The Insomnia of Our Inconceivable Times: Don DeLillo’s America
Summer Chronicle #2*
By Jim Miller
“Suddenly all screens have emptied out, everywhere. What remains for us to see, feel, hear?” So asks one of the central characters in Don DeLillo’s last novel, The Silence. Set in 2022 on an ill-fated Super Bowl Sunday, the novel thrusts us into a world where the digital network that has become our most immediate environment has gone down. What remains of us outside of the network? DeLillo is not optimistic.
As one of the characters muses toward the end of the novel while speculating on whether the shutdown is the opening salvo of World War III:
Cyberattacks, digital intrusions, biological aggressions. Anthrax, smallpox, pathogens. The dead and disabled. Starvation, plague, and what else?
Power grids collapsing. Our personal perceptions sinking into quantum dominance. Are the oceans rising? Is the air getting warmer, hour by hour, minute by minute?
Do people experience memories of earlier conflicts, the spread of terrorism, the shaky video of someone approaching an embassy, a bomb vest strapped to his chest? Pray and die. War we can see and feel.
Is there a shred of nostalgia in these recollections?
People begin to appear in the streets, warily at first and then in a spirit of release, walking, looking, wondering, women and men, an incidental cluster of adolescents, all escorting each other through the mass insomnia of this inconceivable time.
Like the people on the street in The Silence, over his career DeLillo has escorted his readers through the insomnia of our inconceivable times. In his midcareer works White Noise and Mao II, his characters live in a world driven by the twin narratives of technology and terror as they navigate the information chaos of our age. DeLillo’s works presciently map the banal and horrific terrain of our era of screens. In Falling Man, he captures the mood of post 9/11 New York, and in works like Underworld and Libra DeLillo mines dystopian threads and muses about the waste of consumer culture, the nature of history, and conspiracy.
In his later works, DeLillo has mastered the spare, stark poetry of disembodied talk. Always the eloquent consideration of the deep penetration of human consciousness by technology, and the ever-growing network of types of media along with the looming threat of apocalypse brought to you in conversations in airplanes, hotels, living rooms, and the supermarket.
Over the years, DeLillo has masterfully captured the fundamentally paradoxical truth that as we have become more and more technologically sophisticated, we have succumbed to an accompanying bewilderment and passivity. We face the heaven of a spectacle of our own creation with a sense of awe that borders on the religious.
Thus, DeLillo, now in his 80s, is unsure how we will recover from the shocks of our recent history. As he opined to the Guardian recently as he was finishing up The Silence, “The national memory lasts 48 hours, at best. And there’s always something else coming at us down the pipeline. You can’t separate it all out. You get lost in the deluge.”
It’s no wonder then that The Silence leaves us with the characters staring “into the blank screen.”
About Summer Chronicles*
In the summer of 1967, the great Brazilian writer, Clarice Lispector, began a seven-year stint as a writer for Jornal de Brasil (The Brazilian News) not as a reporter but as a writer of "chronicles," a genre peculiar to Brazil. As Giovanni Pontiero puts it in the preface to Selected Chrônicas, a chronicle, "allows poets and writers to address a wider readership on a vast range of topics and themes. The general tone is one of greater freedom and intimacy than one finds in comparable articles or columns in the European or U.S. Press."
What Lispector left us with is an eccentric collection of "aphorisms, diary entries, reminiscences, travel notes, interviews, serialized stories, essays, loosely defined as chronicles." As a novelist, Pontiero tells us, Lispector was anxious about her relationship with the genre, apprehensive of writing too much and too often, of, as she put it, "contaminating the word." It was a genre alien to her introspective nature and one that challenged her to adapt.
More than forty years later, in Southern California—in San Diego no less—I look to Lispector with sufficient humility and irony from my place on the far margins of literary history with three novels and a few other books largely set in our minor league corner of the universe. Along with this weekly column, it's not much compared to the gravitas of someone like Lispector. So, as Allen Ginsberg once said of Whitman, "I touch your book and feel absurd."
Nonetheless the urge to narrate persists. Along with Lispector, I am cursed with it--for better or worse. So, for a few lazy weeks of summer I will, as I have for a few years now, try my hand at the form.