Don DeLillo understands bigness, economics and capitalism. The underworld of Underworld, its base, is economic; its epilogue, titled Das Kapital, underscores that. Structurally, or superstructurally, DeLillo’s novel makes capital. Underworld opens with the 1951 World Series game where the series-winning home run baseball Bobby Thomson hit starts as a fan’s treasure, fought for, won, then stolen. It flies through Underworld’s pages as an underground economic and cultural signifier, its value unifying characters’ desires.
The baseball circulates. Underworld is, in part, an examination of circulation whether marking a meeting of powerful men at that game — J. Edger Hoover, Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra — or the fates of lovers, Nick Shay and Klara Sax, waste analyst and artist, respectively. After an illicit sexual moment, they go their separate ways, taking other into the world as memory.
Memory is another underworld and, in Underworld, it functions as a kind of currency. When intact, memory is as hard as Thompson’s home-run ball, with its strange history that only fans and collectors care about. Along with the baseball, the atomic bomb, atomic energy, and waste blow treacherously. Taste as human excess and folly must be managed, like memory, and hangs in characters’ minds and in the air. If there’s an enemy in Underworld, it’s forgetfulness, the denial of history.
DeLillo’s ambition in Underworld is to join the history of post-war America as a series of events to certain characters, who are shaped more by circumstance than psychology. Hoover’s power and paranoia, the Zapruder film, the firebombing of black churches, the Cuban missile crisis, Lenny Bruce, AIDS, cyberspace — events and things collect and make history. Terrifying weapons, mute objects and traumatic memories proliferate. Underworld’s a proliferation, or a collection, of 40 years of great issues and small ones. DeLillo seems to have wanted to put everything he could into it, as if a book could be a time capsule, which demonstrates DeLillo’s ongoing concern with what we leave to the future, with history. While history may be a collective memory that must be kept alive, fiction plays its role in keeping records for posterity. Like many writers, DeLillo may be concerned, too, with what his work will mean for posterity.
These concerns are probably being fanned by fin-de-siècle anxiety. DeLillo’s previous novel, Mao II, focused on the place of the novelist, with a desire, perhaps, to “reclaim maximum possibility” for fiction. Appearing after the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, Mao II and its protagonist Bill Gray may have spoken for many writers: “In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence. I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Because we’re giving way to terror, to news of terror. news of disaster is the only narrative people need.” His interlocutor argues: “Are you crazy? Writers have long-range influence.”
Do writers have long-range influence? Long-range like missiles? Reading Underworld, one wonders if the author of Mao II decided that for a novel to make an impact now, it must be big in all senses, cover a wide swath of history over many pages, “to reconstruct the Whole.” Though the Whole has never existed and the Real is not available, these illusions nourish fiction. Fiction responds to a multitude of losses, fantasies and wishes. Underworld’s Lenny Bruce’s monologues, reconstructed from Bruce’s LPs and DeLillo’s memory, and its marking of actual events appear to address what Mao II’s Gray thinks novels must do — compete with, or at least challenge, the big, nightly news.
Whether it’s a conscious or unconscious gesture, making things big also responds to being scaled back and down, to holes that need filling or to significance that needs restoring, from an America that never was — innocent — to fiction’s shaky, minimized place. The circulation of books may be thwarted by capitalism looking for fast profits, but the meanings of books accrue, slowly, over time. Especially fiction. Fiction imagines lives and ideas and doesn’t immediately announce its value.
S is for Gertrude Stein and George Saunders
Who’s Afraid of Gertrude Stein?
Approaching Gertrude Stein’s writing critically is tricky. She strove to reshape literary conventions — syntax, language usage, narrative order and the sense of making sense — so any comment on Stein’s choices may already be rebuffed or unsettled in her poetics and practice. Actually, Stein is tricky, even a trickster. This may be why, as I read IDA and Stanzas in Meditation, both reissued in corrected, authoritative editions from Yale University Press, I remembered John Cale’s singing, “Nobody ever called Pablo Picasso an asshole.”
Gertrude Stein is called a genius, and through that brilliant lens her writing gets read or is not read, since awe and reverence are regularly met by dismissal and ridicule. Curiously, other writers are called geniuses, but the term doesn’t suffocate the reception of their writing as much. Obviously, readers know the extraordinary reputations of Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf, but some prefer Shakespeare’s Richard III to Richard II or Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway to Orlando. They feel at liberty to discriminate.
Fewer readers imagine they can create their own Stein; many feel she is beyond their capacity to understand. Maybe this happened because she has been claimed as the sine qua non of the avant-garde. But she aligned herself with her time. Being part of the “contemporary composition” is at the heart of Stein’s trenchant essay, originally a lecture, “Composition as Explanation.” “The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything.” Stein inscribed novelty and surprise, through her special prose, to explain their appearance generation to generation and theorized why the new in art and writing may first be thought “ugly,” then later “beautiful” or “classic.” In that same essay, she declared: “No one is ahead of his time.” A future artist, Andy Warhol, said, “I’m part of my time, like rockets and television.” Uncannily, both Stein and Warhol occupy ambivalent places in American culture. They’re adored and also big jokes, both recognized even if only for a single utterance. Stein: “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” Warhoclass="underline" “In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” But people have called Warhol an asshole.
“For Stein,” Peter Nicholls writes in his important book, Modernisms: A Literary Guide, “language is to be grasped not as a means of reference to a world of objects which can be dominated, but as a medium of consciousness.” Stein’s works of consciousness depend on a reader’s consciousness, and unconscious-ness, to engage them. Otherwise, her writing is flat, dead, the rhythms and her play with words, her biting wit and clarity, lost.
IDA: A Novel was published by Random House in 1941, but excerpts appeared from 1937. The Yale reissue contains reviews from the day and versions from Stein’s notebooks, showing the novel’s development during those years. Its editor, Logan Esdale, has written an excellent introduction (and notes throughout) containing necessary biographical and textual information. One learns that fame was much on Stein’s mind when writing IDA, her own and Wallis Simpson’s, the American divorcee who became the Duchess of Windsor. Stein’s new fame rested on The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, published in America in 1933. The book became very popular and gained Stein a wide readership and celebrity. With the onset of fame, Stein questioned how her work would be received because of it.