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Sunday, March 12, 2006

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.

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. . . 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)?

. . .
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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 Michael on 03/12 at 11:50 AM
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