Chekhov’s Mistess

Don DeLillo has a New Companion

Cambridge University Press’s “Cambridge Companions to Literature” series is always excellent for those of us who are hungry to think more about an author’s works, but are not quite academic (i.e. the books are intelligent, written by academics, but written accessibly and free of maddening obfuscating jargon). They’re a collection of scholarly essays touching on key points of an author’s works and careers. For instance, in the Companion to Cervantes there’s a lot of discussion of his plays and other works that you really won’t find elsewhere, at least not in one accessible source.

While most of the books in the series are on older canonical authors (I have Virgil and Dante up to Yeats, Joyce etc.) I think the series is rounding out in terms of more modern (still canonical) authors as well. So this June, Don DeLillo gets his companion and I think it’ll be interesting to see how an author’s works are treated while they’re still alive and writing.

Here’s an excerpt from the introductory chapter by the volume’s editor, John N. Duvall:

“DeLillo’s final significance may lie in the way that, while he recognizes the power of history, he insists on the novel as a counterforce to the wound of history through the persistence of mystery. Beyond the play of plots and plotlessness, determinism and chance, there lurks in DeLillo’s writing the possibility – never overtly confirmed – of spiritual transcendence. A particular example from Underworld, I believe, is representative. In one of Lenny Bruce’s night-club monologues, DeLillo has the beat comic begin an off-color story about a girl who can blow smoke rings from her vagina, but in mid-story Bruce loses interest and begins instead to tell a decidedly unfunny story that the reader only later recognizes as that of Esmeralda, a girl not yet born when Bruce is speaking but whose tragic death forms part of the Epilogue of the novel. Through a power of his art that exceeds his volition or any possibility of his knowing, then, Bruce begins an uncanny critique of the social forces that enable Esmeralda’s violent end, forces that another of DeLillo’s outsider artists, Ismael Muñoz, must engage later in the novel, again through his art.”

You can read or download the introductory chapter at the Cambridge Website. or order it from the Amazonians

After neglecting DeLillo for years, my friend Tim convinced me to read White Noise and I truly think it’s a masterpiece. Even though it felt dated when I read it, I took that more as being an artifact of the time rather than a weakness of the book. I haven’t gone back to DeLillo, but am open to suggestion from any fans as to what of his to read next.

comments

White Noise was DeLillo clearing his throat. Read Libra: DeLillo performs miraculous narrative poetry while advancing the theory that history is a matrix of thrill-seekers and grudge-bearers and coincidence-enhanced error. I still can’t tell which, between Underworld and Libra, is the bigger book.

    – Steven Augustine (06/02  at  04:35 AM)

Very happy that Don Delillo got his Campanion but unfortunately I’m unable to get it!!! I’m actually writing my thesis on Don Delillo’s White Noise and I desperately want to get this campanion!!!!!!! But I can’t find it!!!!
Can someone help me get a scanned version of the book? Any suggestion? PLZZZ

    –  (06/03  at  12:15 PM)

Libra is masterful and Mao II is quite good. Once you get through those, Underworld is worthy of your time.

    –  (06/12  at  01:17 PM)

White Noise failed to hold my interest, or vice versa. Libra contains an impressive, exhilarating subway sequence at the beginning. The rest is mediocre. Not as interesting as reading good nonfiction about the actual assassination. The hyperbole here is beyond comprehension.

    – Nigel Beale (07/13  at  12:49 AM)

“White Noise failed to hold my interest, or vice versa.Libra contains an impressive, exhilarating subway sequence at the beginning. The rest is mediocre. Not as interesting as reading good nonfiction about the actual assassination. The hyperbole here is beyond comprehension.”

I’ve just re-read, in rapid succession, Gardner’s Grendel, Naipaul’s Mimic Men, and DeLillo’s Libra, three books that would appear to have little in common but can be loosely grouped on the theme of alienation (the word stripped down to its roots, in Grendel); or, specifically, via Gardner and DeLillo, the halo of violence around a certain kind of estrangement, largely masculine.

DeLillo writes, in Libra, “The next day he came back from a work detail and found two guards in the cell pummeling Dupard. They took their time. It looked like something else at first, an epileptic fit, a heart attack, but then he understood it was a beating. Bobby was on the deck trying to cover up and the two men took turns hitting him in the kidney and ribs. One guard sat on Oswald’s bunk, leaning way over to throw short lefts like a man trying to start an outboard. The other guard was down on one knee, biting his lip, pausing to aim his shots so they wouldn’t catch Bobby’s crossed arms. Bobby had a look on his face like this is bound to end someday. He was working hard to keep them unfulfilled.”

I defy any “critic” to *argue well* that that “outboard motor” metaphor isn’t brilliant; the “biting the lip” image isn’t telling; that last sentence isn’t a marvel of compression. Every word is plain yet fine and perfect in its place (and DeLillo sustains that intensity through the novel): the brig is also the playground is also the world, because we all remember how the arbitrary could fuse with the methodological in a playground beating; the nothing-personal (why? just because) quality of enmity… and we all know it doesn’t stop in gradeschool. It goes on to power gangs, corporate clashes, armies and political parties.

In the first chapter of Gardner’s book, Grendel (in somewhat of a fix), reflects: “I understood that the world was nothing: a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears”.

Gardner concentrates our attention on Grendel’s rage with as much force as DeLillo gives us Oswald’s anomie, and each book generates a sort of philosophical negative in the mind of the reader (or this one)… the counter-argument of the soul’s recoil.

Gardner used one of the oldest heirlooms in the English inheritance to shape his version of myth and DeLillo used the seminal tale from Year One, of the Modern Age (in certain systems of counting) to shape his. Each novel makes an inspiringly lyrical case for the notion (among others) that Politics is the smooth mask on that old beast’s face; both novels can be read, with great pleasure, in light of the respective source materials or divorced from them.

Skimming either book (or Naipaul’s, for that matter) won’t bring the satisfaction of unpacking the art for the philosophical treasures, and dismissing DeLillo’s book says too much about the “critic” who mistakes his dimness for a beacon.

    – Steven Augustine (07/13  at  10:45 AM)

http://nigelbeale.com/?p=1026

    – Nigel Beale (07/14  at  09:04 AM)

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: May 30, 2008
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

Tags: Cambridge Companions to Literature, Don DeLillo

• Comments:6
• Links to this Post: Technorati

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