knowing “what it is,” is due only to the (albeit limited register of) words she can
still employ. Words are successive and sequential, they pass, so does time.
Thus, she represents a condensed caricature of the “Convergence.” She
persists in absolute seclusion and isolation, limited to a linguistic temporality, a voice, without space and world – “forevermore.” In this abstract
confinement, there is no change, alterity, history, contingency or “You.”
The succeeding chapters are set in the narrative counterworld of New
York, “back in history now,” (Z 167) with chance meetings, unexpected
occurrences (including terrorist attacks) and the incalculable diversity of
“[e]very living breathing genotype” that may enter a cab. (Z 170) Here is
nothing of the claustrophilia that dominates the “Convergence.” Jeff and
Emma leave their apartments, and so do
“the runners, idlers, softball players, the parents pushing strollers,
the palpable relief of being in unmetered space for a time, a scattered
crowd safe in our very scatter, people free to look at each other, to
notice, admire, envy, wonder at.”
(Z 196)
This depiction of urban life marks already a vivid alternative to the still
lives in the steppe of Kazakhstan. Yet a more remarkable socio-cognitive
contrast to Artis’s stinted self-perception is offered when DeLillo portrays
Jeff and Emma in an intimate situation in front of a mirror. (Mirrors have
served, as we know, since early modern times, as metaphors for, sometimes
deceptive, self-reflection and self-knowledge.) They both look for a few
seconds and Jeff understands that it is “a telling moment.” (Z 207) He
recognizes a “smart woman,” who, “not interested in prettiness,” embodies “a kind of undividedness.” In fact, he sees two people that “exist”: “We
are seeing each other as never before, two sets of eyes, the meandering
man […]. [T]he woman […] watching a dancer splice the air […]. Here we
are, all this and more […].” Rather than a despairing quest for one’s personhood, this is its very confirmation – if only in a mirror and only for
once. They perceive themselves in relation to one another and toward
their lifeworld. Likewise, the respective partner, dress, environment is to
or toward them, this is also why they are “here.” They notice “things that
Zero K 163
normally escape the enquiring eye, a single searching look, so much to see,
each of us looking at both of us,” acknowledging themselves in a mutual
reflection of themselves. After a while, they have to “shake” off, phenomenologically speaking, all those intentional contents, in order to focus on
going to a ballet into “unsparing space.” (Z 208) Artis, on the other hand,
is exclusively the “same words all the time,” (Z 157) locked into the tiny
linguistic mirroring of a few calmed down neurons.
One must add, though, that DeLillo undercuts a possible idealized
reading of the mirror image immediately on the next page. Jeff is dressing
up for an interview for a job he does not really want. Standing in front of
the bathroom mirror, he recalls his father Ross, who, somehow plausible
for a megalomaniac, had denied the mirror inversion of left and right. Jeff
“had to concentrate hard to convince” himself “that this was not the
case.” (Z 209) One’s image (particularly for a job interview) is obviously
always also the image of the other, or what the other purportedly requires.
Moment of Moments: The Affirmation of Life
Don DeLillo completes a number of his novels (White Noise, Underworld,
The Body Artist, Cosmopolis) with moments of perceptive intensity, which
come as a surprise suddenly and unexpectedly. Even if we call these experiences “epiphany,” they differ in a number of decisive aspects from their
modernist or pre-modernist versions. In DeLillo, there is no theological,
metaphysical or anti-historical subcurrent, nor are his epiphanies primarily anchored in a subjective self from which they arise to be absolutely
different from, to override or even negate, empirical space and time.59
DeLillo, son of Italian immigrants, surely has a proclivity for Catholicism
(as it becomes obvious in Underworld), but in his epiphanic states of
exception there is no miraculous revelation of a divine light. Its secular
variety, the temporal otherness, the “lightning flash” (W.B. Yeats) it seems
to induce, has been celebrated by Nietzsche, Joyce or Walter Benjamin as
a redemptive and even messianic rupture. The exceptional suddenness was
to suspend the continuum of causal-chronological or circular history. The
postmodern DeLillo is aware of the aporetic structure of these projections.
If they become manifest only in the subjective imagination of a person,
they are, as is this person, still contingent on time and space. It keeps on
being his or her image of redemption in which his or her alternative history appears. Don DeLillo’s epiphanies are, by contrast, embedded in a
narrative context and they are physically explicable to a degree.
In Zero K, the striking event happens in Manhattan; the occasion is a
profane bus ride from west to east. It is, as the narrator explains, due to
a “natural phenomenon,” whereby “the sun’s rays align with the local
street grid.” (Z 273) It occurs, nevertheless, by chance, on account of an
extraordinary and singular coincidence, and it comes upon Jeff quite
abruptly in midday, his “mind blank.” Spellbound and even struck with
awe, Jeff notices “a glow, a tide of light.” Within seconds, “the streets were
164 Zero K
charged with the day’s dying light and the bus seemed the carrier of this
radiant moment.” Unlike the traditional, subjective epiphany, the “luminous apparition” in Zero K is also witnessed by the response of a second
person (or second-order perspective) on the scene. This lends not only
more credence to the effect, it reinforces it. Jeff is startled by a human
wail; he swerves and beholds “a boy on his feet […] pointing and wailing
at the flaring sun.” More than by the event itself, he is now moved by the
bouncing boy’s “urgent cries” of “wonder”: They “were unceasing and
also exhilarating, they were prelinguistic grunts.” The “macrocephalic”
boy seems mentally handicapped, but this is a thought Jeff hates, not least
as he finds “these howls of awe […] far more suitable than words.” Even
if the experience is beyond language, its linguistic representation (through
DeLillo’s Jeff) is still impressive enough:
The full solar disk, bleeding into the streets, lighting up the towers to
either side of us, and I told myself that the boy was not seeing the sky
collapse upon us but was finding the purest astonishment in the intimate touch of earth and sun.
The reference to apocalypse is already indicative of the fact that the boy’s
“purest astonishment” must be seen against the predictions and mindset
of the “Convergence” along with Jeff’s father Ross’s (“everybody wants
to own the end of the world”). Indeed, this little chapter forms an appropriate and humanist conclusion to a narrative that portrays a dystopian
projection. It enables us to see the technocratic world in a sharper and
clearer light. The “Convergence” aims at putting man under the sway of
the “Ge-stell,” or “enframing,” turning him or her into a “Ge-stelltes” or
“enframed.” It reveals the world, human beings included, as “standing
reserve” (“Bestand,” or stockpile) for technology,60 whose only purpose is
to master temporal and physical deficiency for the sake of technical perfection and immortality. (Heidegger’s terminology could be – literally –
applied to the processes and pods in the “Convergence”). The New York
epiphany, on the one hand, is beyond purposive rationality (Max Weber)
and the scientific “will to power.” It thereby confirms human subordination to and dependency on the pre-given and, by implication, the possibility of the miraculous – and freedom. And precisely because its occurrence
is not at one’s disposability, revealing spontaneously an extraordinary
beauty, it becomes the pure source of elation and transformation. A natural and a cultural phenomenon converge unwittingly to illuminate the
life-world.
