Curating Modernism: Don DeLillo, T. S. Eliot, and Postmodern Muséality in Zero K

Abstract

Curating ModernismDon DeLillo, T. S. Eliot, and Postmodern Muséality in Zero K Matt Phillips (bio) In Don DeLillo’s 2016 novel Zero K, members of the Convergence compound attempt to cheat death with pioneering methods of cryostasis. At the site, located somewhere in Central Asia, the Zero K unit allows those eager to enter preservation to do so before the end of their natural lifespans. Such a choice bears with it the promise of a “transition to the next level” of human consciousness, experience, and expression.1 In the meantime, the preserved are put on display in a “gallery” of “superinsulated plastic tubes.”2 These early adopters are referred to as “heralds” and are thought to be “[s]howing the way, making the path.”3 This path leads to a future believed possible thanks to the “faith-based” technology that is the foundation of the cryogenic project.4 The pedestal on which the Zero K unit places the heralds is indicative of another layer of muséal curation going on in Zero K, one attesting to DeLillo’s well-documented appreciation for the pioneers of modernism. In a 1982 interview, DeLillo lists some of them, including the “paintings in the Museum of Modern Art” and the “writing of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and others.”5 He also confessed on this occasion that he “didn’t necessarily want to write like” the modernists, but that their writing “can make you see . . . the world itself in a completely different way.”6 Decades thereafter and following Mao II (1991) and The Body Artist (2001), in which he pays direct and indirect memorable homage to modernists such as Ernest Hemingway and Samuel Beckett, DeLillo’s most recent novel engages with these icons one more time in a way that, as I suggest in what follows, mirrors and comments on the very theme of cryostasis pervading the [End Page 126] novel. Specifically, Zero K immortalizes the modernists and puts them on display in the “gallery” that is his text. As one may imagine, DeLillo is not the only contemporary writer to look back on the great moderns in such a muséal fashion. Alongside him, several other authors are undertaking projects that contain something one might call a “curation motif.” For instance, Helen DeWitt, in her novel The Last Samurai (2000), writes about preserving classical literature in the margins of various mundane reading materials; Gina Ochsner, in The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight (2009), invents the All Russia All-Cosmopolitan Museum of Art, Geology and Anthropology, which is a museum only in philosophy: all its exhibits are imitation. These examples are among the cases that exemplify contemporary literature’s preoccupation with art, history, and preservation. In DeLillo’s case, while the members of the Convergence enterprise seek to make a clean break with modern history and reboot into a new plane of existence, the preserved, it turns out, remain essential to this new world to come. Similarly, for DeLillo, an absolute departure from modernism is not possible, and so he places it in cryostasis until the future would make itself known. Therefore, Zero K can be read as a fictional curating of sorts. This curation obtains, I argue, stylistically, in DeLillo’s narrative diction, as well as through intertextual “installations” that deploy a whole set of allusion and references to modernists such as Ezra Pound and, especially, T. S. Eliot to articulate a particular vision of the contemporary and its relationship to past and future history. The modernist traces in Zero K have not passed unnoticed. In his review in the New York Times, Joshua Ferris senses Pound’s influence in the screens that line the walls of the compound and play global disaster footage on repeat. Ferris writes, “If literature is Pound’s ‘news that stays news,’ [these screens represent] news about news that stays news, for in a place like the Convergence where death has been antiquated, newspaper headlines turn into art installations.”7 Ferris, quoting one of Pound’s own Exhibits from ABC of Reading (1934), alerts us to the tacit relationship between world events, literature, and art that DeLillo intuitively instills in Zero K. Further examples of DeLillo...