American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo's Dialogue With Culture

by Mark Osteen

Don DeLillo once remarked to an interviewer that his intention is to use "the whole picture, the whole culture," of America. Since the publication of his first novel Americana in 1971, DeLillo has explored modern American culture through a series of acclaimed novels, including White Noise (1985; winner of the American Book Award), Libra (1988), and Underworld (1997). For Mark Osteen, the most bracing and unsettling feature of DeLillo's work is that, although his fiction may satirize cultural forms, it never does so from a privileged position outside the culture. His work brilliantly mimics the argots of the very phenomena it dissects: violent thrillers and conspiracy theories, pop music, advertising, science fiction, film, and television. As a result, DeLillo has been read both as a denouncer and as a defender of contemporary culture; in fact, Osteen argues, neither description is adequate. DeLillo's dialogue with modern institutions, such as chemical companies, the CIA, and the media, respects their power and ingenuity while criticizing their dangerous consequences. Even as DeLillo borrows from their discourses, he maintains a tenaciously opposing stance toward the sources of collective power.

Genres: Essays, Criticism

304 pages, Hardcover

First published May 22, 2000

Reviews

[Michael Rizza · Rating 5 out of 5]

In American Magic and Dread, Mark Osteen covers Don DeLillo’s oeuvre from the early stories to Underworld (1997). Osteen locates a thematic thread that runs through DeLillo’s work, which after Murray Jay Siskind in White Noise, Osteen calls “American magic and dread.” The dread is a postmodern condition caused by “the bombardment of consciousness by cinematic and consumer images; the fetishization of secrecy, violence, and celebrity; the fragmentation of the grand narratives of history, heroism, and high culture” (1). Now in the postmodern world, without recourse to the “Old God” or other stable grounds, DeLillo’s characters seek magical remedies that tend to fail. This general theme is the foundation for Osteen’s argument, which never feels forced, and provides coherence from beginning to end. He manages to maintain his focus, even as his analysis remains wide-ranging and faithful to texts that span thirty years of DeLillo’s career.

In the early stories, the magic is film images, icons and ideals, but film only ends up reflecting back distortions and obscuring purity with simulacra. Also, in Americana, the main character uses film to get to his “true self,” but his production is merely a repackaging of himself as a commodity, and his identity is revealed to be performance, a copy of a copy. In End Zone, the magic is simplicity – manifested both as asceticism and the apocalyptic desire to start over – yet these solutions erase individuality and lead to atrocity. In both Great Jones Street and Mao II, a celebrity – a rock star and a writer – seeks simplicity and a purer life by withdrawing from the public arena, but this gesture backfires, for it merely increases his market value in a capitalist system that continues to control his image. Ratner’s Star, which Osteen calls DeLillo’s least understood work, “exposes science as a form of magic designed to quell our terror of mortality. Mathematics, DeLillo suggests, is a makeshift bridge built over a pool of dread” (63); moreover, science is just another fiction that requires faith, a representation of reality that is “reshaped by observation” (97). Running Dog and The Names both have a quest plot, which implies not only the need for a magical object but also a lack of completion, “spiritual dispossession,” and dread. In Players and Libra, the characters seek secrecy; in their private worlds, secrets confer identity and worth, and concealment provides “magical charms to ward off dread” (156). However, secrets, once revealed, lose their power as currency. In White Noise, dread begins as a fear of death, which the characters attempt to counteract with consumption, pills, and television. Yet, when the dread evolves into “something almost worse than death: the dizzying alienation of insignificance” (181), Jack Gladney, who had originally resisted deathward plots, reacts by constructing a “narrative in which he is the protagonist” (184). In short, his solution to dread is to plot murder. Lastly, in Underworld, dread is a consequence of the Cold War, particularly its ideology of containment both of waste and nuclear threat. While some characters respond by remaining disconnected from others and hidden from themselves, other characters try “to salvage something from the wreckage” (245) of the Cold War. They are resistance artists, such as Klara Sax, Ishmael Muñoz, Sabato Rodia, Sergei Eisenstein, and Don DeLillo himself, who by montage and bricolage invite people to make connections and “embrace the underworld as a source of renewal” (253).

In addition to this unifying focus on magic and dread, Osteen finds other themes that seem to pervade DeLillo’s canon: the inescapable ubiquity of capitalism that manages to commodify everything in its reach; the problem of authenticity and endless simulacra; the role of art and the artist in postmodern America. Yet, in discussing these theoretical issues, Osteen never clouds his text with jargon. His prose is persistently lucid, revealing his penchant for concise declarative sentences that, at times, border on axioms. For example, “Subjectivity is indistinguishable from performance” (109); “Science is collaborative as well as competitive” (74); “In its dematerialized condition, money is closer to sorcery than to currency” (148). Even so, Osteen does not simplify his ideas or DeLillo’s work. Osteen has the ability to make a complex argument in the clearest, simplest terms – as though not only is he completely at home with his subject but also he is a master of the house.

Of course, if Osteen’s thesis is correct, then DeLillo has been grappling for thirty years with America’s unrelenting desire for a meaningful, logocentric world. Osteen argues that Underworld offers a hopeful but tentative solution of communal salvation, not simply with its final benediction: Peace. Rather, he concludes by repeating “only art,” “only art,” “only art” can help us avoid despair and lead us to unity. We can find reconciliation by listening to the marginalized voices and digging into the trash heap of our culture. Yet, if only art can satisfy our need for God or logocentrism, and if the artist has to the visit a wasteland to find fragments to shore up against the ruins, then it seems like this solution, to a large extent, has been offered before. Osteen is not explicit on this point, but, perhaps, when DeLillo declares “Peace,” we are supposed to recall Eliot's “Shantih shantih shantih” – and try to figure out the difference.

[a.g.e. montagner · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the most interesting collection of essays on DeLillo I've read so far, and I've read a few; possibly the most intriguing, and all the more impressing for being the work of a single critic.
The final chapter on Underworld is, I don't know, almost too good. Tight, neat, razor sharp, not once boring in 50 pages, thoroughly so-fucking-brilliant. Did you realize the novel had so many layers, so many possible interpretations? I didn't, either. Jeez.

The book, published in 2000, analyzes all of DeLillo's work up to that point:

ch. 1 early short stories and Americana
ch. 2 End Zone and Great Jones St.
ch. 3 Ratner's Star (with diagrams!)
ch. 4 Running Dog and The Names
ch. 5 Players and Libra
ch. 6 White Noise
ch. 7 Mao II
ch. 8 Underworld

[Маx Nestelieiev · Rating 5 out of 5]

simply the best. найкраща книга про Делілло. вичерпна, цікаво написана, уважно до деталей, а розділ про Underworld просто зразковий

[Luna · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must read for those who want to understand better DeLillo's fiction.