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Don DeLillo Day

I’ve done a little literary theorizin’ here and there on this recently-renamed blog, but, to date, almost no literary criticizin’.  Well, today’s that’s gonna change.  For today, I’m lettin’ everyone know, in a g-dropping, forced- casual kinda way, that there’s a new volume out in the MLA Approaches to Teaching series, that it’s about teaching Don DeLillo’s White Noise, and that I have an essay in it.  The editors of the volume, the patient and long-suffering John Duvall and Tim Engles, have graciously given me permission to flog the book right here, thus swelling their respective coffers, bwah hah hah hah, and permission to offer a section of my own essay as a teaser, thus filling my pockets with . . . hey! wait a minute!

The cover is cool.  Two covers are even cooler.

But the vagaries of academic publishing are so strange.  I remember very well where I was when I finished writing this essay: I was on an Amtrak train between Baltimore and New York, and when I got off at Penn Station I learned that Paul Wellstone had died.  It’s not every day you check into a hotel crying.  The fact that I’d just spent three hours writing about narrative and death didn’t make it any easier.  Today, I notice that the decade hand has moved on my watch, and the hideous Norm Coleman occupies a seat in the Senate. A little patience, perhaps, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over. . . .

In the meantime, here’s an excerpt from that essay.  My mission, once I chose to accept it, was to write about White Noise and DeLillo’s 1997 epic, Underworld; my argument, in a sentence, is that “Underworld complicates and magnifies the question of motive, by narrating itself backwards and by contrasting the motivelessness of sports with the macromotivations of superpower conflict and the micromotivations of ordinary men and women; but White Noise asks us to comprehend a form of narrative that somehow manages neither to eschew nor to embrace the consolations of plot.” Or something like that.

We now turn you over to some literary criticizin’.  Especially you DeLillo fans.  We start, appropriately, in medias res.

_______

. . . In the novel’s final section, “Das Capital,” at the Kazakh Test Site (where, in a sense, the novel began—there and at the Polo Grounds), our protagonist Nick Shay turns to Viktor Maltsev, the representative of a post-Soviet company (“Tchaika”) that offers nuclear incineration of hazardous waste, and asks, “Viktor, does anyone remember why we were doing all this?”

“Yes, for contest.  You won, we lost.  You have to tell me how it feels.  Big winner” (793).

At least two things are going on in this exchange: first, the irony of hearing Nick called a “big winner” long after we’ve learned that he defines himself in terms of loss (the Dodgers, his father, George Manza) and even spent $34,500 to buy a baseball that reminds him about losing; second, the reduction of the Cold War to a “contest” without any motive other than to produce a winner and a loser.  Nothing here about democracy or the worker’s paradise, nothing about market and command economies, nothing about NATO and the Warsaw Pact, Czechoslovakia or Chile, Pershings or SS-18s, capitalist lackeys or evil empires.  Just winners and losers, as in the playoffs; one side goes on, to spin its narrative another day, and one side goes home.

Contrast this scene, then, with Brian Glassic’s response to Big Sims’ Donnie Moore argument:

“. . . well I’m sorry but how do we distinguish Donnie Moore from all the other ball games and all the other shootings?”

“The point is not what we notice or what we remember but what happened,” Sims said, “to the parties involved.  We’re talking about who lived and who died.”

“But not why,” Glassic said.  “Because if we analyze the reasons honestly and thoroughly instead of shallow and facile and what else?”

“Unhistorical,” I said.

“The we realize that there were probably a dozen reasons why the guy started shooting and most of them we’ll never know or understand.” (99)

Glassic complicates Big Sims’ comparison of Ralph Branca and Donnie Moore by foregrounding precisely what Viktor Maltsev refused to engage in his two-word summary of the superpower conflict that structured the latter half of the last century: the question of motive.  And this, finally, is the real distinction between sports and the rest of our lives: though sports may present complex questions about justice that are also complex questions about narrative, sports offer their fans a form of narrative that is evacuated of motive.  No one asks Michael Jordan, “why were you trying to hit that buzzer-beater?” No one grills Tom Brady about why he was trying to unload the ball against the Raiders, no one wonders why the New York Giants were trying to beat the Brooklyn Dodgers, regardless of whether they were stealing signs.  It is for contest, that’s all.

Juxtaposing the narratives of baseball and of the Cold War, then, Underworld insists on the importance of motive: like Thomas Pynchon (to whom he is often compared in this respect), DeLillo makes much of the multivalence of the term “plot,” spinning paranoid tales around the word’s more sinister connotations, ranging from “diabolical scheme” to “area of cemetery land.” But what’s striking about Underworld is that unlike postmodern paranoid fictions in which all plotting is sinister and probably related somehow to your eventual demise, this novel shows us time and again how trying it is, outside of the world of sports, to live in a story without a plot, a narrative without a motive.

