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In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel
"In The Loop" is the first study of Don DeLillo, one of America's most importatnt novelists. While providing an overview of DeLillo's career and a book-by-book analysis of his eight novels, Tom LeClair constructs (and placess DeLillo's fiction within) a new critical category - the systems novel. Like other "systems novelists" - William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, and Robert Coover - DeLillo employs the new scientific paradigm of "systems theory" as a basis for his novelistic analyses of human survival in various spheres, from the nuclear family to that encompassing reciprocal loop, the ecosystem, that is DeLillo's fundamental model of value.
244 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1988
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August 31, 2021
Daniel Green on Single-Author Monographs
“Eventually the single-author monograph took on ambitions beyond providing an introduction or broad overview of its subject's work and began offering more "sophisticated" analyses of theme and aesthetic strategy and, with the rise of Theory, using the author's fiction as tests of a sort for the elaboration of theoretical perspectives or other external systems of thought. While this approach arguably does perhaps extend its own shelf-life for a somewhat longer time--until the theory in question begins losing its academic luster or otherwise no longer seems salient--its long-term value in illuminating the author's work becomes questionable, even if the theory itself retains some interest. Many of the books written about, for example, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Toni Morrison are so heavily inflected by theory, by extra-literary agendas in general, that it is difficult to imagine that future readers interested in deepening their understanding of these writers--as opposed to tracking the influence of such figures as Lyotard, Lacan, Baudrillard, or Gayatri Spivak on American academic criticism--will really have much use for them.”
http://noggs.typepad.com/tre/postmode...
"Certainly There is Awe"
This otherwise excellent book of literary criticism (which covers DeLillo's first eight novels [1]) is undermined by both its motivation and its methodology (i.e., its extra-literary agendas).
At a time when many academics and critics had started to question the concept of a literary canon, postmodernists seemed to be inordinately obsessed with the place of their favourite postmodernist authors on a (if not the) canon (even if it is only a postmodernist canon). It wasn’t enough that they liked a particular author’s work, everybody else had (ought) to as well. Why is it that postmodernists are so consumed by this declarative impulse, even to this day? (It’s a bit like Catholicism: half the appeal seems to be in the pontification!)
In 1987, LeClair seemed to think that DeLillo wasn’t receiving the attention he deserved from American postmodernist academics. They were ignoring him, burying him, well, apart from a few essays by the likes of Frank Lentricchia. He also questioned the views of a couple of rival book reviewers and academic literary critics, one of whom, Jonathan Yardley, was critical of “White Noise”, while the other, (Professor) John Aldridge, was guilty of overpraising DeLillo without adequately understanding his fiction. It was LeClair’s solemn professorial duty to reprimand and correct both of them.
"A Frolic of His Own"
The writers with whom LeClair was comparing DeLillo were "the more academically favoured postmodernists", William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, and Robert Coover (I'll call them the "Big Three").
Aldridge’s error was to suggest that "White Noise" "surpassed them in brilliance, versatility and breadth of imagination". LeClair can only bring himself to say that DeLillo’s body of work rivals the works of these authors. This is how he describes his motivation for writing the book:
"My purposes are to demonstrate in academic fashion the value of his work as a whole and to analyse the comparative value of his individual novels [cf. academically favoured postmodernists such as William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, and Robert Coover?]; to examine and expand the academic circle of attention, the critical system that produces fifteen books on Pynchon, gives wide attention to an academic experimentalist such as Raymond Federman, and generates only a few essays on DeLillo; and ultimately, to attract to DeLillo, by way of fellow academics and their classrooms, those nonprofessional and, especially, younger readers whose world of nonliterary media DeLillo inhabits, readers for whom the rhythms of realism may seem anachronistic and the current academic stars hermetic."
He describes his book in similar terms:
"Written by a professor, published by a university press, directed primarily to other academics, 'In the Loop' has as one of its subjects just this small communications loop and why Don DeLillo's fiction has been largely excluded from it."
"A Wonderful Little System"
LeClair’s motivation dictates and compromises his methodology:
He coins and uses the term "systems novel" to analyse DeLillo’s fiction. However, it becomes apparent that he derived this term from his earlier analysis of novels by the Big Three. At the same time LeClair was reading and reviewing novels by DeLillo, he was also reading and theorising about works by the Big Three. Extended versions of his essays about them would later appear in his book, "The Art of Excess". Thus, this book anticipates the methodology he would make more explicit in the later work. It’s not clear from the above lengthy quote whether LeClair intended to compare DeLillo’s individual works with each other or with the works of the Big Three. Certainly, the extent to which he makes comparative judgements about the four authors is perfunctory at best, and superficial when he does.