More than the temporal structure of the epiphanic moment of moments,
it is the boy who proves the “Convergence” transhumanists wrong. One
should mention here that, owing to the medical progress of blood tests,
embryos with trisomy or Zika, likely to develop macrocephaly, are increasingly aborted. According to the standards of technically advanced societies,
Zero K 165
the boy is deficient and imperfect, with a limited life expectancy. But it is,
of all people, the handicapped person only who is able to respond “suitably” to the beauty of a miracle without bias or apocalyptic apprehension.
While the “Convergence” intends to introduce an unequivocal language of
mathematical precision, the boy shows his unfettered enthusiasm through
“prelinguistic grunts.” With this he not only testifies to the possibility of
truth, the “unconcealment of being,” he confirms life as life. Jeff does not
need “heaven’s light.” He has “the boy’s cries of wonder.” (Z 274)
Notes
1 Robert C.W. Ettinger, The Prospect of Immortality (New York: Doubleday,
1962), 13, There is a reproduction of his pioneering book on https://www.
cryonics.org/images/uploads/misc/Prospect_Book.pdf (accessed: 16 January
2019).
2 http://www.benbest.com/cryonics/cryonics.html. Ben Best is the former president (2003–2012) of the Cryonics Institute, the second largest institution of
its kind.
3 A reconstitution of the body (cum brain) via cloning does not provide an
alternative as this will also preclude the recreation of the personality and
identity of the person in question. Even if most of the now fatal diseases may
be cured in the foreseeable future, it should be difficult to restructure decomposed body cells along with their specific information, nanotechnology and
DNA information notwithstanding.
4 In fact, there is not much talk about the technical course of the cryonic procedures in the novel. For Don DeLillo, it was clearly of subordinate interest
to cultural and psychological questions. In an interview, given to Peter Boxall,
Don DeLillo explained that he did only “limited research” and did not “know
what recent advances may have been made.” Katherine Da Cunha Lewin and
Kiron Ward, ed., Don DeLillo (London/New York: Bloomsbury Academic,
2019), Pos 3560.
5 In keeping with their ideology, people in the “Convergence” do not introduce
themselves.
6 In the above-mentioned interview with Boxall, DeLillo does not in principle
oppose “the science and technology of life extension.” (Pos. 3547)
7 Since death is immeasurable, there can never be done enough against its
“terror.”
8 See Blumenberg, 1986, 72,78.
9 Cf. ibid., 75 and above (Ch.2).
10 See also the seminal work by Roger Luckhurst, Corridors: Passages of
Modernity (London: Reaktion Books, 2019).
11 At the time Yeats wrote his poems, in Russia in the 1920s the technological
immortality movement “Cosmism” was already active. See Julieta Aranda,
et.al., eds., Art without Death: Conversions on Russian Cosmism (Berlin:
Sternberg Press, 2017), esp. 41–46 and passim.
12 Yeats, Collected Poems, 1985, 281, 218, 217, 218.
13 A little later, Jeff remembers the origin from his catholic youth, another narrative counterpoint (see p. 15: “I wanted the stain [of ash ritually spread on
his forehead by a priest on Ash Wednesday] to last for days and weeks.”
14 The original quote can be found in Martin Heidegger, “Einleitung zu ‘Was ist
Metaphysik?’ (1949),” in Wegmarken, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann
(Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1976), 374.
166 Zero K
15 Heidegger 1949, 375.
16 Cf. also Jeff’s (albeit ambiguous) retortion to Emma’s question whether this is
a “philosophical statement”: “Traffic jams are a philosophical statement. I
want to take your hand and wedge it in my crotch. That’s a philosophical
statement.” (Z 172–3).
17 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001, 19271), 192.
Here, and in the following, it is my translation. “The fundamental ontological
characters of this being-in-the- world (“dieses Seienden”) are Existentiality,
Facticity and Fallenness” (“Verfallensein”), (Ibid., 191). One might add
“Befindlichkeit,” or the way one finds oneself together with one’s mood or
state of mind and thereby affected “Verstehen,” (Ibid., 142). Heidegger’s
“Existenziale” would, of course, also pertain in a society in which death could
be put off and “Dasein” prolonged for centuries. Temporality is a priori and
even the cosmos will perish.
18 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 2001, 12, 191.
19 Ibid., 263.
20 I do not have the space to confront Heidegger’s ontology with that of the
“Convergence.” But the diametral opposition becomes already obvious in the
concept of temporality. The “Convergence” is not only ahistorical; they want
to force the future into the present, that is, make it thoroughly pre-calculable.
(Z 128) Heidegger’s “Existenzial” of “Care,” indeed, his entire analytics of
being-there, would then be obsolete.
21 Heidegger’s predisposition for Nazism, especially after the revealing publication of the “Schwarze Hefte,” is well-documented.
22 Stak may well embody “das Innestehen in der Offenheit des Seins, das
Austragen des Innestehens (Sorge) und das Ausdauern im Äußersten (Sein
zum Tode) […] als das volle Wesen der Existenz.” (Heidegger, 1949, 374; or:
“the standing within (halting in) the unconcealment of being, the bearing
(acting out) of the standing within (care) and the perseverance in (to) the
utmost (being-toward-death) […] as the full essence of existence,” my
translation).
23 I have used the Reclam edition: Martin Heidegger, Der Ursprung des
Kunstwerkes (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1988, 19601). The English translation can be found in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell
(London: Harper Perennial, 2008): “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 139–
212, here: 154.
24 “In great art […] the artist remains inconsequential as compared with the
work, almost like a passageway […].” (166)
25 Heidegger, “Dingheit des Dinges,” 2008, 151; 1960, 17.
26 “[…] the open place in the midst of being, the clearing, is never a rigid stage
with a permanently raised curtain on which the play of beings runs its course.
[…] The unconcealment of beings – this is never a merely existent state, but a
happening. Unconcealment (truth) is neither an attribute of matters in the
sense of beings, nor one of propositions.” (179)
27 Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 2008, 179; Der Ursprung des
Kunstwerkes, 1960, 52.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., 2008,180; 1960, 54.
30 Ibid.,2008, 180; 1960, 53–4.
31 Ibid., 172.
32 Ibid.
33 Heidegger’s sentence will certainly please, what has been dubbed “New
Materialism” or “Object-Oriented Ontology.”
Zero K 167
34 Ibid., 2008, 171,161, 173; 1960, 43.
35 Ibid., 172. When leaving the place where the rock is displayed, Jeff wonders
again about Heidegger’s sentence “Rocks are, but they do not exist.” The
experience of it as a work of art has made him doubt the ontological status
asserted in the quote. He now sees it as a subject “that blended well with our
black-and-white descent.” (218)
Rocks, that is, may well take on a different ontic status – as art.
36 Mimesis is, of course, the artistic way to accommodate the materiality of the
thingness. In The Body Artist, DeLillo employs similar means of linguistic
assimilation to what he describes.
37 Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 2008, 172–3.
38 Ibid., 2008, 172; 1960, 42–43.
39 “We [were] simply observing the joined form of object and observer – the
elusive boy who rarely attaches himself to something solid. Of course, he
reached across the taped border and managed to touch the rock, barely.”
Z 215
40 See Rosa 2019, passim.
41 To be sure, this truth, if it is true, is derived from something that is also finite.
Truth is finite, or “untruth,” our understanding is finite.