Accordingly, we can use Underworld to illuminate White Noise’s ruminations about the relation of plotting to death.  Under that heading, as well, we can revisit White Noise by way of two of the twentieth century’s most influential English-speaking theorists of narrative, E. M. Forster and Frank Kermode.  For Forster, of course, there can be no plot without causality: “‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story,” he writes in Aspects of the Novel.  “‘The king died and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot” (86).  Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending, a brilliant, elusive book devoted in part to explaining the longer Western-civ plot lines underlying the many varieties of modernist experimentalism, argues that plotting is indispensable to any humans living outside a religious dispensation that explains to them the purpose of their living, from genesis to revelation.  Kermode’s argument is practically transcribed into White Noise via the person of Murray Siskind, a former sports reporter who not only provides the novel with a kind of running commentary on its own forays into American popular and commerical culture, but also rationally and bloodlessly convinces Jack Gladney to kill Willie Mink:

We start our lives in chaos, in babble.  As we surge up into the world, we try to devise a shape, a plan.  There is dignity in this.  Your whole life is a plot, a scheme, a diagram.  It is a failed scheme but that’s not the point.  To plot is to affirm life, to seek shape and control.  (291-92)

Yet as Kermode points out, the plot that affirms life may well spring from our fear of death:

Men, like poets, rush “into the middest,” in medias res, when they are born; they also die in mediis rebus, and to make sense of their span they need fictive concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems.  The End they imagine will reflect their irreducibly intermediary preoccupations.  They fear it, and as far as we can see have always done so; the End is a figure for their own deaths.  (7)

The first half of this passage sounds like Murray, perhaps, but the second half recalls Jack’s discussion of plots at the outset of the novel, when he tells his students, “All plots tend to move deathward.  This is the nature of plots.  Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games.  We edge nearer death every time we plot” (26).  DeLillo follows this rather obvious announcement of one of the novel’s major preoccupations by having the announcer himself disclaim any insight into what he has just said: “Is this true?  Why did I say it?  What does it mean?” (26).

I have always read these questions as being somewhat disingenuous, though I confess I have not been able to decide whether the disingenuousness is Jack’s or DeLillo’s.  Surely, I think, DeLillo knows what he is about when he peppers a novel with discussions about the functions of plotting, so it seems a bit heavy-handed to have a character offer one such discussion and then to puzzle over it.  As for Jack, perhaps his need to disavow responsibility for an argument about plotting arises from a disingenuousness born of fear: if motive lies at the center of plot, how better to obscure one’s own relation to plots (and thus, perhaps, to death) than to claim not to know why one tells one’s class about the relation of plots to death?

Still, though I am not fond of this passage, I do think that Underworld can help us pry it open.  Let us imagine, first, that Jack sincerely does not understand his own motives for saying that all plots move deathward.  We might then be inclined to remember that Jack apparently does not understand his own motives for studying Hitler or for founding Hitler Studies, and tends to speak about his career in the most shallowly professionalist terms available: he has carved out an academic niche, he has established a new field and a scholarly reputation of some sort, yes, but tellingly, we never get any sense of the intellectual substance of this field, or of Jack’s work in it, on which Jack’s reputation presumably rests.  From here we can move to the more general observation that the major characters and events in White Noise seem to be without motive, and we can secure this point in part by looking at the minor fringe characters who do have clear motives—like Orest Mercator, whose goal is to “break the world endurance record for sitting in a cage full of poisonous snakes” (182), and who bends his entire being to this goal: “he inhaled food according to aerodynamic principles.  Pressure differences, intake velocities. . . .  He was creating an imperial self out of some tabloid aspiration” (265, 268).  Motives in White Noise do, indeed, tend to be the stuff of tabloid aspiration, and are inevitably trivialized, even when they involve terrorist plots of the kind with which we have lately become all too familiar, as in this item Babette reads aloud from a tabloid to an audience of blind people: “Members of an air-crash cult will hijack a jumbo jet and crash it into the White House in an act of blind devotion to their mysterious and reclusive leader, known only as Uncle Bob” (146).  By contrast, the novel’s central event, the release of the chemical Nyodene D in the “airborne toxic event,” is utterly motiveless.  If we compare White Noise’s airborne toxic event with the1984 toxic leak at the Union Carbide chemical plant in Bhopal, India (which occurred about a month before the book’s publication, and which DeLillo is often credited with having eerily anticipated), the motivelessness and the agentlessness of the event should seem all the more remarkable—not because Union Carbide intended to poison thousands of residents of Bhopal, surely, but because White Noise contains so little treatment of the causes of the event, not a word about the train that derailed, about the chemical company that was transporting Nyodene D, or about the large-scale socioeconomic forces behind chemical spills and other industrial disasters.  In White Noise, the airborne toxic event is presented as just another one of “the networks, the circuits, the streams, the harmonies” (46) that fill the air, like the hum of consumers in the mall or the ubiquitous and intangible webs of information that define Jack’s life at Autumn Harvest Farms and at the Automated Teller Machine.

