DeLillo and Things that Become Other Things

Thanks to all who chose my novel as the summer's Read This title, and thanks for giving me this chance to guest blog on a topic of my choice. As for yesterday's sausage thoughts by Richard Nash: that's part of what's great about working with him and Soft Skull.
    I'll attempt to do here what I've seen Litblog Co-op members do so remarkably well, which is to write a brief informal essay on a recently published novel about which I have strong positive feelings, namely, Falling Man by Don DeLillo-an author no longer struggling to be noticed but whose books routinely used to sell fewer than 5,000 copies. This won't be a review but a sketch of a few ways I see that novel accomplishing its task of signification.
    One of the qualities of DeLillo's prose I've admired since I began reading him more than a dozen years ago is its analytic rigor, the way he can use a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph to bore into the texture and meaning of contemporary life. And one of the grammatical constructions he uses repeatedly as the vehicle for his insights is apposition, which is when two nouns or noun phrases, usually adjacent to each other in a sentence, have the same referent and stand in the same syntactical relation to the rest of the sentence, as in, “George W. Bush, the worst president in U.S. history, is on vacation.” Apposition allows a writer two or more passes in a row at coming up with a verbal equivalent for a given phenomenon, wherein each pass amplifies the others. The result can be a kind of verbal Cubism, a grammatical form of hopefulness in which each periphrastic utterance brings you closer to the truth of the subject under discussion.
    In a scene that takes place early in Falling Man, shortly after September 11, 2001, Keith, who escaped from his office on the upper floors of the north tower and is recuperating from minor injuries, is portrayed as follows: “He began to think into the day, into the minute. It was being here, alone in time, that made this happen, being away from routine stimulus, all the streaming forms of office discourse.” There are several felicitous turns of phrase and modifications here-DeLillo is one of my favorite wielders of a comma among contemporary writers-but I will limit myself to suggesting that not only is the first appositive phrase, “routine stimulus,” given specific embodiment in the second, “all the streaming forms of office discourse,” but the repetitions of vowels and consonants that constitute the sentence's melody serve as acoustical underscore to the semantic doubling of the apposition. In other words, part of what makes DeLillo good is that his sentences sound good, and that the sound reinforces the meaning by giving it a physical dimension, as in music or poetry.
    Or there's a passage about midway through the book where DeLillo describes lunchtime walks Keith takes with his best friend and officemate, Rumsey-before the terrorist attack-in which he tells us that Keith, being taller than his friend, “saw male pattern baldness develop in Rumsey, seemingly week by week.” And then: “Baldness in Rumsey, as it progressed, was a gentle melancholy, the pensive regret of a failed boy.” The mood of the first appositive phrase, “gentle melancholy,” gets its own mini-biography in the second, “the pensive regret of a failed boy.” The more striking equivalence in this sentence, though, is not the apposition but the way the concrete subject (baldness) and the abstract objects (gentle melancholy, pensive regret) are melded together by the verb was, becoming each other.
    So DeLillo the rigorous analyst of the texture of contemporary life is also a guy who regularly makes stuff be other stuff that it shouldn't logically be.
    A truly wacky apposition, the kind that so frustrates DeLillo's grassroots base of ardent detractors, and is exactly the sort of thing about his work that excites me, comes at the end of a paragraph about the erotic charge between Keith and his wife, Lianne, at the beginning of their acquaintance: “The rented beach house was sex, entering at night after the long stiff drive, her body feeling welded at the joints, and she'd hear the soft heave of the surf on the other side of the dunes, the thud and run, and this was the line of separation, the sound out there that marked an earthly pulse in the blood.” Well, “entering” is a dangling participle, among other grammatical infelicities, and while “thud and run” and “the sound out there” are clearly two phrases describing the same thing, how is either of them a “line of separation”? But DeLillo throughout his work has lavished attention on uses of language that aren't correct or don't quite make sense. His people make a hash of grammar-“Which, by the way, did you get my postcard?”-while he investigates everyday vernacular's routine betrayals of its own presumed sense-making efficacy-“Light-skinned black woman,” for example, or, in reference to the physical therapy Keith does for his injury from the tower, “He used the uninvolved hand to apply pressure to the involved hand.” DeLillo's people struggle valiantly with or against language as a way to get a foothold in their own chaotic lives, their insurmountable mortality, the terrifying world that is often the subject of his novels-as in this conjugation-gone-mad, the heartbreaking final written remark of an Alzheimer's patient with whom Lianne has been conducting weekly writing sessions: “Do we say goodbye, yes, going, am going, will be going, the last time go, will go.”
    Moments of verbal nonsense and misapprehension are DeLillo's way of representing the mind's-even the intact mind's-logic-transcending representation of the world. An apposition that violates the strict rules of grammar and sense replaces them with intuition's urge to find equivalence in disparate things. A mid-century Italian still life of some bottles in Lianne's mother's apartment reminds Lianne of the fallen towers, and, later, of her now-deceased mother. And the novel itself uses verbal quirks to unite disparate characters in resemblance: Lianne, to stave off Alzheimer's, counts backward from one hundred by sevens; her boy, Justin, refuses to speak except in monosyllables; Hammad, a 9/11 terrorist, recites repetitive prayers; Keith and his poker buddies take deep satisfaction in saying the words “five-card stud” at the beginning of each game, though this is the only version of poker they play.
    The correspondences and equivalencies in Falling Man are myriad. Of course, creating resonances among diverse characters, events, ideas, and objects is one of the tried and true ways novels make sense, but the job of any novel is to bend the verbal and thematic patterning to the shape of the events it seeks to make known-to shape form to content, if we may pretend for a moment that these are separable entities. And indeed, the interconnectedness of people and events does have a singular quiddity in this novel written by a man who used to be called “the chief shaman of the paranoid school of American fiction” (though no one seems to want to call him that anymore, maybe because what might once have looked like paranoia is now seeming-to paraphrase another 20th-century shaman, William Burroughs-more like a realistic assessment of the facts). This is a book about, among other things, how a single large-scale violent act altered the world by forcing things together: East and West, Islam and Christianity, fundamentalism and atheism, rage and contentment, worship and card game, husband and wife (ironically) and, of course, airplane and tower.
    DeLillo describes this last awful convergence at the end of Falling Man in one of the most powerful passages anywhere in his work. He marks the moment itself with a jarring and disorienting violation of grammar in the kind of sentence that makes Falling Man equal to the daunting task of limning that terrible day.

