Liquid Globalization in Don DeLillo S Underworld (79 PP)
Liquid Globalization in Don DeLillo S Underworld (79 PP)
Roland Ellis
Student number: 42255406
This thesis is presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master
of Research at Macquarie University. I certify that this thesis is entirely my own work
and that I have given fully documented reference to the work of others. The thesis has
not previously, in part or in whole, been submitted for assessment in any formal course
of study.
Roland Ellis
________________________
Roland Ellis
10 October 2014
2
Abstract
The notion of connectivity is at the very core of DeLillo’s novel Underworld (1997).
Indeed, the novel’s most cited dictum—“everything is connected in the end” (826)—
forms the theoretical mantra that DeLillo works toward in his sweeping overview of
Cold War and post-Cold War America. But how do we best understand this narrative of
seemingly endless points of connection between characters, contexts, motifs? Thomas
Friedman’s analysis of post-Cold War Globalisation in The Lexus and the Olive Tree
(1999) provides a way of considering narratives of connection as indicative of a
contemporary integration of individuals, markets and nation-states into a globalised,
free-market capitalist network; while sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity
(2000), constructs a more theoretical overview of the post-Cold War condition that
provides a way of interpreting the diffuse nature of contemporary social bonds. Taken
together, these theoretical approaches construct a way of understanding the post-Cold
War world as subject to what I call ‘liquid globalisation’; and I will argue that it is a
liquid globalisation framework that provides the soundest basis for understanding the
dominant narrative at work in DeLillo’s text. I begin by examining how Underworld’s
post-Cold War spatial and social organisation reflects Friedman and Bauman’s
respective constructions of the globalised context. Then I look at the role of recycling in
the text, specifically how DeLillo constructs his central characters as advocates of
recycling as opposed to waste creation, thus reinforcing the notion that integration with
the dominant socio-economic paradigm of globalisation is a core principle of the post-
Cold War condition. Finally, I consider how Underworld works as a historical narrative
that charts the evolution of liquid globalisation over a number of years, from a
foundation in nuclear rather than information technology. The main aim of this thesis is
to add a liquid-global dimension to the growing critical corpus that aligns Underworld
with post-Cold War Globalisation rather than postmodernity.
3
Table of contents
Abstract……………………………………………………………… 3
Introduction…………………………………………………………. 5
Conclusion……………………………………………………………70
Works Cited…………………………………………………………. 73
4
Introduction
How the intersecting systems help pull us apart, leaving us vague, drained,
docile, soft in our inner discourse, willing to be shaped, to be overwhelmed—easy
Among critics, Don DeLillo is widely considered to be an author of novels that
engage with the integration of characters and contexts into capitalist systems.
More frequently than not, such readings have led to the classification of DeLillo as
DeLillo’s magnum opus Underworld (1997). Rather than suggesting that the novel
departs from the core dictum of postmodernity—an encasement of the ‘real’ by
capitalist systems—I will argue that intricate connectivity to capital lies at the
heart of Underworld, but that it may best be contextualised according to a
theoretical model I will call ‘liquid globalisation’. In this introduction I will
interpret connectivity as a core principle of DeLillo’s oeuvre, as well as unpacking
how, from a critical standpoint, connectivity has primarily been related to either
DeLillo’s paranoia or postmodernism. I will then suggest that neither of these
Underworld, but that a separate theoretical frame is required; one that conflates
the post-‐Cold War globalisation theses of Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity
(2000) and Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999).
5
“Everything is connected” (UW 786) has no doubt become Underworld’s most
widely quoted phrase, because, I would suggest, it is the text’s most obvious
apothegm. Indeed, Robert McMinn has argued that it is possible to become a “slave
to connection” (37) as a reader of Underworld, because the text fixates on
multitudinous links between characters and plot lines. David Evans supports such
intersections” (125); while Mark Osteen argues that the novel’s intersections make
up the “major theme and organizational principle of Underworld” (214).1 But how
are we to best understand this major theme of the text, and to what theoretical
Certainly, it is feasible to unpack the many connections in Underworld as
symptomatic of the paranoid approach to social systems that has resonated
throughout DeLillo’s career—after all, connection “is the first article of faith of the
paranoid” (Evans 125). Indeed, such an argument seems applicable when one
considers the connection theories held by members of the novel’s central cast. For
example, baseball fanatic and conspiracy theorist, Marvin Lundy, senses a distinct
link between a baseball and a nuclear bomb given that the proportions of the
atomic core exactly match that of the ball (172). Further, Sister Edgar claims to
understand why an American chess player would remove all of his fillings so that
the KGB could not control him “through broadcasts made into the amalgam of units
packed in his molars” (251). The novel is filled with similar examples, perhaps
highlighting that Underworld demonstrates a revival of “the great age of American
paranoia” (Knight 1999: 813), and thus falls thematically in line with earlier
6
Paranoid linkages stem from the moment at the core of Libra: the
assassination of President Kennedy, which marked the genesis of a spirit of
suspicion and conspiracy that has “infected American culture” ever since (Green
95). In turn, DeLillo conducts a “paranoid speculation search for a redemptive
narrative that might rescue [the] history [of Kennedy’s assassination] from
apparent confusion” (Green 99). He does so in an attempt to make ends meet, and
therefore convert uncertainty into a body of knowledge that essentially “closes the
gap” on mystery (McGowan 133); or as Patrick O’Donnell puts it, forms a “history
conceived as a totality” (108). Of course, DeLillo’s quest here is in vain and instead
what emanates from Libra is a sense of history as “multiple, fragmented,
accidental” (ibid), thus echoing other postwar classic American fictions of paranoia
by the likes of Thomas Pynchon and Norman Mailer.2 Connections formed under a
paranoid structure in Libra are therefore not what Annesley calls “real”
connections between individuals and an integrated cultural system (91); rather,
they aspire to make a full historical record “while making no secret of the fact that
this will remain an exclusively literary endeavor” (Noya 240). As such, the text’s
paranoid version of history becomes overtly subjective, and thus complete with its
Libra, but much of DeLillo’s work preceding Underworld. In Running Dog (1978),
for example, conspiracy and paranoia lie at the centre of the novel “explain[ing] the
world . . .without elucidating it, by positing hidden forces which permeate and
transcend
the
realm
of
ordinary
life”
(McClure
103).
Further,
Ratner’s
Star
(1976)
2
See
Pynchon’s
The
Crying
of
Lot
49
(1966)
and
Gravity’s
Rainbow
(1973);
Mailer’s
The
Executioner’s
Song
(1979);
and
William
Burroughs’
Naked
Lunch
(1959).
7
connections” that see central protagonist Billy Twillig fall victim to delusional
paranoia (Allen 11). Once more, however, the paranoid connections and buried
meanings that characterise these novels are, at best, “half-‐imagined histor[ies]”
(Annesley 87); a series of plots where “delusional” fragmented strands step in to
Certainly DeLillo’s ‘paranoid’ novels are valuable, in that they form part of a
wider critique of the “structures of history and knowledge” that have defined
western culture (LeClair 87).3 However, I want to argue that this ‘type’ of
conspiratorial connectivism does not bleed into Underworld’s central narrative of
connection to capitalist systems, and thus warp it accordingly. I would agree with
Michael Wood’s argument that Underworld is a post-‐paranoid epic: “when one of
DeLillo’s characters thinks of ‘the paranoid elite’, we are meant to catch the
friendly irony, the flicker of nostalgia” (3). O’Donnell concurs, suggesting that the
novel is post-‐paranoid because rather than basing it on conspiracy, DeLillo finds
that “the vast socio-‐economic system of global capitalism” (113) configures such a
framework of connection. Peter Knight furthers this argument, claiming that
agents in Underworld no longer have unmediated access to the world outside of
capitalism, but are rather locked in-‐step with it and constituted according to their
connections with the diffuse nature of media saturation (2008: 30-‐32).
Knight’s reading is indicative of a postmodern critique taken up by Peter
Boxall, who argues that Underworld is “made out of advertising slogans and rock
lyrics,
snippets
of
film
and
television”
(2008:
44)
that
highlight
the
inescapability
3
For
further
discussion
see
Glen
Scott
Allen’s
“Raids
on
the
Conscious:
Pynchon’s
Legacy
of
Paranoia
and
the
Terrorism
of
Uncertainty
in
Don
DeLillo’s
Ratner’s
Star”
(1994).
8
and hermeneutic cycles of consumer culture. Todd McGowan adds that Underworld
becomes a postmodern “waste land because it is a [text] without a site for the
sacred, a world without the gap in the other” (135). The suggestion that nothing
escapes the “aura” of media culture in Underworld is nothing new in the context of
DeLillo’s career. In fact, Boxall suggests that DeLillo’s primary “means for
absorbing and articulating an entire culture” (43) derives from the postmodern
lens applied to his work.4 Consider also, Douglas Keesey’s contention that DeLillo’s
first novel, Americana (1971), demonstrates a failure on the part of the novel’s
protagonist, David Bell, to model his life on film as one lived outside of
DeCurtis’s reading of DeLillo’s Great Jones Street (1973), which analyses how it is
commodified ‘Rock and Roll’ and create meaningful, experimental art: all art is
“bound in the cash nexus and the exchange of commodities, outside of which there
The works of Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson are perhaps most
Baudrillard, the ‘simulacrum’, or simulated representation of reality, is inescapable
4
At
this
point
I
would
like
to
acknowledge
other
critics
who
present
an
alternate
position:
see
Philip
Nel’s
chapter
“DeLillo
and
Modernism”
pp.
13-‐26
in
the
Cambridge
Companion
to
Don
DeLillo
(2008);
Leonard
Wilcox’s
“Baudrillard,
DeLillo’s
White
Noise,
and
the
End
of
Heroic
Narrative,”
Contemporary
Literature
32.3
(1991);
and
Frank
Lentricchia’s
“Tales
of
the
Electronic
Tribe,”
in
New
Essays
on
“White
Noise”,
p.
79
(1991).
Further,
in
American
Magic
and
Dread
(2000),
Mark
Osteen
notes
that
DeLillo’s
writing
is
often
the
result
of
a
“collision
and
collusion
between
image
and
anti-‐image,
between
high
culture
and
consumer
culture”
(25);
also
see
Osteen’s
text
for
further
discussion
on
how
DeLillo
is
potentially
a
modernist
writer
commenting
on
postmodernism.
9
“nothing outside the play of simulations, no real in which a radical critique of the
simulational society might not be grounded” (1991: 363). As such, the authentic
agent, one detached from “simulational society” is no longer possible, instead
every action is the product of a recycling of past styles in a process of “hyperbolic
upon a boundless age of consumerism—elsewhere referred to as a “society of the
spectacle” (Evans 106)—is certainly taken up thematically by DeLillo in the earlier
works noted above, perhaps it is never more evident than in the seminal
White Noise is one of the most frequently cited literary representations of
American postmodernism as it is explicitly made up of product placements and
incessant television references (Boxall 44; Olster 82). What is more, the text’s
diffuse consumer culture drives characters to locate themselves via television or
movie images (Olster 83); thus to “seek history by way of our own pop images and
simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach” (Jameson 25).
There is arguably, then, nowhere left for an authentic conception outside of
systems of control and coercion (Knight 2008: 30-‐32). For example, when Jack
Gladney attempts to kill the man who has manipulated his wife, he cannot focus on
the act of shooting the man. Rather, he obsessively focuses on the description of
the act, which is made up of pastiche assemblage taken from countless films and
novels: “I fired the gun, the pistol, the firearm, the automatic” (White Noise 312).
