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Wednesday, November 21, 2007
And down we went
Here’s the first paragraph:
It was not a street anymore, but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night. He was walking north through rubble and mud and there were people running past holding towels to their faces or jackets over their heads. They had handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths. They had shoes in their hands, a woman with a shoe in each hand, running past him. They ran and fell, some of them, confused and ungainly, with debris coming down around them, and there were people taking shelter under cars.
In the same way that twentieth-century painters wrought, to pleasing aesthetic effect, deliberate distortions on the formal rules of art, so DeLillo puts a deliberate and canny clumsiness into the conventional logic of prose. Another writer, describing the various ways in which people were fleeing the scene, might, first, separate the main character from the others, and then lay out a neater itinerary of the specifics:
He was walking north through rubble and mud. There were people running past, some holding towels to their faces or jackets over their heads, others with handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths. One woman was running past him carrying a shoe in each hand.
That’s duller, of course. More, rather obviously, it fails to realize formally, as DeLillo’s original does, the disorientation of the main protagonist’s point of view. His first sentence embodies the character’s stunned point-of-view; it is prose that notices things as it goes along, and modifies its sentence en courant: ‘They had shoes in their hands,’ plural? many women? no, just one, ‘a woman with a shoe in each hand, running past him.’ Or: ‘They ran and fell,’ (all of them? no) ‘some of them, confused and ungainly.’ Confused and ungainly is the overall effect here, although not so confused as to be baffling, or so ungainly as to constitute bad writing. So, in the same way that Picasso’s yanked and stretched faces often possess a weird beauty that more conventional representations lack, DeLillo’s prose often manages more than ordinary writing can. In part, I think, this is because DeLillo’s ear for the rhythms of speech is so acute, the way language in everyday usage shifts, moves, pulses and fuses in unexpected ways. Some examples from Underworld:
I’ll quote you that you said that.
She’s got a great body for how many kids?
They put son of a bitches like you behind bars is where you belong.
I’m a person if you ask me questions. You want to know who I am? I’m a person if you’re too inquisitive I tune you out completely.
Which is the whole juxt of my argument.
Martin Amis picked these out, in his review of the book, as instances of deliberate uglification. I couldn’t disagree more; they seem to me to possess real beauty, and a poetic apprehension of the way throwing ordinary rhythms slightly off kilter can generate little jabs of beauty. The second one in the particular is just superb—She’s got a great body for how many kids?—its jaunty knight’s-move shape; that little bounce in its middle. Language in use, slightly scuffed and distressed but polished, shining (like the toe of a brass statue of a saint that has been touched and touched by decades of hands); more immediate, more corporeal, and tuned to the rhythms of lungs and tongues than is the typical, polished literary-boilerplate style.
So, the way DeLillo uses and to run together clauses that a more formal writer would separate out: ‘He was walking north through rubble and mud and there were people running past’ … ‘They ran … with debris coming down around them, and there were people taking shelter under cars’. Items in this description are not neatly parceled out. Some, that you might expect to be separated, run on; others, that you might expect to be subsumed in the preceding syntactic unit, are given their own sentences. Repetition. They had handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths.
It’s a carefully handled defamiliarisation technique, of course. DeLilloese; it’s familiar enough now to enable parody in its own right. But there’s a difference with this new novel. In his previous fiction DeLillo used this style to embody a baseline sense of alienation, the generic flattening of day-to-day life, the distortions and background confusions of ordinary people living quotidian postmodernity. But Falling Man begins with the extraordinary; with 9-11, in medias res (we might say: in medias terrores) the twin towers coming down, a protagonist who walks out of ground zero, miraculously alive, covered in dust and debris. When DeLilloese is applied to the extraordinary it turns back into a standard textual strategy: the prose is discombobulated because the main character is discombobulated. He was just in a bombed building, what would you expect? I preferred it when DeLillo wrote stylistic discombobulation as a correlative not for Catastrophe, but for, like, life.
The roar was still in the air, the buckling rumble of the fall. This was the world now. Smoke and ash came rolling down streets and turning corners, busting around corners, seismic tides of smoke, with office paper rushing past, standard sheets with cutting edge, skimming, whipping past, otherworldly things in the morning pall.
Straightaway DeLillo’s in medias res becomes post res; and because we start after the fall, with that word’s resonant lamination of literal and metaphorical sense. But even so, isn’t ‘this was the world now’ a little pompously put? Better is the groping, sideways lurching account of the smoke and ash, groping its way along the topography of the city (not falling, we note; already having fallen, and moving along the ground like a tide of fluid), or the paper, with its pricked out detail of ‘the cutting edge’, as if the danger of a paper cut somehow connected in a meaningful way with the large scale destruction of the scene. But as a whole, is that paragraph as good as the opening one?
