Taking Out The Trash: Don Delillo'S Underworld, Liquid Modernity, and The End of Garbage

Taking Out the Trash: Don DeLillos Underworld, Liquid Modernity, and the End of Garbage
David H. Evans
garbage has to be the poem of our time because garbage is spiritual, believable enough to get our attention, getting in the way, piling up, stinking, turning brooks brownish and creamy white: what else deflects us from the errors of our illusionary ways, not a temptation to trashlessness, that is too far off, and, anyway unimaginable, unrealistic ... A. R. Ammons, Garbage, 2. 18 Garbage. Materials that have been discarded or allowed to escape (as byproducts of an industrial process) as useless. . . It is the willful act of discarding a thing that makes it garbage. Most garbage is worn out, used up, broken, rejected or otherwise worthless, but new and nearly new items also enter the waste stream.1 The human tendency to regard little things as important has produced very many great things.2 DON DELILLOS MAGNUM OPUS, Underworld, has been honoured by an impressive series of prestigious awards, but perhaps the most surprising was the 2000 William Dean Howells Medal, given to the most distinguished work
Steve Coffel, Encyclopedia of Garbage (New York 1996) p. 96. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York 2000) p. 115.
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doi:10.1093/camqtly/bfl008 The Author, 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Cambridge Quarterly. All rights reserved. For permissions please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
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THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY
of American fiction published during the previous five years. Surprising not, certainly, because the novel was undeserving of such recognition; on the contrary, Underworld s ambitious attempt to render the mental rhymes and social rhythms of American life at the end of the twentieth century is fully the equal of Howellss effort to depict the mind and mores of his own fin de sicle. The sense of dissonance arises from something else the implied association of the most energetic American champion of literary realism with an author who has come to be seen as the pre-eminent analyst of the age of the spectacle, the poet laureate of the simulacrum, of the depthless image floating above a social vacuum and from the pairing of a writer whose works are suffused by a vaguely paranoid mood of unlocatable menace, with a novelist who famously fixed his gaze on the more smiling aspects of life. It is a coupling that can easily seem like a critical shotgun wedding, if not a literary bad joke. Yet this association is, I would contend, far more appropriate than it first appears. In many ways Underworld is less an example of artistic postmodernism than an assault on its premises and implications.3 In spite of its disjunctions and ellipses, its historiographical play and narrative anfractuosities, the novels ultimate dedication is to a restoration of access to the real. In this sense, it represents the culmination of a movement in DeLillos oeuvre away from a style whose deadpan ironies and post-nostalgic cool made his works seem to many the latest word in the discrediting of realist novel, with its naive faith in representation and its pious humanism. With conscious contrariness, Underworld takes up once again the task of that novel, rejecting the appeals of postmodern scepticism and paranoid systems theory in favour of an aesthetic that resembles the practice of the character Jesse Detwiler, picking assiduously through piles of garbage in the hope of finding traces of what makes us who we are. The comparison is not arbitrary, for one of the things that inspires the immense effort of the novel is a conviction that the fate of garbage is closely connected to the fate of realism, and to the fate of whatever remains to us of reality as well. No doubt the most obvious way in which Underworld signals its engagement with the nineteenth-century novel is by its stupendous ambition, its heroic attempt to provide a kaleidoscopic portrait of the history of American culture in the latter half of the twentieth century, from the dark and conflicted days of the Cold War to the sunlit and streamlined era of American political and economic supremacy in the globalised 1990s. Its reach is deliberately epic, beginning with a semi-mythical, indeed homer-ic, agon between Giants and Dodgers an updated Gigantomachia and ending
DeLillo himself has remarked that he doesnt see Underworld as postmodern. Maybe its the last modernist gasp. Richard Williams, Everything Under the Bomb, Guardian, 10 Jan. 1998.
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TAKING OUT THE TRASH
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with an allusion to the pacific culmination of the pre-eminent epic of the twentieth century, The Waste Land.4 At the same time, that synoptic vision is complemented by a meticulous respect for the insistently in/significant trivia of ordinary life over a half-century laundry tickets, Jell-O chicken mousse, lollipop condoms, Kelvinators, home movies, baseballs, UFO monthlies, blood-stained garments in Ziploc bags, the slabbed butter melting on the crumbled bun. By itself, this historical aspiration represents something of a revision of DeLillos earlier novels, whose enabling presupposition might be said to have been Fredric Jamesons thesis that the defining element of the contemporary condition is a waning of the sense of historicity.5 Under such circumstances, the concept of history is factitious almost by definition, the quaint residue of a bygone episteme; in a culture constituted entirely by images, the past is only another ephemeral programme on the televisual screen of the moment. Underworld, however, undertakes to offer more: in effect, the history of the apparent end of history. What makes DeLillos history as puzzling as it is dazzling, however, is that it is offered not in terms of a coherent chronological narrative, but as a seemingly arbitrary array of cultural moments and disconnected episodes, a discoordinated series of, as the subtitle of one section of the novel puts it, selected fragments public and private scooped from different decades.6 While critics have often attempted to provide some meaningful pattern that justifies the novels apparently haphazard divagations, the experience of the
4 For other evidence of epic associations in Underworld, see Tom LeClair, An Underhistory of Mid-Century America, Atlantic Monthly, 280/4 (Oct. 1997) pp. 11316; Paul Gleason, Don DeLillo, T. S. Eliot, and the Redemption of Americas Atomic Waste Land, in Joseph Dewey, Steven G. Kellman, and Irving Malin (eds.), Underwords: Perspectives on Don DeLillos Underworld (Newark, Del. 2002) pp. 13043; and Ira Nadel, The Baltimore Catechism; or Comedy in Underworld, in Dewey, Kellman, and Malin (eds.), Underwords, pp. 17698. While it is natural to think of the novel in terms of the epic, the question of genre may be less clear-cut than it seems. Given that the narrative is unified less by the actions of a single character than by the fate of a physical object, the Thomson homerun baseball, as it passes through the possession of a large range of individuals, a case might be made for considering Underworld a steroidal variation on a largely forgotten 18th-century form, the itnarrative or novel of circulation, which offered a satire of contemporary society by way of the adventures of, for example, a guinea, a slipper, or an ostrich feather. See Toby A. Olshin, Form and Theme in Novels about Non-Human Characters: A Neglected Sub-Genre, Genre, 2/1 (1969) pp. 4153, and Jonathan Lamb, Modern Metamorphoses and Disgraceful Tales, in Bill Brown (ed.), Things (Chicago 2004) pp. 19326. 5 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC 1991) p. 6. 6 Don DeLillo, Underworld (New York: Scribner, 1997) p. 499. Subsequent citations are to this edition; page references are given parenthetically in the text.
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reader is more likely to resemble Tony Tanners exasperated response: I just did not see the point of DeLillos randomizings . . . the fragments do not collect around anything.7 If this is a history, then, it is difficult to say what it all adds up to, or what the plot of that history may be, or what order can be found in this seemingly overwhelming disorder. Although criticism has typically invoked the usual suspects of postmodern theory, especially Baudrillard and Jameson, to underwrite an analysis of DeLillos social anatomy, perhaps the most relevant theoretical frame is offered by a less frequently cited thinker, Zygmunt Bauman, who argues that latter part of the twentieth century is best understood in terms of a shift from heavy modernity to light or liquid modernity. For Bauman, the heavy phase of modernity is its bulky, immobile, and rooted phase,8 regulated above all by the concept of solidity. If, according to Marx, modernity was initiated by the desire to melt all that is solid into air, one of the most powerful motives behind the urge to melt them was the wish to discover or invent solids of for a change lasting solidity, and solidity which one could trust and rely upon and which would make the world predictable and therefore manageable.9 Early theorists of economic modernisation strove for an orderly system characterised by monotony, regularity, repetitiveness and predictability,10 all in the service of maximal productivity and goal-oriented projects. The result was an economic landscape populated by giants monstrous machines, huge factories, monopolistic corporations all dedicated to realizing the efficiency to be derived from coordination and integration. From this perspective, even the divergent interests of management and labour are secondary to their interdependence in a shared project of maximised production, and the various capitalist and socialist ideologies whose apparent opposition once appeared to be the fundamental faultlines of the twentieth century turn out in fact to have been superficial distractions, their differences far less important than their common acquiescence in an ethic of rationalised utilitarianism. One might also describe the era of heavy modernity in terms of its organisation of space. The initiating gesture of heavy modernity is one of enclosure and exclusion: if maximal efficiency is to be achieved, everything which cannot be converted into a functioning part of the system must not be simply ignored but, one might say, included out. Since everything [in the world of heavy modernity] serves a purpose, there is no room for
Tony Tanner, The American Mystery: American Literature from Emerson to DeLillo (Cambridge 2000) p. 208. 8 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge 2000) p. 57. 9 Ibid., p. 3. 10 Ibid., p. 55.