While it is certainly plausible to interpret White Noise as an exemplary
postmodern work, in this thesis I stop short of offering a similar reading of
Underworld. To be sure, I agree that by presenting conditions mediated by
10
technology, language, and social formation, Underworld engages with ideas at the
core of postmodernity (Knight 2008: 30). However, I disagree with three key
aspects of postmodern theory in relation to Underworld’s narrative of connection:
that the nexus of connectivity is intrinsically bound to a decentred and depthless
western culture (Jameson 37), a waning sense of historicity (Jameson 5), and an
“endless commodification of objects and humans alike” (Olster 89). As such, I will
proffer an alternative framework that retains connectivism to capitalist systems at
its core, while also accommodating Underworld’s centeredness in the era of
of connections in the software era of the post-‐Cold War has become a burgeoning
strain of criticism related to the text. James Annesley, for example, contends that
and coordinating processes of globalization” (88); while Philip Wegner suggests
that intricate connections in Underworld demonstrate the presence of “new global
social and spatial formations”. I would certainly agree with such theorists that the
novel’s emphasis on convergence, especially in relation to “media, cyberspace, and
corporate policy” (Annesley 87) underscores a desire to engage specifically with
the context of globalisation. Moreover, I aim to extend this growing body of
However, I will do so by suggesting that a particular ‘type’ of globalisation
It does, after all, seem somewhat vague to suggest that globalisation theory is
the most applicable to Underworld, because globalisation is a field defined, at best,
11
within loosely drawn parameters. For example, Francis Fukuyama’s seminal text
The End of History and the Last Man (1992), focuses on liberal democracy in the
post-‐Cold War age, while proffering the idea that multinational or market
Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996)
sees the rise of renewed ethnic and religious tensions following the Cold War
(Eichengreen 119); Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw’s The Commanding Heights
(1998) demonstrates the problems posed to statehood by the maturation of global
economics (Malloy 417); and Naomi Klein’s No Logo (1999) emphasises how
globalisation fosters the modern phenomenon of synergy and branding at the
As such, I will focus specifically on liquid globalisation theory—a conflation
chapter one, I will provide detailed exposition of both theories and show how they
within a software capitalist framework. In doing so, particular emphasis will be
paid to how postmodern thought is, technologically speaking, inept for classifying
the “vast array of systems” that foster connectivity in Underworld (UW 241).
in the text in order to suggest that through the employment of recycling as one of
the novel’s key themes, DeLillo demonstrates a break from the inevitability of the
postmodern wastes in novels such as White Noise. Further, I will argue that
recycling is a crucial component in the movement toward a “weightless” future
(Bauman 119), and that by engaging with it, DeLillo actively establishes deeper
12
In my final chapter, I will discuss Underworld as historicised narrative in
order to separate it from postmodern tropes relating to a waning sense of
historicity. Underworld, by contrast, utilises American technological history of the
late twentieth century in order to show precisely how technology has increasingly
connected culture to a globalisation framework—from a genesis point in 1951, up
until the Internet age of the post-‐Cold War. I will ultimately aim to demonstrate
that by engaging with historical novel form in Underworld, DeLillo moves further
away from the postmodern by reinforcing the liquid global sense that historical
Taken together, this tripartite scheme will posit a way of interpreting
market nexus that may most aptly be termed liquid globalisation. Further, by
providing three paths for separating Underworld from postmodernity, this thesis
aims to contribute to a growing critical firmament that locates the novel in a post-‐
postmodern context.
Chapter One:
Liquid Globalisation
13
Lexus through a wind swept American desert. He feels completely contained by
and engaged with the Lexus, as though he is only a “barely there” part of the
driving process: “The system flows forever onward, automated to priestly nuance,
coming in endless sequence” (UW 63). Like the “global markets” that Don DeLillo
mentions in the novel’s epilogue (UW 785), the Lexus functions as a culmination of
machines and networks “shaped outside the little splat of human speech” (UW 63).
Further, the Lexus leads toward a “planing away of particulars” (UW 824), in that,
Shay is only “barely there”, thus signifying the car’s role as metaphor for a
globalised economy that crafts an erosion of nuance and the promotion of “greater
In this chapter, I want to argue that “global markets” shape the novel’s
central narrative in much the same way that they shape the above scene: by
planing away nuance and attempting to connect all elements with capitalist
systems. I will do so by first establishing consistent links between Underworld and
global markets. But the main trajectory of this chapter will be to arrive at an
understanding as to how Underworld’s seemingly infinite connections to capitalism
may best be theorised. I will consider postmodern theory in this discussion, but I
will aim to discredit its efficacy in relation to Underworld due to instability in terms
of contextualising the technological conditions that frame the novel. In place of
postmodern theory, I will suggest that a liquid globalisation framework acts as the
best way of grasping connectivity in Underworld. Precisely what liquid
globalisation means will be highlighted through a conflation of the central
14
theoretical positions given in Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity and Thomas
Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree.5 The purpose of providing a detailed
analysis and conflation of these theories here, is so that I can demonstrate how
liquid globalisation applies to the mediation of character and spatial organisation
in Underworld; moreover, so that I have a theoretical base to draw upon in the
following chapters, which aim to affirm a liquid globalisation frame at the expense
Floating Frame
In the above scene, one may readily interpret the role of technology as emblematic
of all-‐encompassing global markets, and according to many critics, this theme
remains consistent throughout the novel. Liliana M. Naydan, for example, argues
that “very few things escape the economic cycles of late capitalist existence in the
text” (192), and she does so by conducting an overview of the novel’s “array of
systems” (UW 241) that displace the presence of idiosyncrasy. Daniel Grausem
agrees with Naydan’s summary, arguing that the novel’s structure and themes
“revolve around the final stages of globalization” (310) which produce the
intricately networked impacts of capitalism. Both David Evans and Philip Wegner
arrive at similar conclusions regarding the novel’s structural attempts to
acknowledge newly globalised formations based upon the transnational abilities of
capitalism (Evans 106; Wegner 54). Upon analysis of the text it is difficult to
disagree
with
these
arguments.
After
all,
Underworld
inundates
the
reader
with
5
Hereon
Lexus.
15
characters who find comfort in the feeling of “linked grids” lapping around them in
office spaces (807); and characters who feel as though the world of “product
every need. Such examples arise because, as the critical tide suggests, characters
are “glassed in at press level, set apart from the field” (UW 91) by capitalism; or as
Evans points out, experiences are mediated by comprehensive economic and social
characters and capital derive from DeLillo’s attempts to capture “what it feels like
to live in a postindustrial nation at a time when media forms absorb increasingly
more of our daily attention, so much so that these forms cease to feel like
mediations of the real and are simply experienced as the real itself” (Duvall 4).
John Duvall’s reading here is largely dependent upon the works of Jean Baudrillard
media masks reality to the point where representation bears no relation to reality
whatsoever—what therefore exists is pure simulacrum, “a copy of a copy that has
no original” (Baudrillard 43). Experiences are therefore “no longer immediate but
always mediated through other, prior experiences” (Knight 2008: 31). Take Shay’s
experience of watching a live baseball game in the 1990s: “We had the real
Dodgers and Giants. Now we have the holograms” (91). Shay seems to be directly
acknowledging the presence of simulacra here—the notion that there are no
comprehensive,
they
do
not
mark
the
“obliteration
of
uniqueness
and
free
choice”
(UW
507)
in
the
novel.
Rather,
“uniqueness”
still
exists
on
the
social
fringes,
according
to
Evans.
For
further
discussion
see
Evans’s
“Taking
Out
The
Trash”
p.
127-‐131
(2006).
16
Jameson would certainly agree with such a reading of this scene, given his
argument that people have become so thoroughly immersed in the multinational
capitalist language of advertising and the flow of media imagery, that escape is no
longer possible (36-‐37).7 As such, one would find that not only Shay’s experience of
the baseball game is mediated by simulacra, but that countless other textual
examples are too: Shay’s experience of the Texas Highway Killer video (179); or his
notion that corporations “take you and shape in nearly nothing flat, twist and
swivel you” (282). Further, one may interpret in Jameson that such immersion in a
culture of simulacra has also triggered a colonisation of what Peter Knight calls the
“last spaces of resistance to the voracious logic of the market”—“realms of art, the
unconscious, and even primitive nature itself” (2008: 35). Therefore, the notion
that “reality is shallow and weak and fleeting” (UW 387) seems almost infinitely
applicable. Emblematic of the notion that such colonisation is seemingly boundless
in Underworld is Klara Sax: a central character depicted in the role of world famous
artist. Sax conceives of a “postpainterly” age where artistic culture centres on
taking a range of objects that already exist and creating a pastiche work out of
them (UW 393). In other words, artistic creation is, for Sax, based upon that which
explicitly cannibalises the work of the past and represents it in a different form
instead of aiming for a new kind of expression. Moreover, even if Sax were to aim
for a ‘new’ or ‘real’ expression, her work would inevitably be classified as
representative simulacra, much like that of her friend, Acey Greene: “Her stuff is all
show . . . It’s all surface. She’s catering, she’s pandering to white ideas about scary
7
For
further
discussion
see
Anthony
Giddens’
Consequences
of
Modernity
(1990).
17
To be sure, I do not disagree with the postmodern notion that a colonisation
of space—even that belonging to art or the unconscious—by the global market (or
media culture) exists in the text. The point I want to argue, however, is that it is
difficult to locate precisely how the media culture reflected in postmodern thought
The postmodern conceptions of mediated culture that have been outlined
above in relation to Baudrillard and Jameson pre-‐date widespread use of the
Internet, thus subjecting the positions to earlier means through which to interpret
media culture’s mediating affects. These earlier means have been widely criticised:
Leonard Wilcox, for example, suggests that while Baudrillard delineates a world
where nothing is “outside the play of simulations, no real in which a radical
critique of the simulational society might be grounded” (1991: 346), he fails to
acknowledge precisely how exactly all firm structures and finalities have been
abolished by simulated culture. Similar criticisms have been leveled at Jameson’s
contention that postmodernity is able to form “the internal and superstructural
expression of a whole new wave of American . . . economic domination throughout
the world” (Duvall 4) given the technology available to it.8 I would now like to
follow this line of criticism related to the slippage between postmodern theory and
technological context, by briefly reviewing the functionality and limitations of
arguably the most important device in terms shaping the postmodern arguments
8
For
further
discussion
see
Stacey
Olster’s
“White
Noise”,
and
Philip
Nel’s
“DeLillo and Modernism” in The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo (2008).
18
Television was the most prominent form of mass media spectacle when
Jameson and Baudrillard produced their seminal postmodern works.9 The advent
of cable television in the 1980s was largely responsible for the beginning of a
“democratization of technology” and an awareness of alternate cultures (Friedman
61). Further, the technology of cable television helped to resolve the Cold War and
unite a global culture through its capacity to spread information on a large scale
(Friedman 62). However, television’s effects paled in comparison with those of the
Internet; a point evidenced in Friedman’s analysis of how difficult it was to conduct
multinational business up until the information revolution of the 1990s. Until the
Internet age, finance was still governed by “traditional institutions” and “slow-‐
moving executives and decision-‐making committees, who were risk-‐averse and not
particularly swift at responding to changes in the marketplace” (Friedman 53).
Naturally, these institutions were largely bound to a securitised system that
conducted business in a local market, rather than opening themselves up to a
plethora of international investors and mutual funds (Friedman 57). Therefore,
multinational or free-‐market capitalism, although it could be said to have been “in
the air” (Friedman 161), was still only on the developmental horizon in the late
1980s.10 In real terms then, the effects of television upon the creation of a
Jameson conceived of all-‐encompassing multinational capitalism in an era before
9
For
further
discussion
see
Elizabeth
Klaver’s
“Postmodernism
and
the
information revolution of the post-‐Cold War see Friedman’s Lexus pp. 63-‐71.
19
the Internet (an era that television was at the core of), even though the technology
that contextualised his work did not seem to add up to support such claims.11
Even if we are to accept that the media culture surrounding the production of
Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)12 could
sustain a sense that everything is mediated and thus connected to capitalist
systems, the type of context this theory could support is far removed from what we
find in Underworld. More specifically, it might produce the televisual culture of
earlier DeLillo novels—White Noise, for example. In White Noise, we find
characters so completely colonised by the media that they “randomly spout
gobbets from television” (Knight 2008: 32). Further, characters dream of the brand
names and slogans that they have absorbed via television: while watching his
daughter sleep, protagonist Jack Gladney hears her mutter the words “Toyota
Celica” (WN 114). Many similar examples appear in the novel, each indicating that
culture has been evacuated of reality by a series of “Hollywood version[s]” (Knight
2008: 30). However, the most pertinent example of DeLillo’s creation of what
Adam Kelly calls a “spatial phantasmagoria” of media-‐saturated culture comes in
’The most photographed barn in America’ scene appears as a metaphor for
the media saturation of White Noise. As Murray Jay Siskind puts it in the text, “it
becomes
impossible
to
see
the
barn”
because
it
is
impossible
to
“get
outside
the
11
Further
problematising
Jameson’s
conception
of
the
immersive
culture
of
multinational
capitalism
is
the
fact
that
he
(paradoxically)
steers
away
from
the
notion
that
technology
is
“the
ultimately
determining
instance”
(37)
of
this
phase
of
modernity,
rather
claiming
that
modern
information
technologies
represent
a
network
of
power
that
is
“difficult
for
our
minds
and
imaginations
to
grasp”
(38);
thus
begging
the
question,
if
technology
is
not
the
determining
instance
of
multinational
capitalism
but
rather
a
network
that
we
still
only
loosely
grasp,
then
what
is
the
determining
factor?