42 Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 2008, 183, 196; Der Ursprung
des Kunstwerkes, 1960, 57, 74; 2008, 196; 1960, 74; 2008, 200; 1960, 77
43 A very impressive, if a little overdramatic, Heideggerian interpretation of
sculpture is offered by Andrew J. Mitchell. See, e.g., his comment on
Heidegger’s remark on the sculpture “Vogelschrei” by Bernhard Heiliger:
“Sculpture changes the space around it. Its entrances and invitations change
the density and thickness of things. Sculpture changes the texture of the space
around it as each work eddies forth turbulences into the smoothness of the
world. Sculptures push at the space that runs through us. Sculptures touch us
for this reason; they pull us out of ourselves as well. The sculpture in place
disrupts the homogeneity of space and the encapsulation of the subject. It
tugs both of these at once and testifies to our belonging to world. Heiliger’s
sculptures attest to the fact that we do not belong to this world for long. It
wears us down and erodes us. We die of our relations. Our death is nothing
we possess, but it is not for that reason nowhere to be found. It is right here
in front of us, but behind us, too, and all around. We meet it every day and in
every relation of this world.” Andrew J. Mitchell, Heidegger Among the
Sculptors (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010), 56.
44 Jeff has repeatedly visited the gallery; he imagines “the thing always here,
undocumented” and leaves “objects as they are.” (Z 218)
45 Heidegger,“The Origin of the Work of Art,“ 2008, 197; Der Ursprung des
Kunstwerkes, 1960, 74.
46 Ibid., 2008, 167; 1960, 37; 2008, 202; 1960, 79.
47 Ibid., 2008, 200; 1960, 77.
48 It should be noted, though, that Heidegger addressed a culturally and historically very different audience in the 1930s.
49 If not necessarily to the advantage of those involved.
50 “No similes, metaphors, analogies. A language that will not shrink from
whatever forms of objective truth we have never before experienced.” (Z 130)
51 Derrida’s ontological term for Heidegger’s indissoluble “rift.”
52 See Andrea Kern’s illuminating interpretation of “The Origin of the Work of
Art,” in Heidegger-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung, ed. Dieter Thomä
(Stuttgart: Metzler, 2013),133–43, esp. 143.
53 Ian McEwan, Machines Like Me (London: Jonathan Cape, 2019), 9.
168 Zero K
54 Another symptom for the objectification of human life: “Could the equation
on the plaque be a scientific expression of what happens to as single body
when the forces of death and life join”?, Jeff wonders.
55 See https://koerperwelten.de/plastination/gunther-von-hagens/
56 “I remained, eyes closed, thinking, remembering. Artis and her story of counting drops of water on a shower curtain.” (Z 258)
57 In Heideggerian terms, the former earth artist is exclusively dedicated to the
“earth,” which (without the “strife” with the “world”) does not permit any
knowledge or “truth.”
58 “First you will undergo a biomedical redaction, only a few ours from now.
The brain-edit. In time you will re-encounter yourself. Memory, identity, self,
on another level. This is the main thrust of our nanotechnology.” (Z 238)
Ross is “instructed” here by a woman, Jeff calls “Zara.”
59 James Joyce’s verdict is canonical: “the esthetic image is first luminously
apprehended as self-bounded and self-contained upon the immeasurable
background of space or time which is not it.” James Joyce, Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man (New York: Viking, 1964), 212.
60 Heidegger would have found in the “Convergence” the fulfillment of his
worst fears. See his “The Question Concerning Technology,” repr. in Basic
Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (London: Harper Perennial, 2008), 307–41,
here in particular 329. See also Martin Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund
(Tübingen: Günther Neske, 1957), 198.
9
The Silence and the Death
of Civilization
The End of “Being-in-the-World”
In all the novels we have dealt with here (even in Falling Man), time
moves on slower or faster and we can imagine life to somehow go on
(even in White Noise or Cosmopolis). In The Silence, we have reached a
stage in our civilizing process at which time appears to stop for good.
This does not yet mean the physical death of humanity, but the end of
human “Dasein” or “Being-in-the-World.” Humans get caught up in an
individual time loop that forgoes any meaningful relationship with the
other. In contrast to the romantic cliché that life without technology
would mean a return to an unalienated and authentic existence, the novel
points to the inexorable interpenetration of human beings, media and
technology. Technology coordinates, evidently in Cosmopolis, our temporal being, along with the coexistence with others. Its absence or failure
in the digital age may now mean that we cease to “be in the mode of
existence” if we take language and communicative rationality as the necessary requirements of “existence.” Human life goes on in the mere mode
of “rocks, trees, horses, or angels.”1 Humans have transmuted into functions of technology; without the latter, they end up babbling in their individual bubbles. What is more, in the case of a blackout, the modern
subject does not comprehend the nature of the failure. The multicausality
and interconnectedness of hazards and dreads in the modern “risk society” he or she is exposed to leads to suppression and discursive misunderstandings – rather than to reflexivity.2 On account of the multiplicity of
screens people are hooked to, there is no common language to allow for
a meaningful processing and coping with the perilous undercurrents of
modern civilization that suddenly became manifest.
An Electricity Failure
In DeLillo’s sparsest novel to date, it is an electricity failure that marks the
end of a civilized world. The scenario is realistic. In the past decades, the
power grid has been closely connected with the internet, which in itself
DOI: 10.4324/9781003289937-9
170 The Silence and the Death of Civilization
operates on electricity. The interconnectedness made the production and
supply of electricity more efficient, but increasingly vulnerable to extensive blackouts. Marc Elsberg, in his well-researched bestseller Blackout:
Tomorrow Will Be Too Late,3 delineates a disastrous, even apocalyptic
picture of the consequences of a prolonged collapse of the European
power grid.4 Among these are fatal traffic accidents (traffic lights fail), the
food chain is interrupted (refrigerators stop working), in hospitals the
patients die (surgeries or dialyses cannot be carried out, the diesel for the
emergency generators runs out after some days), there is looting and violence in the streets, people are trapped in escalators, and nuclear meltdowns, along with fallouts, occur.5 Marc Elsberg’s popular thriller is in
keeping with the genre. The suspected former hacker Piero Manzano
eventually manages to escape from a messed-up prison, identify the real
terrorist hackers and restore the system. Up to that point “[t]he death toll
soars.” (Jacket text.) Yet, the likelihood of such a disaster is underscored
by a BBC documentary from 2019, which mentions numerous incidents,
as e.g., the results of a five-day power outage in Venezuela in 2019: “[A]n
estimated 26 people had died in the country’s hospitals.”6
Don DeLillo has bestowed on us many, partly large-scale sceneries of
disaster and apocalypse, notably in White Noise, Underworld, Zero K,
(restrainedly) in Falling Man and previously in End Zone, The Names, or
Mao II. In The Silence, the “death toll” is looming, yet one can only guess
about the possible severity of the outage. As to the causes, an ominous
extradiegetic narrator tells us at the beginning of the second part that
“unknown groups or agencies” are manipulating and incapacitating the
“launch codes” of all “nuclear weapons.” The disruption of “power
grids” (S 77) might have been either the collateral damage of or the means
to the sabotage. However, DeLillo is not interested in the spectacular
circumstances, which is left to his five characters’ vague speculations and
our evident knowledge, thanks to BBC and books such as Elsberg’s.
DeLillo focuses on the socio-cultural and communicative responses of (to
be sure, exemplary7) individuals who are faced with the outbreak of a
catastrophe (which in fact has already been covertly there) and, more so,
with the amputation of their communicative prostheses.
