In his review of Thomas Travers' book "Peripheralizing DeLillo", Conte explores the thematic undercurrents of capitalism and its discontents across Don DeLillo's oeuvre.
An accumulation of misery is a necessary condition for an accumulation of wealth.
Karl Marx, Capital
Don DeLillo’s sometimes satiric and sometimes dead serious critique of postwar commodity culture persists throughout his writing. In Underworld we meet the “garbage guerilla” turned UCLA cultural studies professor Jesse Detwiler, who lectures his students on the basic maxim of their civilization: “Consume or die” (286-87). While commentators have noted DeLillo’s aversion to American materialism, consumption, and extravagant waste, in Peripheralizing DeLillo, Thomas Travers offers the first systematic reading of political economy in his work. Travers deploys Marxist literary theory under the influence of Fredric Jameson to analyze the crisis in late capitalism’s ceaseless subsumption of markets and its creation of a permanently unemployable underclass, a surplus population. Narrative fiction that represents capitalism’s totalizing grasp and its immiseration of the multitude would do well to avoid the abstractions of “mock-comintern manifestos” and instead reveal the odd particulars of human behavior, like Detwiler picking through J. Edgar Hoover’s trashcan (Underworld, 286). Travers reads DeLillo “as a novelist of the dispossessed, a composer of capitalist epics drawn to peripheral zones of accumulation” (19), delving into the “black holes” of impoverishment where, if only there, the system of global capital might be eluded. He assesses the politics of DeLillo’s fiction in four chronological groupings, beginning with the often overlooked early short fiction, the proletarian portraits of Italian Americans in the Bronx. Second, he treats the cluster of “conspiratorial thrillers,” Players, Running Dog, and The Names, as reflections of capital as it “financializes accumulation, commodifies visual attention and imposes neo-colonial economic reforms” (21). The third chapter pairs Libra and Underworld as “novels of historical catastrophe” (21), successors to the modern capitalist epic, but which fail to provide an emancipatory solution to capitalist crisis. Finally, the minimalist novels of the twenty-first century, Cosmopolis, Falling Man, Point Omega, and Zero K achieve a momentary stasis, “the reification of historical processes” (22), such that the work is more observant than reactionary. Like any literary critic-theorist, Travers is entitled to choose the texts among an author’s oeuvre that best demonstrate his thesis, a Marxist analysis of late capital. There are more comprehensive treatments of DeLillo’s career, such as Peter Boxall’s Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction (2006) or David Cowart’s Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language (2002), as well as edited collections by several hands, such as The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, ed. John N. Duvall (2008) or more recently, Don DeLillo in Context, ed. Jesse Kavadlo (2022). Travers’ argument passes over for extended discussions Americana, Ratner’s Star, White Noise, Mao II, and The Body Artist. DeLillo’s latest novel, The Silence (2020), which reinforces the last chapter’s assertion of stasis and the cessation of cybercapital, presumably arrived too late for discussion here. While a Marxist reading of a simulacral economy in White Noise or Warhol’s commodification of the image in Mao II (his serigraphs are a featured exhibit in Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism) would be welcome, Travers makes compelling analyses of DeLillo’s prolonged confrontation with capitalism and his apperception of the dispossessed multitude from early to late in his career.
In Underworld, the protagonist Nick Shay observes that the earnest “waste hustler” Detwiler didn’t care whether there were “two people listening or half a million” (287). But that’s an important distinction for DeLillo because two people in a room is a conspiracy, a terrorist cell, while half a million is a revolution. Lee Harvey Oswald imagines himself as a revolutionary, reading Marxist books in isolation; he is among those “[m]en in small rooms. Men reading and waiting, struggling with feverish ideas” (Libra, 41). As a recurring motif in DeLillo’s novels, one or two people in a room plotting includes authors. DeLillo places the writer at the margins, as a “person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence…. There are so many temptations for American writers to become part of the system and part of the structure that now, more than ever, we have to resist. American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous” (Conversations 45–46). Only at the margins, then, or in Travers’ locution “peripheralized,” does the artist have the perspective to analyze, reveal, resist, and as Jameson would have it, “parody” (Postmodernism 17), the coursing of power and wealth, even if it is not possible to be entirely “outside” of global capitalism.