Comments

[Bookdwarf]

I read DeLillo's book but hadn't thought of it in that way. You seem to really focus on the finer points of grammar. Do you feel that DeLillo's work has influenced your own writing? And how conscious are you of your own grammar when you write?

[carolyn]

Matthew - thanks for a thoughtful essay on Falling Man, which I just read this summer. A longtime Delillo fan, I am a sucker for his cubist language, as you call it. But I wondered if Falling Man was indeed equal to dealing with 9-11 in fiction, and for me, ultimately, it was not.

One of the major frustrations I had with the book was in the texture of the language (which you've given such careful analysis) my problems was specifically in how all the characters spoke. Their broken grammar is no problem -- geez, how many stops and starts do we hear/speak throughout the day -- but in the fact that they all spoke exactly the same way. Each character's dialog was exactly like the others', and all of them seemed to be talking in the close-third narrative voice used for Kevin, which was an awful lot like Lianne's.

So since you've paid such careful attention to language, did you notice the similar dialog in Falling Man? (Maybe it's just me). And, from the authorial perspective, do you think others can pay homage to his writing style without simply creating Delillo pastiche?

[Jacob Russell]

A fine analysis on the transformative power of apposition in Delillo's prose.

Defenders of book grammar in fiction remind me of the armed guards in those little outhouses by the driveways at the borders of Gated Communities. They stand posted to serve the interests of literature as the guards stand to serve the interests of greater humanity.

In the attacks on Delillo's prose, I perceive a deeply conservative and parochial fear of contingency, of the conditioned and relative nature of authority. His sentences tear down the hedgerows and fences that protect us from an open and unguarded encounter with the world; by freeing us from _comprehention_ they expose us to _apprehension_, which the conservative mind experiences as intolerable anxiety.

I hope that Mathew Sharpe won't mind my linking this post on my blog, and perhaps quoting a few passages.

[Steven Augustine]

"Their broken grammar is no problem --(...) -- but (...) they all spoke exactly the same way."

But are characters in DeLillo ever really "characters"...as much as they are lines of reasoning?