The salient exceptions to the rule are, of course, Babette’s plan to have sex with Willie Mink in exchange for Dylar, which she undertakes in a desperate and doomed attempt to alleviate her fear of death, and then Jack’s plan to kill Mink and take his Dylar.  These are plots in Forster’s sense, and it is clear that the second follows causally from the first.  But it’s fitting that both plots go so terribly awry.  For one thing, Dylar itself seems to be a dud.  It causes Mink to confuse words with things, thus affording us some speculations on the relation between language and what Heidegger called Being-toward-death (this would be one facet of the novel’s affinities with existentialism), insofar as it suggests that we must somehow be willing to confront the meaning of death if we are to understand the functions of language.  But since the drug does not actually succeed in counteracting its users’ fear of death, both Babette’s and Jack’s plots to obtain Dylar seem pointless and futile.  And what of the revenge plot that drives Jack to kill Mink for having sex with his wife?  This too fizzles, even though—or because?—Jack obsessively repeats versions of his “plan” to himself some eight times in the course of chapter 39.  Interestingly, had the plan worked, it would have confirmed both Jack’s thesis and Murray’s: it would have imposed order on chaos and it would have moved deathward.  Does Jack’s failed plot, then, suggest that he had it right the first time, when speaking to his students—or perhaps later, when he thought, in that elegiac moment amid the headstones in Blacksmith Village’s “Old Burial Ground,” “May the days be aimless.  Let the seasons drift.  Do not advance the action according to a plan” (98)?

. . .
______

There’s lots more from me in this vein, along with biographical and bibliographic info on DeLillo and seventeen other essays on White Noise.  So go read the whole thing, as they say on “blogs.” And check out the full table of contents—there’s some great stuff in there.

Posted by on 03/12 at 11:50 AM

  1. For several seconds I was convinced this book was edited by The Eagles.

    Posted by  on  03/12  at  01:28 PM

  2. I must be missing something; my own copy of Underworld, after serving time as a doorstop, got dropped off in the local library’s night slot for resale.  Guess I’m a heathen…

    Posted by  on  03/12  at  02:10 PM

  3. Yes, you’re a heathen, but this blog welcomes heathens, Heydave.  So go out and buy another copy, and get through to about page 250 (I didn’t care for the first Nick Shay section, myself).  Read the “Cocksucker Blues” section quickly—there’s a good deal of wheel-spinning in there.  But the novel as a whole really is brilliant, and if you’re not charmed by Marvin Lundy, I don’t know what to tell you.

    Sharon, funny you should say that.  For eight months I thought the book was being edited by the Eagles.

    Posted by Michael  on  03/12  at  03:07 PM

  4. Interesting synchronicity, as i was just working on a little essay regarding the irrationality of fearing the only aspect of life that has a 100% chance of actually happening. 

    But then Dylan (dylar?) talked about that way back when: “that he not busy being born, is busy dying.” Of course in the lines before that we are warned: “Suicide remarks are torn/ From the fool’s gold mouthpiece/ The hollow horn plays wasted words,”.  Is it really all right, ma, because i am not so sure anymore.

    Posted by  on  03/12  at  03:10 PM

  5. Captivating, as usual. But now for important things--do you know the table of contents you linked above put an extra “e” in your name? Or is that some postmodernist ploy--instability of identity and all that?

    Posted by  on  03/12  at  04:13 PM

  6. enough already with the postmodern identity crisis… why does your frontpage still say it is not you in the picture.... Next thing will be that it says “this is no picture"…

    Posted by  on  03/12  at  04:55 PM

  7. Interesting. But sports as offering “a form of narrative that is evacuated of motive”? Was Ali ever just a boxer? The Miracle on Ice just another hockey game? The Yankees and the Mets just a couple of baseball teams?