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whatever may lack use. The consequence is a rigorous maintenance of the division between inside that which has been brought under the regime of measured and instrumental control and outside the space of all that remains unassimilated, unutilised, or unregulated. Like Bartleby in Melvilles prescient fable of the age of heavy modernity, whatever cannot be converted into useful form is progressively squeezed out, until it can literally no longer find a place within the prevailing order. As Bauman argues, The logic of power and the logic of control were both grounded in the strict separation of the inside from the outside and a vigilant defense of the boundary between the two.12 The resultant modernist utopia is a space which is centrally organized, rigidly bounded, and hysterically concerned with impenetrable boundaries.13 There is a long and familiar tradition, extending from Karl Marx to Michel Foucault, of regarding the regime of heavy modernity as a profoundly dehumanising and repressive development, and not without reason. Those aspects of the idiosyncratically particular that interfere with the smooth functioning of the machinery of production must be excised, and individuals who themselves offer resistance to the process of production by the exercise of a personal preference not to are relegated to the position of the unemployable, i.e. the useless. It is no accident that the only room left for the unemployed Bartleby is finally the Tombs. At the same time, however, to focus solely on the success of the process of economic integration is to oversimplify the situation, for it can be argued that, at the same time as heavy modernity sought incessantly to exclude the individual and the particular, it paradoxically circumscribed and maintained a space for it by the very rigour of that exclusion. Even as heavy modernity aspired to extend its organisation into every corner of the world, it defined itself against those parts which were not organised, and which remained obdurately purposeless and unproductive. But it is in those parts that the individual and particular whatever resists conversion into a useful element in a larger process finds the possibility of survival. The era of liquid modernity is characterised by a fundamental transformation, even reversal, of the principles of the preceding order. Size, immobility, and solidity cease to be the measures of economic rationalisation; lightness, speed, and flexibility become the crucial elements of success. The unhampered mobility of capital and the instantaneity of electronic communications conspire to produce an economy whose motto might be Emersons dictum that Power ceases in the moment of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state. In a global market
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Ibid. Ibid., p. 115. Kenneth Jowett, quoted ibid., p. 133.
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increasingly defined less by the production of physical goods than by the exchange of symbolic services and instruments of credit a world become, in Diane Coyles phrase, weightless14 what counts is the rapidity with which participants can reconfigure and recycle assets, and mutate into new forms. Economic, and political, ascendancy is no longer a matter of having, but of passing: Fluid modernity is the epoch of disengagement, elusiveness, facile escape and hopeless chase. In liquid modernity, it is the most elusive, those most free to move without notice, who rule.15 For present purposes, two aspects of the new order have particular importance: the fate of the object and the reorganisation of space. One of the more paradoxical implications of the process of liquefaction is that material objects, the commodities that had once seemed both the substance and purpose of economic activity, become less and less important, the conjectural endpoint of a signifying chain that stretches over the horizon. Jeremy Rifkin has described this development in terms of a process of dematerialisation, as physical capital and property are replaced by intangible assets.16 To the extent that material objects are wholly defined by their capacity for exchange, their specific particularity disappears, leaving behind an infinitely convertible abstraction. The thingness of things is boiled off, as they are converted into pure representations. Rifkin does not hesitate to describe this transition in quasi-metaphysical terms, as a step across the boundary that separates actual beings from their purely intellectual representations. The new era, argues Rifkin, is more immaterial and cerebral. It is a world of platonic forms; of ideas, images, and archetypes; of concepts and fictions.17 In terms of space, the emergence of liquid modernity undermines the rigid opposition of inside and outside and revises the principle of exclusion that had dominated the preceding economic order. One of the features that makes the shopping mall perhaps the exemplary space of the era of liquid modernity is what Bauman calls its phagic quality, its capacity for taking in and rendering homogeneous the heterogeneous. On the one hand, it transforms the urban jumble of distinctive shops and businesses into the unvarying series of Gaps, Body Shops, and Starbucks that line its climatecontrolled streets; on the other, it converts a community of diverse and dissimilar individuals into a constantly circulating mass of interchangeable consumers, endlessly and unconsciously repeating each others trajectories.
Diana Coyle, The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy (Oxford 1997). 15 Ibid., p. 120. 16 The fact is, physical products, which for so long were a measure of wealth in the industrial world, are dematerializing. Jeremy Rifkin, The Age of Access: How the Shift from Ownership to Access is Transforming Modern Life (London 2000) p. 30. 17 Ibid., p. 54.
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Instead of policing the boundary between inside and outside, liquid modernity continually breaches it, constantly striving to convert private space into a common market, and to pull everything, everyone, and everyplace into the orbit of commerce. Rifkin points suggestively to contemporary office design, with its emphasis on open areas and reconfigurable dividers, as another example of the way in which increasingly private space gives over to social space: In the new office setting, possession of private space and the ability to exclude others hallmarks of the ownership mentality are anathema to the corporate mission.18 In such a liquid, mobile environment, even Bartleby need no longer be left out. This new order has seemed exhilarating and emancipatory to some, especially to the minute fraction of the population that has been well situated to exploit conditions of maximal instability, and that has reaped previously inconceivable economic gains as a consequence. But it also results in a serious loss. Paradoxically, it is the loss of precisely what was excluded by the old order of heavy modernity the particular, the singular, the unemployable. Another way to put this would be to say that what disappears is garbage what is left after all the utility has been abstracted from an object, what cannot or can no longer serve a productive purpose. The maximised efficiency of heavy modernism has no use for garbage, which cannot serve as a means to desired effects it is simply in the way, or at worst a source of congestion in the system. Garbage is what resists conversion or translation, a meaningful role in the process of production it simply is what it is. To put it another way, garbage is the material equivalent of what Adorno would describe as the non-identical, all that whose essence is nonconceptuality, individuality, and particularity.19 At the same time, this very stubbornly resistant quality is what makes garbage the last preserve of individuality. In a curious way, garbage is that which maintains the most intimate and personal relation to the private self our garbage is what remains after our participation in the cycle of production and consumption, what falls out of that cycle and marks the crossing of the particular with the general, the idiosyncratic with the interchangeable, the unique with the repeatable. In a very real sense, ones garbage is the thing which is most ones own it is the end in a world defined by means. It is, as DeLillo describes it at one point, the embodiment of a shadow identity (p. 45). But garbage belongs to the age of heavy modernity. Liquid modernity reacts to garbage not by excluding it, but by converting and reintroducing it into the cycle of production, consumption, and reproduction. The final triumph of late capitalism is to turn the merely useless into raw material for future output, and to transform the resistantly non-identical into a convertible
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Ibid., p. 31. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York 1973) p. 8.
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commodity. In this sense, recycling is a key element of the contemporary economy. The modern corporation likes to boast of its raised ecological consciousness, but the urge to recycle is driven more by the impulse to make everything useful, to leave nothing outside the circuit of production and exchange than by the sudden conversion of corporate executives to a vision of natural harmony. The principles of enlightened environmentalism and the natural tendencies of business in the liquid era come together in a common effort to transform garbage, the left over and left out, and compel it to enter the system of utility. The fate of garbage thus parallels that of nature and the Unconscious, of subversion and the aesthetic, of individual and collective praxis alike heterogeneous spaces, resistant to practical use that once survived within the invisible interstices of the economy, but which, at the turn of the twentieth century, late capitalism [had] all but succeeded in eliminating.20 Garbage, in short, comes to an end. From these considerations of the course of the history of modernity I want to turn to Underworld. It is impossible to approach DeLillos landfill of a book without at some point having to deal with the overpowering odour of garbage that permeates the literal, metaphorical, and thematic levels of the novel: Nick Shay is of course employed by a waste management firm, and a good number of the most memorable scenes involve a confrontation with the physical fact, or a meditation on the cultural implications, of trash. Not surprisingly, many of the most thoughtful readings of the novel have focused on the motif of waste, and to good effect. But I would suggest that these interpretations, necessary as they are, go subtly off track, in so far as critics have almost always located the significance of garbage in Underworld in its capacity to represent something else. According to Ruth Helyer, for example, waste is the unwanted baggage that sullies our ability to conform to an acceptable prototype, while John Duvall suggests that landfills figure spiritually wasted lives.21 Several critics have submitted a loosely Freudian reading, proposing that the novels material refuse corresponds to the unresolved elements of Nicks past that he must eventually come to terms with. Mark Osteen has argued that Just as his company works to package and restrict hazardous waste, so Nick tries to contain his memories within carefully guarded boundaries that nevertheless permit traces of his internal poisons to leach from his psychic subterranean and taint his life.22
Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic (London 1990) p. 5. 21 Ruth Helyer, Refuse Heaped Many Stories High: DeLillo, Dirt, and Disorder, Modern Fiction Studies, 45 (1999) p. 998; John Duvall, Don DeLillos Underworld: A Readers Guide (New York 2002) p. 24. 22 Mark Osteen, American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillos Dialogue with Culture (Philadelphia 2000) p. 226.
