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Jan. 21st, 2007 07:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionDid finish Underworld a week or two ago. I loved almost every episode but I'm not sure I have the whole thing in focus. I wonder if Delillo did?
For example, if the unterwelt's what's repressed, is it so in the sense that everyone's anxiously ignoring the main facts (of imminent mortal threat and runaway consumption) or in the sense that the main facts (gov't, military-industrial complex, major media) are ignoring everyone? Surely it can't be both, as the two underworlds are two different sets, beneath the different overworlds of personal and cultural mindsets. Or I suppose the big rug could sweep all the little rugs under it, which could in turn do some kind of anthropomorphic Fantasia-style sweeping of dust under themselves.
Perhaps if he'd stuck with an individual's story: how one of us saw the light of the bomb. Or committed more fully to panorama: how the bomb saw us. As it is there's a great confusion of lights and levels--which I admit is interesting in itself. But we want to pull it all together. There's a reason books are shaped like little boxes.
It does sometimes feel disquietingly personal, too, no? Presumably Delillo never killed anyone but I wonder if he sees some central aspect of his life as having been hijacked by sudden complicity (ambiguously guilty) in a great assault, after which nothing was the same. Life was lived, but off-kilter, S/M, requiring obsessions and hobbies and sins to vent bad air and relocate limits. And the post-'91 life descriptions are reminiscent of the flat affect and quiet pliability following PTSD spasms.
And to the extent it is personal, how much does that compromise it as an analysis of our history and culture? How much of it is a Wordsworthian gilding of youth, made troublesome by incomplete awareness of being such a gilding, and of a season rather than a numerable year?
Have to give Roth credit, in hindsight, for merging the two Falls seamlessly in American Pastoral. His opinions about how his life and times were related are probably as complex and ambivalent as Delillo's, but the emotional push of his story wasn't. Roth's so good at the shuffleboarding, the central movement of his novels--his best novels. Even his less good ones tend to fall apart into a handful of independently excellent pushes. Delillo, I don't know (yet he's frequently Roth's superior, I'm surprised to grant, in many narrative capacities: telling details, dialogue, authenticity of texture). Maybe Underworld should be seen as more like Dubliners or Turgenev's Hunter's Sketches, a collection of stories cutting through the same world at different angles.
Still, the central conceit, or thinking about what the central conceit might be, is totally fascinating. The earth full of missiles and garbage and secrets and lost selves. And there was that great anxiety, of which I'm sure I only tasted a corner but that was more than too much. And that great relief, he gets that right at the end. Most of us were still riding it in early September, 2001.
I think what I need is a phrase, something to illuminate all the happenings and figures at once. And I have maybe the nouns of such a sentence, maybe the verb, but can't quite say it. A bit like those awful French dreams I used to have.
For example, if the unterwelt's what's repressed, is it so in the sense that everyone's anxiously ignoring the main facts (of imminent mortal threat and runaway consumption) or in the sense that the main facts (gov't, military-industrial complex, major media) are ignoring everyone? Surely it can't be both, as the two underworlds are two different sets, beneath the different overworlds of personal and cultural mindsets. Or I suppose the big rug could sweep all the little rugs under it, which could in turn do some kind of anthropomorphic Fantasia-style sweeping of dust under themselves.
Perhaps if he'd stuck with an individual's story: how one of us saw the light of the bomb. Or committed more fully to panorama: how the bomb saw us. As it is there's a great confusion of lights and levels--which I admit is interesting in itself. But we want to pull it all together. There's a reason books are shaped like little boxes.
It does sometimes feel disquietingly personal, too, no? Presumably Delillo never killed anyone but I wonder if he sees some central aspect of his life as having been hijacked by sudden complicity (ambiguously guilty) in a great assault, after which nothing was the same. Life was lived, but off-kilter, S/M, requiring obsessions and hobbies and sins to vent bad air and relocate limits. And the post-'91 life descriptions are reminiscent of the flat affect and quiet pliability following PTSD spasms.
And to the extent it is personal, how much does that compromise it as an analysis of our history and culture? How much of it is a Wordsworthian gilding of youth, made troublesome by incomplete awareness of being such a gilding, and of a season rather than a numerable year?