    I also want to echo your reading of White Noise. You can find as much at the very end of the novel in the juxtaposition of the crowds at the overpass against the crowds in the supermarket. Both are bereft of an articulable reason but remain strangely cohesive, the narratives of the tabloids finding an echo in the paparazzi of the overpass, “the man with a camera and a long lens, waiting for his moment"(325).  But what are we to make then of Jack’s final fear of “the imaging block” and what it knows(325)? Aren’t the ways of knowing instrumentalized in its “magnetic fields, its computerized nuclear pulse"(325) repeated in the checkout line’s “holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly"(326)? What are we to make then of Jack’s decision to take “no calls"(325)? I don’t think, in this light, that I would go so far as to say that the novel “asks us to comprehend a form of narrative that somehow manages neither to eschew nor to embrace the consolations of plot.” Jack has clearly learned something whose contours are on display in the novel, which is to say that maybe it comes down to the distinction that can be drawn between knowing and understanding in relation to posession.

    Posted by  on  03/12  at  05:27 PM

  8. I think that this is the place to say that I found your essay on the end of _Underworld_ very helpful.

    HA-HOP

    Posted by  on  03/12  at  06:39 PM

  9. Uncannily, when I found out Paul Wellstone had died, I’d just gotten off an Amtrak train from Baltimore to DC. I started crying right in the metro station, and a woman came up to ask if I was okay, which vaguely restored some sense of faith in humanity.

    Posted by amb  on  03/12  at  06:43 PM

  10. If people I respect continue to praise Delillo for what I consider accidental and intermittent moments of non-utter-vapidity, I’ll be forced to re-read White Noise and The Names.  But I don’t want to.  Ever.  So stop it already.  Please?

    Just.

    Stop.

    It.

    Posted by Scott Eric Kaufman  on  03/12  at  06:56 PM

  11. In my reading of White Noise, Jack and Babs exhibit a phobic fascination (per Stallybrass & White), rather than fear, of death. Insofar as plot equals death or leads deathward, I think it has a kind of return-of-the-repressed quality to it. Jack and Babs are as much necrophiles as necrophobes.

    Posted by D.B.  on  03/12  at  07:37 PM

  12. But sports as offering “a form of narrative that is evacuated of motive”? Was Ali ever just a boxer? The Miracle on Ice just another hockey game? The Yankees and the Mets just a couple of baseball teams?

    You know, Tom, Gerald Graff didn’t buy this part of my argument either, and (like me) he’s a serious sports fan.  So we thrashed this out over a couple of emails, and I agreed (as I’ll agree here) that there are all kinds of ancillary motives that lend greater significance to individual and team performances.  The guy hitting that three might want to (a) win the game and (b) enhance his value as a free agent and (c) impress the woman he’s spotted courtside.  The U.S. hockey team wanted to (a) win the game and (b) deal the Soviet juggernaut a decisive blow for the sake of U.S. hockey at a particularly tense political moment and (c) join the ranks of the 1960 gold medalists whose victory in Squaw Valley was about as incredible as anything the sport of hockey has ever seen (and (c) was especially important to Herb Brooks, the last man cut from that 1960 team). 

    But still, these are ancillary motives that inflect the desire to win; the primary motive is to win—for contest, as Viktor says, you win, we lose.  So, in retrospect, I probably should have said ”largely evacuated of motive,” because, after all, to this day no one has asked Jordan why he was trying to hit that buzzer-beater (and you Cleveland fans will know that I’m talking about that 1989 thriller in which Jordan went up over Craig Ehlo).  As Heidegger once said, why ask why?

    D.B., that’s a good point.  A very good point.  Scott, stop whatever you are doing and reread White Noise now.  Or after you read Underworld.

    Posted by Michael  on  03/12  at  07:54 PM

  13. I have never read DeLillo.  None whatsoever.  I am indeed a heathen.  Though I do like that his name also sounds like the name of a mafioso.  Next thing you know they’ll be calling him Teflon Don DeLillo, for no criticizin’ ever sticks to him.  Or something.

    Anywho, I just wanted to say I like the fact that the blog name is multiple—it’s different on my Bloglines subscription and in the heading at the top of Firefox from the name in the top right column.  Now that’s some postmodern multiplicity for ya.  Next I think you should go for “Danger Bérubé” and sign your posts “Danger,” too.

    Posted by Dr. Virago  on  03/12  at  09:39 PM

  14. Your name is spelled “Michael Bérubeé” in that online Table of Contents you linked to. New alias for the International Prøfessør of Danger? Or is it the inevitable effect of dangeral studies on the formerly punctilious and presumably French-enabled Modern Language Association?