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Still others offer a more purely formal interpretation: for Jesse Kavadlo, Nicks obsession with trash is the primary metaphor of DeLillos novelistic activity reusing, reappropriating, recycling, and ultimately redeeming language.23 These various readings display an insight and critical virtuosity that seems invoked by the texts own complexity, and if they miss something crucial about the novel they do so not because of any lack of critical acuity, but rather by the very force of their hermeneutic ingenuity. For what all these interpretations share is an unwillingness to let garbage be garbage. Instead, they recycle the material reality of trash, converting it into a useful abstraction or meaningful symbol, and in doing so sacrifice its stubbornly senseless singularity. They thus replicate the processes of liquid modernity, refusing to allow anything to be useless, to abide in its obdurate particularity, its simple non-identity. To define the function of garbage in Underworld more precisely, it is useful to set it in the larger context of what we might call a brief history of garbage in modern literature. Art theory has long been engaged with the paradox of the depiction of the disgusting, which seems to represent a serious challenge to both common sense and traditional philosophies of the aesthetic. Typically, the solution has been found in emphasising the form as the redemption and sublimation of the content, so that the latter becomes effectively invisible to a mind properly focused on the felicities of expression. Thus Joseph Addison, for example, succeeded in finding a place even for excrement within neoclassical norms of art by arguing that the Description of a Dunghill is pleasing to the Imagination, if the Image be represented to our Minds by suitable Expressions ... we are not so much delighted with the Image that is contained in the Description, as with the Aptness of the Description to excite the Image.24 The social and cultural conditions that led to the emergence of modernism have been described in many different ways, but one development that has perhaps not received the attention that it deserves is the new attitude towards waste that began to take shape in the second half of the nineteenth century. Prior to that period, as Susan Strassers history of refuse demonstrates, our relationship to garbage is best characterised as a kind of stewardship; garbage was a part of normal daily life, generally in sight and available as a resource for patching, repairing, and constant bricolage. Such attitudes gradually died out as garbage underwent a social redefinition that associated it with poverty and disease. Garbage began to be seen as unsanitary in the latter half
Jesse Kavadlo, Recycling Authority: Don DeLillos Waste Management, Critique, vol. 42 (2001), p. 385. 24 The Spectator ed. Donald F. Bond, vol. 3 (Oxford, 1965), p. 567.
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of the century, and thus something to be excluded and removed from sight by an increasingly professional sanitation service. To the extent that, by the first decade of the twentieth century, sanitation was equated not only with the struggle against disease per se, but also with civilisation, morality, and an orderly way of life,26 that service in time became less like a branch of public works and more like the front line in an endless battle to hold back the relentless pressure of degeneration. In a sense then, we may say that in the late nineteenth century the garbage problem was created as much as it was discovered27 as part of the generalised process of exclusion of the useless that is characteristic of heavy modernity. But the new status of garbage as that which is left out of the economic and social system also makes it particularly significant to an emerging aesthetic based on alienation, nonconformity, and particularity. Thus waste in modern literature begins to become thematically significant, indeed to become the artistic topic par excellence. Consider, for example, Baudelaires famous poem Une Charogne: Les mouches bourdonnaient sur ce ventre putride, Do sortaient de noirs bataillons De larves, qui coulaient comme un pais liquide Le long de ces vivants haillons. Tout cela descendait, montait comme une vague, Ou slanait en ptillant; On et dit que le corps, enfl dun souffle vague, Vivait en se multipliant. [Flies buzzed on the putrid stomach, From which emerged black battalions Of larvae, which trickled like a thick liquid Along these living rags. All this fell and rose like a wave Or darted forward bubbling One would have said that the body, swollen with a vague breath, Lived by multiplying itself.] (ll. 1724) Baudelaires morbidly detailed blazon of this carcasse superbe is more than a supercilious dandys spoof. On the one hand, he is, as Louis Cazamian
The first citation for sanitary in the OED dates from 1842; sanitation from 1849; unsanitary from 1871. 26 Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (New York 1999) p. 121. 27 Martin V. Melosi, Garbage in the Cities: Refuse, Reform and the Environment, 1880 1980 (College Station, TX 1981) p. 21.
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remarks propos of Les Fleurs du mal as a whole, determined to show things as they are; and this resolve fastens naturally on aspects of life ignored by conventional art.28 At the same time, the successful rendering of ordure, the refused refuse, becomes a triumphant vindication of arts indifference to subject matter in a way that an exquisite poem about an exquisite thing never could. Only from the foul can truly beautiful flowers emerge. With Anglo-American modernists, one might venture the generalisation that the role of refuse becomes more symbolic than aesthetic. The central work here, and the biggest piece of literary garbage of the twentieth century, is of course Eliots The Waste Land. In the standard reading, waste here has primarily mythical and spiritual connotations, and the ecological devastation of Eliots landscape is the sign of a crisis of moral sterility. But it is useful to remember that waste also means something much more material and actual, and a poet so rooted in the life of the city would have been well aware of the more practical crisis created by overproduction and the subsequent problem of mounting trash. Early appearances of refuse in The Burial of the Dead in the form of stony rubbish and a heap of broken images may seem purely allegorical, especially when Eliot is directing us to Ezekiel and Ecclesiastes, but by the time we come across the empty bottles, sandwich papers, | Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends of The Fire Sermon we are in the world of real trash. What compelled Eliots imagination about garbage, perhaps, was its condition of exclusion, which aligns it thematically with the missing spiritual dimension of modern life, and poetically with Eliots own technique of elision and repression. It is what is left out in modern life, all that there is neither place nor words for, like the Hanged Man missing from Madame Sosostriss deck. At the same time, it is only that which is defined as refuse, declared to be useless, that really holds the promise of any true value, so that even Christ seems present in the poem only as a kind of garbage, the repeated invocations of the Christ/stone metaphor all deriving their power from the verse in Psalm 118 that literally equates Christ with refuse: The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner (Ps.118: 22).29
Louis Cazamian, A History of French Literature (Oxford 1955) p. 342. The most deliberate American version of the waste land, on the other hand, Fitzgeralds valley of ashes in The Great Gatsby, does away with this ambivalence. In a novel constructed of simulations and shams, the mocking imitations generated by this fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air represents only the sterile reality that lies behind the dazzling spectacle mounted by a superficial society. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York 1995) p. 27.
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For other modernists, the promise of garbage is more circumscribed; rather than the shadowy sign of a possible salvation, it becomes the source of a purely literary transcendence. Yeatss The Circus Animals Desertion for example, concludes with a turn to the trash of the everyday as the ultimate origin of all artistic inspiration: Those masterful images because complete Grew in pure mind, but out of what began? A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut Who keeps the till. Now that my ladders gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. (ll. 3340) In Finnegans Wake, on the other hand, Yeatss private store of poetic recyclables becomes for Joyce a universal and transpersonal Dirtdump,30 the yeasty matrix of literature, embodied in the middenheap outside HCEs pub which is the source and endpoint of Shems letter-litter, and symbolising the endless ricorso of consumption-excretion-and-reconsumption that unites the word and the world. More problematic is the dump of Wallace Stevenss Man on a Dump: The dump is full Of images. Days pass like papers from a press. The bouquets come here in the papers. So the sun, And so the moon, both come, and the janitors poems Of every day, the wrapper on the can of pears, The cat in the paper-bag, the corset, the box From Esthonia: the tiger chest, for tea. One sits and beats an old tin can, lard pail. One beats and beats for that which one believes. Thats what one wants to get near. Could it after all Be merely oneself, as superior as the ear To a crows voice? Did the nightingale torture the ear, Pack the heart and scratch the mind? And does the ear Solace itself in peevish birds? Is it peace,
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James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York 1976) p. 615.
