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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.
