Underworld

Imagine a bomb being dropped in the middle of life, spreading everyone in thousands of directions. Now, imagine that instead of killing these people, this bomb becomes a kind of gravity on how someone’s life develops: some, from housewives become artists, others, from typical teenagers become killers, and so on. You can now change the word “bomb” with “Cold War” (or any kind of war). And ask yourself, are we the product of history, or do we have some agency in front of history? Who, or what molds what we call a Life?

“Reverse” is one of the keywords for DeLillo’s Underworld, because "‘I suppose in this case it’s not the ending we need but the beginning” (314). On the one hand, if we ignore the prologue, we have its reversed structure, starting from the end/one of its endings - 1992 - and ending when the story actually begins – 1952. “Reverse” also because sometimes you struggle to read those almost 1000 pages, asking yourself what this book is really about because, as we find inside the novel about the Underworld from 1927, “The plot was hard to follow. There was no plot. Just loneliness, barrenness, men hunted and ray-gunned, all happening in some nether-land crevice” (430). But when you finish it, you know it’s that kind of book you will carry inside you, with that type of language that only a few writers manage to powerfully use. And although DeLillo seems to tell us that history is the nightmare we will never awake from, Underworld is about Everyman and Everywoman, about the humanity of the simple man/woman in the age of waste and consumerism.

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“Men passing in and out of the toilets, men zipping their flies as they turn from the trough and other men approaching the long receptacle, thinking where they want to stand and next to whom and not next to whom, and the old ballpark’s reek and mold and consolidated here, generational tides of beer and shit and cigarettes and peanut shells and disinfectants and pisses in the untold millions, and they are thinking in the ordinary way that helps a person glide through a life, thinking thoughts unconnected to events, the dusty hum of who you are, men shouldering through the traffic in the men’s room as the game goes on, the coming and going, the lifting out of dicks and the meditative pissing.” (21) 

“There is a balance, a kind of bundle of soma and psyche. We eventually succumb to time, it’s true, but time depends on us. We carry it in our muscles and genes, pass it on to the next set of time-factoring creatures, our brown-eyed daughters and jug-eared sons, or how would the world keep going. Never mind the time theorists, the cesium devices that measure the life and death of the smallest silvery trillionth of a second. He thought that we were the only crucial clocks, our minds and bodies, way stations for the distribution of time.” (235)

“Seasons ran together, the years were a stunned blur. Like time in books. Time passes in books in the span of a sentence, many months and years. Write a word, leap a decade. Not so different out here, at his age, in the unmargined world.” (236)

“Civilisation did not rise and flourish as men hammered out hunting scenes on bronze gates and whispered pihosophy under the stars, with garbage as a noisome offshoot, swept away and forgotten. No, garbage rose first, inciting people to build a civilization in response, in self-defense. We had to find ways to discard our waste, to use what we couldn’t discard, to reprocess what we couldn’t use. Garbage pushed back. It mounted and spread. And it forced us to develop the logic and rigor that would lead to systematic investigations of reality, to science, art, music, mathematics. [...] We make stupendous amounts of garbage, then we react to it, not only technologically but in our hearts and minds. We let it shape us. We let it control our thinking. Garbage comes first, then we build a system to deal with it.”(288)