The Art of Feeling

Abstract

‘Don DeLillo is the poet of entropy’, writes John Banville in his review of Point Omega for the New York Review of Books in 2010. ‘The world he sets up in his fictions’, he continues, ‘is a tightly wound machine gradually running down, and in it all action is a kind of lapsing drift.’ This chapter considers the critical stakes, formal implications, and the cultural, ethical, and aesthetic work of negative affects in DeLillo’s novels, particularly Players (1977), Point Omega (2010), and The Silence (2020). First considering the characterisation of DeLillo’s early work by critics and reviewers as difficult, and DeLillo’s own observations about the writer’s responsibility to occupy an oppositional stance—“against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments”—the chapter submits that the affective turn of the 1990s compels us to look again at the emotion generated and stilted within his fiction. Examining categories of ‘the swirl’, ‘tone’, ‘the gesture’, and ‘the glint’, this chapter considers how DeLillo’s novels show that negative affects such as detachment, attenuation, exhaustion, withdrawal, inertia, drift, and entropy, don’t just service plots concerned with trauma, loss, and fear, but have significant aesthetic, formal, and stylistic implications.