    Posted by  on  03/12  at  09:48 PM

  15. I find all this loose talk about literature intimidating. I have a hard enough time keeping up with non-fiction. I haven’t read so many good fictional things--I’d like to read Hugo and the entire work of Zola and Balzac, in French, for instance--that I hesitate to dive into fiction of the last decade or two. It’s like I want to say, stop writing, man, so I can catch up which, thankfully, I know is insane to even think. (That’s why I never write that statement down where someone else might read it.) I don’t want to wade in the shallows and, since I can’t dive in, I won’t go near the shore. I could quit my job and hang out at the library, but there would still be all those non-fiction tomes…

    By the way, The Drudge Report with Norbizness would work pretty well, too. Try that one, next.

    Posted by  on  03/12  at  09:49 PM

  16. New blog name: Diabolical Diacriticism.

    Posted by  on  03/12  at  10:04 PM

  17. not because Union Carbide intended to poison thousands of residents of Bhopal

    Not intended as a corrective, but as a footnote. Can we say that the insoucience they displayed in handling toxic chemicals renders questions of direct intent moot. At any rate, they did have an intent: to make a profit. 22,000+ dead and likely because of that very intent:

    Bee and Shukla consistently refer to what happened in Bhopal as a crime rather than an accident. “It was Warren Anderson’s criminal negligence and insistence on cost-cutting that caused this disaster,” says Bee. Internal Union Carbide documents, released in 2002 during the discovery phase of a civil lawsuit against the company, seem to support her contention. A 1973 document, signed by Anderson himself, notes that the technology to be used in the Bhopal factory was “unproven.” A safety review conducted by Union Carbide experts in 1982 warned of a “serious potential for sizable releases of toxic materials” at the factory.

    Dow spokesman John Musser confirmed the existence of the 1982 study but asserted, “None of the issues [it] raised would have had an impact on the fatal gas leak and all of the issues had been addressed by the plant well before the December 1984 disaster.” The real culprit, the company insists, was sabotage.

    I’m a longtime fan of White Noise,* because I’m just morbid that way (ask me about the ‘dead flesh’ tattoo I got in 1993), but the novel’s been grating on me increasingly in the past years. Perhaps the motivelessness--and big thanks to you MB for putting your fickle finger of fate on that--of the Airborne Toxic Event is part of that irritation. I want to try to think through death, following Marcuse’s “Ideology of Death,” as something that should be resisted. I don’t think DeLillo’s helping with that hopeless project.

    More importantly maybe, was it just of DeLillo to use an industrial accident--not inevitable, not “natural"--as a way to thrust the white noise of death back into our consciousness?

    * I read the baseball bit in Underworld and about another 100 pages. And then I sold it. I’d regret it, but I expect death will catch me before I run out of satisfying books to read. I do wonder if White Noise would be half so popular in academia if it weren’t thick with academics.

    ** By the way, isn’t Three-Mile Island a better reference than the Bhopal disaster?

    Posted by  on  03/12  at  10:29 PM

  18. Your name is spelled “Michael Bérubeé” in that online Table of Contents you linked to. New alias for the International Prøfessør of Danger?

    Oøøøøh, I like those ø’s, Åmandå.  But seriously, Michael Bérubeé is my maiden name.  Née Bérubeé.  You could look it up.

    It’s like I want to say, stop writing, man, so I can catch up which, thankfully, I know is insane to even think.

    Not at all, Brian!  I think it all the time, and I am very sane.  Really!  Though I also think “The Drudge Report with Norbizness” is brilliant, so maybe you shouldn’t go by me.

    Can we say that the insoucience they displayed in handling toxic chemicals renders questions of direct intent moot.

    Yes, of course we can say that, Karl the Norbiznessness, but criminal negligence is leagues away from direct intent, and my point about the motivelessness of DeLillo’s ATE holds, no?

    I do wonder if White Noise would be half so popular in academia if it weren’t thick with academics.

    You must be kidding.  The book is actually one of the funniest, LOL “serious” novels written in the United States after Gravity’s Rainbow.  But yeah, the Elvis Studies bit doesn’t hurt.  See Gil Rodman’s very smart Elvis After Elvis for a decent response.

    As for Underworld:  see, see urgently, right this second, comment number three.

    Posted by Michael  on  03/12  at  11:45 PM

  19. Sport attracts because the motive is clear, not that it does not exist. It doesn’t need an ideology, or a creed because we all get it. What we love especially in great champions, Ali, Jordan, Rose, is that their will, their motivation to win, to be the greatest becomes clearer as we get to know them. We love the moment of triumph, because we then participate in that motive of victory.
    THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT! THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT!