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Is it a philosophers honeymoon, one finds On the dump? Is it to sit among mattresses of the dead, Bottles, pots, shoes, and grass and murmur aptest eve: Is it to hear the blatter of grackles and say Invisible priest; is it to eject, to pull The day to pieces and cry stanza my stone? Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the. (ll. 39, 3548) The excremental implications of this poetic dump are all too relevant here,31 but Stevenss pile of cultural crap seems only to obscure the view, and offers little of the promise of inexhaustible fertility of Joyces rubbish heap, or even the rhetorical reassurance of Yeatss magnificent rhythms. The final stanza seems to want to return to definite articles the wrapper on the can of pears, | The cat in the paper-bag, the corset rejecting, as A. Walton Litz puts it, the evasions of the nightingale in favor of the grackle, a poetry of the irreducible minimum,32 but it finally leaves us with precisely that, the infinite ambiguity of an open-ended definite article: The the. Any attempt to identify a literary interpretation of garbage that could be described as distinctively postmodern would have to begin with Thomas Pynchon, in whose writings the concept of waste forms a kind of subterranean network linking his diverse narratives, from the early story, Lowlands, in which a character escapes from his dreary domestic existence into a maze of tunnels beneath a garbage dump, to Mason & Dixon, where, in a memorable passage, the yet unexplored continent of America itself, with its vague aspirations and equivocal promises, is described as, the very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive hopes, for all that yet may be true.33 In all its incarnations, Pynchons rubbish seems to have a particular purpose, to stand in for that which has been left out of history like the residue that Mucho Maas, in The Crying of Lot 49 finds in the used cars he cleans out before selling: when the cars were swept out you had to look at the actual residue of these lives, and there was no way of telling what things had been truly refused ... and what had simply (perhaps tragically ) been lost: clipped
It is hard not to hear, for example, in the obsessive invocations of dew in the middle of the poem (how many men have copied dew | For buttons, how many women have covered themselves | With dew, dew dresses, stones and chains of dew, heads | Of the floweriest flowers dewed with the dewiest dew) an insistent complaint that poetry, at this late hour, has become has become no more than so much doo-doo. 32 A. Walton Litz, Litz, Introspective Voyager: The Poetic Development of Wallace Stevens (New York 1972) p. 262. 33 Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon (New York 1997) p. 345.
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coupons promising savings of 5 or 10, trading stamps, pink flyers advertising specials at the markets, butts, tooth-shy combs, help-wanted ads, Yellow Pages torn from the phone book, rags of old underwear or dresses that already were period costumes, for wiping your own breath off the inside of a windshield with so you could see whatever it was, a movie, a woman or car you coveted, a cop who might pull you over just for the drill, all the bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a salad of despair, in a gray dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust, body wastes ... 34 In his fascination with trash, as in so many other regards, it would be easy to represent DeLillo as simply a follower of Pynchon. But his treatment of waste is distinctively different. Compare, example, this vivid depiction of the product of a trash compactor in White Noise: An oozing cube of semi-mangled cans, clothes hangers, animal bones and other refuse. The bottles were broken, the cartons flat. Product colors were undiminished in brightness and intensity. Fats, juices and heavy sludges seeped through layers of pressed vegetable matter ... I unfolded the bag cuffs, released the latch and lifted out the bag. The full stench hit me with shocking force ... I found a banana skin with a tampon inside. Was this the dark underside of consumer consciousness? I came across a horrible clotted mass of hair, soap, ear swabs, crushed roaches, flip-top rings, sterile pads smeared with pus and bacon fat, strands of frayed dental floss, fragments of ballpoint refills, toothpicks still displaying bits of impaled food.35 The similarity of these passages is entirely superficial. Pynchon offers not simply an ekphrasis of excrement, but the ghostly traces of a grand narrative. Lost coupons promising savings, flyers advertising specials long past, remnants of old clothes useful now only to wipe the screen between you and your unattained desires all point to a history of missed opportunities and unfulfilled hopes. Such rubbish represents all the waste material, human and other, which is discarded to realise any design the unsaved remnant, the excluded middle, the Preterite, for whom not even Gods commodious plan has a place. Pynchons garbage reminds us that all his works tell one story, the quintessential American story, a jeremiad whose returning burden is the recurrent failure of the worlds last best hope to realise the promise that should have been its destiny. DeLillo chooses a different route, rejecting Pynchons allegorical temptation, and plunging into the material immediacy, the concrete and sensuous, oleaginous and viscid
34 35
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (New York 1999) p. 5. Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York 1985) pp. 2589.
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substance of garbage itself the oozing cube, the fats, juices and heavy sludges, the horrible clotted mass of bodily excretions and waste products. Some have attempted to find a meaning in this,36 but interpretative subtlety seems beside the point this garbage hits us, as it does the narrator, with shocking force, leaving little time or appetite for hermeneutical speculations. DeLillo insists that we pay attention to the resistant and repulsive thing itself, instead of recycling and reprocessing it into an intellectually palatable form more useful for our critical aspirations. Sometimes a banana skin with a tampon inside is simply a banana skin with a tampon inside. The description of compacted trash in White Noise is something of a bravura stylistic turn; in Underworld garbage moves to the centre of the novels thematic and literary concerns, and subtends the entire length of the work. The celebrated opening section, with its multiperspectival account of the legendary 1951 homerun with which Bobby Thomson secured the pennant for the Giants over the Dodgers, has been admired for its skilful counterpointing of the on-field struggle and international military tensions. But if this is, in some sense, an allegory of Cold War anxieties, it also needs to be read as a metaphor for the final stage of heavy modernity. The Cold War in fact can be seen as the natural political outgrowth of that stage a global confrontation of immense fixed blocs, each measuring its success in terms of size and weight, territorial expanse and megatonnage, and each determined to squeeze out what it cannot control and use. Whatever else it may represent, the epic game between two powerful teams, tied in a knot, absolutely deadlocked ... stalemated (Underworld, p. 32), seems an apt image of the world in its bulky or immobile age.37 That deadlock is finally broken by something wholly unpredicted and unexpected, the singular event of Thomsons homerun, the inexplicable intrusion of the mystery of bad luck, as Nick will later describe it (p. 97). Thomsons hit is a miracle, an unrepeatably (p. 27) lucky strike; he tomahawks an inside pitch he had no business chasing in the first place. There is no accounting for such a thing, which belongs, like shouts, bat-cracks, full bladders and stray yawns to the sand-grain manyness of things that cant be counted (p. 60), and which is answered by the crowd with its own eruption of countless particulars, a shower of what DeLillo calls happy garbage: the paper keeps falling. If the early paper waves were slightly hostile and mocking, and the middle waves a form of fan commonality, then this last demonstration has a softness, a selfness. It is coming down from all points,
36 Tom LeClair suggests that this passage comes close to being a model for the novels own form, or lack thereof In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel (Urbana 1987) p. 212. 37 Bauman, Liquid Modernity, p. 57.
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laundry tickets, envelopes swiped from the office, crushed cigarette packs and sticky wrap from ice cream sandwiches, pages from memo pads and pocket calendars, they are throwing rumpled dollar bills, snapshots torn to pieces, ruffled paper swaddles for cupcakes, they are tearing up letters theyve been carrying around for years pressed into their wallets, the residue of love affairs and college friendships, it is happy garbage now, 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 rolls of toilet paper unbolting lyrically in streamers. (p. 45) The word that jumps out from this passage is selfness, as though the particularity of garbage, personal waste, were the last refuge of individuality, expressed in a gesture that momentarily creates an ideal community of selfrecognition involving all members, players and fans, and realises, if only for the miraculous space of an instant, the Whitmanian promise of the novels opening line: He speaks in your voice (p. 11). The moment, to be sure, passes as quickly as it erupts, and no sooner does the baseball leave the field than it becomes the object of a property struggle between a middle-aged white man and a black teenager.38 By the beginning of the next section, which moves us into the 1990s, the possibility of such a community of individuals is no more than an implausible memory. Nick and his friends can only reminisce about the celebrated homerun as they sit in the Stadium Club in Dodger Stadium, insulated and cocooned, set apart from the field, glassed in at press level, hearing only muffled sounds from the crowd ... [which] remained at an eerie distance, soul-moaning like some lost battalion (p. 91), and watching what we are surely intended to see as the antithesis of real baseball, the thing that happens in the sun (p. 25). The game they watch is between the new Giants
38
As John Duvall points out, this interracial struggle brings an end to the ideal transracial community that prevailed for the space of the game, and reminds abruptly of the social tensions and inequalities in 1950s America. But I cannot agree that that community is thereby exploded as mere myth. For the fans, and for the moment that it lasts, it is as real as any objective conditions that sociological analysis unearths. In any event, DeLillos remarks on the homerun elsewhere suggest that his attitude is less sceptical than that of his critics: Newsreel footage of Bobby Thomsons home run resembles something of World War I vintage. But the shakier and fuzzier the picture, the more it lays a claim to permanence. And the voice of the announcer, Russ Hodges, who did the rapturous radio account of the games final moments, is beautifully isolated in time not subject to the debasing process of frantic repetition that exhausts a contemporary event before it has rounded into coherence: Thomson and Hodges are unconsumed. Don DeLillo, The Power of History, New York Times Magazine, 7 Sept. 1997, pp. 603. <http:// www.nytimes.com/library/books/090797article3.html>.
