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)

 

 

 

 

 

White Noise: Sound of Life and Death

“How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn’t they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise.”

“What if death is nothing but sound?”
“Electrical noise.”
“You hear it forever. Sound all around. How awful.”
“Uniform, white.” (228)

Close your eyes and listen – there is so much noise around us: the cars in the streets, the working machineries in old and new factories build inside the city, the background music. The song of birds, heard somewhere among all these. The sound of animals, of trees, of wind, of rain. The sound of the keyboard, of our fingers. The sound in the supermarkets, in schools, in cars, in our homes, our trips, our beds. And the everlasting sound of our brains, the whispers, the buzzing, the sound of pain and angst. Never stopping, never leaving, so old in us that we simply ignore it. But it is there, with us. The sound of our insanity, of our battlefield.

All of these sounds represent Life, and paradoxically, it can also be the sound of Death, death waiting at every corner, in every whisper, in every movement. A wrong movement, a crazy man, an accident of any sort.

White Noise was my first encounter with Don DeLillo. Smart writing, easy to read, unlike some of his contemporary American writers, but with a rich vocabulary. A writer who plays here, in an absurd, ironic way, with two themes: our tremendous fear of death and the society in which we live – consuming everything, having access to all kinds of machines, of pills, of drugs, the era of money, where everything can be found, where everyone is so far away from their archaic selves … .

"Traffic lights swayed on cables in a sudden gust. This was the city’s main street, a series of discount stores, check-cashing places, wholesale outlets. A tall old Moorish movie theater, now remarkably a mosque. Blank structures called the Terminal Bilding, the Packer Building, the Commerce Building. How close this was to a classic photography of regret. (105-106)

"It’s Malcolm, of course. He’s got his jungle. What does she have? A huge airy kitchen with a stove that belongs in a three-star restaurant in the provinces. She put all her energy into that kitchen, but for what? It’s not a kitchen at all. It’s her life, her middle age. Baba could enjoy a kitchen like that. It would be a kitchen to her. To Mother it’s like a weird symbol of getting through a crisis, except she hasn’t gotten through it." (113)

"The truth is I don’t want to die first. Given a choice between loneliness and death, it would take me a fraction of a second to decide. But I don’t want to be alone either. Everything I say to Babette about holes and gaps is true. Her death would leave me scattered, talking to chairs and pillows. Don’t let us die, I want to cry out to that fifth-century sky ablaze with mystery and spiral light. Let us both live forever, in sickness and health, feebleminded, doddering, toothless, liver-spotted, dim-sighted, hallucinating. Who decides these things? What is out there? Who are you?" (121)

"The more things I threw away, the more I found. The house was a sepia maze of old and tired things. There was an immensity of things, an overburdening weight, a connection, a mortality. I stalked the rooms, flinging things into cardboard boxes. Plastic electric fans, burnt-out toasters, Star Trek needlepoints. It took well over an hour to get everything down to the sidewalk. No one helped me. I didn’t want help or company of human understanding. I just wanted to get the stuff out of the house. I sat on the front steps alone, waiting for a sense of ease and peace to settle in the air around me." (301)

"The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait together, regardless of age, our carts stocked with brightly colored goods. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks. Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead." (375)