    Posted by  on  03/13  at  12:34 AM

  20. I can see what you’re saying Michael. But I don’t know that to call them merely “ancillary” motives makes the situation any clearer. As Heidegger and his progeny demonstrate, “why ask why” has value beyond the simply rhetorical. “Why ask why” inaugurates the method by which we access being, a necessary enterprise, it seems to me, if we are to honestly argue that anything is subordinated to anything else. That doesn’t mean establishing a universal as much as the terms of argument; Isn’t this the way that the distinction between macro and micro motivations becomes clear?

    I don’t want to push this too hard because I don’t want to turn White Noise into simply some iteration of hyphenated being. But if we’re going to assert the primacy of some motives over others, it seems to me then that White Noise is less about “Do not advance the action according to a plan” than the difficulty inherent in embracing “Do not advance the action according to a plan” as a plan (To mention Heidegger again, this would seem to be closer to what he thought the Greeks were on about). It is only in this light, it seems to me, that the juxtaposition of the community of the overpass and the crowds wandering among the shelves and aisles of the supermarket makes any sense at the end. There is a palpable sympathy there for a crowd that gathers under the spell of an inexplicable, almost sublime, awe at the sunset as opposed to those gathered in the supermarkets speaking the “language of waves and radiation,” quantum mechanics, the bomb, the auratic thrall of the commodity and technology. Not a judgement for or against, just a evanescent sympathy that ebbs and flows with the crowd.

    Posted by  on  03/13  at  01:02 AM

  21. Libra.  C’mon, doesn’t everyone know that’s Delillo’s best?

    But, and no disrespect meant to Prof M Bé’s own literary criticizing, let me repeat my boost on Scott’s blog for Richard Gehr’s great Village Voice review of Ellroy’s Cold Six Thousand that turns out to be a comparison between Ellroy and Delillo, in rather interesting ways.

    Posted by Jon  on  03/13  at  03:42 AM

  22. Tom,
    I think you’re right to “juxtapose” the crowds on the overpass with those in the crowds in the supermarket, but your juxtaposition turns into equation too easily. First, the crowds aren’t equally cohesive. You’ll find a lot more coming and going on the overpass. Second, the overpass crowd gathers to watch the sunset “through a cloud of unknowing” that simply doesn’t exist in the complete-information environment of the supermarket. It’s on the axis of “unknowing” that the juxtaposition turns, and not “motive.” In short, the desire to ask “why” dissipates under the sunset, whereas the “psychic data” in the supermarket dictates why you’re there.

    Posted by D.B.  on  03/13  at  06:02 AM

  23. You must be kidding.

    Not sure if I am or not. A man’s allowed to wonder, though.

    my point about the motivelessness of DeLillo’s ATE holds, no?

    Mais oui. But the Q of responsibility. In a legal sense, yeah, direct intent ("I want to invade a country, lie about why, throw my own country into financial ruin and theirs into civil wars so brutal that the victims of this war would probably be willing to immigrate to El Salvador circa 1985") is different from just screwing the pooch ("I’m going to carry out this war in such a way that I do nothing to prevent anything negative that’s likely to happen and in fact in such a way as to increase the chances of anything negative happening"). But in a moral sense, I’m not sure the difference between the two is all that great, especially when the primary intent--for this wholly hypothetical war I describe, or likely Bhopal--is to make a profit, or, more broadly, because the agent has valued his or her life and pleasure far, far above the lives of others who might, or probably will suffer because of that agent’s pursuit of profit & pleasure.

    Not that I’m trying to hijack the thread w/ morality! My Q--and I’m not looking for an answer anymore--is simply this: because any ATE likely results from a combination of carelessness and a highly directed pursuit of profit that complicates q’s of responsibility per the above paragraph, was it responsible for Delittlelillo to use an apparently motiveless ATE to frame and permeate his novel? Does a kind of collusion or complicity of hopelessness arise from that motiveless presentation? Wouldn’t I rather be spurred engagement?

    -
    My fun reading for the next day or so, although it might seem that I’m calling for us all to reread The Poisonwood Bible, is Julian Barnes History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters. Why? Because the fiancee kept laughing while she read it, and more importantly, because until I finish the diss., get a job, and (very likely) move or at least get my own office, I just don’t have room on my shelves for Underworld. So MB, I promise to read it in Fall of 2008 unless I get a 3/3 position, in which case, it’ll be Summer of 2009. Satisfied?

    Posted by  on  03/13  at  10:20 AM

  24. Wait. What year is it?

    I’ll read it either Fall of 2007 or Summer of 2008.

    Spurred to engagement.

    And now off to finish a chapter.

    Back to Heidegger folks!