[Matthew Sharpe]

Megan and Carolyn and Jacob, thanks for your comments and questions. Megan, yes, DeLillo's work has influenced me in a number of ways. The first book of his I read was White Noise, and I was struck by how anthropological it was: how he was doing a kind of poetic ethnography of campus life, small town life, American life; how he was attempting to figure out the meaning of TV, of supermarkets, of tourism ("the most photographed barn in the world"); how he was trying to understand the modern American nuclear family with its private language, its house shapes, even the way moms and dads and kids position their bodies in relation to each other. And of course fear, modern fear, DeLillo's big subject, the fear that gets more primitive the more advanced civilization supposedly becomes, as he has said.

And then I was also struck by the rhythms and melodies of his sentences, the beauty of this combination of foregrounded lyricism and analytical urgency. My father is a publisher and my mother and older sister are musicians, so attentiveness to the musicality of language, the possibilities for the sound of language to be in itself the bearer of meaning, these things are in my blood, you might say, and DeLillo is one of the writers--though by no means the only writer--who offered me a model for how to do this. And Carolyn, to answer your last question first, I think it would be a bad idea for younger writers to pay homage to his prose style with their own, but the standard of beauty and incisiveness that his style represents can be really useful.

Am I conscious of my own grammar when I write? Yes and no. Writing for me is a paradoxical activity in which abandon and control are always in tension. I guess I’ve tried to learn the bejesus out of the grammatical and syntactical possibilities of English so that when I'm writing, the sentences will flow out my fingertips without too much interference from the part of my mind that's concerned about the rules.

Carolyn, about the question of the characters in Falling Man all talking like each other and like the third-person narrator of the book, I agree and disagree. On the disagreement side, I think each of them says things none of the others would say. When Lianne chides her mother for disrespecting Keith's wildness only because he's not an artist by saying, "Tell me this, what kind of painter gets to behave more unspeakably, figurative or abstract?," only she could have said that line. When Keith's adulterous lover, Florence, greets him at Macy's by telling him he's right on time and he replies, "You're the one who's on time. I've been here for hours, riding the escalators," that's Keith's sui generis sense of humor. So I do find each of them to be highly specific and individuated characters, and I find their lives and considerable struggles moving. But here's where I agree with you: DeLillo is an emphatic stylist, and his distinctive cadences do inflect every sentence he writes, so yeah, the way his people talk is stylized, not naturalistic and, I think, not meant to be. I can see where this would frustrate you, and maybe prevent you from connecting with the characters, but it didn't frustrate me. A way more wacky version of this business where the characters talk the way no real person could, and kind of all sound like some refraction of the author, is Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, which I also love. I guess I'm just built that way.

Jacob, though DeLillo does indeed seem to be reviled by conservative readers, I have writer friends whom I admire and respect who actively dislike DeLillo, and these are people who are themselves deeply thoughtful and adventurous writers, not at all conservative, so go figure. But I like your point about DeLillo's relation to authority. I am also inspired by him as someone resistant to accepted ways of thinking and seeing, and resistant to entrenched power. As he said in a 1993 interview in The Paris Review, "We have a rich literature. But sometimes it's a literature too ready to be neutralized, to be incorporated into the ambient noise. This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against power, who writes against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of assimilation. We're all one beat away from becoming elevator music."

This is a long-ass comment, sorry, I'm new to blogging.

[Johnny Origami]

I agree with your analysis of Delillo's syntax. I loved the overall structure of the novel. I also re-read Underworld right after, and can almost see Falling Man as an extention of that work...

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[John Caruso]

Although this analysis does indeed reveal the attention to detail evident in Delillo's writing--especially his obsession with language games and grammar--Sharpe's advocacy for Delillo's rigor and felicity is strained to the point of incredulity by the very examples he chooses. As in the paragraph below:

“He began to think into the day, into the minute. It was being here, alone in time, that made this happen, being away from routine stimulus, all the streaming forms of office discourse.” There are several felicitous turns of phrase and modifications here-DeLillo is one of my favorite wielders of a comma among contemporary writers-but I will limit myself to suggesting that not only is the first appositive phrase, “routine stimulus,” given specific embodiment in the second, “all the streaming forms of office discourse,” but the repetitions of vowels and consonants that constitute the sentence's melody serve as acoustical underscore to the semantic doubling of the apposition. In other words, part of what makes DeLillo good is that his sentences sound good, and that the sound reinforces the meaning by giving it a physical dimension, as in music or poetry.