12
Hereon
Postmodernism.
20
aura” of representations (12-‐13). This “aura” is “the irrecoverable substitution of
the fake for the real” that sustains White Noise’s characters within a “collective
perception” of identity (Knight 2008: 31); a perception determined according to
“pop images and simulacra” (Jameson 25). But although such a collective
perception of identity deriving from a culture of pop images may be visible in
White Noise, contained as it is within the aura of the “ephemeral televisual screen
of the moment” (Evans 105); it is more difficult to apply a similar reading to the
vast nature of Underworld. Rather, Underworld’s containment of characters within
an “aura” that mediates existence draws upon a technological framework far more
sophisticated than the one at work in White Noise. Underworld is, after all, a novel
that deals with instantaneous capitalism and relations between “dozens of
characters and identities, scattered across the temporal and geographical terrain
of America” (O’Donnell 109); and thus must be theoretically approached using a
framework capable of grasping how relations work to create a coordinated
modern network.
for classifying the intricate and vast connections between capitalist systems and
Underworld. As such, while ’the most photographed barn in America’ from White
Noise may intrinsically be linked to postmodern theory in that it invokes the core
promise of simulated culture—that everything is mediated by televisual media
imagery. If the same barn were situated in Underworld, perceptions of it would be
co-‐opted not just by media culture, but also by the ways that “contemporary
experience [is] colonized and coordinated by ‘Das Kapital’” (Annesley 87): through
money and information that “forms waves and codes. A higher kind of intelligence.
Travels at the speed of light” (UW 386). Knight has perhaps best capitulated what I
21
am referring to here, arguing that Underworld is an “attempt to map the impossible
complex of interactions in the age of globalization between individuals and larger
social and economic forms” (1999: 830). And as I will argue in the following
section of this chapter, the optimal way to understand DeLillo’s attempt to map
and integrate complex global interactions, and therefore mediate existence, is by
applying a theoretical basis located firmly in the cyber-‐technology age of the post-‐
Cold War.
A Liquid Turn
What I have aimed to establish to this point is that although the effects of mediated
culture in Underworld may resemble those in White Noise, the means for creating
culture, rather than reflecting those networks conceived in accord with inferior
moving around an already unstable theory (Kellner 79). However, if we are to look
beyond Bauman’s postmodern musings to his liquid modern theory, we may find
not only the emergence of a clear attempt to work through the logic of
contemporary social systems (Ray 66), but an adequate framework for grasping
22
The ‘liquid’ metaphor is the best way to grasp the contemporary phase of
modernity, according to Bauman (2). Liquids are constantly prone to changing
shape, and rather than being contained in specific dimensions (like solids) they are
driven era where the social labyrinth is “no longer cut in rock or molded in
concrete, but cast out of electronically conducted information” (ibid). By
dominance of new information systems and the concurrent rise of multinational
conglomerates; what he calls “software capitalism” (LM 116). Once software
capitalism became a reality, the era of heavy modernity had ended and the era of
What this devaluation of space meant for Bauman was an “all-‐permeating, all-‐
penetrating” era of software driven liquid modernity; an era where power had
become “extraterritorial” due to its dependence upon technology that subverted
13
The
heavy
period
of
modernity
was
essentially
a
“bulky”,
“immobile”,
and
territorially
“rooted”
phase
(Bauman
57).
Above
all
else
it
was
regulated
by
solidity
and
an
‘inside/outside’
dynamic
built
upon
the
Weberian-‐Marxist
conceptions
of
modernity
(Bauman
3).
The
result
of
such
‘heavy’
modernisation,
according
to
David
Evans,
was
an
economic
and
spatial
landscape
“populated
by
giants—monstrous
machines,
huge
factories,
monopolistic
corporations”
(106).
Moreover,
a
global
landscape
characterised
by
economic
and
social
division,
and
the
strict
defense
of
boundaries
that
threatened
to
integrate
ideologies
(Bauman
115).
23
limits of distance and time (Bauman 11). This extraterritorialsim oversaw a
demolition of borders and boundaries that had previously “stopped the flow of
new, fluid global powers”, thereby imparting a newly opened and yet connected
Throughout Liquid Modernity, Bauman is able to locate a sense of the global
market’s liquefied yet connected nature in the rise of software capitalism, thus
linking with Underworld’s core principle that connections occur based on post-‐Cold
War capitalism’s ability to draw everything into an integrated mode of existence
(McClure 86). However, I do not want to simply put the argument now that
way of theorising connectivity in Underworld. Because Bauman only implicitly
bases the transition into Liquid Modernity on the ubiquity of software capitalism,
he does not specifically locate the driving mechanisms behind this change. 14 As
Larry Ray avers, Liquid Modernity provides a vision of a post-‐Fordist, globalised,
fluid, post-‐bureaucratic society hinged upon the advent of software capitalism, but
its claims are too theoretical (65-‐66). Keith Tester furthers this argument by
asserting that Bauman is an imaginative not systemic sociologist, and as such, his
work is unlikely to provide statistics or ‘facts’ to support an argument, but is more
likely to refer to literature (81-‐83). It therefore seems imperative to introduce a
second theorist in order to more firmly contextualise liquid modernity, and thus
framework than Bauman’s, while at the same time echoing the core theses
provided
in
Liquid
Modernity.
Lexus
is
Friedman’s
definitive
compendium
on
what
14
For
further
discussion
see
Liquid
Modernity
pp.
9;
14;
112;
116.
24
he calls globalisation “Round II” (17). The first round of globalisation ran between
the mid-‐1800s and the 1920s, but it was split apart by successive World Wars. In
terms of trade volumes, capital flows, and the flow of labour across borders when
compared with relative GNP’s and populations, the period of globalisation
preceding World War I was similar to the one we are living through today,
What separates the two eras, however, is that while globalisation “Round I”
was founded upon falling transportation costs, largely due to the invention of the
railroad, steamship and automobile, which enabled movement and trade between
territories to be much cheaper and faster than before (xvi-‐xvii); globalisation
“Round II” was instigated by falling telecommunication costs owing to the
development of microchips, satellites, fibre optics and, of course, the Internet in
the late 1980s-‐early 90s (xviii).15 Such developments meant the potential
quickening (to the point of instantaneity) of trade capacity and foreign investment;
and also that the availability of telecommunications moved from esoteric to
relatively homogenous in the space of a few years. Friedman calls this transition a
It is through exposition of the “democratization of technology” that Friedman
provides a more grounded view of Bauman’s “software capitalism”. Where Bauman
uses metaphor—power that is “no longer bound” (11), the “mind-‐boggling speed
and
subsequent
ubiquity
of
information
technologies
has
led
to
a
new
globalised
15
For
further
discussion
see
Friedman’s
Lexus
pp.
61-‐63,
wherein
he
analyses
the
gradual
development
of
information
technologies
that
led
to
a
widespread
“democratisation
of
technology”.
25
in 1990—the creation of the ‘world wide web’—meant that the Internet was, after
years of development, ready to be used as a “mass tool for research, commerce and
communication” (Friedman 66); and in the early 90s, this “mass tool” is precisely
what it became.16 The Internet was the main catalyst for an information revolution
that triggered an inexorable integration of markets, nation-‐states, individuals and
technologies to a degree never witnessed before (Friedman 9). The ultimate result
of this transformation was the dissolution of those systems that had operated on a
monopolising basis during the Cold War (Friedman 66). In effect, what the
alike (by and large) could no longer be confined within borders, because widely
available technology enabled them to see, and to capitalise upon, what was going
to open their systems to a globalised model because they could no longer control
the spread of information. However, it was not simply that countries were forced
into globalisation; they were also coerced into it because this new system
ultimately provided greater profit margins, and therefore higher standards of
living than any of the alternatives (Friedman 104).17 Globalising technologies
16
In
1990
Berners-‐Lee
made
it
possible
to locate information across a global
model
fosters
more
economic
growth
and
higher
average
incomes
through
higher
volumes
of
trade,
foreign
investment,
privatisation,
and
“more
efficient
26
enabled governments to buy and sell anything, anywhere, at any time, and this
fascism—in the discussion at this point, and although his analysis concedes that
these models may be able to distribute and divide income more equitably, he
argues that they are unable to compete when it comes to generating wealth (133).
As such, the economic model of globalisation is largely desirable compared to the
alternatives; as well as being inevitable on the basis of an information revolution
(Friedman 74). This combination of desirability and inevitability signified the end
of the Cold War, according to Friedman; and as former Korean Prime Minister Lee
Hong Koo put it, “a victory for market forces over politics”.18
All that was left for governments to do if they sought economic prosperity
after the Cold War was to fully embrace the market-‐led revolution by donning
what Friedman calls “the Golden Straitjacket” (104). For Friedman, the Golden
Straitjacket is the defining political-‐economic garment of the post-‐Cold War era,
and putting it on signals an acceptance of free-‐market principles (ibid). It is, in
short, a removal of all foreign investment restrictions, widespread privatisation of
enterprises, and an elimination of subsidies for state-‐owned firms (Friedman 105;
Eichengreen 120). In other words, the Golden Straitjacket signifies a general
deregulation that removes control of the economic sector away from governments,
and places it with global market forces. Putting on the Straitjacket is a step that
virtually
every
country
has
been
willing
to
take,
resulting
in
a
sharply
defined
use
of
resources
under
the
pressure
of
global
competition”,
see
Friedman’s
Lexus
p.
106.
18
Quoted
in
Friedman
p.
107.
27
contrast between the Cold War and post-‐Cold War worlds (Friedman 152).
Whereas the Cold War world had been characterised by division, the post-‐Cold
War world is characterised by an integration of global markets (Friedman 8). Walls
and boundaries that had previously divided countries have effectively come down,
and a market-‐led globally interwoven system has stepped in to replace them; a
system governed by technology that enabled capital to be, in Bauman’s terms,
“extraterritorial”.
Friedman recognises the dominant economic and structural trend of the
post-‐Cold War world here (Eichengreen 118). Further, his conception of
globalisation is markedly similar to Bauman’s liquid modern theory. For instance,
Bauman’s notion that the advent of “software capitalism”—which enabled space
and time to in principle be transgressed—is the defining catalyst for a transition
into liquid modernity (116). Friedman saw the same reason for change: a
global scale (47). Moreover, both theorists agree on the conditions of this new
phase of modernity: where Bauman finds that the increasing liquedisation of
borders and boundaries at the hands of “software capitalism” has led to an epoch
capacity for speed, mobility, connection and co-‐option has led to the inexorable
government. As such, I suggest that the congruous relationship between the two
theories lends them to conflation under the term liquid globalisation.
