The other side of silence: realism, ecology and the whole life in Don Delillo’s late fiction

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article locates a form of literary realism adapted to the event of climate change in Don DeLillo’s late fiction. The social element of the realist novel is shaped by limits in human empathy. ‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life’, writes George Eliot in Middlemarch, ‘it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence’. That ‘roar’ has become intelligible as global warming, and the world fashioned by the sensations of the bourgeois body is now vulnerably, imperfectly separated from a larger ecological reality. DeLillo’s late fiction attunes itself to this reality through its emphasis on the contingent character of sensation. In ‘Midnight in Dostoevsky’, Libra, Underworld and other works, momentary impressions gleaned from an environment capture the ‘whole life’ – a figure’s past, future and life’s meaning. A tension between these ‘whole lives’ and the consistently disruptive environments from which they are drawn expands the receptive field of DeLillo’s fiction, producing an ecological realism that suggests future possibilities for extending the range of human empathy to objects as big as global warming and the planet.