Of what felicitous turns of phrase is Sharpe speaking? "being away from routine stimulus"? This is hardly felicitous. Routine stimulus is pure abstract jargon (another thing writer's like Delillo are fond of collecting in their prose, like so many pills on a worn out bed sheet). This kind of jargon has often served Delillo as ironic commentary on corporate culture. Here I think he's caught (not in a moment of true rigor) rather infusing a moment of supposed instrospection with his pomo habit of empty jargon speak. Something more like rigor mortus has set in. It can be just as easily, and more plausibly, argued that what Sharpe loftily describes as semantic doubling is little more than unfocused repitition of abstract generalities. For "routine stimulus" and "all the streaming forms of office discourse" not only lack the poetic sonority and music Sharpe claims for them, but they are utterly vague as language. Sharpe's claim that "the first appositive phrase, 'routine stimulus,' (is) given specific embodiment in the second, 'all the streaming forms of office discourse,'” is, if not false, at the very least unproven by Delillo's words. For, a the first phrase is not given specific embodiment at all, because the second phrase is not specific about what the "routine stimulus" is and is itself a merely lengthier abstraction with the generic word 'office' as the only concrete noun thrown in. With abstraction following abstraction here, it is more just to remark on a lack of precision and discipline here than an excess of rigor.

By the way, if you need more proof that Delillo was asleep at the office discourse streaming device, stimulus should have been the plural stimuli, given that he invokes "all the streaming forms" in the second appositive phrase. Sharpe is also about to make a claim about why Delillo's his favorite wielder of commas, but he limits himself to the strained and hollow claim above--a rather sensible restraint, given how conventionally the commas are used in this sentence. They merely string together a series of vague, repetitious and lame abstractions mascarading as penetrating thought and rigorous technique. Yet, barring any grounds in the quoted passage for such a claim and lacking explication to boot Sharpe lets his extraordinary claim stand.

Sharpe's last claim in this paragraph is not only grandiose, but one he asserts without proof:

"the repetitions of vowels and consonants that constitute the sentence's melody serve as acoustical underscore to the semantic doubling of the apposition. In other words, part of what makes DeLillo good is that his sentences sound good, and that the sound reinforces the meaning by giving it a physical dimension, as in music or poetry."

First of all we have ample grounds for disputing that Delillo's jargon filled sentence sounds good or felicitous. Certainly 'routine stimulus' and 'all the streaming forms of office discourse' are not phrases rich in either music or poetry. Second, given the abstract and nebulous nature of what Delillo is communicating how indeed do the consanants and vowel sounds reinforce "the meaning by giving it a physical dimension"? Even read aloud sound has no more physical dimension than words on a page. And it is doubtful how consonant or vowel sounds can reinforce meaning. At most, certain sounds can enhance a mood or feeling, but Sharpe neither describes which sounds in particular convey this reinforcing effect. He doesn't because he can't. Delillo's sentence itself as a structure fails to deliver anything worthy of so much "rigor". Even Delillo's core thought in this sentence, the effect of "being away from routine stimulus" does not deliver an insight. Read: "He began to think into the day, into the minute..." Again abstractions. What does Delillo mean by thinking into the day, into the minute? That is the part of the sentence and the thought he leaves unplumbed--the truly interesting part about a transformation in his consciousness of time and even of himself is supplanted by a language game. Whether or not this game is the result of rigor or mental laziness is open to interpretation, but the presence of such extroadinary claims of specific embodiment, semantic doubling, felicity, poetry and music for a sentence that defies all evidence of the kind does not engender the kind of trust one would wish to place in a reviewer of such obvious skill and intelligence. Alas sometimes the overly zealous advocate unwittingly confirms the wisdom of detractors.

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[Brad Listi]

Great piece. Thanks for reminding me what "apposition" is.

I still say that the opening section of 'Underworld' is one of the best pieces of fiction ever written.

Or: Certainly the best piece of fiction involving baseball ever written.

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[Sarah Collins Honenberger]

I"ve come so far from our article, through spam and wind and things that go bump in the night, I'm having trouble remembering what I felt so strongly about that I decided to comment. Ah, yes, refreshing to find a literary person, reviewer perhaps?, who listens for the melody of writing. Apostrophe placement aside, as a fiction writer, I find most writing today misses the mark completely on melody and I dance on my pillow when I find an author (or blogger) who pays attention to it. Thank you.

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