“The Surge and Pelt of Daily Life”: Rediscovery of the Prosaic in Don DeLillo's The Names

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes See David Remnick 42–48; Philip Nel, 736–59. During a recent interview conducted by New York Times Magazine editor Gerald Marzorati, DeLillo was asked by a woman in the audience the old “Are you a postmodern writer?” question. He quipped that postmodernism was already over, wasn't it? He then noted that he thought of himself more as a modernist. In novels like Dostoevsky's The Devils or Gide's Les Caves du Vatican (trans. as Lafcadio's Adventures), intellectual types wrack their brains to create an action that has no human rhyme or reason, but can never fulfill that necessarily theoretical position, discovering for themselves the moral implications of their detachment. I discuss this idea in my doctoral dissertation, Murder in the Name of Theory: Theoretical Pardigms and Ethical Problems in Works by Dostoevsky, Gide and DeLillo, Rutgers University, 1998. James is complacent. In Dante's Inferno (Canto III), those unwilling to take a moral risk do not even make it into hell because the distinction of a particular vice would show too much individuality. The complacent sit on the doorstep of hell, “neither hot nor cold,” and hell, too, “spews” them out of its mouth (Revelation 3:15–16). To not use one's talents or manifest one's being is a deadly sin, an issue that James makes manifest in the novel. Mark Osteen notes that James is “protecting his psychic investment with sartorial ones” (130). Osteen uses this particular word to invoke “language” as an expression of “filial and communal bonds,” perfect because its very articulation evokes the associations by contiguity which touch one's muscle memory and establish the body's own cellular links to language (118). Murray Jay Siskind, in White Noise, also demonstrates an academic distance from prosaic experience as he discusses plots and murder with Jack Gladney: “‘Think how exciting it is, in theory, to kill a person in direct confrontation. If he dies, you cannot. To kill him is to gain life-credit. The more people you kill, the more credit you store up’” (290). Siskind similarly explains his ideas as an exercise in abstraction. “This is theory. We're a couple of academics taking a walk” (291). But Gladney becomes increasingly intrigued and finally executes Murray's “theory.” Like Raskolnikov in the Dostoevsky novel, Jack acts upon the impulses that he imagines will give him immortality, but his crime and punishment derive from the dangerous fantasy that intellectual formulations can be readily divorced from their impact on mentality and behavior. “Monologism” is a Bakhtinian term that has lost most of its whallop in hackneyed academic use. Once, the term had between-the-lines resonance with regard to the Soviet authority, whose stranglehold on discourse and dialogue—secret police and internal spies abounding—could not be discussed explicitly. Like “finalization” or “fatal theoretism,” “monologia” has a frightening literal connotation which belies today's innocuous usage. Osteen reminds us that the names in The Names are significant (122). David Cowart notes that “DeLillo takes the cult's implicit nihilism fully into account—and gives it the lie by deconstructing the mock-pentecostal question the cultists like to ask: how many languages do you speak? In effect he counters their question with a counter-question: `How many language-games do you play?’” (167). This quotation provides the chapter title for Douglas Keesey's discussion of The Names. Caryl Emerson, Bakhtin's most insightful translator and explicator, argues that “for Bakhtin, to translate was never to betray; on the contrary, translation, broadly conceived, was for him the essence of all human communication. Crossing language boundaries was perhaps the most fundamental of human acts” (Editor's Preface to Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984, xxxi). Additional informationNotes on contributorsJacqueline A. ZubeckJacqueline Zubeck is a Visiting Professor at the College of Mount Saint Vincent in Riverdale, New York. Her scholarly interests include Don DeLillo, war literature, Dostoevsky, and Eastern Orthodox Christian culture. She recently spent a fruitful month in Milledgeville, Georgia, studying Flannery O'Connor at an NEH Summer Institute and will continue to pursue this southern writer's work.