Thus, in this book, we don’t really get to see the context in which the idea of the "systems novel" was conceived and to which it might have been better suited.
Of greater concern is the absence of a succinct dictionary-style definition of the term. How are we to know one if we see or read it?
LeClair discusses the qualities of systems novels in such broad abstract terms, it's difficult to glean anything concrete from the discussion, let alone learn to differentiate systems- and non-systems novels.
On page 11, he mentions writers "synthesising ranging abstractions, detailed attention to the world, and a looping self-examination of both theoretical frames and empirical insights."
On page 33, he mentions "perspectivism, doubling connections, regressing replications, framed analogies, frequent allusions and multiple styles (systems methods that question the very possibility of raw experience and artfully represent the difficulties of articulating it should it be discovered, formal equivalents of the protagonists' frustrated searches for simplicity and certitude)."
LeClair has a penchant for listing, linking and looping abstractions.
Without an express effort to compare and contrast, we readers are also left wanting a basis for LeClair’s assertion that DeLillo deserves equal ranking with the Big Three (even if I personally agree with this assertion). We are not treated to an analysis of the Big Three in terms of their "systems novel" characteristics. Presumably, if we want to witness this, as in the Marx Brothers’ film, "A Day at the Races", we have to buy and read the other book/manual (which I had already unknowingly done, before getting embroiled in the loop).
As a result, this reader remains sceptical about Professor LeClair's "systems novel" concept and the extent to which it creates an association or loop that joins the four novelists.
"He's the top man in the English Department"
"Only Your [Secret] Code Allows You to Enter the System"
LeClair starts with a 31 page introduction to Systems Theory and the Systems Novel.
In it, he summarises the theory developed by the Austrian biologist, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, in his 1968 book, "General Systems Theory".
Although von Bertalanffy was interested in philosophy and literature, as well as dialectical theories of history (Hegel and Marx), it needs to be said that, whatever its relevance, this theory constitutes an extraliterary approach to fiction. Elsewhere LeClair expresses scepticism about the kind of continental theorists who seem to have taken over American literature departments in the eighties and nineties. Apart from whatever intrinsic relevance it might have, the concept of a "systems novel" almost seems to have been an attempt to wrestle back control from these theorists with an academic rigour co-opted from another physical or social science. Thus, this is ostensibly a home-grown American literary theorist trying to establish a rigorously constructed bulwark against continental influence, even though von Bertalanffy himself was an Austrian.
Regardless, LeClair is very adept at traditional close reading of the text. It could be argued that he didn’t even need to resort to systems theory to justify the results of his literary analysis. Although DeLillo rarely gives interviews (one of the most useful being with LeClair himself), his thematic and theoretical concerns as an author are usually set out within the body of his text and can be teased out by a close reading (even if it requires a little effort and practice).
To paraphrase LeClair’s review of Steven Moore’s book on William Gaddis:
"The adventurous professor will be well served by [LeClair’s] book."
"...anyone interested in seeing how the virtues of old-fashioned scholarship, close reading, and theoretical sophistication can be valuably combined should read this...book."
"The Metaphysics of Presence"
Ironically, LeClair’s analysis of "End Zone" (which I found to be one of the three best essays, the others relating to "Ratner's Star" and "The Names") almost parodies the approach of Derrida ("although I have criticised in my Introduction contemporary critics’ absorption with Derrida"). Yet Derrida’s concept of "logocentrism" (and "metaphysics of presence") is highly material to DeLillo’s concerns. LeClair admits:
"I use his ideas and terminology here because they describe quite precisely some of the primary materials of ‘End Zone’ and because, if limited to its proper linguistic sphere, deconstruction provides an interpretation that parallels, in its anti-absolutism, systems theory’s description of systems other than language."
[You could counter that systems theory should equally have been limited to its proper social sciences sphere.]
Never mind that DeLillo had already said to LeClair in his 1979 interview:
"I began to suspect that language was a subject as well as an instrument in my work."
There is enough in this statement upon which to build a rigorous interpretation of DeLillo’s fiction. (Indeed, LeClair does so in the other two essays mentioned above.)
In relation to "Ratner's Star", LeClair says:
"...the systems novelist with an abstract bent exposes his imagination to severe scrutiny, especially if his ideas are not the religious, moral, sociological, or, more recently, aesthetic notions usually treated in novels of ideas."