Most importantly though, I posit that the above exposition of liquid
mediations that may be defined in terms of convergence between characters and
28
“global markets” (UW 785). Underworld is a novel built upon the economic and
technological conditions outlined in the two theories above: it interprets the world
as an “increasingly interwoven place” due to the prominence of instantaneous
(Annesley 90); or as Bauman might put it, extraterritorialism is made manifest by
software capitalism. Therefore, in the same way that a globalisation network has
required virtually all countries to don a ‘golden straitjacket’ and adopt the “same
basic hardware” of free-‐market capitalism in Friedman’s terms, so too does
DeLillo’s novel conceivably don a golden straitjacket of its own, thus connecting
characters to, and mediating existence via, a globalised strata. Perhaps this concept
is never more apparent in the text than in Shay’s submission to a metaphorical
representation of global markets in the form of a Lexus that he drives through the
desert. However, representations of coordinated spatial environments in the text
also work alongside such instances to affirm that a liquid globalisation framework
New Space
A spatial transformation and restructuring is crucial under liquid globalisation, for
the modern world is now propelled by transgression of space on the basis of
information technologies (Bauman 9).19 Space is therefore made “mutable and
dynamic, not preordained and stagnant” (Bauman 112). In other words, liquid
globalisation proffers a spatial whole rather than divided spatial regions; or as
19
For
further
discussion
on
space
in
reference
to
globalisation
see
also,
Anthony
29
Roland Robertson puts it, globalisation “refers both to the compression of the
world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole” (8). DeLillo
recognises this formation of integrated space by drawing seemingly disparate
contexts and characters into a tight network of connection. Through his creation of
integrated space, DeLillo is therefore able to lend credence to the “coordinating
forces of the global market” that liquefy the resistance of space and draw nearly all
elements into an integrated mass (Bauman 14; Annesley 89); or a “blended whole”
Consider, for example, DeLillo’s positioning of protagonist, Nick Shay, toward
the end of the novel: Shay is in a Russian night-‐club on the “forty second floor of a
new office tower filled with brokerage houses, software firms, import companies
and foreign banks” (786). This structure, along with Shay’s location within it,
technology and finance are disappearing in the era of liquid globalisation
individual and capital has emerged to signify a newly coordinated era. Moreover,
consider DeLillo’s repeated allusions to being contained by elements pertaining to
“the regimented typeface on [a] map” (UW 803). A sense of “order and command”
(UW 806) emanates from the map’s typeface in the novel, enveloping characters
like Shay in a sense of comfort and organisation—his life rarely strays from the
“trammeled jogging paths” (UW 809) of contemporary life, that, according to James
Annesley, represent the significance of coordinated environments in the novel
(93).
life also reinforces the idea that DeLillo sees the dominant spatial paradigm of
30
contemporary life as an integrated whole: Shay is a dominant character—he is an
Friedman might suggest that he is an exemplar of liquid-‐global consciousness
(119-‐120;199). Shay’s integration with modern space should, therefore, not be
viewed as an anomaly, but as DeLillo’s conception of the everyday citizen (Wegner
63; Olster 83); one that is, in Bauman’s terms, determined according to
If one is looking for elements beyond the spatially integrated whole in
Underworld, one must look not at Shay, but into the “white areas on the map”
(404). One must look to those spaces where streets are named for old Indian
tribes, and where landfill is located (803); where radioactive waste is held (106);
where the deluded, psychotic, parasitic bodies of society roam (242). Or, perhaps
most importantly, one must examine the subterranean plot line of Eisenstein’s
imaginary art-‐house film as rendered by DeLillo (445). It is only through the
‘underworld’ aspects of such a film that DeLillo is able to contextualise the
antithetical trajectory of a model touched upon in allusions to landfill, radioactive
gradual breakdown of all notions of division and separation, culminating in what
Grausem calls the fusion of a “techno-‐religious fantasy of cyberspace” at the end of
20
This
trajectory
is
one
characterised
by
waste
and
dysfunctionality.
Further,
it
31
the novel (318). This is a fusion in which all spatial elements are intimately
connected, thus making spatial separation impossible. To be sure, this conclusion
is indeed a “fantasy” as it connotes a sense of what Bauman calls
“weightlessness”(121)—a vision of Sister Edgar’s soul laid bare in cyberspace,
entirely integrated with the Internet technology that governs the world (824-‐827).
spatial boundaries—is not possible, by alluding to the as yet “unwebbed” objects
that still linger in the final pages of the text (Naydan 196). Thus, Underworld
remains in keeping with the Baumanian conception that the infinite flexibility of
space has not yet been achieved due to a continuing dependence upon certain
physical forms (119). However, by creating a narrative of gradually tightening
connections and cooptions that culminate in a fantasy of “weightlessness”, DeLillo
is able to finally conceptualise what he sees on the horizon of modernity: an
entirely integrated account of space in coming times based upon the
“unconstrained futurity at the heart of the capital markets” (Grausem 313).
In rendering space, character and global markets as part of an almost entirely
integrated whole, the final pages of Underworld affirm the logic of applying a liquid
globalisation framework to the text. Moreover, by attributing this sense of
globalised integration throughout the novel to the effects of post-‐Cold War
technologies and concomitant socio-‐economic shifts, DeLillo not only aligns with
Friedman and Bauman’s concepts that are rooted in the 1990s condition, but also
creates separation between Underworld and postmodern theories that fail to grasp
how global markets work to mediate existence in the context of Underworld’s vast
“array of systems” (UW 241). Thus far, however, I have only touched upon how a
liquid globalisation framework may be applied to the novel’s organisation of space,
32
and to the integrated relationship between characters and capital in the text. In the
further draws upon the integrative, or connective, liquid globalisation theory
33
Chapter Two:
While looking at the enormous ‘Fresh Kills’ landfill and the twin towers of the
World Trade Center in the distance, Brian Glassic, a waste management executive
in Underworld, finds a sense of “poetic balance” between the two ideas (UW 184).
On the one hand, the towers represent modern capitalism—they are key
monuments to a system that is “constantly striving to convert private space into a
common market” (Evans 109), thus functioning as indicators of capitalism’s
attempt to penetrate the “the most minute textures of life” (Wegner 56). Landfill,
by contrast, resides at the other end of the spectrum. It is the waste of our lives—
“the particular, the singular, the unemployable” (Evans 110); or as Liliana M.
Naydan puts it, late-‐twentieth century waste is the end-‐point of “post-‐capitalist
reproduction, simulation, and mass consumption” (189). What therefore lies at the
heart of Glassic’s “poetic” vision is a dichotomy, in that, one side represents the
endless cycles of capitalism (Naydan 180), while the other demonstrates the final
However, it is not an invariably balanced relationship between waste and
capitalism that Glassic senses here. Rather, this balance is made problematic by the
threat of waste’s “mass metabolism” coming to “overwhelm us” (UW 184); or in
other words, the potential for waste’s permeation of all levels of society due to
recognising the potentially damning threat posed by material waste, Glassic finds
34
the challenge that he had been craving in his vision of landfill: a chance to
counteract waste by recycling it, and thus re-‐incorporating it into capitalist cycles
(UW 185).
In this chapter, I will argue that counteracting waste’s threat to capitalism
through recycling is not only at the heart of the above scene, but of Underworld in
general. Further, I will suggest that by positioning it as such, Don DeLillo works to
connect the narrative with a “slimming trend” that is inherent to the prosperity of
a liquid globalisation model. In order to make these claims, I will first establish that
the dichotomous relationship between material waste and capital is central to the
novel in literal rather than metaphorical terms. Second, I will compare the
deployment of material waste in White Noise and Underworld in order to suggest
that the former depends upon a postmodern sense of containment, while
departure from the postmodern. Finally, I will argue that DeLillo’s casting of
Waste Works
Molly Wallace is correct in arguing that much of Underworld is “about the
underside of history, the abjected “wastes” of consumer society” (369). These
“wastes”, as the character Viktor Maltsev points out, act as “the mystical twin of the
other” (UW 791). As much as the novel is filled with the liquefied elements of free-‐
market capitalism—as has been pointed out in chapter one—so too is the text
filled by its “devil twin” (ibid) in the form of material waste; thus demonstrating
35
how Glassic’s conception of a “poetic” balance works at a fundamental level in the
text. Consider, for instance, repeated motifs regarding an ‘underworld’ bursting at
the seams with material waste: “the landfill across the road is closed now, jammed
to capacity, but gas keeps rising from the great earthern bern” (809).21 The point of
these repeated motifs is to reinforce the “overpowering odour of garbage” (Evans
110) in the text. I would also agree with David Evans’s contention that DeLillo
focuses on the “overpowering” material quality of waste as a byproduct of
consumer-‐driven culture, rather than on waste’s capacity for metaphor (117).
Many critics have been tempted to read Underworld’s visions of waste as sign
or symbol of something greater. Amy Hungerford, for example, argues that
material waste seems less connected to “concrete meanings in the world” (2006:
350) than to the waning sense of spiritual belief following the twentieth century’s
nuclear moment. John Duvall finds a relatively similar connection in his argument
that waste, in Underworld, is representative of “spiritually wasted lives” (5).22
Perhaps the most prominent interpretation, however, is that DeLillo uses material
waste as an allegorical jeremiad for the failure of consumer-‐driven culture in the
late twentieth century, and that he embellishes the impact of waste as a result
(Wegner 57; Kavadlo 385; Osteen 18). Such an argument may appropriately be
applied to, say, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), which sees
capitalist culture in a state of entropy, and thus uses material waste to underscore
the cracks in the dominant social order (Fedirka 613). Pynchon uses the “residue
of [the] lives” (COL 5) of his characters—“coupons promising savings of 5 or 10c,
trading
stamps,
pink
flyers.
.
.butts,
tooth-‐shy
combs”
(ibid)—to
“point
to
a
history
21
For
further
discussion
see
Underworld
pp.
88;
106;
806.
22
For
further
discussion
see
Mark
Osteen’s
American
Magic
and
Dread:
Don
36
of missed opportunities and unfulfilled hopes” (Evans 116); or in other words, to
tell the story of capitalism’s failure to realise a state of prosperity for all involved.
In Underworld, however, it would be a misinterpretation to read the role of
material waste as following Pynchon’s allegorical path. Rather, DeLillo plunges into
“the material immediacy, the concrete and sensuous, oleaginous and viscid
substance of garbage itself” (Evans 117) to highlight the notion that material waste
is a modern reality, and the logical byproduct of consumerism. He therefore moves
“garbage stacked in black bags” on the streets of New York (UW 376); landfills that
are the size of mountains (UW 184); and the ever-‐deepening entombment of
contaminated waste (UW 88), to the centre of his focus because of material waste’s
sheer inescapable presence in the modern world. The characters are “surrounded
by it,” says Patrick O’Donnell; “vast waste dumps occupy the periphery of [the
novel’s] cities” (110), and ultimately present “omnivorous movie terror[s]” (UW
Rather than metaphor, Underworld’s conception of the role of waste echoes
what Garbology theorists have pointed out.23 Edward Humes, for example, notes
that “across a lifetime. . .we are each on track to generate 102 tons of trash. . . Each
of our bodies may occupy only one cemetery plot when we’re done with this world,
but a single person’s 102 ton trash legacy will require the equivalent of 1,100
graves” (4). Further, Adam Minter observes that yearly loads of America’s garbage
trucks would “fill a line of trucks stretching halfway to the moon” (7).
But it is not just Underworld that presents material waste as the manifest
outcome of consumer culture in terms of DeLillo’s oeuvre. Certainly, White Noise
23
For
further
discussion
see
Raymond
Benton
Jr’s
“Reduce,
Reuse,
Recycle
.
.
.
37
presents a similar picture. For example, we find the “oozing cube[s] of mangled
cans, clothes hangers, animal bones and other refuse” (WN 259) in an attempt to
portray the “ruinous end-‐point of all material things” (Naydan 187). In a text
defined by the “commodification of objects and humans alike” (Olster 80),
stockpiles of waste are therefore representative of the concomitant outcome; or
the natural “underside of consumer consciousness” (WN 259). O’Donnell makes an
interesting argument in terms of analysing waste in White Noise, claiming that this
“underside” of waste represents “the spoor of our mortality, the map of our
progress toward death, individual and collective” (110).24 It does so because waste
is a “breakdown of material order” much like death (O’Donnell 111). Therefore, in
light of what is arguably White Noise’s core dictum—a centering on the “collapse of
the real and the flow of signifiers emanating from an information society” (Wilcox
2002: 146)—it becomes necessary to view the “underside” qualities of waste and
death alike, as threatening possibilities. After all, the quality of “life-‐always-‐
becoming-‐death” (O’Donnell 114) seems at once to be a vehicle that threatens to
destabilise, perhaps even derail, the veneer of a culture that holds a Baudrillardian
“loss of the real” (Wilcox 1991: 347) at its core. As Douglas Keesey argues, death
and the “wasted life” (32) both fall outside of simulated postmodern cycles, in that
they represent the fragmented or idiosyncratic event (Wegner 56; Evans 109).
idiosyncratic death and waste product are “the other[s] of the contemporary
world, the real specter[s] that returns to haunt the floating zones of desire of
24
For
further
discussion
see
Mark
Osteen’s
American
Magic
and
Dread
p.
