Episode 36: Ratnerama

In Episode 42, DDSWTNP’s Summer of Underworld comes to a conclusion with guest Jesse Kavadlo, who draws on his New York and Fordham University past and his many years of DeLillo scholarship to discuss Part 6 and the Epilogue with us. This episode digs into connections between this mafia-associated novel and The Sopranos, the deeper meanings of Nick’s shooting of George Manza, and the questions of belief, miracles, and art raised by the reactions to the Angel Esmeralda in the Epilogue. Together with Jesse we share thoughts about Albert Bronzini’s distillation of DeLillo’s themes, the presence of other violence in the basement room where Nick raises that sawed-off shotgun, and how his final confrontation with Brian Glassic in Kazakhstan rounds out his history. Doubling, oedipal anger, and elements of circularity and balance in the narrative occupy our attention, as do the enduring meanings in DeLillo of sacrificial victims, gunshots and gun violence, and the possibilities of redemption and aestheticism in images of recycling. We suggest throughout the bottomless associations of so many images in this novel and the way regionalism and highly local cultures ramify with the national and epic scopes DeLillo is interested in. Jesse gives not just great analysis but great voice and performance to some passages we close-read together (including the book’s amazing Joycean ending), and we cover a few ideas about the ways Underworld relates to contemporary popular cultures of cinema, television, and digital forms.

In Episode 41 DDSWTNP continue the Summer of Underworld by turning attention to Part 5 and the conclusion of Manx Martin’s narrative and welcoming to the show Mark Osteen, major literary scholar, author of American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture (2000), and editor of the two Library of America volumes comprising DeLillo’s novels from 1982 to 1997. Mark is also an accomplished saxophonist with special insights into the inspiration DeLillo takes from jazz. We hear from Mark about all his absolutely essential work with DeLillo and Underworld since the 1990s, including his criticism on the novel, his suggestion to DeLillo about publishing his works with Library of America, and his conversations with the author about his writing techniques, from his lack of preparatory outlines to his interesting reply when asked whether he lifted any lines from Lenny Bruce recordings. In our discussion Mark moves nimbly across the many fragments of “Better Things For Better Living Through Chemistry,” showing how methods of montage and improvisation account for many of DeLillo’s structural choices, as well as how motifs of Cold War containment, chemicals’ ubiquity, the religion of consumerism, and the hidden connections of everyday life suffuse Part 5 in particular. Points of focus include the incredibly rich Bruce monologues, particularly his consideration of the art of making things up as DeLillo’s metafictional reflection; how DeLillo brings Hoover back into the narrative through the Black and White Ball and its “garbage guerrillas”; and how Part 5 fills in some unknown aspects of Nick Shay’s education, Jesuitical, sexual, and otherwise. We conclude with some close attention to Manx’s sale of the ball over a shared whiskey flask to Charles Wainwright, suggesting the ways this scene resonates with other black/white relationships across the novel. Over these two hours Mark draws on moments from his recent teaching of the novel to undergrads, makes comparisons to a few other contemporary writers, and shares with us and our listeners many ideas from the decades he’s spent at the forefront of DeLillo scholarship.

In Episode 40 DDSWTNP cover Parts 3 and 4 and Manx Martin (2) of Underworld and welcome to the show Patrick Whitmarsh, a scholar of eco-criticism, the anthropocene, and the contemporary U.S. novel. We spend time discussing the importance of Underworld to Patrick’s arguments about perspective, scale, images of the earth, and the advent of what he calls the “vertical sciences,” taking in geological discoveries, aerial viewpoints, and all the new understandings of natural and built environments that DeLillo’s novel juxtaposes. Topics and images that preoccupy us in this discussion include DeLillo’s reasons for placing side by side the views of “garbage archeologist” Jesse Detwiler, Nick’s religious self-examination, and a convention for swingers; Klara Sax’s “rooftop summer,” film-viewing, and all the honing of her artistic perspective that takes place across these 1970s sections; and the many comparisons of filmmaking and other artforms that dominate Part 4: “Cocksucker Blues,” especially Sergei Eisenstein’s science fiction and montage techniques and Ismael Muñoz’s developing graffiti work. Does DeLillo arrange Underworld according to Eisenstein’s techniques, and does this idea help mediate questions about modernism and postmodernism? What power is expressed when Moonman claims about his painted subway train, “I’m your movie, motherfucker”? What themes of ecology and lost innocence emerge in considering Klara’s views of “the West” and the Zapruder film? How do such scenes connect to the aerial photography important to Matt Shay’s surreally treated military work in “the Pocket”? What layers of paranoia cut across Manx’s quest to sell the baseball? And who can lay claim to the legacy of Charlie Parker? The discussion draws in not just Underworld but parts of DeLillo’s earlier corpus, especially ideas of “counter-archeology” from Great Jones Street. Patrick adds as well some perspectives from other U.S. fiction of the late 1990s, and all together you have another two and a half hours of insight into DeLillo and especially what his waste-centered work has to teach us about the earth and ecology.

