Don DeLillo Should Win the Nobel Prize

In Episode 41 DDSWTNP continue the Summer of Underworld by turning attention to Part 5 and the conclusion of Manx Martin’s narrative and welcoming to the show Mark Osteen, major literary scholar, author of American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture (2000), and editor of the two Library of America volumes comprising DeLillo’s novels from 1982 to 1997. Mark is also an accomplished saxophonist with special insights into the inspiration DeLillo takes from jazz. We hear from Mark about all his absolutely essential work with DeLillo and Underworld since the 1990s, including his criticism on the novel, his suggestion to DeLillo about publishing his works with Library of America, and his conversations with the author about his writing techniques, from his lack of preparatory outlines to his interesting reply when asked whether he lifted any lines from Lenny Bruce recordings. In our discussion Mark moves nimbly across the many fragments of “Better Things for Better Living Through Chemistry,” showing how methods of montage and improvisation account for many of DeLillo’s structural choices, as well as how motifs of Cold War containment, chemicals’ ubiquity, the religion of consumerism, and the hidden connections of everyday life suffuse Part 5 in particular. Points of focus include the incredibly rich Bruce monologues, particularly his consideration of the art of making things up as DeLillo’s metafictional reflection; how DeLillo brings Hoover back into the narrative through the Black and White Ball and its “garbage guerrillas”; and how Part 5 fills in some unknown aspects of Nick Shay’s education, Jesuitical, sexual, and otherwise. We conclude with some close attention to Manx’s sale of the ball over a shared whiskey flask to Charles Wainwright, suggesting the ways this scene resonates with other black/white relationships across the novel. Over these two hours Mark draws on moments from his recent teaching of the novel to undergrads, makes comparisons to a few other contemporary writers, and shares with us and our listeners many ideas from the decades he’s spent at the forefront of DeLillo scholarship.


For more on Mark Osteen’s work and the Library of America edition he edited that includes Underworld, see: https://www.loyola.edu/academics/english/faculty/osteen-mark.html, https://markosteen.com/, and https://www.loa.org/books/783-mao-ii-underworld/

In Episode 40 DDSWTNP cover Parts 3 and 4 and Manx Martin (2) of Underworld and welcome to the show Patrick Whitmarsh, a scholar of eco-criticism, the anthropocene, and the contemporary U.S. novel. We spend time discussing the importance of Underworld to Patrick’s arguments about perspective, scale, images of the earth, and the advent of what he calls the “vertical sciences,” taking in geological discoveries, aerial viewpoints, and all the new understandings of natural and built environments that DeLillo’s novel juxtaposes. Topics and images that preoccupy us in this discussion include DeLillo’s reasons for placing side by side the views of “garbage archeologist” Jesse Detwiler, Nick’s religious self-examination, and a convention for swingers; Klara Sax’s “rooftop summer,” film-viewing, and all the honing of her artistic perspective that takes place across these 1970s sections; and the many comparisons of filmmaking and other artforms that dominate Part 4: “Cocksucker Blues,” especially Sergei Eisenstein’s science fiction and montage techniques and Ismael Muñoz’s developing graffiti work. Does DeLillo arrange Underworld according to Eisenstein’s techniques, and does this idea help mediate questions about modernism and postmodernism? What power is expressed when Moonman claims about his painted subway train, “I’m your movie, motherfucker”? What themes of ecology and lost innocence emerge in considering Klara’s views of “the West” and the Zapruder film? How do such scenes connect to the aerial photography important to Matt Shay’s surreally treated military work in “the Pocket”? What layers of paranoia cut across Manx’s quest to sell the baseball? And who can lay claim to the legacy of Charlie Parker? The discussion draws in not just Underworld but parts of DeLillo’s earlier corpus, especially ideas of “counter-archeology” from Great Jones Street. Patrick adds as well some perspectives from other U.S. fiction of the late 1990s, and all together you have another two and a half hours of insight into DeLillo and especially what his waste-centered work has to teach us about the earth and ecology.

For a scholarly profile of Patrick Whitmarsh, see https://www.holycross.edu/academics/people/patrick-whitmarsh

Texts mentioned and discussed in this episode:

Patrick Whitmarsh, Writing Our Extinction: Anthropocene Fiction and Vertical Science (Stanford, 2023); Chapter 1, “Earthly Language: Don DeLillo and the Novel of the Anthropocene.”

Jennifer Gabrys, Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (U. of Minnesota, 2016).

Richard Williams, “Everything Under the Bomb” (interview with Don DeLillo), The Guardian, Jan. 10, 1998. https://www.theguardian.com/books/1998/jan/10/fiction.dondelillo (“When people say White Noise is post-modern, I don't really complain. I don’t say it myself. But I don’t see Underworld as post-modern. Maybe it’s the last modernist gasp. I don't know.”)

Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange (Coffee House Press, 1997).

In Episode 39 DDSWTNP look at Parts 1 and 2 of Underworld and welcome back to the show Curt Gardner, creator of the most important DeLillo resource in cyberspace, Don DeLillo’s America (https://perival.com/delillo/delillo.html). We talk with Curt about his indispensable site coming online thirty years ago, just as news of DeLillo’s big novel was breaking, and at the episode’s end we get Curt’s thoughts on the emergent Internet of the mid-1990s as space for literary discussion and as this novel’s climactic example of an underworld where everything may indeed be connected. The bulk of this discussion focuses on “Long Tall Sally,” “Manx Martin 1,” and “Elegy for Left Hand Alone” as they shift the narrative terrain from 1951 to the 1980s and 1990s, retrospect on the meanings of the Cold War and its end, and introduce Nick Shay as a figure of memory, marital strain, middle age, repressed violence, and compromised fatherhood. Topics in this episode include all the evocations of and key differences from past DeLillo in this novel, especially White Noise; the explorations of visual media, violence, and loserdom brought out by the portrait of the Texas Highway Killer; the distinct DeLillo view of the aging self and its fear of mortality that arises in Parts 1 and 2; and what he might be up to in his nuanced depictions of drugs, forms of self-protection, and Marvin Lundy’s remarkable idea of “the dot theory of reality.” Curt shares with us many insights into the expectations and mysteries around this novel for keen DeLillo readers like him throughout the 1990s, while also helping us work through exactly how Parts 1 and 2 launch the novel’s deeper investigations of creativity, time, mean New York streets, and public and private identities. It all adds up to a great continuation of the Summer of Underworld with DDSWTNP and someone who’s spent more than three decades illuminating DeLillo for readers and scholars worldwide.     