216-‐
223.
38
Death and material waste are contained to a degree in White Noise through
what Fredric Jameson would call a “free-‐floating and impersonal feeling” (16), a
feeling that “tends to be dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria” (ibid). This
“euphoria” is driven by the consumer-‐commodification culture that I touched on in
chapter one; a culture that has penetrated all enclaves, including “nature and the
unconscious” and crafted individuals in a postmodern mould (Olster 80). As
Jameson puts: “[n]o longer the old monadic subject but rather that of some
degraded collective ‘objective spirit’” (25). As a result of this postmodern mould,
characters like central protagonist Jack Gladney are, for the most part, shielded
from waste (and death) by a context that is almost entirely mediated by media
representations (Boxall 45; Olster 88). In moments when waste cannot be
contained by postmodern culture, however, what erupts is a “kind of sardonic
response to the promise of consumer fulfillment”.25 Effectively, the novel’s “sense
of well-‐being, the security and contentment” (WN 20) is disturbed and threatened
by the detritus that lies on the ‘outside’. But the best that characters in White Noise
can do is to try and shield themselves from death rather than attempting to
counteract it. For example, Gladney’s wife, Babette, uses a drug called ‘Dylar’,
which is meant to stave off the fear of death (Wilcox 1991: 353). Babette’s
approach here is indicative of the novel’s consistent attempts to contain death (or
waste) at all levels. Further, the failure of ‘Dylar’ to abate the fear of death is
ultimately significant too, because it marks a failure of the containment project,
and, in turn, the perpetual resonance of a material waste threat (Evans 120).
25
For
reference
see
“Matters
of
Fact
and
Fiction,”
a
Don
DeLillo
interview
with
Anthony DeCurtis in Rolling Stone p. 120 (November 17, 1988).
39
project of waste containment.26 However, there is a glaring element to the novel
that demonstrates something more than simply a will to strike a sustainable
balance between capitalist culture and waste. If we refer back to the section of the
novel where Glassic senses a challenge in the site of landfill, for example, what
DeLillo demonstrates here is the reinvigoration of the complacent, threatened
spirit that we might ascribe to Jack Gladney in White Noise—a character utterly
subjected to consumer culture, floating along with it and unable, despite his best
attempts, to establish a sense of “interiority” within its inescapable postmodern
framework (Olster 91). It is not necessarily that Glassic has escaped a framework
of subjection, but rather that he is given a sense of purpose within such a
framework that further triggers the novel’s recognition of a new social order
beyond that of the postmodern. As a waste manager, Glassic’s primary role is not
to contain or ignore waste but to transform and absorb it into something useful
(UW 102); or as Evans points out, to re-‐integrate “garbage back into the
landfill he does not simply want to contain what he sees, or to accept it as a
frightening yet inevitable part of American culture; instead, he wants to “penetrate
[the] secret” (UW 185) and reinvigorate waste so that it does not escape “the
26
For
further
discussion
see
Mark
Osteen
American
Magic
and
Dread;
and
Philip
Wegner’s
Periodizing
the
Cold
War
in
Don
DeLillo’s
Underworld
p.
57
(2001);
and
Patrick
O’Donnell’s
“Underworld”
in
the
Cambridge
Companion
to
Don
DeLillo
p.
114
(2008).
40
Evans attributes this shift in Underworld beyond the postmodern cycle of
DeLillo. This new paradigm aspires to a sense of weightlessness, whereby what
counts is “the rapidity with which participants can recycle assets, and mutate
[them] into new forms” (Evans 108). James Annesley makes similar claims, finding
Naomi Klein’s globalisation theory particular useful in grasping the novel’s desire
for weightlessness (91). This desire, according to Klein, stems from the
contemporary speed of circulation and the capacity for instantaneous access on a
global scale through modern technologies (146). The result of this circulation is a
divestment of a need for “things” and a mass-‐gravitation toward a need for brands,
because branding as opposed to production, provides the most ubiquitous
presence and therefore the highest value (Klein 4; 148; 195). As such, what was an
American landscape dominated by the seductions of shiny consumer objects, has
become one dominated by free-‐floating, weightless brands (Klein 143; 196).
Both Zygmunt Bauman and Thomas Friedman acknowledge a similar shift to
Klein in their respective discussions of the global desire to engage in a “slimming
trend” (Bauman 123), and a process of getting “rid of paper” (Friedman 97). For
both theorists, such a shift is attributed to the fact that the Internet now defines
asset (Eichengreen 119).27 As a result of this shift toward intangible assets like
brands, the bulky prospect of material waste becomes something more than that
which needed to simply be contained as it does in the postmodern context
(Rifkin12). Rather, it is anathema to the perpetuation of social order: a
27
For
further
discussion
see
Friedman’s
Lexus
p.
199;
and
Bauman’s
Liquid
41
“loathsomely corporeal” (Klein 196) prospect that must be transformed and
recycled back into a system that ultimately aspires to a waste-‐free destiny (Wegner
57).
As the recycling movement plays an increasingly crucial role in a real-‐world
context, so too does it play such a role in Underworld. I have touched upon this
briefly by looking at Glassic’s response to landfill, but I now want extend this
discussion by examining how DeLillo casts central characters as agents of
recycling, and thus locates the recycling movement at the core of Underworld’s
concerns.
During Underworld’s early Cold War years, J. Edgar Hoover is crafted as “deeply
embroiled in the intrigue and espionage of cold-‐war politics” (Wilcox 2002: 121); a
man “whose own sequestered heart holds every festering secret in the Western
world” (UW 51). Liliana M. Naydan puts it best, observing that Hoover functions as
“an all-‐powerful gatekeeper of dark secrets and mysteries” (188). During this time
against the threat of nuclear annihilation, and DeLillo depicts him as such.
However, by the time Underworld arrives into the 1980s and early 90s—where
“well-‐founded categories began to seem irrelevant. . .and a certain fluid movement
became possible” (UW 571)—Hoover’s role has become relatively outmoded by a
set of defense principles that revolve around counteracting material waste
(McGowan 123).
42
(UW 804) who, like his colleague, Brian Glassic, also sees himself as a member of
an “esoteric order”; a “Church Father of waste” (UW 102). Shay is able to see
himself in this way because he is the inheritor of the dubious legacy of upholding
America’s Cold War supremacy and prosperity, through his role as a waste
manager (Wilcox 2002: 123). Leonard Wilcox’s contention here reinforces the
notion taken from garbology theory that recycling, or waste management, provides
a path toward a sustainable global community and marketplace (Minter 5). But
more than that, Wilcox underscores a central paradigm shift in the text—what was
a fixation on the bomb’s capacity for annihilation has evolved into a fixation on
responding to the threat of waste (Knight 1999: 818). As such, the supplanting of
Hoover for Shay in terms of status functions as metaphorical representation of the
Cold War’s progression toward its conclusion, and the concurrent rise of global
economic, spatial and social formations that brought with them the goal of
weightlessness. In chapter three, I will examine how the nuclear threat evolves
into a globalised framework via Underworld’s historical overview of the late
twentieth century. For now, though, I want to argue that this paradigm shift is
marked through Shay’s role as a reinterpretation of the Hooverian G-‐man.
Consider, for instance, Shay being led through “hallway mazes fitted with
electronic gates that Sims open[s] by inserting a keycard in a lockset” (303); and
the fact that he is granted “the feeling of some power source accessible to those of
us with coded keys” (ibid). He is granted such access and power because waste
assumes almost religious proportions in the novel (McGowan 124), as outlined
above; and it must therefore be treated with a sense of “reverence and dread” (UW
88). In other words, material waste inhabits a similar status to that of the nuclear
43
bomb at the height of the Cold War: that which holds the potential to reap “a
landscape of visionary havoc and ruin” (UW 41). And as such, only the most
powerful means necessary are deployed to deal with it. During the Cold War such a
role was assigned to men like Hoover, the director of the FBI and arguably the
most powerful man in America—“[e]very official secret . . . had its blood-‐birth in
Edgar’s own soul” (UW 573). In the post-‐Cold War era, however, the role of
assigned to those like Shay, a man of “religious conviction” with regard to waste
management (UW 88). As O’Donnell puts it, Shay sees “waste management [as]
part of a global system of design and control that has both sacred and secular
implications” (111). Such a claim adds up when we read Shay’s description of
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.
Sunny
loves
this
place
and
so
do
the
other
kids
who
come
with
their
parents
or
teachers
to
stand
on
the
catwalk
and
visit
the
exhibits
(809).
There is certainly a sense of reverence for recycling in this excerpt taken
from one of Shay’s (apparently) regular visits to a facility outside of Phoenix. He
conflates the fashion runway and the museum—“stand on the catwalk and visit the
exhibits”—with the recycling plant, thus demonstrating how, in his view, two of
the highest forums of cultural reverie may now be equated with the act of
recycling. Further, he seems to exult in the transformation of garbage into “square-‐
edged units, products again”, by later describing products that alight anew “with a
44
kind of brave ageing” (809). But it is not simply in his professional life that we find
Shay’s reverence for recycling on display: as Evans argues, “Nick is equally as
obsessed with eliminating waste at a personal level” (120). Take the following, for
instance:
Shay and his family thus go to great lengths to separate their garbage into
categories that will assist recycling procedures.28 Significantly, on the following
page we may notice how Shay barely discusses what happens to organic waste:
“We did the yard waste. We bundled the newspapers but did not tie them in twine”
(103). What these conflicting examples indicate is, on the one hand, Shay’s desire
to transform garbage into simply “a moment in an endless process of
transformation and circulation” (Evans 120); and on the other, his distaste for the
unrecyclable wastes of consumer culture. For Shay, the difference between the two
kinds of waste is that unrecyclable waste lacks any redemptive qualities; or as
Evans argues, it displays “a common resistance to utility” (122). Recyclable waste,
therefore avoiding landfill to alight anew into economic cycles. As such, we find
Shay’s reverence for recycling again and again in the text; and when it comes to
that which is unrecyclable we find him wanting to “conceptualise and package it”
28
For
further
discussion
see
Underworld
pp.
121;
116.
45
and thus reduce its “irreducible thingness” (Evans 122) to the state of a
homogenised product.
In terms of Shay’s “religious” devotion to recycling, there is something also to
be said about the fact that his life in Phoenix seems a repeated or recycled set of
events from one day to the next. He consistently returns to the repeated motif, be it
references to watching Jackie Gleason on TV with his mother;29 or to the
shimmering “bronze tower” that is his workplace;30 or to ruminations about his
father smoking Lucky Strikes, and then leaving one day and never returning.31
DeLillo makes sure to keep the details virtually identical with each repetition, and
the effect upon the reader is a form of hypnosis due to Shay’s obsessive treatment
I suggest that when taken together, the above examples are indicative of
tightening ring of coordination” (Annesley 89). In other words, Shay is a recycler
by virtue of the dominant social forces in Underworld’s modern context. During the
Cold War, dominant political and social forces crafted agents like Hoover: those
who were paranoid due to the nuclear threat constantly looming overhead (Knight
1999: 811). In the post-‐Cold War era, however, what crafts society is the speed of
transnational software capitalism; and thus, a Baumanian sense that value is
determined according to one’s ability to act in a fluid and instantaneous manner
(132). The characterisation of Shay as an agent of recycling reinforces these core
principles of a liquid globalisation model, therefore symbolising a paradigm shift in
29
See
Underworld
pp.
103;
105;
121.
30
See
Underworld
pp.
85;
87;
104;
119;
803;
806.
31
See
Underworld
pp.
87;
90;
102;
105;
118;
805;
808.
