Cowart, David. Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2003.

“The enigmatic quality of the DeLillo aesthetic suggests a recognition that language will always resist and betray attempts by the unsubtle to make it a transparent medium, a window on the world of things. Immured in language, one has, like Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, only words to play with—words that refer to other words and such reality as words may construct, but never to the world in its extralinguistic integrity. The named thing escapes” (Cowart 2).

“The achievement of a rare art, the perfectly hermetic fictions of such writers, resistant to all but self-referential meaning, invite recognition of a seemingly infinite tolerance of the image and its ontological pretensions. Two-dimensionality is the signature of the age. Americans live in an image culture, the artists of this age declare—not just a culture in which images proliferate, but a culture in which one recognizes no reality deeper than the image” (Cowart 3).

“He defines and embodies a culture wholly wedded to the image, a culture that has long since discarded the assumption that signifieds exist behind or beneath signifiers . . . signifiers referring to other signifiers in an endless chain, an infinite regression” (Cowart 3).

“The only reality knowable is the one shaped by endlessly self-referential sign systems and by an art committed to replication, pastiche, and the commodified “mechanical reproduction” that Benjamin describes in his most famous essay. In short, the age of the simulacrum” (Cowart 4).

“DeLillo in no sense retreats from or becomes less engaged with language; rather, he recognizes and examines the way images themselves constitute a semiotic. DeLillo contemplates more and more of the sign systems—including the cinematic—that form branches of the language tree. Language subsumes image” (Cowart 4).

“Thus DeLillo does not defer to the poststructuralist view of language as a system of signifiers that refer only to other signifiers in infinite regression. DeLillo’s text in fact undermine this postmodernist gospel. Fully aware that language is maddeningly circular, maddeningly subversive of its own supposed referentiality, the author nonetheless affirms something numinous in its mysterious properties. He intimates, for example, that one can discern some larger signification in the naïve constructions of those learning to speak” (Cowart 5).

“DeLillo, by the same token, imagines a symbiosis, a defining mutualism, of speaker and spoken. Language fosters subjectivity, which, however fluid, is another word for the sentience that makes us human. This study centers, then, on DeLillo’s interrogations of language and on the fictive strategies by which the author contrives to make language yield up its secrets” (Cowart 6).

“Where the modernists saw myth as some kind of universal, instinctive truth, a DeLillo or a Pynchon starts from a recognition of the essential factiousness of myth. From their postmodern perspective, they understand that myth reflects only the over-hungry needs of the psyche” (Cowart 8).

“Readers respond to the acuity with which DeLillo captures the spirit of a postmodern America highly resistant to being understood in the old ways, but they find his fictions strangely protean, slippery, difficult to arrest in stable postures and meanings. In short, they find DeLillo relatively easy to read but no so easy to sort out. He avoids thematic directness” (Cowart 9).

“One must honor DeLillo’s instinct for indirectness by avoiding critical or theoretical schematicism—even when the schema illustrates the author’s thematic catholicity” (Cowart 9).

“By the same token, even more eclectic applications of theory require caution—for to overdo theoretical readings of a writer like DeLillo can be an exercise in the redundant and the pretentious. Theory always threatens to make merely less immediate the fictive praxis of a DeLillo, a Pychon, an Ishmael Reed, or an Octavia Butler” (Cowart 10).

“But instead of arguing that theory has something of its own to contribute to our understanding—or suggesting that we dispense with theory and simply read DeLillo—[Noel] King urges us to divide our attention between DeLillo and the theoretical discourse that parallels him. To that end, he juxtaposes ‘quotations from the novel and quotations from the cultural criticism of writers such as Barthes, Eco, Virilio’ because ‘the roles of novelist and cultural critic must be regarded as, at all times interchangable’ (76). In his view, ‘We now inhabit a historical moment where . . . the binary opposition of the ‘fictional’ and the ‘critical’ must give way before something he calls the ‘ficto-critical’. But I resist the argument that artistic expression and critical discourse are somehow indistinguishable. However true technically, this assertion fails the test of experience. King errs to declare that theory has nothing to tell the DeLillo reader; he compounds error with self-contradiction when he insists on giving us some theory anyway—rather than falling respectfully silent. The point, of course, is that in rejecting premises such as King’s, critics and theorists alike reject the grounds of their own silencing. They see a writer of such enormous subtlety as DeLillo benefiting from a good deal of analysis and explication. The critic, in short, remains convinced that analysis can benefit from theory judiciously chosen and applied” (Cowart 10).

In any event, one must seek out truly cogent theory and consider the ways in which it brings the DeLillo text more sharply into focus” (Cowart 11).