Texts mentioned and discussed in this episode:

Curt Gardner, Don DeLillo’s America: https://perival.com/delillo/delillo.html (for the Underworld entry page: https://perival.com/delillo/underworld.html) 

Adam Begley, “Don DeLillo: The Art of Fiction CXXXV,” The Paris Review 128 (1993): 274-306. 

Ralph Gardner, Jr. “Writing That Can Strengthen the Fraying Threads of Memory.” New York Times, January 30, 1997.

https://www.nytimes.com/1997/01/30/garden/writing-that-can-strengthen-the-fraying-threads-of-memory.html

Gerald Howard, “The American Strangeness: An Interview with Don DeLillo.” Hungry Mind Review, 1997. https://web.archive.org/web/19990129081431/www.bookwire.com/hmr/hmrinterviews.article$2563

In Episode 38, DDSWTNP talk to John Duvall, a major scholar of DeLillo, author of a 2002 reader’s guide to Underworld, and expert especially on how DeLillo’s 1992 novella “Pafko at the Wall” became, five years later, the Prologue, “The Triumph of Death.” In examining the 1951 Giants/Dodgers game and the Soviets’ bomb test, we discuss with Duvall in great detail the issues of race and racism in the portrayal of fourteen-year-old Cotter Martin, winner of the struggle for Bobby Thomson’s home run ball, as well as the major difference made by DeLillo’s change of the very last word of “Pafko” in Underworld: “It is all falling indelibly into the now”? Or “into the past”? Throughout this episode, Duvall gives us a rare critical glimpse at DeLillo as editor of his sentences and scenes. He speaks also to the mythologizing effects of baseball, what it means to aestheticize politics in DeLillo’s representations, DeLillo’s relationship to E. L. Doctorow’s work, and the competing visions of ideology and history embodied in FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and metafictional radio man Russ Hodges. Not only that, but Duvall has several intriguing, “paranoid” stories to tell about his correspondence with the author and how it’s possible his interpretations of “Pafko” in a 1995 journal article might have directly influenced some of DeLillo’s revisions as he shaped it into Underworld’s opening. Other topics in this probing discussion include how DeLillo fits in with conceptions of Fredric Jameson’s postmodernism and Linda Hutcheon’s historiographic metafiction, his claims about his art in “The Power of History,” and the motifs of “The Triumph of Death” that set up the 700+ pages to come.

For a profile of John Duvall’s scholarship and teaching, see https://www.cla.purdue.edu/directory/profiles/john-duvall.html

Stay tuned for a series of guest episodes on Underworld to come in the next few months!

Texts mentioned and discussed in this episode:

Don DeLillo, “Pafko at the Wall.” Harper’s (October 1992): 35-70.

—. Pafko at the Wall: A Novella. Scribner, 1997. 

—. “The Power of History,” New York Times Magazine, September 7, 1997. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/books/090797article3.html

John N. Duvall, “Baseball as Aesthetic Ideology: Cold War History, Race, and Delillo's ‘Pafko at the Wall.’” Modern Fiction Studies 41.2 (Summer 1995): 285-313.

—. Don DeLillo’s UNDERWORLD. Continuum Contemporaries Reader’s Guide. 2002.

Mark Osteen, ed. “Notes.” Don DeLillo, Mao II and Underworld. Library of America, 2023. p. 1038.

David Remnick, “Exile on Main Street [interview with Don DeLillo].” New Yorker, September 7, 1997. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/09/15/exile-on-main-street-don-delillo-profile-remnick

In Episode 37, DDSWTNP kick off the Summer of Underworld with an overview that, like Episode 20: Discovering White Noise, offers newcomers to the novel a set of things to look out for as well as readings bound to appeal to those already familiar with DeLillo’s big book and headed back to it. How is this mega-novel structured in its six main Parts bookended by Prologue and Epilogue? How and why does it portray time’s variability and crisscross four decades of history? What to make of all the depictions of art and artists, from Klara Sax to Moonman 157, that populate these pages? What does a reader have to look forward to when they make it to the remarkable Lenny Bruce stand-up DeLillo creates? How do we keep track of all the meanings of waste and “under” in this book, and how does the quest for a single baseball help move the reader along? How to describe all the uncanny connections between paired characters and images, and is an aesthetic of filmic montage the way to understand Underworld’s method? Has DeLillo somehow made this giant book into both a vast, scattered history of the Cold War and a page-turning, character-driven account of personal transgression, confession, and regret? With these and other questions DDSWTNP begin a series of episodes, featuring many a guest appearance and working through the sections of Underworld one by one. 

Enjoy the new variations in intro and outro music, and stay tuned for more episodes in the Summer of Underworld. Coming up next, an episode devoted to the Prologue and “Pafko at the Wall” with DeLillo scholar John Duvall.

Texts mentioned in this episode: 

Mark Osteen, American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture. Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania P., 2000.