The Endgame
The Beckettian chamber drama, more a novella than a novel, is confined
to one evening in 2022. In a bourgeois Manhattan apartment, the building inspector Max Stenner, his wife Diana Lucas, a former physics professor, and her sometime student Martin Dekker, now a teacher, deeply, if
incoherently, steeped in Einstein, are set to watch the Super Bowl. They
are also expecting two friends, still on a flight from Paris to Newark, Jim
Kripps, a claims adjuster, and his wife Tessa Berens, a poet. Before their
plane crashes, the reader learns about the conditioning and determination
The Silence and the Death of Civilization
171
of perception and memory through technology and media. Jim is captivated by the screen overhead, which constantly informs about “[a]ltitude,
air temperature, speed, time of arrival” as well as on the “Heure à Paris,
Heure à London.” (S 3) As he keeps on reciting aloud the data into the
interior of the plane, the scene takes on something of a farce. On 17
pages, he reiterates the slightly changing numbers roughly 13 times,
which is already indicative of his mental relatedness to and dependence
on the display and the machinery. Caught in the hermetic or monad-like
space of a technical apparatus, he cannot help enunciating meaningless
information (without communicative value) and reaffirming his own
being-there by that very enunciation.
He pronounces only the first letter C. (of Celsius), addressing Tessa to
complete the word. Tessa is afraid of forgetting and has gone into the
habit of making notes in her little book. She does not “sneak a look” at
her “phone” (S 6) and is very pleased to also retrieve “Mr. Fahrenheit’s
first name” from her deep memory, “out of nowhere.” However, of a common mnemonic knowledge “almost nothing” is “left,” the narrator notes.
Cultural memory has been stored to a degree on easily accessible hard
drives that individual mnemonic spaces have become redundant (which
surely has led to a much stronger technological dependency).8 Likewise,
it may become much more a matter of curiosity and distraction: “When
a missing fact emerges without digital assistance, each person announces
it to the other while looking off into a remote distance, the otherworld of
what was known and lost.“ (S 14–5) The “otherworld” is not least the
sphere of inspiration, the unexpected and surprise. Yet if one relies on
given storages, the corresponding algorithms will cast a pall on the “otherworld.” Google has always already precalculated what you want anyway. As Google decides about your knowledge beforehand, so do other
technological environments. Thus, the couple’s conversation within the
context of airline travel is “a function of some automated process.” Their
thoughts and words are “predetermined,” (S 14) and they do what they
are supposed to do. (S 15) The technological dispositif makes people
want to do what they are to do. No wonder that everything they talk
about (“stale air”) is forgotten as soon as the “plane sets down.” (S 7)
And even finally, when the plane crashes and the screen goes “blank,”
Jim’s consciousness is still that of the medium. Similarly to Oswald in
Libra and the Highway Killer in Underworld, he anticipates the media
coverage, imagining every passenger watching “Channel 4” reporting on
their crashed airplane. (S 17) Yet whereas Oswald or the Highway Killer
may continue to feed on their media representation, in The Silence all
screens will simultaneously go blank; people are cut off and denied further pictures.
In their Manhattan apartment, Max, Diane and Martin are waiting for
the Super Bowl LVI to begin, the “superscreen” still bright. Max is tensely
fixated upon it, digging his fingers into his flesh “primate style.” He is a
172 The Silence and the Death of Civilization
bettor who has invested a large sum. Until the kickoff, they have to watch
and keep on watching “streams of commercials,” talking en passant
about how to watch and what to eat. Martin is introduced as “a man lost
in his compulsive study of Einstein’s 1912 Manuscript on the Special
Theory of Relativity.” (S 23) His sometimes “trance”-like obsession with
time and space is owing to the desire to understand an increasing nonsimultaneity in late modernity. This Martin shares with Cosmopolis’s
Eric Packer, who moreover, wanted to press temporality.
Before the actual match starts, “something” happens, that is, the screen
goes defunct, and so do the phones and laptops. (S 25–6) So far communication in the room was led and held together by the expected broadcast. With the breakdown of the common technical frame (Heidegger’s
“Gestell”), ontological bewilderment and uncertainty set in, and hence
conspiracy theories, the fragmentation of communication and a further
loss of reality, de-realization. The boundaries between a humorous attitude and serious fears blur. Martin proposes a “selective internet apocalypse” by the Chinese. “It is extraterrestrial,” Diana remarks (S 27), “a
communications screwup,” (S 30) Max adds. “A systems failure. Also a
sunspot,” Max was told by neighbors he now notices and meets as such
for the first and probably last time. (S 34) Diane receives no response
when she asks, with some astonishing foreknowledge, whether this was
“the casual embrace that marks the fall of world civilization.” (S 35) In
the meantime, Martin fills the otherwise communicative vacuum with
Einstein, the phrases he voices, though, have no (contextual) value:
“Space and time. Spacetime.” (S 29) The abstract reference is, of course,
Einstein’s refutation of absolute space and time and his observation of
the inexorable interwovenness of the latter with the first in a fourth
“spacetime continuum,” or simply put, your time depends, is relative to,
the perceived body in motion. In the given situation, suchlike momentous
remarks come down to empty speech. For the nerd alone, who tends “to
fall into a pale trance,” (S 23) it might be helpful to cope with the – intuitive lifeworld – relativization of time and space in modernity due to
media and locomotion.
If time can no longer be synchronized, or brought into a relation with
a chronometer, it gets out of joint. What remains for reassurance is to
align one’s motion with that of another moving object or subject. When
the surviving Jim and Tessa and other casualties are taken to a hospital in
a bus, the driver no longer responds to urging questions in diverse languages; instead, he slows down, “keeping pace” with a jogger, a woman
“moving at a steady pace in the lane reserved for bicycles.” Rather than
increasing speed, he remains “clearly determined to stay aligned with the
runner.” (S 39–40) When later on, Tessa and Jim are walking from the
clinic to the apartment they are looking out for the “encouraging” jogger
(who also stays in Jim’s mind, S 108), only to come across a homeless
man who in his turn begins to “imitate their movements.” (S 63) Mimesis
The Silence and the Death of Civilization
173
(along with keeping on running or walking, S 40, 63) appears to be the
residual orientation aid left if technological time is gone.
Back in the apartment, the effects of the blackout prevail. It turns out
that the communicative dumbness which is so obvious now has long governed the social life of the protagonists. Max mutters “Jesus” (surely not
religiously), does not respond to his wife’s attempts at some (although
rather insubstantial) exchange and continues to stare “into the blank
screen.” As with a fetish, he tries to magically “induce an image to appear”
on the screen. (S 43) And then Max’s voice mimics not only the emphatic
comments of the sports broadcaster, he also impersonates the voices of
the crowd, and even reproduces the commercials; all this, notably, in the
right temporal succession of the game. The texts, “emerging from a
broadcast level deep in his unconscious mind,” (S 46) take on an authenticity that he appears to merge into the spectacle, he simulates:
‘De-fense, De-fense, D-fense.’ [Crowd]
‘These teams are evenly matched more or less.’ […] [Broadcaster]
‘Wireless the way you want it. Soothes and moisturizes. […]’
[Or:] ‘Sometimes I wish I was human […], so I could taste this
flavorful prune juice.’