    Posted by  on  03/13  at  10:23 AM

  25. I just finished White Noise last week (like Brian, I’m having a hard time keeping up), so this was an interesting, timely post for me.  You English Majors always find so much there that I never see.  (I guess that’s why you’re English majors!) I spent almost the entire novel waiting for someone to die.  Even before we learned about Willie Mink, I feared Murray would talk Jack into killing someone so he (Murray) could have Babette to himself.  The chapter with Fink at the motel was so vivid and suspenseful, and then truly surprising in its outcome.  Then, toward the end with Wilder crossing the highway, I kept thinking “No, you aren’t going to do this.... don’t you dare...”.  And then he didn’t, much to my relief. 

    I guess my point is that it worked for me as a novel even if I don’t know from ancillary motives and know E.M Forster only as Merchant/Ivory’s meal ticket.  (Maybe Modern American Novel Recommendations would be a good topic for an arbitrary but fun Friday?)

    Posted by  on  03/13  at  11:27 AM

  26. I was intrigued by this and decided I should read “Underworld”.  I was a bit pressed for time so I decided to rent the DVD, starring Kate Beckinsale.  I think that the director may have taken some liberties interpreting the novel.  I hope that “White Noise”, starring Michael Keaton will stick to the story a little better, or at least have smarter werewolves.

    Posted by  on  03/13  at  02:59 PM

  27. An essay on White Noise and social change —
    http://www.socialit.org/fictionchange.html — a look at some of the unnecessary emptiness, and worse, of White Noise in particular, along with other such “star” novels (ones that are esteemed and not unaccomplished in various ways).

    Posted by Tony Christini  on  03/13  at  05:27 PM

  28. Tony Christini’s article is so poorly written that I couldn’t get through it. Quite the opposite, then, of White Noise, though not in the way Tony intends. Unnecessary emptiness? Such is life these days, no? DeLillo tells us what’s wrong. It’s not up to him to also tell us how to fix it.

    Posted by  on  03/13  at  05:46 PM

  29. Thanks for the props, Bucky Wunderlick. I quite agree that “It’s not up to [DeLillo] to tell us how to fix” life, nor do I suggest that it is, as anyone who reads the essay can plainly see.

    Posted by Tony Christini  on  03/13  at  06:40 PM

  30. I always thought that DeLillo was unreable, esp. White Noise, which seemed like the most overpraised book of its decade and writing a teaching guide just confirms it, esp. an edited volume.

    Posted by  on  03/13  at  06:49 PM

  31. writing a teaching guide just confirms it, esp. an edited volume.

    Just curious—why esp. an edited volume?

    I thought Kate Beckinsale did a great job, Njorl.  Completely convincing.  Did you watch it with the sound off too?

    Posted by Michael  on  03/13  at  06:53 PM

  32. All it takes is one sentence from Tony’s essay to proves both my points (that it’s poorly written, and that it blames DeLillo for not telling us how to fix what’s wrong):

    “That we need better industrial and environmental regulations seems a plausible thought, but DeLillo’s characters give it only passing attention, if that, and base no action upon such an idea—something readers might learn a lot from and be wonderfully enthralled by, personally and otherwise—nor does the narrative counterpoint very much with characters or perspectives more insightful, and yet White Noise, especially representative of a current dominant ethos in fiction, is one of the most praised contemporary novels.”

    ‘Nuff said.

    Rich: That’s odd logic. What difference does it make that the volume is edited? And on your first point--a book is overpraised if a teaching guide appears on it? I guess that applies to the 80 or so other works covered in that MLA Approaches to Teaching series? Like say, Othello, Native Son, Things Fall Apart, To the Lighthouse, and on and on . . .? I can’t follow you.

    Posted by  on  03/13  at  07:04 PM

  33. My very next sentence—and still in the same paragraph from which Bucky Wunderlick takes the excerpt—happens to be:

    “That White Noise and other novels here discussed are highly accomplished I take as a given.”

    Which is immediately followed by:

    “What I aim to discuss are the, at least, equally striking, and unnecessary, limitations of such novels and such fiction.”

    Enough said, indeed.

    Always refreshing to see evidence.

    Wunderlick imagines a “blame” game, in place of normative critique—as the evidence reveals.

    As for the essay being “poorly written,” obviously the essay is utterly opaque and devoid of meaning. How else to explain Wunderlick’s unsupported and unsupportable analysis?