46
the text: one that has led away from Hoover, and toward the recycling agent that
But if Shay is a clear-‐cut agent of recycling, it is not so apparent how Klara
Sax, the novel’s other protagonist, plays a similar role. Discerning her involvement
in this regard is important, given that—as I argue—recycling, and thus, liquid
globalisation principles lie at the core of the novel. What has been problematic for
critics, in terms of reading Sax as a recycler, is the fact that she is an artist. Evans,
for instance, argues that Sax resists the role of a recycler through the prime
motivations of her desert art project (UW 77), which he claims, aims to
“in this sense, Underworld suggests that the making of art is the ultimate act of
irresponsibility” (ibid). Evans falls in step with archetypal clichés related to ‘the
artist’ here; clichés that would render Sax as a liberated, individualistic figure
operating outside of, or against, the dominant cultural paradigm. The philosopher
of modernity, Jürgen Habermas, for example, would perhaps make a similar claim
given his regard for the monadic artist “who seeks to maintain the promise of
liberalism and humanistic ideologies of equality, civil rights, and humanitarianism
over and above those ideals to be realised in the development of capitalism
itself”.32 And while it is true that Sax does uphold a sense of the reflexive life that
forms a social critique through art and lifestyle, it is only that: a sense of
individualism as compared to real abstraction from capitalist cycles. Though it is
often difficult to distinguish between a sense of individuality and ‘real’
32
Quoted
in
Jameson’s
Postmodernism,
or,
the
Cultural
Logic
of
Late
Capitalism
47
individuality in relation to Sax, it is necessary to do so in order to situate her as a
recycling agent and therefore contributor toward the perpetuation of a liquid-‐
global framework.
Sax is depicted as a world-‐famous artist of the late-‐twentieth-‐century for her
works that incorporate a range of castaway objects, earning her the title ‘the Bag
Lady’ (UW 70). I would agree with David Cowart’s argument that such work sees
her role as a recycler “extend even to some hundreds of decommissioned B-‐52’s”
(59). These planes were set for the “cutter’s torch” (UW 70); in other words, they
were set to be scrapped and sent to landfill (Helyer 1000). But instead, Sax works
to reinvigorate the planes by turning them into artworks. Of course, Evans would
contend that Sax conducts “irresponsible” acts through art that contribute to the
rubbish heap. To be sure, her work “does not ring with the clamour of the
marketplace” (Boxall 44) in the same way that, say, Shay’s recycling work might.
Further, much of the rhetoric surrounding Sax makes it seem counterintuitive to
argue for her role as a recycler. For instance, she talks about disassembling the
homogenous qualities of the humanless factory line for a return to the unique “felt
life” (UW 77), thus indicating that she moves more toward Habermas’s modernist
However, what critics such as Evans overlook in relation to Sax, are the
hypothetical economics related to her desert installation. Consider, for example,
Shay taking his wife to see the installation from a candy-‐striped hot-‐air balloon
(124-‐125). While Shay is floating overhead and pondering whether the enormous
installation is visible from space (126), we may arrive at an understanding as to
why Sax received “foundation grants. . .congressional approval, all sorts of permits”
48
to construct the work (69): because it stands to fulfill an economic purpose. As
tens of thousands of people flock monthly to see a public exhibition such as ‘The
Bean’ in Chicago,33 so too could we reasonably assume that many would visit a
gargantuan installation in the desert by a world famous artist, thus generating an
economic basis for the work. Sax’s artwork therefore knowingly represents re-‐
monetisation and, in turn, the recycling of discarded products back to economic
cycles; thus separating the work from what some claim to be a vehicle for
and Sax, the outcomes of their work as recyclers are markedly similar, as the above
analysis has shown. Furthermore, it is not simply a whimsical engagement with
recycling that each of these characters display. Rather, they both demonstrate
commitment to their roles as recyclers; and moreover, it is a commitment that has
forged the basis of their professions, and in Shay’s case, also resonates clearly in
his personal life. As such, both characters aid the transition into what Jeremy
Rifkin calls, a “new cultural and economic dispensation” (12) that strives for
weightlessness. They do so through a collective refusal to let material waste be the
useless stuff of landfill, instead asserting that waste must be re-‐incorporated into
the global economy in some way (Benton Jr. 4). Both characters thus signify a
postmodernity: an acceptance that commodification to waste cycles are a fait
accompli. Indeed, Underworld refuses to accept this delicate balance, but rather
33
For
further
discussion
see
the
City
of
Chicago
website
at:
http://www.cityofchicago.org/city/en/depts/dca/supp_info/millennium_park.h
tml
49
seeks to recycle and thus abide by the Baumanian “slimming trend” that is an
What this chapter has aimed to make clear is that by acting as recycling
liquid globalisation framework at the expense of a postmodern one. However, it
should be noted that, in the novel, Sax and Shay did not always exist within such an
integrative system. In the chapters set during the 1950s, for example, we find a
young Shay living in the “quick of his skin” (UW 810), and driven for the most part
by instinct. Indeed, Evans is correct in arguing that in the 50s, we find Shay more
concerned with “the unpredictable . . . elements of ordinary life” (129), than with
“thinking in systems” (ibid). As such, we may be more inclined to read Shay as
aligned with idiosyncratic material waste than systemic recycling at this point in
the text. So what shifts in the novel to later embed Shay within a culture that he
initially seems so at odds with? In chapter three, I will argue that DeLillo gradually
constructs Shay and others as liquid globalisation agents on the basis of
moment in 1951. In conducting this analysis, I want to show how Underworld
works as a historical novel, and is thus further separated from a postmodern frame
50
Chapter Three:
Underworld begins with the recreation of a famous American sporting moment: the
1951 pennant game (baseball) between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York
Giants where Bobby Thomson strikes the winning homerun.34 This strike, which
came to be known as ‘the shot heard ‘round the world’, has indeed endured in the
memory of sports fans, but it is not simply the gravitas of the homerun that drew
Don DeLillo toward its re-‐creation here. Rather, October third, 1951, also marked
the day that the Soviet Union would conduct its second successful nuclear test in
Siberia; a moment, according to Philip Wegner, that acted as the truly significant
‘shot heard ‘round the world’: “one that inaugurates a new historical period and a
Certainly, DeLillo’s fictionalised J. Edgar Hoover sees a similar significance to
Wegner in this nuclear moment: “Edgar fixes today’s date in his mind. October 3,
1951. He registers the date. He stamps the date” (23). He perhaps does so because
DeLillo is signifying that the Soviet Union’s achievement of nuclear capability
marked a beginning of Hooverian “paranoid speculation that [would] be a hallmark
of the Cold War period” (Wegner 59). However, the ways in which a history of
American Cold War paranoia extends from this moment in Underworld will not be
analysed in detail here, though I acknowledge that such analysis has occurred
34
For
further
discussion
see
Kenneth
Shouler’s
“The
Men
at
the
Mike:
Recalling
51
elsewhere.35 Rather, I want to undertake another kind of historical reading of the
nuclear moment and the text that unfolds from it. To wit, I want to argue that
DeLillo uses the nuclear moment outlined above as the catalyst for the evolution of
a new age of technological systems that culminate in the era of post-‐Cold War
liquid globalisation.
In order to establish such a position, this chapter will do several things. First,
it will establish how the nuclear moment unleashes DeLillo’s history of late
unfolds from this point that is indicative of the gradual evolution toward liquid
globalisation—an argument I will develop by analysing the evolution of the
condom metaphor in the text. And finally, I will show that Underworld not only
charts the evolution of liquid globalisation networks, but also that it counteracts
The news of the second Soviet blast encourages DeLillo’s Hoover to realise that the
Soviets “are moving ever closer, catching up, taking over” (UW 23-‐24).36 This
35
For
further
discussion
see
Peter
Knight’s
“Everything
is
Connected:
Union
(UW
50),
Hoover
clearly
indicates
that
he
believes
that
such
a
test
marks
the
beginning
of
a
new
historical
period.
He
holds
this
belief
because
it
is
only
upon
the
second
occurrence
of
an
event
that
the
beginning
of
a
historical
series,
and
therefore
something
new,
is
marked,
according
to
Slajov
Zizek:
“Only
through
a
repetition
is
[the]
event
recognized
in
its
symbolic
necessity—it
finds
its
place
in
the
symbolic
network;
it
is
realised
in
the
symbolic
order
(61).
Moreover,
Philip
Wegner
effectively
paraphrases
Zizek’s
point
in
arguing
that
it
was
“only
in
the
repetition
of
this
inaugural
event
did
it
become
clear
to
the
52
feeling “works into him, changes him physically as he stands there, drawing the
skin tighter across his face, sealing his gaze” (24). As well as interpreting the
emergence of Cold War paranoia in these lines, I suggest that we may also gauge a
sense of competition in Hoover that relates to the concept of the Soviets “taking
over” the United States in terms of nuclear capabilities. I want to argue that this is
not an arbitrary sense of competition but rather one that would largely craft the
struggle between two superpowers for nuclear supremacy; a struggle that lay at
the heart of the Cold War (Knight 1999: 820). In doing so, I will thus foreground
the role of the bomb in crafting late twentieth century technological history.
In 1951, the nuclear bomb was so powerful that it “out-‐imagined the mind”
(UW 76), as Klara Sax puts it—it was “too big or evil or outside your experience”
(77). The bomb was so far beyond comprehension because it represented such a
massive spectre of death (Knight 1999: 814). Perhaps Hoover puts it best when he
reflects on the potential effects of the nuclear threat, remarking that it represents
“the sun’s own heat that swallows cities” (24). Further, he equates the nuclear
fallout potential to a rendering of panoramic death and conflagration by Flemish
master Artist, Pieter Bruegel, called The Triumph of Death: “[t]he meatblood
colours and massed bodies, this is a census-‐taking of awful ways to die . . . Terror
universal . . . [A]nd he thinks of a lonely tower standing on the Kazakh Test Site”
(50). Hoover clearly sees the potential destruction that the bomb represents
perhaps
best
surmises
Hoover’s
sentiment,
equating
the
bomb
to
“Godly”
people
of
the
United
States,
and
indeed
the
world,
that
the
Soviet
Union
had
developed
a
nuclear
weapons
capacity”
(60).
37
For
further
discussion
on
how
the
nuclear
threat
reached
apocalyptic
53
capabilities, and suggesting that its threat resembled “a judgment and punishment
from an absent or remote father on high” (2002: 126). Further, it is not just Hoover
who acknowledges the almost divine threat that nuclear weapons represent in the
text: conspiracy theorist Marvin Lundy interprets the Cold War as dependent upon
the two great powers’ ability to “hang a threat over the planet” (UW 182); and
Sister Edgar depicts the role of God as having been filled by “radioactivity” (UW
251).