[Commercials, S 46–8, italics in original]
This pastiche is strongly satirical. The wish to be “human,” the soothing
“wireless,” or syntactic shreds, such as “Super Bowl Fifty-Six. Our
National Death Wish,” can be read as bitingly ironical comments on the
blackout. But Max’s “stunning” perfection makes also clear that his mind
(“beyond distraction,” S 48) has long been infused and predetermined by
the format. His mind is that of the medium, a simulacrum of the super
bowl simulacrum.
Diane, in the meantime, presumes his impulses to originate in “Deep
Space” or some “transrational warp that belongs to Martin’s time frame.”
(S 48) This pseudo-scientific babble, along with vacuous monologues, is
to dominate the rest of the evening. As to the (inconsequential) side effects
of a pill: “Could be constipation […] diarrhea […] the feeling that others
can hear your thoughts […],” (S 49) or: “food will go hard or soft or
warm or cold whatever,” (S 66) or: “Thaumatology, ontology, eschatology, epistemology […],” (S n68) or: “Umbrella’d ambuscade.” (S 69) The
loss of meaning is salient, absurdity has taken over.
Martin’s fixation on Einstein and the 1912 manuscript (a facsimile he
always carries with him) is governed by freaky rapture (“The event horizon. The atomic clocks.” S 30) rather than scientific interest. His quotations
from Einstein or Marx (see S 95) are not only patched incoherently together,
they are also misquoted (such as the assumed prediction that World War IV
will “be fought with sticks and stones,” Motto and S 114). “The beautiful
and airy concepts of space and time” (S 28) cannot be found in the Collected
174 The Silence and the Death of Civilization
Einstein Papers.9 Einstein, along with Heisenberg and Gödel, has been
serving Martin as a prop to hold on to a young man who is otherwise
without qualities and identity. The physically precise terms “Relativity,
uncertainty, incompleteness” (S 29) may well be applicable to his sociopsychological state. He does not recognize himself in a mirror, nor in the eye
of the other people who, he thinks, never look at him. (S 51–2)
The vented signifiers are empty and float around without signifieds, let
alone referents. Hooked to TV, smartphone, “Alexa,” tablet, etc., homo
digitalis is exposed to a constant and increasing stream of info bits and
pieces, which do not even pretend to accord with reality.10 In a world of
simulacra, an always relative semblance of mutual understanding and
ontological reassurance is constructed by the media and technology. In
case of their absence, all ontological and epistemological certainties will
cease. In the 1990s of the past century, the German sociologist Niklas
Luhmann famously claimed: “What we know about our society, in fact,
the world we live in, we only know through mass media.”11 There is no
social interaction unless it has been mediated by technology. This is more
true when body and smartphone coalesce. “What happens to people,” a
worried narrator12 asks, “who live inside their phones?” (S 52, see also
82) Before, people were “staring into their phones, morning, noon, night
[…], consumed by the devices.” But this is over, “everything,” the various
screens, that have produced our self and sense of time, are “down down
down.” (S 99, see also 80) People do not know anymore who they are:
“How do we know who we are?” (S 61), the receptionist at the clinic
asks. In DeLillo’s present-day society, a general shutdown of screens
amounts to the general closure of human sense perception: “What
remains for us to see, hear, feel?” (S 80) Intuitions remain blind, thoughts
remain empty, self-reference without external reference remains blank
and meaningless. The decapitated Artis in her pod in Zero K presents the
striking, if extreme, endpoint of the deprivation of perception.
The further consequences of the withdrawal of technology are a sense
of de-realization, fear and paranoia and, eventually, mere self-talk, complete self-isolation, social death, and silence. Reality is created by “sensemaking.” It emerges, according to Luhmann,
when inconsistencies are resolved, which may result from the participation of remembrance in the operation of the [psychic] system. The
resolution may be reached, for example, by the construction of space
and time as dimensions with various places, in which different perceptions or memories may be localized without coming into conflict with
one another.13
However, in the absence of media and of memory (on account of media),
the consistent construction of space and time and the corresponding
localization of perceptions and memory are no longer possible. In The
The Silence and the Death of Civilization
175
Silence, “events” appear to drastically “shift.” (S 60) A sense of unreality
gains the upper hand. Martin, the relativity theorist, gets to the heart of
it: “Are we living in a makeshift reality? Have I already said this? A future
that isn’t supposed to take form just yet?” (S 67) Since perception, time
and memory can no longer be brought in line, the construction of simultaneity and a mutually shared presence no longer works. For Martin and
Diane, a fundamental estrangement with their environment takes place.
What used to be self-evident is no longer so. Tessa worries whether she
lives in some “living breathing fantasy,” wondering if time has “leaped
forward” or even “collapsed.” (S 87) Max thinks they are “being zombified […] bird-brained,” does not know in which day or month he is and
rightly expects his “expiration date” to be imminent. (S 84)
Even or precisely because of its external referentiality, communicative
prolificacy and illusionary status, the world as a secondary or simulated
reality has long or always been there as a given condition.14 In the absence
of “eidola” or simulacra, it surfaces ex negativo. Martin, therefore,
exclaims that it is “[a]rtificial intelligence that betrays who we are and
how we live and think.” (S 68) Tessa wonders if “our normal experience”
is “simply being stilled […]. Are we witnessing […] [a] kind of virtual
reality?” (S 113) Ironically, now that the media background noise is
“stilled,” homo medialis suspects that he or she may be living in a “virtual
reality.”
Yet, The Silence is far from being only a novel about the status (or
failure) of reality in an advanced digital age. It is much more a book
about the social pathologies (and about social death), which the breakdown of a communicatively binding and virtually reaffirming technology
reveal. These are pathologies, though, which technology and media have
first and foremost given rise to. Among the many pertinent sociological
analyses that have appeared in the past decades, three are particularly
notable: Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society, Heinz Bude’s Society of Fear and
Andreas Reckwitz’s Society of Singularities.15 Because of globalization
and modernization, society sees itself increasingly confronted with all
types of social, ecological and technological threats (Risk Society was
written after Chernobyl). They sink into the daily consciousness and
determine public and private discourse. A pertinent instance (at the time
of the novel’s publication) was the Covid-19 virus, which for a while had
replaced climate change. Yet the normatively postulated and actual
“reflexivity” in the political and, more so, civil sphere, which Beck
observed, was not as momentous as he would have liked it. It fundamentally depends on the efficiency of technology and media themselves, that
is, on external referentiality. Heinz Bude sees “Angst” not only as an effect
of possible technological disaster or terrorism but as the prevailing mood
in late capitalist neoliberal societies, in which even well-off middle-class
people are permanently absorbed by the fear of social decline, the financial market, big data and cyber-attacks. The growing complexity, the loss
176 The Silence and the Death of Civilization
of common sense, and the distribution of vague, fake or incorrect news
renders, one might add, the late modern media world more vulnerable to
malfunctions and disorder. This mélange has given rise to forms of pathological dread, which renders people helpless, confused and accessible to
extremist or populist tribunes. All this has also contributed to what the
sociologist Andreas Reckwitz has dubbed “singularization.” The reasons
leading to an advanced individualization and atomization of society are
diverse. They range from social differentiation to flexibilization to (“custom-made”) commodification, but this individual dissociation is likewise
due to latent fear, given the intransparency and incomprehensibility of
technological late modernity. People retreat into the seclusion or isolation
of internet bubbles and the seeming security of the private and individual
areas of life behind drawn curtains. The result is the loss of a common
language, speechlessness, and anonymity. When Max, the building inspector, leaves the apartment early after the “communications screwup,” he
wants to find out whether other inhabitants of the building are also
affected. Only a few open their doors and he is met with caginess; he tries
to talk to them, evidently for the very first time:
They saw and heard what we saw and heard. We stood in the hallway becoming neighbors for the first time. Men, women, nodding
our heads.
