“Longing on a Large Scale Is What Makes History”: The Uses of Baseball and the Problem of Storytelling in Don DeLillo’s Underworld

Abstract

“Longing on a Large Scale Is What Makes History”The Uses of Baseball and the Problem of Storytelling in Don DeLillo’s Underworld Philipp Löeffler (bio) Critics like to speak in superlatives when they measure the impact of Don DeLillo on postwar American fiction, but there is considerable disagreement about the precise nature of his greatness.1 According to John Duvall, DeLillo is “one of the most important American novelists since 1970” because of “his fiction’s repeated invitation to think historically.”2 Duvall’s assessment is a viable starting point, because however central Don DeLillo’s work really is, it no doubt reflects an almost obsessive interest in the history of the postwar decades. DeLillo’s novels are all—in some way or another—focused on the extent to which the Cold War has shaped American culture in ways that are not documented in official, textbook versions of the twentieth century. His novels remind us constantly to think beyond the confines of the ordinary and to look at those figures that often evade the frameworks of historiography proper. And yet the point of DeLillo’s fiction is not mainly to envision alternative plots and speculative counterhistories that would oppose more traditional accounts of the postwar era. That would be a traditional postmodernist agenda, asking what we can or cannot know about history. For DeLillo, American history is relevant as a very practical archive of stories that people need to get a grip on their own lives—here and now—and not primarily as a field of epistemological inquiry or skepticism. In this article, I plan to discuss this shift in focus—from history understood as an epistemological object to history understood as a site of memory—in the context of DeLillo’s much acclaimed novel Underworld (1997). The novel celebrates individual moments of commemoration as a legitimate and reliable form of historical sense-making and thus provides a contrast to more traditional versions of postmodernist historiographic metafiction. As readers of Underworld delve into the worlds of the postwar decades, they learn about the uses rather than the truth of history that such literary encounters enable. That is to say, readers learn that how we perceive a series of historical events [End Page 91] is conditioned by the ways we conceptualize them within a coherent narrative. DeLillo seems to be suggesting that we need such narratives to stabilize our individual life worlds, rather than to find out about what really happened at a particular point in time. This is why for DeLillo the Cold War period is integral as a cultural reference frame: not because we need additional knowledge about the Cuban missile crisis, the assassination of John. F. Kennedy, or Watergate, but because the Cold War period itself sparked the coevolution of a historical vocabulary that allowed people in the postwar decades to know what they believed in and what their stories about life in America meant. Hence, my argument will be that Underworld is a novel dedicated not exclusively to crucial events of the Cold War decades but also to the mechanisms of storytelling and a corresponding belief system that helped people to define themselves meaningfully as historical subjects. The second claim I want to make pertains to the problem of storytelling and how Underworld appropriates the history of postwar American baseball, more particularly the history of the Dodgers versus Giants series in October 1951. Many critics read DeLillo’s baseball obsession as just another moment of allegorizing the Cold War decades, famously suggested by the “Shot Heard ‘Round the World” in John Drebinger’s article for the New York Times.3 But the incorporation of baseball into the novel goes way beyond mere allegorical symbolism. The cultural logic of baseball is inextricably entwined with Underworld’s theoretical commitment to a memory discourse in which the subjectivity of individual experiences supplants the authority of “objective” history, as it were. Like baseball, history depends on sudden and often unpredictable turns of events. Such events evade traditional analytical categories and become meaningful only through their incorporation into the story worlds of very personal lives. This is how they are endowed with meaning and reliability no matter how implausible their...