Have to give Roth credit, in hindsight, for merging the two Falls seamlessly in American Pastoral. His opinions about how his life and times were related are probably as complex and ambivalent as Delillo's, but the emotional push of his story wasn't. Roth's so good at the shuffleboarding, the central movement of his novels--his best novels. Even his less good ones tend to fall apart into a handful of independently excellent pushes. Delillo, I don't know (yet he's frequently Roth's superior, I'm surprised to grant, in many narrative capacities: telling details, dialogue, authenticity of texture). Maybe Underworld should be seen as more like Dubliners or Turgenev's Hunter's Sketches, a collection of stories cutting through the same world at different angles.
Still, the central conceit, or thinking about what the central conceit might be, is totally fascinating. The earth full of missiles and garbage and secrets and lost selves. And there was that great anxiety, of which I'm sure I only tasted a corner but that was more than too much. And that great relief, he gets that right at the end. Most of us were still riding it in early September, 2001.
I think what I need is a phrase, something to illuminate all the happenings and figures at once. And I have maybe the nouns of such a sentence, maybe the verb, but can't quite say it. A bit like those awful French dreams I used to have.
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no subject
Date: 2007-01-22 01:12 am (UTC)Isn't there a line in the book about how the orange juice carton resembles the bomb casing and they all come off the same assembly line? The slippage, the possibility that one might be the same as the other, but that you can't quite say so or you plunge into some form of madness, is what it's all about and why DeLillo, like Dickens, has to maintain that tension between the high-flying omnipresent omniscient third-person narrator and the first-person observer.
If you could bring it all together, the book wouldn't be Underworld, it would be the Bible, or the Qu'ran, or indeed Das Kapital. And the root of it isn't so much political paranoia as such, but simply the retreat of global explanations for the things that happen. The refrain of the Lenny Bruce set piece, "We're all gonna die!" That's the problem. Because we are, but what does it all mean? Dickens is dealing with the first wave of this radical doubt, the rise of the modern state and science and capitalism and the eclipse of Christianity, and DeLillo is dealing with maybe the last wave, the end of the Cold War, the end of history, of ideology. What's left to explain things? Conspiracy theory and various other sorts of personal obsession replace God and History. The central conceit is the inability to imagine a central conceit, other than things that are crazy and inhuman, like the bomb.
What it makes it a weird and sad book is that DeLillo for whatever reason can't bring himself around to the perfectly good practical answer supplied by both Dickens and Pynchon to this quandary, which is try to form communities of love within all this mess. I remember the end of the book imperfectly, but it's a kind of ecstatic vision, is it not, in which the nun and J. Edgar Hoover become one in cyberspace followed by a peroration on peace. It's satisfying in that it's an extraordinary visionary piece of writing, and suggests a hope for the post-historical future in which the end of grand narratives means a global democratic dispersal of meaning (maybe, if I recall correctly), but I'm not sure it's humanly satisfying like marrying Dr. Woodcourt would be.
Oh, and the personal guilt thing...I think it stems from DeLillo's desire to connect the baseball game with the bomb and the Cold War. What brings together this communal, shared, hopeful moment with the threat of doom and destruction and loss? And he traces it back to an original sin. Might be a reference to founding American crimes, slavery and genocide. The game and the bomb represent, as Melville said of slaveholding America, "Man's fairest hope linked with man's foulest crime."
Sorry this is so long! But that's my take.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-22 04:00 am (UTC)God and history are pretty inhuman, to my mind; and radical doubt was presumably intense in the Goddiest times (imagine that underworld). I think the days of order are represented to Delillo by the sophisticated tribalism of the semi-segregated New Yorkers, with their ubiquitous, defining inherited forms--so powerful that violations of individual ones were readily shrugged off, or anticipated. Kind of a means of ignoring history and defusing metaphysical speculation, I'd say: God as the sum total of the words, pictures and program events associated with him. Roots and ritual, though, yeah.
I guess Delillo's take on the Cold War is, that period in which communities of love didn't have a fighting chance.
Notice that trying to do X is never a practical answer. Doing X is. And the X was undoable, too big. Making what little y's, z's and o's one can is the proper philosophical answer, but one can understand some emotionalism and defeatist behavior among the X fans.
Interesting how the baseball game stands for both American victory over Europe post-WWII, with its military, bomb, intact infrastructure etc. and the eventual Cold War 'victory' (though it's an open question if our souvenir ball for that victory is still real, i.e. if the victory's meaningful). All the connections are interesting...I think that's why Underworld doesn't come across as critiquing interpretation, overall: Delillo keeps doing it.
I think I might park my phrase at "these were the things that we saw in those days, we survivors."