What these textual examples indicate is that the bomb conceivably possessed
the power to inflict total annihilation, the likes of which had previously been
reserved for divine powers alone—making it “the most destructive force of the
twentieth century” (McCormick 105). But more than that, these examples
underscore the notion that to hold nuclear supremacy meant that one asserted
themself at the global epicentre of power. After all, “[t]he bombs are a kind of God”
(End Zone 80), as DeLillo put it in an earlier novel, and to control God-‐like power to
an un-‐rivaled extent is surely to control the world (Naydan 183). Therefore, what
ensues in Underworld from 1951 is a “cold-‐war (oedipal) narrative of mastery”
(Wilcox 2002: 126) alluded to initially in the way that Hoover “seal[s] his gaze”
against the Soviets. This is a narrative that holds “the history of America and
American culture between its covers”, according to Hungerford (2008: 375). I will
return to Underworld’s status as historical novel later in the chapter, but for now I
want focus briefly on the unfurling of a competition for nuclear supremacy that
In Underworld, maintaining supremacy (or at least a fine balance of power)
over the “enemy [who] lives in long coats and fur caps, speaking that old weighted
language of theirs, liturgical and grave” (UW 50), comes down to the consistent
54
development of nuclear technologies. Viktor Maltsev, for example, remarks to his
colleague, Nick Shay, that early nuclear bombs were primitive compared to
modern versions: the bombs themselves were incredibly large—all “bulk and
mass”—and relatively impractical in terms of missile range (790). Shay adopts this
idea in conversation with Brian Glassic, claiming that the early design of mating
male elements with female elements to cause a chain reaction was quickly
outmoded by technological progress (791). This progress was initially defined by
very little blast. The perfect capitalist tool. Kill people, spare property” (790). And
from this point nuclear technology became increasingly more advanced, and more
controllable from remote locations like the bunker in the Nevada desert where
Matt Shay works (189). The bombs therefore emerge in “perverted [re]births”
throughout the twentieth century in the text, thus highlighting that the
development of nuclear warfare capabilities was crucial in the struggle for Cold
But it was not only competition for supreme nuclear technologies that
defined the cultural mood of the late twentieth century in Underworld. As DeLillo
himself said in an interview, “the vast technology of war . . . characterised the
book’s themes” (108). In other words, the bomb’s power to ‘out-‐imagine’ the mind,
coupled with its “sheathed but omnipresent” force (Sante 7), also inspired other
technological competition. This notion is evidenced in Hoover’s response to the
bomb which, I might add, functions as further example of Underworld imitating life
(or history to be more precise): Hoover alludes to having increased “the F.B.I.’s
range of responsibilities by developing systems of surveillance that persecuted
innocent individuals for purportedly leaning too far to the political left” (Naydan
55
188).38 But Hoover is not alone in having sought out new technologies, or systems,
following the realisation of the nuclear threat. For example, Sister Edgar ponders
how a system might best be created to instill nuclear fear in the masses (776); and
Albert Bronzini longs to understand how the bomb can “carry so much information
and contain such shattering implications” (735). More than just considering how
systems that mirror the vastness of nuclear technology work or could work, car
weave of chromium alloys carried in interlocking arcs . . . soaring ornaments of
coachwork fitted and merged” (63). But superseding the Lexus in the text is, of
course, the Internet. According to Casey J. McCormick, the Internet in Underworld
community” (97). It is the culmination of ultimate connectivity that has built
throughout DeLillo’s technological history beginning in 1951. But exactly how did
the bomb inspire new technologies—and ways of thinking about technology—that
McCormick has argued that DeLillo equates the bomb with the divine because
it presents the “spiritual possibility” of access to “unlimited information” (105).
She thus seems to heed Underworld’s contention that the bomb is a work of
“genius” in terms of its “physics of particles and rays” that form an array of
“bundled links” between ostensibly disparate sources (UW 51). But in more
specific terms, what makes the bomb the source of potentially endless information;
what makes it god-‐like, is the fact that it echoes a globalisation thesis of complete
connection. As James Annesley argues, the bomb is the source of a “dense network
38
Naydan’s
quotation
is
in
reference
to
Hoover’s
remarks
between
pp.
559-‐578
of Underworld.
56
of narrative linkages” (86) that form the context of globalisation; and it is so
because the bomb unifies a world under threat of nuclear annihilation. As Daniel
Grausem puts it, the bomb’s capacity for “mass and instantaneous death . . . created
a structure of feeling that shaped people’s way of being in the world by adding a
certain form of urgency to private lives lived with a foreshortened horizon of
futurity” (310). The bomb therefore worked as a globalising force in much the
same way that the Internet has; or as Wilcox argues, “the atom becomes the perfect
product of capitalism” (2002: 123). It does so because, like the capitalism of the
post-‐Cold War era, the bomb draws elements into a similar mode of globalised
existence where seemingly everything is connected under the spectre of its
technology.
Edgar, Bronzini, Lexus, Internet—because they all demonstrate the emergence of
technologies and systems that draw upon the bomb. In other words, all of these
examples display a will to omnipotence; a will to create an increasingly
interwoven, and thus connected, technological platform that can coordinate a vast
array of systems. Eventually the technological drive toward globalisation in
Underworld culminates in the Internet (McCormick 109). But the point I have
aimed to make here is that one cannot ignore how bomb technology—with its vast
and complex arrays that are intrinsically cyber in nature (Knight 1999: 825; Evans
126; Friedman 63)—provides a platform for shaping the “deep completion” (UW
51) sensed in the text’s arrival into the era of post-‐Cold War liquid globalisation. As
such, “all technology refers to the bomb” (UW 467) may be retained as the central
57
Condomisation
One way of interpreting precisely how technology refers to the bomb in
Underworld is by tracking recurring references to the condom in the text. I suggest
that the condom functions as metaphor in Underworld for a world made
technology to the point where everything is seemingly connected in the novel’s
post-‐Cold War liquid global context. The condom therefore functions as
representative of a technological history born in the text’s 1951 nuclear moment,
and extending outwards from there to increasingly encompass the world in an
integrated network; or as Annesley calls it, a world where “[individuals], science,
The condom first appears when Klara Sax casts her mind back to 1937 and
the memory of witnessing her friend Rochelle having sex in the back seat of a
parked car (399). Beforehand, Rochelle asks the boy whether he has a condom, but
when he pulls his penis out and declares that he does not have one, sex goes ahead
anyway. The condom is thus not imperative at this point, it is suggested but it has
not yet taken the place of that which is “hot and real, independently alive” (ibid).
We may therefore interpret a sense of independence or individuality, in this
moment, in that, the “hot and real” quality of the boy’s penis has not been
sterilised, covered up, and held within a network of homogenising effects.
Essentially, the “independently alive” quality of the penis in this scene counter-‐
balances the notion that in a globalised context there is only one ideological path—
Of course, Zygmunt Bauman would expect to find that which is
58
“independently alive” to be prominent in a “heavy” phase of modernity—an era of
division and individuality (31).39 After ‘the shot heard ‘round the world’ moment in
1951, however, it is less feasible to view things as independent or “heavy” in a
Baumanian sense, according to David Evans (106). Rather, modernity had shifted,
albeit gradually, into a phase of “lightness” due to the globalising networks that the
bomb imparted (ibid). The altered condom dynamics between pre and post 1951
Lenny Bruce is trying to fit a condom over his tongue during a stand-‐up set in
1962. Upon licking, rubbing, twirling and snapping the condom, Bruce remarks, “I
just realised. This is what the twentieth century feels like” (584). What Bruce offers
here is quite a contrast from the “hot and real” moment above, in that, his sense of
the twentieth century—which he has only “just realised”—is that it resembles a
condom. And what are the characteristics of a condom? It is basically sterilised
plastic; but figuratively speaking, it may be viewed as a sheath that contains that
which is independent or idiosyncratic (Wilcox 2002: 130). The condom, its feel and
taste, therefore encourage Bruce to realise that the twentieth century feels as
though a generic sheath has come down to cover up that which is “independently
alive”. But what is it about the latter stages of the twentieth century that so closely
mirror a homogenising layer for Bruce? I would suggest that it is no coincidence
that
the
line
immediately
following
Bruce’s
above
remark
is,
“We’re
all
gonna
die!”
39
In
claiming
that
“heavy
modernity”
was
the
era
of
the
individual,
one
must
be
cognisant
of
the
fact
that
Bauman
claims
that
it
felt
this
way
to
social
bodies
in
many
respects,
thus
reinforcing
the
nature
of
the
modern
project.
However,
in
reality
it
was
actually
a
period
of
mass
coercion
into
Fordist
structures
of
order
that
negated
pluralism,
and
resulted
in
disastrous
outcomes.
For
further
discussion
see
Liquid
Modernity
pp.
53-‐61.
See
also
Bauman’s
Modernity
and
the
Holocaust
(1989).
59
(UW 584); no coincidence because one line feeds directly into the other. First,
Bruce claims that the homogenising layer that is the condom, feels like the
twentieth century. He then follows with a line that captures the hysteria
surrounding the homogenous and imminent threat of nuclear annihilation. Both
lines thus treat the same subject: what “feels” most like the twentieth century is a
homogenous, sterilising layer that has come down to cover American culture.
It could be argued that Bruce’s realisation outlined above is relatively
prophetic, because it is only as the text moves through the years that
overwhelmingly apparent. However, there are others like Bruce who also
acknowledge a new sense of condomised context in the early stages of the Cold
In this excerpt we find a young Eric Demming, presumably twelve or thirteen years
old in 1957. Twenty years later, Eric works alongside Matt Shay at a top-‐secret
weapons testing facility in the Nevada desert, and given the insight we have into
his early years, it seems no coincidence that he goes on to such a profession. In
1957, Eric likes the condom because of its “sleek metallic shimmer”, and because it
is “rubbery dumb and disaffecting” (515). Other ‘condomised’ elements that appeal
to Eric include “the masking waxes, liners, glosses and creams” that cover Jayne
Mansfield’s face in a photograph (ibid); or the generic quality of televised
60
newscasts, ball games, and comedy hours of which he could anticipate the dialogue
effects; but more than that, they demonstrate a sense of shielding the subject from
what Wilcox calls “the real”—a disturbance in an otherwise mediated, symbolic
world (2002: 121). Therefore, these examples may be deemed condomised in that
they correlate with the homogenising effects of the condom itself.40 Further, these
A character who would certainly agree that Eric’s relationship to the world
around him is condomised is his mother, Erica, whom the above excerpt is
focalised through. Erica feels that she has “to put gloves on just to talk to [Eric]”
because it is the only way to relate to him (UW 521). For Erica, her son stands
diametrically opposed to the traditional values she holds dear, which include
fulfilling the role of the archetypal 1950s housewife—preparing a week’s supply of
Jell-‐O recipes before fitting the moulds neatly into the refrigerator (514); dressing
in a swirly blue skirt and buttercup blouse “that happened to match the colors of
their Fairlane” (516). Erica’s reference to the family (Ford) Fairlane seems apt
here, because it a Fordist model of heavy modernity—a “heavy”, “bulky”,
example, she subscribes to notions of artisanship and bulk, reminiscent of heavy
modern ideals of embodied labour and the production of hardware (Bauman 121),
in that, she follows recipes passed down by her grandmother; and she stockpiles
many
different
types
of
Jell-‐O
in
the
refrigerator
(514).
Moreover,
in
accordance
40
For
further
discussion
on
how
media
cycles
shield
the
subject
from
the
“Lacanian
real”
see
Wilcox’s
“Don
DeLillo’s
Underworld
and
the
Return
of
the
Real”
pp.
120-‐137
(2002).
61
with the conceptions of modernist individuality that ran parallel with heavy
modernity (Bauman 31), Erica also responds to words like “breezeway” which
seem to evoke individualism: “it spoke. . .of having something others did not”
(516); thus situating her in opposition to the integrative political forces of
A critical example of how Erica is situated in opposition to her son’s
condomised approach to the world lies in her regard for the Sputnik satellite that
was put into orbit by the Soviet Union on October 4th, 1957. The satellite
represents an ominous and shadowy presence to Erica (518). And it does so
because Sputnik was one of the mid-‐twentieth century’s greatest emblems of
technological progress, in that, it complemented the bomb in “set[ting] in motion
the cyberspace age” (Friedman 63). Erica views this development as an entirely
negative one that stands to destabilise traditional American culture (518). Eric, on
the other hand, takes a “scientific” interest in Sputnik (ibid); and I suggest that we
may read Eric’s “scientific” interest as a marker that indicates his later migration
into the field of weapons technology. Sputnik represented progress toward a cyber
age, and those Americans who sensed this fact and took a “scientific” interest in it,
would often serve to contribute to America’s technological buttressing against a
symbolic foe (Wilcox 2002: 126); thus contributing to the movement toward ever-‐
Beyond the 1957 example of the Demming family, it becomes increasingly
increasingly inescapable. In 1978, for instance, Marvin Lundy and his wife are in a
41
For
further
discussion
see
Bauman’s
discussion
regarding
“inside”
and
62
nostalgia shop going through old magazines cased in acetate folders—“like
condoms for reading matter” (320). This scene underscores the notion that
technology increasingly penetrates all enclaves given that the nostalgia shop is the
harbinger of that which is “dust-‐veneered” (ibid) and mostly useless. In the same
year, Shay takes his family to see an ancient ruin in the desert, but in looking at the
ruin Shay finds that he is “more interested in the protective canopy than [he is] in
the ancient structure” (343). Similar to the encasement of magazines in condom-‐
like folders, this example indicates that society has fundamentally altered in an
attempt to encase all effects in a homogenous layer. Therefore, what was still a
struggle between heavy and liquid ideologies in 1957 (Eric and Erica Demming),
has transmogrified into a system that has encased and homogenised nearly all
effects.