In Episode 39 DDSWTNP look at Parts 1 and 2 of Underworld and welcome back to the show Curt Gardner, creator of the most important DeLillo resource in cyberspace, Don DeLillo’s America (https://perival.com/delillo/delillo.html). We talk with Curt about his indispensable site coming online thirty years ago, just as news of DeLillo’s big novel was breaking, and at the episode’s end we get Curt’s thoughts on the emergent Internet of the mid-1990s as space for literary discussion and as this novel’s climactic example of an underworld where everything may indeed be connected. The bulk of this discussion focuses on “Long Tall Sally,” “Manx Martin 1,” and “Elegy for Left Hand Alone” as they shift the narrative terrain from 1951 to the 1980s and 1990s, retrospect on the meanings of the Cold War and its end, and introduce Nick Shay as a figure of memory, marital strain, middle age, repressed violence, and compromised fatherhood. Topics in this episode include all the evocations of and key differences from past DeLillo in this novel, especially White Noise; the explorations of visual media, violence, and loserdom brought out by the portrait of the Texas Highway Killer; the distinct DeLillo view of the aging self and its fear of mortality that arises in Parts 1 and 2; and what he might be up to in his nuanced depictions of drugs, forms of self-protection, and Marvin Lundy’s remarkable idea of “the dot theory of reality.” Curt shares with us many insights into the expectations and mysteries around this novel for keen DeLillo readers like him throughout the 1990s, while also helping us work through exactly how Parts 1 and 2 launch the novel’s deeper investigations of creativity, time, mean New York streets, and public and private identities. It all adds up to a great continuation of the Summer of Underworld with DDSWTNP and someone who’s spent more than three decades illuminating DeLillo for readers and scholars worldwide.

In Episode 38, DDSWTNP talk to John Duvall, a major scholar of DeLillo, author of a 2002 reader’s guide to Underworld, and expert especially on how DeLillo’s 1992 novella “Pafko at the Wall” became, five years later, the Prologue, “The Triumph of Death.” In examining the 1951 Giants/Dodgers game and the Soviets’ bomb test, we discuss with Duvall in great detail the issues of race and racism in the portrayal of fourteen-year-old Cotter Martin, winner of the struggle for Bobby Thomson’s home run ball, as well as the major difference made by DeLillo’s change of the very last word of “Pafko” in Underworld: “It is all falling indelibly into the now”? Or “into the past”? Throughout this episode, Duvall gives us a rare critical glimpse at DeLillo as editor of his sentences and scenes. He speaks also to the mythologizing effects of baseball, what it means to aestheticize politics in DeLillo’s representations, DeLillo’s relationship to E. L. Doctorow’s work, and the competing visions of ideology and history embodied in FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and metafictional radio man Russ Hodges. Not only that, but Duvall has several intriguing, “paranoid” stories to tell about his correspondence with the author and how it’s possible his interpretations of “Pafko” in a 1995 journal article might have directly influenced some of DeLillo’s revisions as he shaped it into Underworld’s opening. Other topics in this probing discussion include how DeLillo fits in with conceptions of Fredric Jameson’s postmodernism and Linda Hutcheon’s historiographic metafiction, his claims about his art in “The Power of History,” and the motifs of “The Triumph of Death” that set up the 700+ pages to come.