LeClair fails to differentiate a systems novel from a novel of ideas, while, in the same paragraph, he refers for the first and only time to "abstract fiction". It seems that he is simply renovating these terms with little more than an extraliterary paint job.
The resort to an extraliterary theory almost simultaneously adds to and subtracts/detracts from the significance and recognition of DeLillo’s own idiosyncrasy and creativity. To paraphrase Joseph Tabbi, this could be another example of how the author is "diminished by his audience", if not specifically his readers and critics.
The Man with the Golden Helmet
"What to Read and Not" - Not for Readers with a Post-Modernist Beat-Up Aversion
By way of allusion to the tedious know-it-all Alexander Theroux, I have long had an aversion to post-modernist beat-ups (especially when the beat-ups are systematic, agenda-based and coterie-driven).
If you have the same aversion, you might not enjoy the theoretical aspects of this book. However, for those who have already read DeLillo's early fiction, this book might remain of some interest to the extent that it adheres to close textual analysis. It is not a book that I would recommend reading before you read DeLillo himself. It does not purport to avoid spoilers, and might detract from the pleasure of reading and interpreting the novels on your own. Besides, after reading it, you might never want to see the word "loop" again for the rest of your life (DeLillo himself only speaks of books that "bend back on themselves"). Speaking of which...
"Eventually the single-author monograph took on ambitions beyond providing an introduction or broad overview of its"
[1] DELILLO'S FIRST EIGHT NOVELS:
Americana
End Zone
Great Jones Street
Ratner's Star
Players
Running Dog
The Names
White Noise
"Language as a Subject as well as an Instrument in my Work" (An Alternative Cosmo-Fictional Hypothesis)
Mankind uses words (language) and numbers (mathematics) to capture, ingest, name, identify, count, differentiate, separate, understand, keep, preserve, trade, transact, arrange and order things. Order gives mankind a sense of certainty and safety. However, at the boundary of words or between them, or where there are no words, there is uncertainty, disorder, chaos, danger, peril, fear, terror, mystery, silence and conspiracy. Language and mathematics are of limited use in this part of the cosmos, so mankind embraces mysticism and faith to address and disarm the mystery. Mysticism and faith fill the gaps between words and numbers. Mysticism and religion depend on the maintenance of secrecy and the protection of codes and passwords.
SOUNDTRACK:
June 22, 2017
“Eventually the single-author monograph took on ambitions beyond providing an introduction or broad overview of its subject's work and began offering more "sophisticated" analyses of theme and aesthetic strategy and, with the rise of Theory, using the author's fiction as tests of a sort for the elaboration of theoretical perspectives or other external systems of thought. While this approach arguably does perhaps extend its own shelf-life for a somewhat longer time--until the theory in question begins losing its academic luster or otherwise no longer seems salient--its long-term value in illuminating the author's work becomes questionable, even if the theory itself retains some interest. Many of the books written about, for example, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Toni Morrison are so heavily inflected by theory, by extra-literary agendas in general, that it is difficult to imagine that future readers interested in deepening their understanding of these writers--as opposed to tracking the influence of such figures as Lyotard, Lacan, Baudrillard, or Gayatri Spivak on American academic criticism--will really have much use for them.”
http://noggs.typepad.com/tre/postmode...
"Certainly There is Awe"
This otherwise excellent book of literary criticism (which covers DeLillo's first eight novels [1]) is undermined by both its motivation and its methodology (i.e., its extra-literary agendas).
At a time when many academics and critics had started to question the concept of a literary canon, postmodernists seemed to be inordinately obsessed with the place of their favourite postmodernist authors on a (if not the) canon (even if it is only a postmodernist canon). It wasn’t enough that they liked a particular author’s work, everybody else had (ought) to as well. Why is it that postmodernists are so consumed by this declarative impulse, even to this day? (It’s a bit like Catholicism: half the appeal seems to be in the pontification!)
In 1987, LeClair seemed to think that DeLillo wasn’t receiving the attention he deserved from American postmodernist academics. They were ignoring him, burying him, well, apart from a few essays by the likes of Frank Lentricchia. He also questioned the views of a couple of rival book reviewers and academic literary critics, one of whom, Jonathan Yardley, was critical of “White Noise”, while the other, (Professor) John Aldridge, was guilty of overpraising DeLillo without adequately understanding his fiction. It was LeClair’s solemn professorial duty to reprimand and correct both of them.