Did you introduce yourselves? [Diane asks]
We nodded our heads.
(S 34)
The sociological findings are arrestingly exemplified in the novel. Yet in a
Heideggerian sense, the characters’ condition may be even fundamentally
worse, bare existential angst comes to the fore. Devoid of all media distractions, “fallen” “man” cannot cling to “man” (put another way, “entertainment industry”) anymore, he or she is therefore thrown back onto
their mere being-there. Their “being,” that is, their being-toward-death
was always “concealed” to them.
Enunciations of diffuse fears and paranoia are released into the apartment space without repercussion: “People in the grip of serious threat.”
(S 65) This premonition – no media of self-understanding are available –
produces in “Part Two” of the book strings of exclamations denoting
most diverse phenomena mostly unconnected to the present blackout:
“Cyberattacks, digital intrusions, biological aggressions. Anthrax, smallpox, pathogens. […] Are the oceans rising rapidly?” (S 77) Discursive
coherence is gone. The more or less unmotivated and arbitrary concatenation of risks and fears shows that one no longer deals rationally or
“reflexively” (Beck) with the welter of tribulations. The almost incantatory dropping of fear-laden terms takes on farcical dimensions.
Bewilderment gains ground: “Germs, genes, spores, powders.” (S 81)
The Silence and the Death of Civilization
177
“We’re being zombified.” (S 84) “Cryptocurrencies.” (S 85) The party
loses itself in ejections of apocalyptic scenarios: “[…] foul air. Landslides,
tsunamis […] skies blotted out by pollution. […] virus, plague […] the
face masks.” (S 88, see also 94 for “microplastics”) Obviously, DeLillo
did not want to explicitly mention the Corona crisis in 2020–21. Tessa’s
attempts at a poem result in one line: “In a tumbling void.” (S 96) In this
twilight state of “relativity, uncertainty, incompleteness,” the boundaries
between simulation and reality are still blurred: “The end-of-the world
movie.” (S 104, see also 113)
The confinement to self-reference (or first-order reality) leads to a
senseless dependence on and foregrounding of language, which in circling
loops revolves around itself. Words lose their communicative referentiality; signifieds become gratuitous. Even if language at best still serves some
idiosyncratic and expressive impulse, it has lost its performative (or illocutionary) function:
‘Data breaches,’ he says. ‘Cryptocurrencies.’
He [Martin] speaks this last term looking directly at Diane.
Cryptocurrencies.
She builds the word in her mind, unhyphenated.
[…]
She says, ‘Cryptocurrencies.’
[…]
‘Crypto,’ she says, pausing, keeping her eyes on Martin. ‘Currencies.’
(S 85–6)
When Jim wakes up, he hears Tessa say something. He understands nothing,
realizing “it is simply fake, a dead language, a dialect, an idiolect (whatever
that is) or something else completely.” As if echoing Heidegger’s famous
dictum about language as the “house of Being,”16 his subsequent question
remains unanswered: “‘Home,’ he says finally. ‘Where is that?’” (S 97)
Along with technology, the people in the apartment have lost the language which tied them together. Communication amounts to nothing
more than “babbling” self-talk. (S 71, 82, 87) Between these empty
speeches, there are periods of silences; they do not “look at each other.”
(S 68) The protagonists turn out to be “singular” monads, indeed, mysterious to one another, “each individual so naturally encased.” (S 73) The
other does not know what he or she “means by this.” (S 84) The mutual
lack of understanding increases (S 88): “[Y]ou don’t want to know.”
(S 101) They question their identities: “[W]e are still people, the human
slivers of a civilization,” (S 90) and feel compelled to tell “themselves that
they’re still alive.” Jim must listen to himself “breathe” and check whether
he is “still there.” (S 102) Martin fantasizes about the German word
“Freitod” and translates it with “free death,” distorting the sense (again).
The novel ends with monologues by five speakers, “speaking into the
178 The Silence and the Death of Civilization
carpet” a “kind of splintered Haitian Creole,” with Martin immersed “in
his nowhere stare.” (S106, 112, 114) No one intends or expects the other
to remember or understand. (S 111, 115) Max has ceased to listen; he
does not understand a thing, and “stares into the blank screen.” (S 116)
If it is language that bestows on humans a home and “Being,” then
humans in Don DeLillo’s novel are not only profoundly homeless, they
are bound to die a metaphysical, a social and eventually a physical death.
The Silence is much more than a disaster novel17; it is a piece of deep
cultural pessimism.
Notes
1 Martin Heidegger means self-consciousness here, yet the later philosopher
could surely have agreed with language as being existentially indispensable.
The quote is from “Einleitung zu: ‘Was ist Metaphysik?’,” (1976, 19491), 374.
2 The increasing global exposition to risk forces, according to Ulrich Beck (and
similarly Anthony Giddens), a “reflexive modernity,” but may also prompt
the undermining of the technological reason of modernity. See Ulrich Beck,
Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992), passim.
3 The German version appeared in 2012, the English in 2017 (London:
Penguin). The book was published in 15 languages and sold more than 1.6
million copies.
4 See especially “Day 10,” 625 ff.
5 Elsberg, 631, 641.
6 https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191023-what-would-happen-in-anapocalyptic-blackout
7 One of DeLillo’s achievements is, almost needless to say, that the general, the
contemporary political and technological situation, is always also present and
reflected in his protagonists.
8 One must contend, though, that this criticism has been current since Plato;
writing and books fulfill the same function as digital stores.
9 https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol4-trans/15
10 Sure, Thomas of Aquinas’s “veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus” is philosophically no longer up-to-date. Yet, we still rely normatively on referentiality
and on the logic consistency of comprehensible and reasoned statements.
11 Niklas Luhmann, Die Realität der Massenmedien (Opladen: Westdeutscher
Verlag, 1996), 9. (Here and in the following my translation.) The German
original: “Was wir über unsere Gesellschaft, ja über die Welt, in der wir leben,
wissen, wissen wir durch die Massenmedien.”
12 As so often in Don DeLillo, focalizer and extradigetic narrator cannot be
clearly distinguished. I take the voice that is not unequivocally related and not
set apart by inverted commas to be the collective voice of the late modern
technological subject.
13 Luhmann 1996, 19.
14 I do not have to go into the various theories from Plato to Baudrillard. Even
the question whether the world we refer to is real or a simulation has not
been sufficiently answered. Among those who plead for a simulation, the
question whether this is an ontological, epistemological, anthropological,
only a media effect, or even a priori or transcendentally given effect, is still
very much an open one.
The Silence and the Death of Civilization
179
15 Ulrich Beck, Risk Society (see above). Heinz Bude, Society of Fear (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2018). Andreas Reckwitz: The Society of Singularities
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020).
16 Cf. Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, ed. David
Farrell Krell (London: Harper Perennial, 2008), 217: “Language is the house
of Being. In its home man dwells.”