“But one sometimes feels that certain of our most sophisticated ideas about language and representation are all artificial overlays of something better encountered in its ‘natural’ state—in the pages of writers innocent of theory but attuned, nonetheless, to the Zeitgeist. I cannot help thinking that the real test of such ideas is their suitability in glossing fictions such as DeLillo’s.” (Cowart 11).

“Theorists can nonetheless offer useful vocabularies to the critic, and to read DeLillo without theory would be to reinvent wheel after wheel. Theory gives criticism its common terms, some of them jargon, to be sure, but all conducive to discursive economy and precision. One must, at least initially, test DeLillo’s various fictions against elements of the postmodernist aesthetic defined by such theorists as Lacan, Derrida, and Baudrillard: the foreshortened view of history, the unmooring of subjectivity, radical discontinuity, replication and parody, awareness of the contructedness of all knowledge and all myths, resistance to closure, indifference to what Lyotard calls ‘the solace of good forms,’ and that ‘new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense’ that Frederick Jameson characterizes as ‘the supreme formal feature of all postmodernisms’” (Cowart 11).

“By this means one may hope to avoid the occasional sense that postmodern theory somehow ‘licenses the practice of imaginative postmodern artists . . . To read the best postmodern writers is to encounter, in a peculiarly cogent form, the very insights theory seeks to formulate. To read DeLillo, by the same token, is to encounter radical thinking that—specifically vis-à-vis the conceptualization of language—proves healthily resistant to certain of the more reductive elements in deconstruction and its theoretical congeners” (Cowart 12).

“It is open, eclectic, anti-hierarchical, and nondoctrinal” (Cowart 12).

“DeLillo undertakes an unflinching exploration here [in Mao II] of authorial disability during the reign of the simulacra” (Cowart 111).

“But as these languages come under scrutiny for their diversity and viability, the vision is less of healthy, democratic, Bakhtinian heteroglossia than of a Darwinism of discourse: some dialects—notably those that nourish ‘the language of self’ (8)—survive precariously on this or that linguistic Galapagos, while others (discourses of media, consumption, capital) proliferate like starlings” (Cowart 112).

“Bill himself, working ‘the old spare territories of the word’ (142), remarks that ‘every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it.’ Struggling to get to that truth, the writer ‘matches with language’ (48). Karen Janney suspects that ‘everything she saw was some kind of vernacular.’ Momentarily an Emersonian eyeball, she discovers a visual language, ‘a dialect of the eye’ (175). Among street people, she hears ‘a language everywhere that sounded like multilingual English’ (149), for ‘it is hard to find a language for unfortunates. One word out of place and their eyes call up a void’ (145). As she tries to speak with this derelict population, Karen finds that she cannot understand their language completely, unwritable and interior, the rag-speak of shopping carts and plastic bags, the language of soot’ (180)” (Cowart 112).

“DeLillo has remarked that ‘true terror is a language and a vision,’ and here he characterizes Beirut itself as language, its squalor, suffering, torture, civil war, and endless, violent death all giving tongue to the misery of the ‘nowhere’ population that keeps its head down but still lifts an inarticulate cry from doorways and bombed-out cellars” (Cowart 113).

“Bill perishes first in the simple exhaustion of his talent. But, more insidiously, he suffers death as the victim of societal indifference or cultural forces that turn him and the books he writes into commodities” (Cowart 115).

“Some link this authorial dissipation to the death of authority in its most general sense, the death that comes about with the undermining, in poststructuralist thought, of every foundational principle” (Cowart 115).

“Consciously or unconsciously engaged in furthering the politics of mass will, the crowds that DeLillo depicts in this novel—cultist, soccer fans, Chinese communists, Shiites mad for Khomeini, TV audiences, even certain kinds of mass-market readers—variously seek to deny or repress individual subjectivity. They express, too, a millennial desire to escape from the present, from the self, and from history” (Cowart 119).

“The Chinese dictator, in other words, effected something ironically identical to the dream of every marketing and sales manager, creating instant ‘product recognition’ and putting his name and ideas into the mouths of millions” (Cowart 120).

“Now political ideology, art, show business, advertising—all prove to be part of a larger economy or grammar of the image” (Cowart 120-121).

“Modern advertising and the consumer consciousness it shapes makes of the many one—one in taste, one in appetite, one in vision, one in values” (Cowart 121).

“Partly through state-sanctioned art, Mao strove, like Hitler, to produce assembly-line human beings, and in Mao II DeLillo problematizes such replication in a number of ways” (Cowart 121).

“He parodies this aesthetic of mechanical reproduction in his own quasi-lithographic scenes of thematic iteration and reiteration” (Cowart 121).