Travers finds in DeLillo, especially his big books, examples of the “capitalist epic,” if not quite in the fashion of Georg Lukács’ prerevolutionary The Theory of the Novel (1916), then in its reinterpretation by David Cunningham, “not as an epic of the bourgeois ‘people,’ but as a displaced account of ‘the system of capitalism itself’” (“Capitalist Epics,” 13). However, he is perturbed to admit that there is no call to collective action. The “disappearance of collective subjects” (122) in DeLillo’s novels, or the lack of collective agency, does not comport with Marxist theory of historiography. Travers’ book asserts that “DeLillo has insistently given representational form to a seemingly insoluble contradiction between affect and collective history,” even though “the people are missing” (2, 111, 151). Interestingly, this phase, as well as “peripheralizing,” comes from Gilles Deleuze, whose own engagement with collective agency faltered with the May 1968 general strikes and student occupations of the universities in France. In Cinema 2, Deleuze wagers a distinction between classical and modern political cinema. In classical political cinema, “the people are there, even though they are oppressed, tricked, subject, even though blind or unconscious. Soviet cinema is an example: the people are already there in Eisenstein” (216), in such films as Battleship Potemkin (1925) or October (1928). But after the totalitarian regime of Stalin, “the people no longer exist, or not yet . . . the people are missing” (216) in modern political cinema. Instead of addressing a presupposed people, third world and minority/minoritarian postwar filmmakers contribute to “the invention of a people…. [T]he missing people are a becoming, they invent themselves, in shanty towns and camps, or in ghettos, in new conditions of struggle to which a necessarily political art must contribute” (217). Travers argues that, in fact, DeLillo’s historiographic novels of the late twentieth century contribute to “the invention of the multitude” (27). Returning to Underworld, the artist Klara Sax, onetime lover of Nick Shay, views an unknown, possibly secret film by Eisenstein, Unterwelt. Klara observes that the plotless film features “none of the cross-class solidarity of the Soviet tradition. No crowd scenes or sense of social motive—the masses as hero, colossal crowd movements painstakingly organized and framed” (430). The fictional film by Eisenstein in the 1930s, Klara surmises, “might be a protest against socialist realism, against the party-minded mandate to produce art that advanced the Soviet cause” (431). On the analogy with Unterwelt, DeLillo’s Underworld as a modern political novel is not an epic of the peoples’ struggles but an indictment of the capitalist system itself. Immediately following the account of the film screening, set in the summer of 1974, DeLillo introduces Ismael Muñoz, a subway artist tagging trains in “neon zoom” (433), known as Moonman 157. Out of the south Bronx ghetto, Muñoz is the minority/minoritarian artist whose graffiti rejects the orthography of the American advertising billboard, resists the authority of the transit police, and refuses to reveal himself or his whereabouts to the art gallery curators, a renegade Basquiat. Each tag on the subway cars spreads “the seed of a people to come” (Cinema 2, 216). Eisenstein didn’t survive to make a post-Stalinist political film. DeLillo’s postwar political fiction in Players and Running Dog, The Names and Libra, Mao II (with the hostage-taking of a writer, images of the Ayatollah’s funeral, and its conclusion in war-stricken Beirut) and Underworld, stands at the periphery of capital and instigates a people to come.