17 Incidentally, at one point in the novel, the streets fill up with confused and
rioting crowds, “a streaming mass,” into which Max walks. (S 99) Yet they
naturally offer no means of “terror management.” In the end, the crowds are
“dispersed. Streets empty.” (S 115)
10 Epilog
Don DeLillo’s novels are outstanding “linguistic works of art.” His “lyrical” and “beautiful” sentences have often been rightly praised. But more
importantly (in terms of a long-term impact), he has been concerned with
the socio-cultural and existential conflicts of his time. His novels tell us
about these from various and multiple perspectives in, to be sure, concrete situatedness, reflexive and exemplary voices. The task of the critic is
to spell out and discursively bring forth the cultural and conceptual
implications of those social, psychological and existential dislocations. In
doing so, critics usually place the suggestive narratives in theoretical
frameworks. They then cannot do otherwise but refer to overarching historical ideas, phenomena or symptoms, which may add up to strong and
far-reaching socio-cultural theses. It is, however, the meager job of the
critic to reduce and transform the semantically rich and nuanced multidimensionality of the narrative text (from which I have deliberately amply
quoted) into the thin one-dimensionality of the conceptional and analytic
discourse applying a few guiding principles. This necessarily implies the
problem of all studies in the history of ideas or culture and, for that matter, literature, namely a certain generalization and abstraction that goes
beyond the letter of the work of art. I am well aware that any generalization must provoke the occasional objection “yes, but,” and another interpretative point of view. Not only the humanities, though, have to live
with deviating and relative perspectives.
However, I take it that my theoretical interpretations (derivations,
diversions and elaborations) are plausibly mirrored in and supported by
Don DeLillo’s narratives and vice versa. Don DeLillo is deeply read and
steeped in Western philosophy, cultural theory or the sciences, as his
many references to Heidegger or Einstein, for example, show. His work
has left traces, clues and references of far-reaching existential consequences. I hope I have been able to shed a light on some of them.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003289937-10
Index
Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes numbers.
Adorno, Theodor W., Negative
Dialectics 21–2
aesthetics 20, 39, 43, 59, 124, 136,
140–60; aisthetics 112, 141, 160
alienation 67, 75, 76, 82, 93, 102,
125; monetary 87, 88; physical
91; temporal 83–6
apparition 26, 27, 50, 51, 59, 164; see
also epiphany
apocalypse 24, 31–40, 102, 137, 140,
164, 170; catastrophe 3, 50,
141, 170; end time 8, 138, 141,
144; eschatology 24, 137, 140,
156; teleology 133; teleological
time 19, 129–30
Aranda, Julieta 165n11
‘arrivant’ (Derrida) 63, 67
art: abstract expressionism 79–81;
architecture 141, 143–4; ars
mortem (installation) 158;
indeterminacy (ambiguity,
overdetermination) of 106,
156; memento mori 2, 68,
143–5; performance 56–66,
67–70, 107–9; sculpture 140,
143–6, 150–4; still life 68,
105–7, 145
Baudler, Georg 90
Baudrillard, Jean 91
Beck, Ulrich, Risk Society 45, 175–6
Becker, Ernest 21
Benjamin, Walter, Charles Baudelaire
15; German Tragic Drama 71,
71n28
Bizzini, Caparole Silvia 117n2
Blumenberg, Hans, Lebenszeit und
Weltzeit 24, 77, 139–40
Body Artist, The 7–10, 19, 32, 51,
56–72, 73, 102, 120
‘bomb, the’ 31, 35–40
boredom 44, 60; dreariness 44, 59;
ennui 68; horror vacui 68;
taedium vitae 60; tedium 42,
44, 57
Boxall, Peter 25, 40, 57, 27n2, 28n7,
29n26, 30n37, 52n11, 70n1,
70n2, 117n3, 118n14, 165n4
Browne, Thomas 157
Bude, Heinz, Society of Fear 175
Butler, Judith 71n28
Caillois, Roger 121–4, 131; see also
mimicry
capital: accumulation of 9, 73–5, 78,
90, 93; capitalism (financial) 9,
14, 73–5, 76, 83–5, 88, 94;
economic growth 74, 90; see
also money
Chamisso, Adelbert 91
claustrophilia 162
Coetzee, J.M., The Master of
Petersburg 7, 61
commodities 5, 12–4, 26, 45–6;
commodification 18, 75
communication 17, 172–7; empty
speech 177; language 23, 58,
86, 87, 103, 137, 150–2, 156,
169, 176–8
consumerism, consumption 34, 45,
51; affluent society (Galbraith)
14, 47
182 Index
contingency 31, 35, 50, 137–8, 143,
146, 148, 156, 159
corridors (hallways) 140–3, 145
Cosmopolis 5, 6, 19, 73–101, 105,
120, 163, 169, 172
Cowart, David 134n27
crowds 21–3, 31, 34, 41, 44, 141, 148
cryonics (cryonicists) 3, 135–6, 138;
cryobiologists 135; cryopreservation (cryoconservation) 145, 158
death: (ontological) ambiguity of 145;
culture of 2, 9; cult of 115;
defenses, distal and proximal 4,
8, 38; dying 2, 10n2, 23,
48–50, 78–80, 115–6; fear of
2–4, 7–10, 12–27, 31–2, 50,
51, 77, 81, 145; finitude 6, 18,
84, 139, 154, 157; images of
42, 103, 104; immortalism,
3–5, 47, 75–6, 82, 90, 97, 116,
136–40, 143, 158; inconceivability of 7–8, 16–7; killing
22–5, 48–9, 80, 90, 128;
life-in-death (death-in-life) 61,
91, 146; memento mori 2, 68,
143–5; mortality 2–6, 14, 18,
43, 45–7, 93–6, 105–6, 144,
147; negativity 40, 94;
ontology of 7, 69; paradox of
16, 61, 64, 69; sublation of 66;
see also Solomon et. al.
de-individuation 78–80; depersonalization 67, 122, 132, 145, 161;
disintegration 12, 92, 93–5,
132; see also ekstasis
de-realization 172, 174
Derrida, Jacques 63–4; différance 157
deterrence (cold war) 38
deus absconditus 114
Di Prete, Laura 71n9
disembodiment 78, 81
Einstein, Albert 171–4, 180
ekphrasis 108
ekstasis 5, 143; intensity 5, 8, 38
electric failure (blackout) 169–70, 173
Eliot, T.S. 134n35
Elsberg, Marc, Blackout 170
End Zone 1, 170
‘entertainment industry’ 21, 176
Enzensberger, Hans Magnus 32
epiphany 50, 59, 70, 97–8, 163–5;
epiphanic moment 10, 27, 126,
164; moment of moments 51,
163–5; see also apparition
Epicurus 19
Ettinger, Robert C.W. The Prospect of
Immortality 135
Euripides, The Bacchae 94
existentialism 146–9
Falling Man 9–10, 68, 102–19, 169,
170
fear: angst 46, 142–3, 148, 156,
175–6; paranoia 174,176
Foxe, John, Acts and Monuments 116
Friedrich, Caspar David 35
Freud, Sigmund 5, 76, 121–3, 66, 69,
74, 118n20
Fukuyama, Francis 6
Gander, Catherine, 133n2
Garrigós, Cristina 74, 98n3
Geble, Peter 133n13
Gesamtkunstwerk 136, 144
Google 83, 171
Gordon, Douglas, 24 Hour Psycho
120
Greenspan, Alan 74
Hagens, Gunther von 159
Hall, John R., Apocalypse 52n3
Han, Byung-Chul 90
Heidegger, Martin 38, 44, 82, 83, 106,
116, 146–55, 150–55, 177–8;
being-in-the-world,169;
being-there (‘Da-sein’) 80, 84;
care (“Sorge”) 107; concealment, unconcealment 146,
150–53; decisiveness
(“Entschlossenheit”) 38, 148;
equipment (“Zeug”) 106, 152,
154, 156; fallenness
(“Verfallenheit”) 44, 83;
thrownness (“Geworfenheit”)
112
Hirst, Damien 145
Hitler, Adolf 13, 20–4, 48, 77
homo digitalis 174
Horkheimer, Max (with Th. W.