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and Dodgers, who have been packaged like a commodity and, like Nick himself, shipped west to a more lucrative and predictable market, where history did not run loose (p. 86). For we are now well into the era of liquid modernity, in which there is no space for the individual, the singular, or the unpredictable. And, above all, no place for garbage. Yet something, or some thing, remains. As they watch the game, the conversation shifts to the legendary homerun ball, which in a real sense is the counterpart of the other items put into the air by Thomsons swing. The ball, by its exit from the field of play, becomes simultaneously useless and intensely valuable. As it ceases to serve a purpose in the closed circuit of the baseball game, as one ball interchangeable with others, it becomes a singular non-identical object, the synecdoche of the singular event it commemorates. The Thomson homer, Nicks friend Brian Glassic says, continues to live because it happened decades ago when things were not replayed and worn out and run down and used up before midnight of the first day ... its something thats preserved and unique (p. 98). It is this quality of uniqueness that links the legendary ball with what one character describes as other kinds of waste; it is a piece of melancholy junk from yesteryear ... a worthless object (p. 99). The trajectory of the ball converges with that of other kinds of waste most significantly in the character of Nick himself. Nick Shay is a kind of updated Nick Adams, wandering the postmodern wasteland of suburban Arizona, a self-replicating stretch of squat box structures ringed by the shimmering heat of the empty desert (p. 85). Shay is as wounded and divided as his eponymous precursor already split at birth between Anglo and Italian, Shay and Costanza, the renounced name the father who disappeared in his childhood. From one point of view Nick is the perfect representative of the age of liquid modernity. He is a member of the contemporary hyperfluid executive class who, according to Jacques Attali, love to create, play, be on the move,39 and for whom, says John Kao in Jamming: The Art and Discipline of Business Creativity, management is a performing art.40 I noticed how people played at being executives while actually holding executive positions, Nick reflects at one point. You maintain a conscious distance between yourself and your job. Theres a self-conscious space, a sense of formal play that is a sort of arrested panic ... a sense of games and half-made selves (Underworld, p. 103). His position keeps him at several removes from contact with anything solid or material: he is, he says, a sort of executive emeritus who goes to the office now and then but mostly travel[s] and speak[s] lecturing at colleges and research facilities (p. 804).
39 40
Quoted in Bauman, Liquid Modernity, p. 153 Quoted in Rifkin, The Age of Access, p. 163.
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As important as Nicks professional function, however, is the nature of his business waste management. Critics have sometimes described Nick as trying to contain waste, at both professional and personal levels, and ultimately failing to do so,41 but there is something crucially incorrect in describing his project this way. Nicks company does not just sequester garbage; it makes it disappear, by turning it into something useful, transforming and absorbing junk (p. 102), converting or transubstantiating it in process that is almost, as Nicks hyperbolic description of his colleagues as Church Fathers of waste (p. 102) suggests, magico-religious. Waste management has as its task the reintegration of garbage back into the productive-consumptive system; near the end of the novel Nick visits one of his companys recycling operations, and watches the assembly lines of garbage, sorted, compressed and baled, transformed in the end to square-edged units, products again, wire-bound and smartly stacked and ready to be marketed (p. 809). Nick is equally obsessed with eliminating waste at personal level. He is a compulsive recycler: At home we separated our waste into glass and cans and paper products. Then we did clear glass versus colored glass. Then we did paper versus aluminum; We rinsed out old bottles and put them in their proper bins. We faithfully removed the crinkly paper from our cereal boxes; Tuesdays only we did plastic, minus caps and lids; Marian and I saw products as garbage even when they sat gleaming on store shelves, yet unbought ... We said, What kind of garbage will that make? Safe, clean, neat, easily disposed of? Can the package be recycled and come back as a tawny envelope that is difficult to lick closed? ... How does it measure up as waste, we asked (pp. 89, 119, 120, 121). For Nick, garbage is only a moment in an endless process of transformation and circulation. From one point of view, of course, it seems counterintuitive, or even wilfully perverse, to read Underworld as in some way against recycling. At the very least, such a claim would seem to run against the grain of commonplace notions of enlightened environmentalism, and although students of DeLillo hardly need to be reminded of the difference between a text and the world, several have been tempted to apply metaphors based on responsible ecological practice to the novels own themes and strategies.42 But recycling is an ambiguous term; among other things it can refer to the endless spinning of videotape that DeLillo suggests, in the essay The Power
See e.g. Osteen, American Magic and Dread. Mark Osteen, for example, proposes that the social philosophy to which the novel points [is] an ecological ideal in which recycled waste represents a form of grace (American Magic and Dread, p. 216), while for David Cowart, The recycling theme of Underworld subsumes a vision of art that lends itself to conclusions about the entire DeLillo oeuvre (Shall These Bones Live, in Dewey, Kellman, and Malin (eds.), Underwords, p. 59).
42 41
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of History, published contemporaneously with Underworld, is one of the ways in which our collective sense of the reality of reality has been eroded.43 When Nick takes his granddaughter Sunny to the recycling plant near the end of the novel, the experience is less a glimpse into the grimy and fetid foundation of consumer society than a magnificent spectacle, a rock concert of refuse, lit up by a gassy glow of pseudo-religious luminosity: Brightness streams from skylights down to the floor of the shed, falling on the tall machines with a numinous glow ... The landfill across the road is closed now, jammed to capacity but gas keeps rising from the great earthen berm, methane, and produces a wavering across the land and sky that deepens the aura of sacred work ... The kids love the machines, the balers and hoppers and long conveyors, and the parents look out the windows through the methane mist and the planes come out of the mountains and align for their approach and the trucks are arrayed in two columns outside the shed, bringing in the unsorted slop, the gut squalor of our lives, and taking the baled and bound units out into the world again, the chunky product blocks, pristine, newsprint for newsprint, tin for tin, and we all feel better when we leave. (pp. 80910). Several of the novels various artist figures, who are usually seen as surrogates of DeLillo himself, in particular Klara Sax and Sabato Rodia, have sometimes been described as recyclers,44 but a careful reading makes clear
43 Youre watching a video-tape of hooded men emerging from a bank and they move with a certain choreographed flair, firing virtuoso bursts from automatic weapons, and you wonder if they are repeating a scene from a recent movie, the one that disappeared overnight when the weekend gross was flat, and the tape is played and replayed, exhausting all the reality stored in its magnetic pores, and then another tape replaces it, a car chase through a startled suburb, and the culture continues its drive to imitate itself endlessly the rerun, the sequel, the theme park, the designer outlet because this is the means it has devised to disremember the past Or youre staring at the inside of a convenience store on a humdrum night in July. This is a surveillance video with a digital display that marks off the tenths of seconds. Then you see a shuffling man with a handgun enter the frame. The commonplace homicide that ensues is transformed in the image-act of your own witness. It is bare, it is real, it is live, it is taped. It is compelling, it is numbing, it is digitally microtimed and therefore filled with incessant information. And if you view the tape often enough, it tends to transform you, to make you a passive variation of the armed robber in his warped act of consumption. It is another set of images for you to want and need and get sick of and need nonetheless, and it separates you from the reality that beats ever more softly in the diminishing world outside the tape. DeLillo, The Power of History. 44 [Klara Saxs] recycling extends even to some hundreds of decommissioned B52s. (Cowart, Shall These Bones Live, p. 59). See also Helyer, Refuse Heaped Many Stories High, p. 1000, and Osteen, American Magic and Dread, p. 216.
