“What We Excrete Comes back to Consume Us”: Waste and Reclamation in Don DeLillo’sUnderworld

Abstract

Meditations on waste, value and recuperation underwrite DeLillo’s entire oeuvre, from Americana (1971) through to his one-act play about climate change, The Word for Snow (2007) and his most recent novel, Zero K (2016), which imagines how humans themselves might be reclaimed. It is, however, in Underworld (1997), widely regarded as the twentieth century’s definitive waste novel, that these themes are most explicit.1 At the time of Underworld’s publication, DeLillo noted that he “had been thinking about garbage for twenty years.”2 In the twenty years since then, the ideas the novel suggests—that garbage might hold cultural value; that garbage might evince something beyond humiliation; and that American history in particular is best told through the matter buried in its landfills—have become all the more relevant, and in fact, become the subject of an academic field of their own. The interdisciplinary field of waste studies, also known as discard studies, effectively seeks to wrest ontological meaning from waste. By probing the cultural significance, history and politics of landfills, marine gyres, and human and animal scat, and tracing the origins of waste metaphors, waste theorists seek to understand such disparate—and seemingly unconnected—phenomena as the everyday lives of garbage pickers and scavengers; the obstacles to mobilizing efforts against climate change; the agential potential of discards; and the relationship between language, capitalist ideology, and the material reality of manufactured waste. DeLillo’s novel anticipates many of these efforts, showing how “everything is connected in the end” (U 826)—from the raw materials with which consumer goods and weapons are made to the companies in charge of carting off, incinerating, or burying their residues. But an examination of the novel’s “management” of waste and reclamation is made all the more compelling by the transformation in the last decade of Fresh Kills Landfill—the gigantic presence that haunts Underworld—into a national park. In what follows, I aim to historicize DeLillo’s depictions of waste in Underworld as well as to suggest the ways in which the text implicitly understands waste to be imbricated in networks or entanglements of human and non-human actors. Waste is an entity that can be seen to “produce effects,” to adopt the terminology used by the New Materialist Jane Bennett, as much as to evidence an effect.3 It is a product of human activity, but it also generates “stories” or activity of its own, in the form of toxic emissions, alteration of soil composition, and human deformities. By attending to DeLillo’s different approaches to waste and its effects, I show their multi-faceted and unstable properties to be central to his aesthetic project as a whole. In doing so, I depart from much of DeLillo scholarship, which has tended thus far to read his depictions of waste psychoanalytically, metonymically, or as exemplifying a postmodern sublime.4 These discourses, I would argue, are in fact products of the “intra-action” of human and non-human agency within Fresh Kills landfill—they are themselves participants, in other words, in the social fabric of the landfill (including its shifting significance over the course of the twentieth century).5