Obviously the most drastic developments in terms of condomisation have
been reserved for the novel’s most contemporary context. As expounded in
chapters one and two, nearly everything in Underworld’s 1990s frame is drawn
down under a canopy whereby only the globalised will survive.42 Perhaps Nick
Shay best summarises the nineties condomised approach when he is in a
megastore called ‘Condomology’ and remarks, “[n]ow there are rubbers called
barebacks, electronically tested for sheerness and sensitivity” (110). Shay uses the
metaphor of the “bareback” condom here to capture the structure of the post-‐Cold
War world with acuity: like the “bareback”, the post-‐Cold War network is one
electronically tested and measured so as to produce the most efficient system
(Friedman 11-‐12; 79). This globalised system is still homogenising, in the sense
42
For
discussion
on
how
only
the
globalised
will
survive
see
Joseph
A.
63
that it encases the “independently alive” aspect, while at the same time managing
to maintain the notion of sensitivity; or as Friedman put it, the sense of an “olive
tree” within the network of the “Lexus”.43 The fact that the globalised system is
able to maintain a sense of the uniquely “felt life” while at the same time
electronic tests and measurements by this point in the text, and simultaneously in
the bell curve of liquid globalisation evolution. In other words, liquid globalisation
has arguably become so sophisticated by the time Underworld reaches its post-‐
Cold War context that the “chain” riveting agents of globalisation to their “working
To conclude this chapter, I would now like to put the argument that although
condomisation deriving from the nuclear moment in 1951 seems to demonstrate a
mediation of conditions of the real by technology—a central premise of
postmodernity (Jameson 16); it differs in the sense that it represents a
history thus separates Underworld from the postmodern notion of a waning of
historicity, and locates the text more firmly in a liquid global frame, which
History Emerges
43
Friedman
sees
the
‘Olive
Tree’
as
representative
of
unique
and
individual
prospects.
He
also
sees
the
‘Olive
Tree’
largely
consumed
by
the
‘Lexus’
in
the
period
of
globalisation.
‘Lexus’
represents
“anonymous,
transnational,
homogenizing,
standardizing
market
forces
and
technologies
that
make
up
today’s
globalizing
economic
system”
(33).
For
further
discussion
see
Friedman’s
Lexus
pp.
31-‐37.
64
Toward the end of the twentieth century, new readings of classic postmodern texts
such as The Crying of Lot 49 and White Noise began to emerge. Rather than
interpreting these novels as exemplary postmodern works, critics began to take on
a “determinedly revisionist and historicist perspective” (Kelly 391). The role of
Mexico in Pynchon’s work, for example, became less peripheral, and instead began
to be offered up as historically situating the text (ibid). Of course, de-‐historicising
readings of these texts still circulate, indicating that the postmodern spectre has
far from disappeared. Peter Knight, for example, argues that history functions only
as an “aura” in White Noise, it has no real bearing because media saturated culture
transforms history into an endless program of simulations (34).44 However, the
point I want to make is that such readings are increasingly being supplanted: Amy
Hungerford remarks upon this changing approach, noting that the critical practice
assumption about literary-‐critical work”—“the water we all swim in” (2008: 416).
Perhaps what inspired this revisionist critical perspective was a wave of
fiction that was decidedly less postmodern than, say, White Noise or The Crying of
Lot 49. By less postmodern, I mean texts that gravitated away from the most
recognisable trait of the postmodern: an emphasis on “space over time—the
contemporary loss of history and emergence of an endless present—in the totally
“[forgetting] how to think historically” (Jameson ix), then, these new novelists
44
See
also
Stacey
Olster’s
“White
Noise”
in
the
Cambridge
Companion
to
Don
systems,
based
in
media
and
consumer
culture,
have
begun
to
lose
the
capacity
to
retain
their
own
past—think
of
how
quickly
the
media
exhausts
news
stories,
for
example.
For
further
discussion
see
Jameson’s
Postmodernism
p.
25
(1991).
65
“historical focus” on how these conditions emerged (Kelly 393). “Hybrid fiction”
all of these titles have been applied to this recent literary movement. However, I
suggest that none is accurate in terms of classifying what has surely been one of
the seminal works in crafting a movement beyond postmodernism. Instead, what
separates Underworld from the postmodern is a sense of historicisation born of a
novelist for the end of the century” (4). In Underworld, however, such a claim is
acutely problematised by the textual motivations detailed in previous chapters.
But never is this problematisation more apparent than in Underworld’s
contradictory relationship with the waning sense of historicity that lies at the heart
DeLillo works such as Libra and Mao II) demonstrates that DeLillo has a “rare gift
for historicizing our present” which derives from his ability to capture how the
contemporary world bears the residue of crucial historical events (2). This
argument is certainly applicable to the evolution of the condom in Underworld and
how it mirrors historical events. For example, the condom’s analogous relationship
with the Sputnik satellite demonstrates how the world in the novel’s 1957 context
bore the weight of technological history. The launch of Sputnik brought with it a
further step toward a cyber future, according to Friedman (63).46 It was a satellite
the
size
of
a
basketball
that
was
sent
into
orbit
by
the
Soviets
so
that
it
might
46
I
say
a
‘further’
step
here
because
as
Merriman
Smith
noted,
nuclear
technologies
represented
the
initial
step
toward
cyber
culture.
For
further
discussion
see
Friedman’s
Lexus
pp.
63-‐69.
66
broadcast radio signals on an unprecedented global scale (Maher 529). The
response to Sputnik by the Americans in many ways mirrored Hoover’s
competitive response to Soviet nuclear tests as outlined earlier in the chapter:
resulting in two organisations that were instrumental in shaping an increasingly
computer science and information processing research, the preeminent result of
which was the development of the first Internet prototype, and therefore, further
“foundations for what is now the age of networks” (Friedman 63).
What therefore began as competition for nuclear technology, evolved into the
competition related to satellite technology evidenced in the American response to
Sputnik. Concurrent with these technological developments was the rise of ever-‐
more globalising networks,48 and it is this fact that I argue DeLillo recognises
through his increasing condomisation of context in Underworld. With ‘the shot
heard ‘round the world’ moment in 1951, for example, we find Hoover’s
prophesying—“[a]ll these people . . . have never had anything in common so much
as this, that they are sitting in the furrow of destruction” (28)—however, there is
little else to signal condomisation because the unifying nuclear moment has only
just occurred. By 1957, however, we find Eric Demming explicitly condomised,
while his mother still responds to a relatively unmediated mode of existence.
Together, mother and son symbolise that condomisation has evolved in accord
with the spread of globalised networks—first with the deepening manifestations of
nuclear
culture,
and
then
with
the
launch
of
Sputnik.
By
the
time
the
text
reaches
47
The
National
Aeronautics
and
Space
Administration,
and
the
Advanced
67
the late 1970s-‐early 80s, we find a condomised relational dynamic has penetrated
nearly all enclaves—even ancient ruins that no-‐one knows the purpose of (343),
and magazines that represent nothing more than a “pornography of nostalgia”
(320). I argue then that this era in Underworld is further representative of an
avers, by the time the 1980s arrived, developed countries were democratising
their capital markets—“opening them to any foreign traders who wanted to
play”—thus, preparation for post-‐Cold War era globalisation was in full swing (59).
The post-‐Cold War era marked the culmination of globalising technologies in the
form of the Internet and the concomitant software capitalism, as detailed in
chapter one in relation to Bauman and Friedman’s theories. DeLillo equally marks
this spread of homogenising technologies: indeed we may perceive his narrative as
firmly held within the “grip of systems” (UW 825) by this point. And this notion is
illuminated in Nick Shay’s trip to a store named ‘Condomology’, where condoms
pliable to every mode of existence are available, thus symbolising a comprehensive
network of effects that is able to capture almost everything within a homogenising
frame.
For Wegner, Underworld attempts to unify hosts of realities to create a
“monumental historical overview” of Cold War and post-‐Cold culture (52). I agree,
but rather than stating that this function simply situates the text away from
technological history also more concretely establishes it in a liquid globalisation
mould. For as we may gleam from Friedman’s text in particular, liquid
globalisation has been an evolving process of technological convergence over a
number of years; certainly this process culminated with the information revolution
68
that triggered the end of the Cold War, but it was an evolving process that
amounted to reaching this stage nonetheless. As I have argued in this chapter,
DeLillo not only marks the arrival into a liquid globalisation era through
Underworld, but also charts how and why such a context evolved from a
technological standpoint.
69
Conclusion
Throughout this thesis I have argued that connectivity is a dominant theme in
Underworld; a theme that is based upon seemingly endless narrative intersections
between plot, character and post-‐Cold War capitalist systems. However, although
we may now read Underworld as offering a narrative path that is “coordinated and
systematized” (Annesley 87) in certain ways, I want to suggest that the imprinting
of liquid globalisation schemas on Underworld is not a totalising process. Further, if
one were to seek to connect Underworld’s entire structure to integrative
Underworld’s strongest suit is, as David Evans suggests, its “restoration of access to
The ‘real’ includes, to a large extent, the conditions summarised by Thomas
Friedman as the “inexorable integration of markets, nation-‐states and technologies
to a degree never witnessed before” (9). As such, we find Underworld’s dominant
narrative trajectory maintaining at its core a sense of integration, whereby nuance
is sacrificed at the hands of converging global markets. We also find the narrative’s
central characters to be held “in the grip of systems” (UW 825) to such an extent
that it is difficult to see them as anything but agents in the perpetuation of a
globalisation spectre. The previous chapters have indicated how this somewhat
elusive framework may be theorised according to the designs and controls of the
70
post-‐Cold War world. And yet, elements still remain to suggest that the novel
These elements that are problematic to totalising readings of Underworld also
contain a semblance of the ‘real’. As Leonard Wilcox reminds us, even in an
environment where integration with global markets is the measure of success, we
“are still left with excess, a remainder that is unassimilable” (2002: 121). Don
DeLillo thus offers what might best be termed ‘underworld’ aspects in the novel—a
series of fragments that are unclassifiable according to the measurements that
define social order. These elements exist in the “white area on the map” (UW 404):
in the contaminated nuclear waste dumps that are entombed in remote mountains
(UW 804); in the psychotic bodies that roam backstreets (242); and in the vacant
lots of the Bronx that are surely incomprehensible to coordinated systems (UW
249). Taken together, what we find in the milieu of ‘underworlds’ that the author
elucidates is an antithetical path to the ‘over-‐world’ systems outlined throughout
this thesis. In fact, a liquid globalisation framework could not quantify these
‘underworld’ effects even if afforded endless amounts of space to do so, because
such effects are located outside of the current scope by virtue of being
characterise these effects as “unwebbed” or “unique”(Evans 126), thus prompting
the following question: how does DeLillo retain the effects of modernism within a
modernity that is thoroughly embedded in integrative capitalism? Or, what do
“unique” or dysfunctional elements in the text indicate regarding the state of
By conducting analysis of both ‘over’ and ‘underworld’ aspects of late-‐
twentieth-‐century culture, DeLillo is able to allude to the prominent hermeneutic
71
cycles of liquid-‐global culture, while also retaining the ‘real’ sense of that which
exists outside of these cycles. Underworld is thus the work of a writer who
“contains multitudes” (Wegner 60); one who refuses to accept totalising systems
but rather embraces culture in all its multifarious incarnations. This thesis has
sought to interpret the dominant cultural strain of connectivity that runs through
DeLillo’s masterwork, thus adding a dimension to the corpus of readings that
situate the novel amid the post-‐Cold War globalisation landscape. I acknowledge,
however, that such an interpretation provides only a means for placing a
framework around those textual elements that fall within connected capitalist
cycles; and that what is left on the outside are those rhythms and idiosyncratic
beats of life that also resonate in the text. It thus seems pertinent to conclude by
noting that although one may plausibly interpret Underworld’s narrative as
connected to the ‘real’ integrative cycles of the late-‐twentieth-‐century world, its
status as a ‘real’ text also ultimately affirms that not everything will connect in the
end.
72
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