"A Frolic of His Own"
The writers with whom LeClair was comparing DeLillo were "the more academically favoured postmodernists", William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, and Robert Coover (I'll call them the "Big Three").
Aldridge’s error was to suggest that "White Noise" "surpassed them in brilliance, versatility and breadth of imagination". LeClair can only bring himself to say that DeLillo’s body of work rivals the works of these authors. This is how he describes his motivation for writing the book:
"My purposes are to demonstrate in academic fashion the value of his work as a whole and to analyse the comparative value of his individual novels [cf. academically favoured postmodernists such as William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, and Robert Coover?]; to examine and expand the academic circle of attention, the critical system that produces fifteen books on Pynchon, gives wide attention to an academic experimentalist such as Raymond Federman, and generates only a few essays on DeLillo; and ultimately, to attract to DeLillo, by way of fellow academics and their classrooms, those nonprofessional and, especially, younger readers whose world of nonliterary media DeLillo inhabits, readers for whom the rhythms of realism may seem anachronistic and the current academic stars hermetic."
He describes his book in similar terms:
"Written by a professor, published by a university press, directed primarily to other academics, 'In the Loop' has as one of its subjects just this small communications loop and why Don DeLillo's fiction has been largely excluded from it."
"A Wonderful Little System"
LeClair’s motivation dictates and compromises his methodology:
He coins and uses the term "systems novel" to analyse DeLillo’s fiction. However, it becomes apparent that he derived this term from his earlier analysis of novels by the Big Three. At the same time LeClair was reading and reviewing novels by DeLillo, he was also reading and theorising about works by the Big Three. Extended versions of his essays about them would later appear in his book, "The Art of Excess". Thus, this book anticipates the methodology he would make more explicit in the later work. It’s not clear from the above lengthy quote whether LeClair intended to compare DeLillo’s individual works with each other or with the works of the Big Three. Certainly, the extent to which he makes comparative judgements about the four authors is perfunctory at best, and superficial when he does.
Thus, in this book, we don’t really get to see the context in which the idea of the "systems novel" was conceived and to which it might have been better suited.
Of greater concern is the absence of a succinct dictionary-style definition of the term. How are we to know one if we see or read it?
LeClair discusses the qualities of systems novels in such broad abstract terms, it's difficult to glean anything concrete from the discussion, let alone learn to differentiate systems- and non-systems novels.
On page 11, he mentions writers "synthesising ranging abstractions, detailed attention to the world, and a looping self-examination of both theoretical frames and empirical insights."
On page 33, he mentions "perspectivism, doubling connections, regressing replications, framed analogies, frequent allusions and multiple styles (systems methods that question the very possibility of raw experience and artfully represent the difficulties of articulating it should it be discovered, formal equivalents of the protagonists' frustrated searches for simplicity and certitude)."
LeClair has a penchant for listing, linking and looping abstractions.
Without an express effort to compare and contrast, we readers are also left wanting a basis for LeClair’s assertion that DeLillo deserves equal ranking with the Big Three (even if I personally agree with this assertion). We are not treated to an analysis of the Big Three in terms of their "systems novel" characteristics. Presumably, if we want to witness this, as in the Marx Brothers’ film, "A Day at the Races", we have to buy and read the other book/manual (which I had already unknowingly done, before getting embroiled in the loop).
As a result, this reader remains sceptical about Professor LeClair's "systems novel" concept and the extent to which it creates an association or loop that joins the four novelists.
"He's the top man in the English Department"
"Only Your [Secret] Code Allows You to Enter the System"
LeClair starts with a 31 page introduction to Systems Theory and the Systems Novel.
In it, he summarises the theory developed by the Austrian biologist, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, in his 1968 book, "General Systems Theory".
Although von Bertalanffy was interested in philosophy and literature, as well as dialectical theories of history (Hegel and Marx), it needs to be said that, whatever its relevance, this theory constitutes an extraliterary approach to fiction. Elsewhere LeClair expresses scepticism about the kind of continental theorists who seem to have taken over American literature departments in the eighties and nineties. Apart from whatever intrinsic relevance it might have, the concept of a "systems novel" almost seems to have been an attempt to wrestle back control from these theorists with an academic rigour co-opted from another physical or social science. Thus, this is ostensibly a home-grown American literary theorist trying to establish a rigorously constructed bulwark against continental influence, even though von Bertalanffy himself was an Austrian.