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that this is exactly what they are not. Klara, in her conversation with Nick, is emphatic that one of the prime motivations of her desert project is to prevent the recycling of the decommissioned warplanes, their disassembly and reprocessing for other purposes: we are not going to let these great machines expire in a field or get sold as scrap ... We are saving them from the cutters torch (p. 70). Likewise, Rodias towers are constructed of objects taken out of circulation and fixed permanently in a functionless concrete structure. In both cases, the work is created by interrupting the cycle of consumption-reprocessing-and-reconsumption. What ties art and garbage is a common resistance to utility; in this sense, Underworld suggests that the making of art is the ultimate act of irresponsibility. But if Nicks occupation as a recycler makes him a facilitator of the endless circulatory system that is the modern economy, there is clearly a side to him which is deeply unsatisfied with this reduction of the object to the status of moment. It is a side that is most clearly revealed by his intense relation to his most prize possession: the legendary Thomson homerun ball itself, which he has managed to locate and purchase. It is the balls non-identical objecthood, its irreducible thingness that seems to speak to Nick in a way nothing else does. As he sits, late in the night, contemplating the ball, his reflections give rise to passage extraordinary in its assiduous specificity: You squeeze a baseball. You kind of juice it or milk it. The resistance of the packed material makes you want to press harder. Theres an equilibrium, an agreeable animal tension between the hard leather object and the sort of clawed hand, veins stretching with the effort. And the feel of raised seams across the fingertips, cloth contours like road bumps under the knuckle joints how the whorled cotton can be seen as a magnified thumbprint, a blowup of the convoluted ridges on the pad of your thumb. The ball was a deep sepia, veneered with dirt and turf and generational sweat it was old, bunged up, it was bashed and tobacco-juiced and stained by natural processes and by the lives behind it, weather-spattered and charactered as a seafront house. And it was smudged green near the Spalding trademark, it was still wearing a small green bruise where it had struck a pillar according to the history that came with it flaked paint from a bolted column in the left-field stands embedded in the surface of the ball. (p. 131) What makes this passage especially interesting is that it succeeds by its failure. What fascinates Nick about the ball is its resistance to his attempts to conceptualise and package it, to transform it into a squareedged unit. Instead, the ball slips in a looping slurve beneath Nicks
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attempts to fix it in words: it is a fruit or a breast, a road, a thumbprint, or a seafront house; you kind of juice it with a sort of clawed hand, but the thing itself slips out from the most supple linguistic fingers. Like all garbage, it resists classification.45 In the end, he is left with only the sheer unspeakable and useless materiality of the ball. His response to that materiality is perhaps best understood by way of Walter Benjamins celebrated analysis of the psychology of collecting, which involves, he argues, a relationship to objects which does not emphasise their functional utilitarian value that is, their usefulness but studies and loves them as the scene, the stage, of their fate.46 For Benjamin, that relationship is necessarily one of ownership indeed he will go so far as to assert that the phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning as it loses its personal owner.47 For Nick, the baseball is the only thing in my life that I absolutely had to own (p. 97). The ownership of the unique, the agreeable animal tension between the hard leather object and the sort of clawed hand is connected intimately to identity, as DeLillos comparison of the whorled cotton of the balls stitching to a thumbprint intimates. Nick is not the only character to suspect that there is a profound association between garbage and what DeLillo elsewhere calls the idiosyncratic self.48 Both J. Edgar Hoover and the garbage guerrillas see trash as a privileged route into the secret hiding places of personality, and intuit that waste is the most authentic expression of the self. The FBI collects the garbage of organised crime figures it is investigating for analysis by forensic experts on gambling, handwriting, fragmented paper, crumpled photographs, food stains, bloodstains and every known subclass of scribbled Sicilian (p. 558). In turn, the garbage guerrillas plan to publicise the true nature of the FBI by raiding the secretive Hoovers discards: Confidential source says they intend to take your garbage on tour. Rent halls in major cities. Get lefty sociologists to analyse the garbage item by item. Get hippies to rub it on their naked bodies. More or less have sex with it. Get poets to write poems about it. And finally in the last city on the tour, they plan to eat it . . . And expel it. Clyde said.
Klara also makes the connection between garbage and resistance to semiotic classification: They didnt even know what to call the early bomb. The thing or the gadget or something. And Oppenheimer said, It is merde. ... He meant something that eludes naming is automatically relegated, he is saying to the status of shit. You cant name it. ... Its also shit because its garbage, its waste material (Underworld, pp. 767). 46 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York 1969) p. 60. 47 Ibid., p. 67. 48 DeLillo, The Power of History.
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Publicly. For both G-man and subversive, our garbage is ourselves, our own.49 This affirmation of the linkage of identity and ownership may seem surprising, especially since some have argued that this linkage is one of the objects of DeLillos critique in Underworld.50 Such interpretations, however, are still dominated by the notions of heavy modernity what Underworld is registering is the transition to a new economic and cultural dispensation, one in which the very ownership of material objects is rapidly disappearing. Jeremy Rifkins term for what I have been calling the era of liquid modernity, the Age of Access, highlights what he identifies as the most significant socioeconomic development of the latter half of the twentieth century, the shift from ownership to access, and the concomitant replacement of a self defined in terms of personal property, and properties, by one constituted by its connection to a network of resources and facilities.51 It is a shift which has been uncritically celebrated by apostles of the new age, who, like Nick in one particularly postmodern moment, exult in the caress of linked grids that give you a sense of order and command ... the warbling banks of phones ... fax machines and photocopiers and all the oceanic logic stored in your computer [which] connects you ... to the things that slip through the world otherwise unperceived (p. 89). But it comes at a significant cost that of the authentic individual self, now dissolved into a web of roles and relationships, temporary nodes embedded in networks of shared interests.52 In such a relational, multiphrenal condition, as Kenneth Gergen calls it, in which one swims in ever-shifting, concatenating, and contentious currents
The career of the character Jesse Detwiler offers a kind of allegory of the transition from heavy to liquid modernity in miniature. In the 1960s he was one of the garbage guerrillas who found in societys refuse a place to deploy a counter-cultural message; by the time we meet him, in 1978, he has been remade, retooled, recycled as it were, in the form of a waste hustler, looking for book deals and documentary films, a jet-setting industry maverick and cultural theorist who is preaches the doctrine and reaps the rewards of an economic system that leaves nothing outside: Ill tell you what I see here, Sims. The scenery of the future. Eventually the only scenery left. ... Only I dont think you should be isolating these sites. ... Bring garbage into the open. Let people see it and respect it. Dont hide your waste facilities. Make and architecture of waste. Design glorious buildings to recycle waste and invite people to bring it with them to the press rams and conveyors (Underworld, pp. 2867). 50 For example: The dependency of identity on ownership ironically poses a profound threat to ones freedom and individuality Jennifer Pincott, The Inner Workings: Technoscience, Self, and Society in DeLillos Underworld, Undercurrents 7 (1999), <http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~ucurrent/uc7/7-pin.html> 51 Benjamin in fact anticipated this development some seventy years ago, suspecting time was running out already for the individual collector. Illuminations, p. 67. 52 Rifkin, The Age of Access, p. 12.
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of being, an identity that cannot be connected is simply garbage. The force with which Nick holds on to the baseball is the measure of his obscure sense that he is holding on to the last resort of his idiosyncratic self. The mention of connection reminds us that the drama of the end of garbage is played out in another, more public stage in the novel. Everything is connected, we are repeatedly told, and this pregnant and portable apothegm has no doubt become the novels best-known phrase. It is, of course, the first article of faith of the paranoid, and paranoia has long been for DeLillo what allegory was for Dante, the fundamental organising principle of his world-view, what Wittgenstein would call the representational form connecting his fictional creations to the universe they reflect. Underworld, however, takes this fixation to a new level, offering endlessly proliferating narrative intersections above and beyond the call of necessity, or even sense, as though the novel proposed to be some sort of postmodern Orlando Furioso. The novels apparent obsession with dietrologia the science of what is behind something (p. 280) has given rise to starkly divergent responses. On the one hand, some of the most powerful and comprehensive analyses start from the assumption that the reality of occult linkages and subterranean networks is the novels ultimate secret, a truth as legible in the narratives own elaborate interconnections as in its more overtly articulated messages.54 At the same time, the ubiquitous hints of dark forces and unfathomable conspiracies have been for many readers the most problematic aspect of the text: a number of reviewers reacted to the book like people trapped on a transatlantic flight between Lyndon Larouche and Gore Vidal. James Wood, for example, asserts that Underworld proves, once and for all, the incompatibility of paranoid history with great fiction,55 while for Tony
53
Quoted in ibid., p. 209. Osteens reading is perhaps the most explicit and extended development of this idea: Although this insight [i.e. everything connects in the end] may resemble nothing more than the paranoid fantasies of loony conspiracy theorists, in fact it describes the major theme and organizational principle of Underworld (American Magic and Dread, p. 214). Likewise, after a lengthy catalogue of some of the novels parallels, intersections, and convergences, Peter Knight concludes that taken together [these connections] amount to an extended demonstration of the hypothesis at times even the faith that everything is connected. Underworlds revised version of paranoia ... suggests that what is wrong with the usual forms of conspiracy theory is not that they connect to many factors but that they dont connect enough. Peter Knight, Everything Is Connected: Underworlds Secret History of Paranoia, Modern Fiction Studies, 45 (1999) pp. 82930. See also Robert McMinns comment: Underworld [is] about connection more than it is about anything else (Underworld: Sin and Atonement, in Dewey, Kellman, and Malin (eds.), Underwords, p. 37). 55 James Wood, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (New York 1999) p. 181.