Adorno), Dialectics of
Enlightenment 98n8, 134n18
hysteron proteron 83
Index 183
indeterminacy (literary) 127, 156
International Monetary Fund (IMF)
77–8
“In the Ruins of the Future” (DeLillo)
117n1
Jaspers, Karl 107, 118n10
Joyce, James 163, 168n59
Jünger, Ernst 116
Jungk, Robert 36
Kauffman, Linda 114, 118n11
Kavanagh, Matt 98n2, 100n44
Keats, John 61, 143
Kern, Andrea 167n52
Kosellek, Reinhard 33
Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth 118n20
Kurzweil, Ray 20, 77
mourning 4–5, 59–69, 107, 112–5,
117, 118n20; Commemoration
114; ethos of 59, 65; grief
61–6, 69, 103–4, 112–3;
remembrance 110, 114–5;
responsive memory 109,
118n20; prosopopoeia 113
Nagel, Thomas 17, 29n15
naming 65, 137
Nietzsche, Friedrich 41, 79, 94, 129,
163
nothingness 5, 7, 44, 45, 67, 127
Nozick, Robert 29n17
O’Donnell, Patrick 53n26, 54n53
Oppenheimer, Robert 36, 37
Osteen, Mark 71n9, 71n24, 98n2
Lacan, Jacques 121–3
Libra (DeLillo) 49, 82, 171
Luckhurst, Roger 165n10
Luhmann, Niklas 174
Lynch, David 13
Patterson, James T. 34
phlegm (mucus) 132, 33
Pöhlmann, Sascha 119n21
Point Omega 91, 102, 107, 112, 120–34
pop (culture) 43–5
mannequins 155–8, 159
Mao II (DeLillo) 41, 170
martyrdom 115–7
material, materiality 79–80, 91, 93,
97, 106, 150–2
McEwan, Ian, Machines Like Me
158
McKinney, Ronan 117n2, 117n6,
118n9, 118n11
media 33–4, 48–50, 60, 82, 84, 87,
108, 122, 128, 140, 169, 176
memory 39–40, 42, 47, 59, 86, 104,
107, 109–11, 112–5, 125, 138,
158, 171–4; cultural memory
47, 158, 171
metaphysics of presence 150
Meyers, Mark 133n8
mimesis 112, 124, 172; mimicry
121–25; see also Caillois
Mishima, Yukio 116
Mishra, Pankaj 3
Mitchell, Andrew, J. 167n43
money 74–5, 87–92, 93, 111;
exchange value 14, 88–90, 97;
see also capitalism
Morandi, Giorgio 68, 105–7, 109,
111
Rachel, James, Elements of Moral
Philosophy 18, 29n16
reader-response theory 81, 99n17
Reckwitz, Andreas 175–6
resonance 42, 70, 85, 100n29, 123,
154, 155
revelation 31, 51, 59, 115, 163; see
also epiphany
Rilke, Rainer Maria 27, 145
‘Risk Society’ (Beck) 45, 54n48, 136,
143, 169, 175, 178n2
Rosa, Hartmut 82, 99n25, 100n29,
100n30, 154
Roth, Philip, Nemesis 52n9
salvation 10, 14, 27, 35, 90, 97, 138,
143; redemption 15, 31, 34,
48, 69, 97, 128, 140, 163
Sandel, Michael, J. 99n9
Schaub, Thomas Hill 53n26
Schopenhauer, Arthur 5, 40, 79, 129
Schuster, Marc 29n26
Shonkwiler, Alison 98n2
Silence, The 6, 169–79
Simmel, Georg 129
Solomon et. al., The Worm at the
Core 3; ‘terror management’
184 Index
3–5, 19, 21, 31, 44, 48, 51, 59,
68–70, 72, 93, 112, 115
stick figure 62, 69
sublime 22, 27, 31, 35–9
Taureck, Bernhard H.F. 6, 11n11, 12, 16
technology 14, 19, 33, 36–8, 74, 82,
84, 135–8, 140, 164, 168n58,
168n60, 169–77
Teilhard de Chardin, The
Phenomenon of Man 130–1,
134n28
terrorism 3, 8, 130, 175; terrorists
(Jihadists) 55n56, 102–3, 113,
115, 117
‘Texas Highway Killer’ 48–9
time, temporality 8, 24, 29, 32, 34, 37,
39, 41–6, 50, 56–60, 61–3,
67–70, 73, 76, 77, 83–7, 88,
90, 102, 109–10, 120, 121,
124, 125, 129, 137–8, 139–41,
143, 144, 146, 148, 156,
159–62, 169, 172–3, 174, 175;
acceleration 9, 25, 73, 84–7,
99n25, 120; apocalyptic 6, 31;
geological 6, 121, 124, 133,
155; historical 12, 44, 155;
life-time, world-time 24, 37,
77, 84, 139–40; messianic 6,
163; narration of 56, 57;
salvific 34, 137, 140; sense of
61–2, 124, 129, 162, 174;
sequential-linear (linearsequential) 59, 60, 62, 67, 68,
73; simultaneity of the
non-simultaneous 50, 82;
spatial continuum 68, 70, 73,
151; spatialization of 58–9;
teleological 6, 19, 53n36, 88,
129–30; time-toward-death 44;
transience 6, 15, 32, 42, 46, 59,
68, 106, 131, 143, 152; see
also Heidegger
transhumanism, transhumanist 77, 82,
137, 143, 164
Trauerspiel (Benjamin) 67–70
trauma, traumatic 9, 102, 104, 117n2,
110; post-traumatic stress
disorder 4, 8
traveling 8, 44, 76
Trentman, Frank 28n4
trisomy 164–5
truth, untruth 146, 150–55, 158, 160,
165
Underworld 12, 14, 19, 24, 31–55, 82,
91, 97–8, 105, 138, 163, 170–1
United States, the 10n6, 33–5, 115,
130, 136; American society 12,
154; cold war 32–40, 42, 47;
post-war period 33, 43, 44, 47
Varsava, Jerry A., 98n1, 98n2
Veggian, Henry 70n1
Vondung, Klaus, Apokalypse 31, 52n2
waste 4, 15, 16, 39–40, 42, 45–8
White Noise 12–30, 31, 32, 35, 45–6,
77, 91, 98, 139, 163, 169, 170
Yeats, William Butler 33, 61, 93, 143,
163, 165n11
Zero K 19, 91, 98, 105, 134n32,
135–68, 170, 174