586 The American Century: Literature since 1945range of disguises. DeLillo is concerned here and elsewhere in his fiction, not just
with the power of the media to invade consciousness but with the idea that all
contemporary American experience is crucially informed by modes of representation
which determine consciousness at every level. And not just contemporary American
experience: Mao II (1991), for example, explores the impact of mass culture on a
global level. What place is left for the individual, the novel asks, in the face of the
totalizing ideologies of the media. Perhaps “the future belongs to crowds.” In the
fictional world of DeLillo, characters negotiate their ironic or pathetic way through
a culture defined by its consumption: not so much of the actual but the imaginary,
the promissory image offered to them on the television screen. DeLillo is, in a way,
the novelist as anthropologist, sifting through American lives as signifiers of their
culture to see what place there is, if any, for the notion of the individual
or the authentic. The anthropological character of his fiction is never more
noticeable than in his 1997 novel Underworld, which plots the course of American
history from 1951 to 1992. It pivots, in particular, on the technology of waste.
“Waste is the secret history, the underhistory,” one character declares, “the way
archaeologists dig out the history of early cultures.” Future historians, the reader
infers, might interpret twentieth-century America in terms of the story of its waste
products, the relics or aftermath of consumption. And that, at any rate, is DeLillo’s
narrative project here: to gather and study the discarded remnants of American
culture, weaving historical memory and imaginative recall together to produce a
secret history, an underworld narrative.
What distinguishes so many of the characters of DeLillo is their subjection to the
anonymizing processes of the market and certain feelings generated by that
subjection – a vague anxiety (an anxiety that achieves momentary point and
poignancy in his post-9/11 novel, Falling Man (2007)), and an even vaguer sense of
dissatisfaction, yearning. These are precisely the distinguishing features of
protagonists in a number of other late twentieth-century novels, notably The
Moviegoer (1961) by Walker Percy (1916–1999), Cabot Wright Begins (1964) by
James Purdy (1923–), Ironweed (1983) by William Kennedy (1928–), The Universal
Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968) by Robert Coover (1932–)
The Sportswriter (1986), Independence Day (1995), and The Lay of the Land (2006)
by Richard Ford (1944–), the New York Trilogy (City of Glass (1985), Ghost (1986),
The Locked Room (1987)) of Paul Auster (1947–), Bright Lights, Big City (1984) by
Jay McInerney (1955–), Straight Cut (1986) by Madison Smartt Bell (1957–), and
Less than Zero (1985) by Bret Easton Ellis (1965–). Nominally, all these novels and
their protagonists are very different. The Moviegoer, for instance, is suffused with
Percy’s own special brand of ironic existentialism and urgent faith. Over a third of
Cabot Wright Begins is spent discussing the problems connected with writing a book,
the biography of Cabot Wright – which announces its theme, the fabrication of
reality. The novels by Coover and Kennedy both turn to the game of baseball to
explore the journeys of Americans in and out of the literal and the imaginary. The
stories of McInerney and Ellis are initiation tales, set in bleak modern landscapes, of
two young men trapped in their own alienation. The New York Trilogy pursuesGGray_c05.indd 586ray_c 05 .indd 586 8 8/1/2011 7:31:33 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 33 PM