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Tanner the many forms and manifestations of paranoid consciousness finally serve only to create a rather wearingly uniform paranoid structure.56 This sharp division of response is significant, because it says something about Underworld s own complex and divided attitude towards paranoia. To the extent that the novel depicts the emergence of liquid modernity, it registers the replacement of political and personal autonomy with a transnational web of interdependence and the disappearance of spaces off the grid, where the disconnected and idiosyncratic survives. Peter Knight is undoubtedly correct to relate the narratives ubiquitous intersections to the increasing interconnectedness of social and economic relationships within a global economy.57 The novel does seem to confirm Fredric Jamesons sardonic observation that paranoia is the poor persons cognitive mapping in the postmodern age,58 and to validate the prediction of Marvin Lundy, the most far-sighted visionary among DeLillos varied crowd of conspiracy theorists, that when the tension and rivalry [of the Cold War] come to an end, thats when your worst nightmares begin ... Because other forces will come rushing in, demanding and challenging (Underworld, p. 170) forces that will be identified in the Epilogue, when political confrontation has been replaced by economic integration: Foreign Investment, global markets, corporate acquisitions, the flow of information through transnational media, the attenuating influence of money thats electronic and sex thats cyberspaced, untouched money and computer-safe sex, the convergence of consumer desire ... (p. 785). But the problem with adopting paranoia, even a paranoia that is reconfigured as an appropriate response to the to the bewildering complexities of the current world,59 is that such a strategy reproduces and internalises, at an intellectual level, the totalised order to which it is reacting. To begin from the premise that in the contemporary world everything is connected, a premise as congenial to postmodern cultural theorists as to obsessed conspiracy-mongers, is to reject a priori the possibility of the disconnected as such, and to consign to the dustbin of history, or at least the museum of outmoded ideas, the very possibility of the singular, the non-identical, and finally the idiosyncratic self. The idiosyncratic cannot be predicted, but paranoia allows of no surprises; its totalising intelligence leaves no space available for chance, contingency, or dumb luck. Thus paranoid knowingness inevitably becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, a mode of knowledge whose
Tanner, The American Mystery, p. 209. Knight, Everything Is Connected, p. 825. 58 Fredric Jameson, Cognitive Mapping, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, Ill. 1988) p. 355. 59 Knight, Everything Is Connected, p. 823.
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predestined object is its own presupposition, whose logic is exposed in Jesse Detwilers exchange with Sims: A ship carrying thousands of barrels of industrial waste. Or is it CIA heroin? I can believe this myself. You know why? Because its easy to believe. Wed be stupid not to believe it. Knowing what we know. What do we know? Sims said ... That everythings connected, Jesse said. p. 289) It is a hermeneutic circle of endlessly recycled meaning that allows no escape, and the reader who sees only meaningful connections in the novel risks becoming, as one commentator says with unsuspected irony, a slave to connection.60 Underworld is full of slaves to connection, characters who cannot stop making sense, from Marvin Lundy, who sees in Gorbachevs birthmark the map of Latvia (p. 181), to Sister Edgar, who [knows] that Bobby Fischer had all the fillings removed from his teeth when he played Boris Spassky in 1972 it made perfect sense to her so the KGB could not control him through broadcasts made into the amalgam units packed in his molars (pp. 2501), to her namesake J. Edgar Hoover, who demands, Find the links. Its all linked. The war protestors, the garbage thieves, the rock bands, the promiscuity, the drugs, the hair (p. 577). Matt Shays version is perhaps the most subtle and convincing. For the one-time chess prodigy, whose success results from his ability to think in systems (p. 707) the contemporary world easily takes the form of a vast game, in which pieces resolve into patterns and figures into forces, and in a druggy episode at a bombhead party he in effect takes on the perspective of a bewildered but woozily suspicious pawn: He was surrounded by enemies. Not enemies but connections, a network of things and people. Not people exactly but figures things and figures and levels of knowledge that he was completely helpless to enter (p. 421). It is Nick, however, whose paranoid fixations are the most significant in terms of their motivation and cost, in spite of the fact that his paranoia is personal rather than global in its scope. His own biography can be seen as a living out of the transition from heavy to liquid modernity, the passage into world in which nothing is left to chance, and luck has no place. As a youth, he is intrigued by the underworld of organised crime, that particular life, because it seems to offer access to a secret story [under] the surface of ordinary things. And organized so that it makes more sense in a way, if you understand what I mean (p. 761); as an adult he will amuse his colleagues by adopting the persona of a mobster (pp. 87, 104). But it is the Jesuits who
60 Robert McMinn, Underworld: Sin and Atonement, p. 37 in Dewey, Kellman and Malin.
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become his real secret society, teaching him to examine things for second meanings and deeper connections (p. 88), and reinforcing his tendency to see nothing for itself but only as a part of a larger whole. His response to the most formative event of his early life, the disappearance of his father, is characteristic: while his mother cannot invent a reliable plot (p. 207), Nick, against all evidence (p. 765), has convinced himself of a drama of men pushing him into a car and speeding him away (p. 204). What Nick cannot accept about Jimmy Costanzas inexplicable erasure is that it is an example of the mystery of bad luck, the mystery of loss (p. 97); his father, a bookie who lived by luck, disappeared going out for Luckies, but Nick misses the warning in the name, seeing only the target on the cigarette package: I call the Lucky Strike logotype a target because I believe they were waiting for my father when he went out to buy a pack of cigarettes ... And isnt there a connection between the name of the brand and the design of concentric circles on the package? This implies they were thinking target all along (p. 90). Nick remakes himself into a made man, like a sturdy Roman wall (p. 275) that offers no gaps or spaces by which luck might enter. When we first encounter him he is driving a Lexus, a car assembled in a work area thats completely free of human presence (p. 63), whose very name suggests a reversal and neutralisation of the Luckies that once intruded so catastrophically into his life. By now, all of Nicks life has become an effort to insulate himself by means of various containers from the accidental, the contingent, the lucky. It is with this is mind that the decisive incident in Nicks life must be interpreted, the event whose narration brings an end to the novel proper the shooting of George the Waiter. From the readers point of view, this is at once an entirely conventional and highly ambiguous conclusion. The scene is almost a parody of a novelistic climax; things end with a bang, echoing the twin blasts that opened the book, and promising with its final revelation of a long deferred secret that will at last explain the motivations of its protagonist. That explanation is also all too conventional, and we hardly need the help of Nicks prison therapist to provide us with the predictable key: Nicks wounds are Oedipal, his father was the third person in the room that day, and Jimmys disappearance and Georges murder are in one way or another ... connected (p. 512). Yet it is equally possible to see this interpretation as yet another kind of conspiracy theory, provided by a dietrology that insists on discovering a sense and a story in the underworld of the unconscious, [under] the surface of ordinary things. Psychoanalysis, like paranoia, refuses to make space for the accidental, for the possibility that even a fatal event might not be fated, but only a result of the mystery of bad luck. Not all the characters in Underworld, however, become tyrannised by the need to make connections; there remain a rare few who do not think in
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systems, and who remain committed to the unique and idiosyncratic. One of these is Albert Bronzini. It is easy to dismiss Albert as a figure of pathos, old before his time, as Klara is quick to do, but in his own way he is as important an artist as the more overt examples in the book indeed, one from whom Klara may have unconsciously learned her own appreciation of the ordinary thing (p. 77). An Americanised version of Benjamins flneur, he can justly claim to be master of an art This is the only art Ive mastered ... walking these streets and letting the senses collect what is routinely there (p. 672) whose raw material is reality itself, the unpredictable and singular elements of ordinary life, the endlessly varied sights, sounds, and smells of a living city neighbourhood: He was out nearly everyday after school, letting the route produce a medley of sounds and forms and movements, letting the voices fall and the aromas deploy in ways that varied, but not too much ... Even in this compact neighborhood there were streets to revisit and mend doing interesting jobs, day labor, painters in drip coveralls or men with sledgehammers he might pass the time with, Sicilians busting up a sidewalk, faces grained with stone dust. (p. 661) But above all his attention is attracted by what happens in those spaces excluded from the business and traffic of the city, where there is room for free play, in particular the play of children: He heard voices and looked down a side street filled with children playing. A traffic stanchion carried a sign marking the area a play street and blocking the way to cars and delivery trucks (p. 662). These are the spaces of the unconnected and the real, the fullness of a moment in the play street (p. 666), something pure and unrepeatable (p. 676). They are also spaces of garbage, not just metaphorically, but materially as well, since childrens games in the streets are associated with trash, things discarded as useless by the larger society: How we used to scavenge. We turned junk into games. Gouging cork out of bottle caps. I dont even remember what we used it for. Cork, rubber bands, tin cans, half a skate, old linoleum that we cut up and used in carpet guns (p. 663). The other character who keeps alive the prospect of the unique seems a good deal more unlikely: Sister Edgar. Sister Edgar can easily seem a highly inappropriate candidate for such an important commission. She is certainly one of the more problematic figures in the novel, as rigid and suspicious as her FBI namesake, and equally obsessed with the menace of dirt and infection not to mention out of fashion in both her clothing and her politics. Yet it is to this benighted individual, with all her superstition and pettiness, rather than to her enlightened companion Sister Gracie, that the novel