It is possible to read White Noise as a pastiche, or blank parody, of postmodern culture in the manner of Jameson’s Postmodernism treatise. The saturation with “waves and radiation” (1) and the (mock) worship of television pose a distinct challenge to the writer who persists in literally hammering out his prose on an Olympia manual typewriter. The Marxist critic Perry Anderson observes that postwar television brought “a combination of undreamt-of power: the continuous availability of radio with an equivalent of the perceptual monopoly of print, which excludes other forms of attention by the reader.” Co-eval in Jameson’s pitch with consumer capitalism and postmodernism, television affords the “saturation of the imaginary” (The Origins of Postmodernity, 88). Recall that David Bell, the protagonist of DeLillo’s first novel, Americana, resigns his position as a television executive and becomes a peripatetic filmmaker, outside the capitalist system of production. DeLillo’s twenty-first century novels, however, especially Cosmopolis, Zero K, and The Silence, represent the turn from “historical to absolute capitalism, a purified capital” (Travers 160), in which financialization devoid of any tangible product predominates. Derivatives, international currency spot trading, and cryptocurrencies; or, the cultural logic of post-postmodernism. The epilogue to Underworld, “Das Kapital,” begins with a sort of paean to cybercapital: “Capital burns off the nuance in a culture. Foreign investment, global markets, corporate acquisitions, the flow of information through transnational media, the attenuating influence of money that’s electronic and sex that’s cyberspaced, untouched money and computer-safe sex, the convergence of consumer desire…” (785). Having succeeded in its earlier stages of subsuming material markets, late-late-capitalism now subsumes the virtual domains of social media. DeLillo received his BA in Communication Arts from Fordham University in 1958. Forty years later, he is well attuned to how social communication that was not ‘paid labor’ and formerly ‘outside’ of capital, such as ‘chat,’ has now been subsumed and financialized by corporations such as Meta and X, whose corporate rebranding evolves toward pure, reflexive abstraction. Every account, post, picture, like, and trend on social media is a form of ‘unpaid labor,’ provided gratis by the user, the party formerly known as the consumer. Cybercapital financializes the information supplied by millions of users, thus making this multitude an unemployed surplus population. DeLillo has no verified social media accounts, not because he’s reclusive but because “[it] would be the master thrust of cyber-capital, to extend the human experience toward infinity as a medium for corporate growth and investment, for the accumulation of profits and vigorous reinvestment” (Cosmopolis, 76). Travers assesses this twenty-first century turn, less concerned with “the auroras of postmodernity than with the grim persistence of unevenness, with ideas that a fully commodified social world is constitutively uneven, prone to malfunctions and the dismemberment of labour” (9).
Widely noted is DeLillo’s gift for prognostication, including intimations of the 1984 Bhopal, India chemical leak and the 2023 East Palestine, Ohio train derailment in White Noise, the fall of the towers on 9/11 in Underworld, and a yet-to-come worldwide cessation of digital communications in The Silence. To that we could add anti-capitalist Cassandra, in Cosmopolis, as protesters alter the ticker on the NASDAQ to read, "a specter is haunting the world—the specter of capitalism" (96). In Peripheralizing DeLillo, Travers asks whether the flashing warning lights of global capitalism’s collapse may yet signal the invention of multitude, not the proletarian masses as such, but the transnational unity of a people to come.
Works Cited
Anderson, Perry. The Origins of Postmodernity. Verso, 1998.
Arensberg, Ann. “Seven Seconds.” Interview with Don DeLillo. Reprinted in Conversations with Don DeLillo, ed. Thomas DePietro. University Press of Mississippi, 2005. 40–46.
Cunningham, David. “Capitalist Epics: Abstraction, Totality and the Theory of the Novel.” Radical Philosophy 163 (September/October 2010), 11–23.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
DeLillo, Don. Americana. Houghton Mifflin, 1971.
DeLillo, Don. Cosmopolis. Scribner, 2003.
DeLillo, Don. Libra. Viking, 1988.
DeLillo, Don. Underworld. Scribner, 1997.
DeLillo, Don. White Noise. Viking Penguin, 1985.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 1991.
Travers, Thomas. Peripheralizing DeLillo: Surplus Populations, Capitalist Crisis, and the Novel. Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.