    Possibly there are other explanations. As V.F. Calverton notes in The Liberation of American Literature (1932):

    “That the attempt to be above the battle is evidence of a defense mechanism can scarcely be doubted. Only those who belong to the ruling class, in other words, only those who had already won the battle and acquired the spoils, could afford to be above the battle. Fiction which was propagandistic, that is, fiction which continued to participate in the battle, it naturally cultivated a distaste for, and eschewed. Fiction which was above the battle, that is fiction which concerned only the so-called absolutes and eternals, with the ultimate emotions and the perennial tragedies, but which offered no solutions, no panaceas - it was such fiction that won its adoration. “It is possible that we are growing a bit tired of the novel with a purpose,” The Nation declared in its issue of April 18, 1912, reflecting that change in the process of consummation, and then adding in a carping vein that the “American novelist, like the American playwright, has listened to the counsel which urged him to look for his materials in problems of the nation and the day.” The new aim was to escape social reality and to exalt individual emotionality. In short, this new ideology, like that of all leisure classes, sought to cultivate literature as a form of escape - escape either from boredom or from its own limitations of self and soul.”

    And Terry Eagleton, “Conclusion: Political Criticism,” Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983):

    “Radical critics...have a set of social priorities with which most people at present tend to disagree. This is why they are commonly dismissed as ‘ideological’, because ideology’ is always a way of describing other people’s interests rather than our own.”

    Posted by Tony Christini  on  03/13  at  07:53 PM

  34. Tony, I’ll be happy to have a look at your essay soon. It sounds like it’s getting at some of my beefs.

    BTW, MB, something else struck me this morning: The book is actually one of the funniest, LOL “serious” novels written in the United States after Gravity’s Rainbow.

    Surely you’re not arguing that there’s a meritocracy at work?

    Posted by  on  03/13  at  08:20 PM

  35. Surely you’re not arguing that there’s a meritocracy at work?

    Why, yes I am, as a matter of fact!  And I’m in charge of it.  Or I will be, as soon as Harold Bloom hands over the keys and cashes my security deposit.

    Posted by Michael  on  03/13  at  10:24 PM

  36. Karl, You can see too if our books walk the talk, via Mainstay Press—http://www.mainstaypress.org—Glory, Homefront, and Point of No Return are the ones currently available—two of them priced beyond reasonable (hint, hint to college instructors of financially strapped students).

    Incidentally, I wrote that fiction and social change essay in State College not far from Michael’s house, though back in spring 1992 when I was an undergraduate at Penn State (I extended and updated the essay a little a couple years ago). It was for Jennifer Jackson’s great course on culturally critical contemporary novels—one of three lit courses I took at PSU and by far the best.

    Posted by Tony Christini  on  03/14  at  12:19 PM

  37. MB: Harh!

    Tony: I did have a look around your website, and it looks as though you’re doing the right thing. If only I had the time and space to do more reading for fun! I’m bookmarking your site though.

    Posted by  on  03/14  at  07:57 PM

  38. Karl, I get what you’re saying but maybe I ought to just note that Mainstay Press and my progressive lit sites are focused on literature at least in the classic sense, that is, we study it, create it, use it, read it to entertain and to enlighten, both—and then some.

    Political fiction matters greatly, and is vastly underworked in efforts for change (and understanding). Psychoanalysis Director Stephen Soldz notes that “political attitudes and behaviors are as influenced by emotional factors as by rational arguments”—and Roland Barthes once felt compelled to wonder:

    “Why are we so slow, so indifferent about mobilizing narrative and the image? Can’t we see that it is, after all, works of fiction, no matter how mediocre they may be artistically, that best arouse political passion?”

    Even Wunderlick appears to accept didactic fiction—to a point—in that it “tells us what’s wrong” or what “is life these days.” Whether DeLillo would agree with him or not, or to what extent, I don’t know. Of course, many of the greatest most entertaining classics of imaginative literature are extremely didactic in many ways—everything from the Odyssey to “A Modest Proposal” but that’s not all these works are, and certainly that’s not all Mainstay works are, neither only didactic nor only entertaining but a whole lot of both, and more (speculative, in particular, or heuristic...). And if the novels, plays, criticism, and poetry of Mainstay would not set readers back on their heels or powerfully transport them, and so on, at least in moments in these various ways, then we wouldn’t have done our jobs as well as we’ve aimed to, and literature and life would be the poorer for it.

    “The road to hell—he had seen a bumper sticker the other day—is paved with Republicans. With a marker, Jim had wanted to add: and Democrats.”

    That’s from the second page of one of my Mainstay books, Glory. Is there some fun there? Some overt and symbolic didacticism? Some heuristic needling, of various sorts? Some psychological, social, political, cultural insight?

    It’s not for me to say, of course. But maybe sometimes the briefest of excerpts actually is fairly indicative of the whole.

    Posted by Tony Christini  on  03/15  at  02:12 AM

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