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vouchsafes its final manifestation of grace, the appearance of the murdered girl Esmeralda in a billboard ad for Minute Maid Orange Juice. Sister Gracie, naturally, has a mundane explanation: the image is simply garbage, a fragment of a leftover undersheet showing through the surface advertisement. But for the moment that it lasts, the experience is real, a miraculous break of the singular and unpredictable into the repetitive rhythms of cause and effect. To call this experience religious, or even spiritual, seems wrong. It is not non-material: the meaning inheres in the unique, non-identical object and cannot be abstracted from it. The best way to describe the appearance of Esmeralda is perhaps as an instance of what Ernst Cassirer calls a momentary deity: These beings do not personify any force of nature, nor do they represent some special aspect of human life; no recurrent trait or value is retained in them or transformed into a mythico-religious image; it is something purely instantaneous, a fleeting, emerging and vanishing mental content, whose objectification and outward discharge produces the image of the momentary deity ... In stark uniqueness and singleness it confronts us; not as a part of some force which may manifest itself here, there and everywhere, in various places and times, and for different persons, but as something that exists only here and now, in one indivisible moment of experience, and for only one subject whom it overwhelms and holds in thrall.61 The experience of Esmeraldas face is, of course, not for only one subject but for a crowd, but one might say that the crowd becomes a single subject, a community of the awestruck who stand in tidal traffic (p. 823), created by the miracle itself, a community that echoes the one with which the novel began, the awestruck fans joined by delirious wonder at the miracle of Bobby Thomsons homerun. The moment cannot last, and Esmeralda can only be, as the sign itself tells us, fleeting: a minute maid. Just as the exhilaration of the baseball games incredible conclusion is followed by a sordid struggle over the possession of the ball, so the site of Esmeraldas manifestation quickly becomes a makeshift strip mall, where [vendors] move along the lines of stalled traffic selling flowers, soft drinks, and live kittens (p. 823). But the promise of a disconnected space created by the will to believe in the possibility of such a gap or hole (p. 824) in the uniform and connected surface of liquid modernity remains, a promise ambiguously and ironically embodied in the white sheet that replaces the orange juice ad, bearing two lonely words, Space Available (p. 824).
61 Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth, trans. Suzanne K. Langer (New York 1946) pp. 1718. Cassirer takes the term and concept from Hermann Useners Gtternamen (1896).
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To speak, however, of the appearance of Esmeralda, or of Thomsons homerun, as miraculous is misleading in that it suggests that we are dealing with something extraordinary, an exception to the reality of ordinary life. But miracles are not exceptions to the ordinary; they are the simply ordinary, attended to for itself, in its uniqueness, uselessness, and non-identity. There is nothing mystical or spiritual in this claim; on the contrary, it is the dream of converting ordinary individual things into the connected elements of an integrated and comprehensive system, of denying space to the singular, or to put it in terms of the metaphors of Underworld of eliminating garbage, that makes the world immaterial and unreal. In the closing paragraphs, the novel suddenly addresses the individual reader, directing his or her gaze to ordinary objects in their simple multiplicity: the things in the room, offscreen, unwebbed, the tissued grain of the deskwood alive in light, the thick lived tenor of things, the argument of things to be seen and eaten, the apple core going sepia in the lunch tray, and the dense measures of experience in a random glance, the monks candle reflected in the slope of the phone, hours marked in Roman numerals, and the glaze of the wax, and the curl of the braided wick, and the chipped rim of the mug that holds your yellow pencils, skewed all crazy, and the plied lives of the simplest surface, the slabbed butter melting on the crumbled bun, and the yellow of the yellow pencils ... (p. 827) Underworld is itself an attempt to make space available for such everyday things or more precisely the novel is that space. Ultimately, it is less concerned with satirising the excesses of an economic and social system whose end, conscious or not, is the obliteration of the idea of uniqueness and free choice (p. 507) than with preserving and representing the stubbornly particular, offscreen, unwebbed elements of ordinary life, to which it holds, like Nick gripping his baseball, with the argument of binding touch (p. 827) an adherence that is as powerful as the love of the common, the immediate, the familiar and vulgar elements of life that, according to Henry James, was the animating passion of William Dean Howellss realism. James goes on to say, in words that start to seem as appropriate to DeLillo as Howells: He thinks scarcely anything too paltry to be interesting, that the small and vulgar have been terribly neglected ... He adores the real, the colloquial, the moderate, the optimistic, the domestic, and the democratic; looking askance at exceptions and perversities and superiorities, at surprising and incongruous phenomena in general.62
62
Henry James, Essays on Literature (New York 1984) pp. 5023.
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In a word, the quotidian. There are, to be sure, plenty of surprising and incongruous phenomena in Underworld, but the ultimate thrust of the novel is to direct our gaze away from the freakish and fantastic spectacle that comprises the preferred subject matter of most postmodernist fiction. For DeLillo, the ordinary and contingent, the merely real, is equally marvellous and more mysterious to the extent that it lies neglected beneath the mesmerising parade of media-generated effects and virtual images that holds in thrall both consumers and cultural theorists. In part 5 Nick has a brief and enigmatic dialogue with Father Paulus, a priest at Voyageur, the correctional school to which he has been sent after his conviction for shooting George the Waiter. After expressing some dismay about the heaven-dwelling abstract ideas and eternal verities favoured by Jesuit educational practice, the priest shifts abruptly back to earth, directing Nicks attention to the ordinary objects that connect him with the ground, his own boots, and demanding, in a parodic catechism, that he name the parts (p. 540) the cuff, the counter, the quarter, the welt. After lamenting Nicks pitiable ignorance of what is literally under his own feet, Father Paulus concludes, in an address that is directed as much to the reader as to his student, This is the final arcane knowledge: Everyday things represent the most overlooked knowledge. These names are vital to your knowledge. Quotidian things. If they werent important, we wouldnt use such a gorgeous Latinate word. Say it, he said. Quotidian An extraordinary word that suggest the depth and reach of the commonplace. (p. 542) In spite of the intimations of vast criminal conspiracies and unfathomably interconnected subplots carried by the title, it is into this underworld that Underworld finally seems to want to guide us, for which it aspires to find the names. It is this gigantic novels still small hope that such things, even in a world of spectacular and endlessly recycling images, may preserve what Marvin Lundy calls at one point, The shock, the power of an ordinary life. It is a thing you could not invent with banks of computers in a dust-free room (p. 308). Another word for those forgotten quotidian things might be garbageWhich is just another name for ordinary life (p. 594)63 the garbage of a yet human world where trashlessness is unimaginable, unrealistic.
63 Lenny Bruce is referring to shmek here, but throughout the novel shit and garbage name the same thing. Klara Sachs says, in a declaration that is a statement as much about Underworld as about her own project: Its also shit because its garbage, its waste material. But Im making a whole big megillah out of this. What I really what to get at is the ordinary thing, the ordinary life behind the thing. Because thats the heart and soul of what were doing here (Underworld, p. 77).

Taking Out The Trash: Don Delillo'S Underworld, Liquid Modernity, and The End of Garbage

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Taking Out the Trash: Don DeLillos Underworld, Liquid Modernity, and the End of Garbage

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