Of course one of the skills of DeLillo (no mean skill) is the way his prose is so light on the balls of its feet. This sort of criticism, the literal-minded construing of its techniques, seems—is—clumsy: it misses the rapidity and snap of the writing; it misses its cool. There’s a snooty aspect to this, too: the schoolyard pressure (scornfully: ‘don’t you get it? What, are you some kind of retard?) that can lead people into feigning appreciation, and even (more risky, this, in case somebody calls your bluff) comprehension. But then again, with the best postmodern art, feigning appreciation is close enough to actual appreciation to be the opposite of no cigar. To be, in fact, cigar.
But. DeLilloese; famous enough to invite parody. A novel populated with very DeLillo characters. In a conventional novel, it might be appropriate, when asked to describe the protagonist, to say something like, ‘Keith Neudecker is a 39 year-old lawyer who worked in the World Trade Center, who survived the 9-11 attack and made his way to the apartment he previously shared with his son Justin and estranged wife Lianne.’ But this is wholly to miss the way DeLillo undertakes characterisation; not the external details, but not the internal ones either (as it might be, ‘the main character, Keith, has been traumatized by his experience on 9-11’). That’s not it. Instead we should say something like: there’s Keith, and this is his personality:
He sorted through his mail. His name was misspelled on a couple of pieces of mail, this was not unusual, and he snatched a ballpoint pen from the mug near the telephone and made corrections on the envelopes. He wasn’t sure when he’d started doing this and didn’t know why he did it. There was no reason why. Because it wasn’t him, with the name misspelled, that was why. … He never corrected the spelling on mail that was out-right third-class indiscriminate throwaway advertising matter. He almost did, the first time, and then did not. [31-2]
Or of his wife, we might say:
She washed her hands and face. Then she went to the cabinet and got a fresh towel and dried herself. After she tossed the towel in the hamper she flushed the toilet. She didn’t flush the toilet to make others think she had left the living room for a compelling reason. The flushing toilet wasn’t audible in the living room. This was for her own pointless benefit, flushing. Maybe it was to mark the end of the interval, to get her out of there. [47-8]
But the problem with the novel, then, is that where in White Noise or Underworld this mode of characterization, and DeLillo’s style, were both means of apprehending the world we live in today, a way of embodying the logic of the contemporary as flattened, distorted, affectless, in this book these things are put at the service of the much less markworthy observation that life after a large-scale social trauma can appear flattened, distorted and affectless. Which, as an observation, approaches banality. DeLillo is not a novelist whose sensorium is suited to rising to The Big Occasion. How can he so rise, when his particular game is all in the fall? Maybe I’m not in the right location to say. But it seems to me that if you want to portray the waste land, the best way to do it is not to dwell on the recent war (‘the novel traces the experiences of one of the 9/11 hijackers named Hammad from a training camp in Afghanistan, to the Hamburg cell of the plotters… and eventually to his position behind the cockpit on the flight that destroys Keith’s building’) but on the contrary to make no explicit mention of the war at all, and concentrate instead on the unreality of the city. The brownness of the fog. But what do I know? Bin gar keine Amerikanisch, stamm’ aus britisch, echt gefallen.
Comments
Adam, some would argue—James Berger, for instance—that *all* of DeLillo’s work should be read as an attempt to mirror a post-traumatic symptomology. It’s just that *Falling Man* is more explicit about the Scene of the Wounding.
He lost me at “It was not a street anymore, but a world”: It was not a novel anymore, but a big statement. I agree the shoes sentence is darned good, though.
I wrote a whole post thinking you were talking about Cosmopolis, which I despised, when you were talking about Underworld, which I haven’t read.
Oh well. I had a lot of trouble with Cosmopolis,
particularly with the ways the characters spoke. Most of what I remember from that book is how the characters often spoke in this sort of winding off-kilter and abstract prose that resembled nothing so much as how DeLillo narrates the story outside of quotations. The characters spoke straight from their rambling unconscious most of the time, said things that people don’t say in ways they wouldn’t say them, and talked past each other nearly all the time. I thought the “uglification” almost worked at the surface to disguise this, but didn’t.
Adam: great analysis. I agree, the DeLillo aesthetic packs its biggest punch in the placid and domestic.
How about prose that refers to something past thought or speech? Like prose that’s beautiful because we find it satisfying to type? Read here for more.
You almost had me there for a minute, Adam, but here’s the problem: great as that sentence about that kind of body for a mother is, it sounds like every single one of his sentences. So, you know, stopped clock being right twice daily and all. (I should insert more of an argument here, I know.)