Regardless, LeClair is very adept at traditional close reading of the text. It could be argued that he didn’t even need to resort to systems theory to justify the results of his literary analysis. Although DeLillo rarely gives interviews (one of the most useful being with LeClair himself), his thematic and theoretical concerns as an author are usually set out within the body of his text and can be teased out by a close reading (even if it requires a little effort and practice).
To paraphrase LeClair’s review of Steven Moore’s book on William Gaddis:
"The adventurous professor will be well served by [LeClair’s] book."
"...anyone interested in seeing how the virtues of old-fashioned scholarship, close reading, and theoretical sophistication can be valuably combined should read this...book."
"The Metaphysics of Presence"
Ironically, LeClair’s analysis of "End Zone" (which I found to be one of the three best essays, the others relating to "Ratner's Star" and "The Names") almost parodies the approach of Derrida ("although I have criticised in my Introduction contemporary critics’ absorption with Derrida"). Yet Derrida’s concept of "logocentrism" (and "metaphysics of presence") is highly material to DeLillo’s concerns. LeClair admits:
"I use his ideas and terminology here because they describe quite precisely some of the primary materials of ‘End Zone’ and because, if limited to its proper linguistic sphere, deconstruction provides an interpretation that parallels, in its anti-absolutism, systems theory’s description of systems other than language."
[You could counter that systems theory should equally have been limited to its proper social sciences sphere.]
Never mind that DeLillo had already said to LeClair in his 1979 interview:
"I began to suspect that language was a subject as well as an instrument in my work."
There is enough in this statement upon which to build a rigorous interpretation of DeLillo’s fiction. (Indeed, LeClair does so in the other two essays mentioned above.)
In relation to "Ratner's Star", LeClair says:
"...the systems novelist with an abstract bent exposes his imagination to severe scrutiny, especially if his ideas are not the religious, moral, sociological, or, more recently, aesthetic notions usually treated in novels of ideas."
LeClair fails to differentiate a systems novel from a novel of ideas, while, in the same paragraph, he refers for the first and only time to "abstract fiction". It seems that he is simply renovating these terms with little more than an extraliterary paint job.
The resort to an extraliterary theory almost simultaneously adds to and subtracts/detracts from the significance and recognition of DeLillo’s own idiosyncrasy and creativity. To paraphrase Joseph Tabbi, this could be another example of how the author is "diminished by his audience", if not specifically his readers and critics.
The Man with the Golden Helmet
"What to Read and Not" - Not for Readers with a Post-Modernist Beat-Up Aversion
By way of allusion to the tedious know-it-all Alexander Theroux, I have long had an aversion to post-modernist beat-ups (especially when the beat-ups are systematic, agenda-based and coterie-driven).
If you have the same aversion, you might not enjoy the theoretical aspects of this book. However, for those who have already read DeLillo's early fiction, this book might remain of some interest to the extent that it adheres to close textual analysis. It is not a book that I would recommend reading before you read DeLillo himself. It does not purport to avoid spoilers, and might detract from the pleasure of reading and interpreting the novels on your own. Besides, after reading it, you might never want to see the word "loop" again for the rest of your life (DeLillo himself only speaks of books that "bend back on themselves"). Speaking of which...
"Eventually the single-author monograph took on ambitions beyond providing an introduction or broad overview of its"
[1] DELILLO'S FIRST EIGHT NOVELS:
Americana
End Zone
Great Jones Street
Ratner's Star
Players
Running Dog
The Names
White Noise
"Language as a Subject as well as an Instrument in my Work" (An Alternative Cosmo-Fictional Hypothesis)
Mankind uses words (language) and numbers (mathematics) to capture, ingest, name, identify, count, differentiate, separate, understand, keep, preserve, trade, transact, arrange and order things. Order gives mankind a sense of certainty and safety. However, at the boundary of words or between them, or where there are no words, there is uncertainty, disorder, chaos, danger, peril, fear, terror, mystery, silence and conspiracy. Language and mathematics are of limited use in this part of the cosmos, so mankind embraces mysticism and faith to address and disarm the mystery. Mysticism and faith fill the gaps between words and numbers. Mysticism and religion depend on the maintenance of secrecy and the protection of codes and passwords.
SOUNDTRACK:
June 22, 2017
September 4, 2013
Hard to think of a more important book on DeLillo's earlier career, and on the conception of the systems novel, which LeClair later hones in his ART OF EXCESS: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction. I really valued the insights on Ratner's Star in this, giving me a deeper perspective on the dualities at play in the novel. Great for any fan of DeLillo's early half.
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