“This transition from books to paintings seems natural enough—one follows a young man who likes graphic as well as literary art. But DeLillo improves on mere plausibility. In the progression from bookstores to art museum to pictures of a dictator, DeLillo presents pieces of a larger puzzle—a puzzle that subsumes civil war in Beirut, that ‘millennial image mill’ (229), and the chiliastic fantasies of organizatitons like the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church” (Cowart 122).

“Noting the extent to which even books can be made to fuel consumer desire, the creator of this scene emphasizes not bibliophilia but merchandising. Hardly a temple consecrated to the unique and holy work of literary art, this is the bookstore as Disneyfied simulacrum. Whatever aura exists here (and it extends even to an erotics of book covers) is co-opted by commercial calculation” (Cowart 122).

“Warhol called his studio ‘The Factory’” (Cowart 123).

“His ‘Little Red Book of Quotations’ is the ultimate bestseller (162), a book that enjoys a new kind of ‘aura’ (to use the term that DeLillo often favors, though usually in a somewhat different sense than Benjamin). It is the bible of ultimate conformity, the icon of crowd mentality” (Cowart 123).

“Taking as his subject the death of an author, DeLillo himself embodies the still viable will to create, which his character Bill Gray cannot sustain” (Cowart 127).

“But postmodern discontinuity is more radical—it is not susceptible to integration. When DeLillo writes a paragraph full of verbless nouns, as in the example above, he expresses something more than a nostalgia for lost cultural wholeness; he invokes ideas of presence that cannot, as Derrida has shown, coexist with expression in the deceptive and misleading medium of standard grammatical structures. One must look, then, to the all-nominative construction—Wittgenstein calls it the ‘elliptical’ or ‘degenerative’ sentence—and to whatever binds noun to noun or name to name therein (name and noun do not differ etymologically: both derive from Latin nomen, Greek onoma). According to philosophers of language, this universal binding ingredient is still, as in standard sentences, the copula—but a copula that derives special force from being effaced, elided, under erasure” (Cowart 164).

“In ‘The Supplement of Copula,’ in which he critiques the discussion of this subject by Benveniste, Heidegger, and others, Derrida ponders the relation of language to ‘the transcendental value of ‘Being’ and argues (characteristically) that certain forms of reality can only be present when linguistically absent (195). ‘The absence of verb ‘to be,’ the absence of this single lexeme, is absence itself,’ he observes. ‘The lexical-semantic value of ‘to be,’ then, depends on the ‘semantic value of absence’ (201). Thus in verbless constructions he descries intimations of precisely the semantic fullness whose loss Heidegger laments. This presence, which absconds when ‘named,’ is Being itself, which Derrida has characterized (in Benveniste’s words) as ‘the condition of all predicates’ (195)” (Cowart 165).

“Like Derrida, DeLillo seems to construe as transcendental and even spirituality enabling the idea of presence that cannot be represented directly. It may be, then, that DeLillo’s paragraph of nominative sentences allows one to think in new ways about the familiar modernist problem of connecting (‘Andreas,’ asks a character in The Names, ‘is it absolutely necessary to know verbs? Must we know verbs?’ [63]). At the same time, more importantly, it engages the postmodern problem of representation. DeLillo, that is, recognizes an important affinity between the gap-ridden mechanics of signification and the essential feature of literary art—its indirection” (Cowart 166).

“A camera is commonly the means of creating an illusory presence: it is the means of producing the sign of something absent, a photograph. But this camera is itself a sign, the sign of the absent photographer. Aimed at a work of art that exemplifies the old idea of uniqueness and ‘aura’ (a word DeLillo is fond of), it is also the emblem of ‘art in the age of mechanical reproduction’” (Cowart 166).

“the very distinction between Being and being-known” (Cowart 166).

“DeLillo’s foregrounding of the noun/name, then, along with his stylistic gestures toward verblessness, asyndeton, simple juxtaposition may, of course, have nothing to do with what Derrida unblushingly calls ‘transcendental’ import” (Cowart 167).

“Owen devotes himself to what theorists would call grammatology—a term proposed by Derrida to suggest that writing, not speech, is the true model for all structures of signification, all semiotic difference, all language” (Cowart 168).

“(for the root here, arche, as some of Derrida’s usages reminds us, means not merely ‘ancient’ but original)” (Cowart 168).

“Owen seems, then, to have arrived independently at Derrida’s insight regarding the paradoxical anteriority of writing to speech. Derrida, one recalls, deconstructs the notion of writing as unnatural supplement to speech; in fact, he deconstructs the logic of supplementation in all its forms. The existence of supplements (and frames and parerga) argues against the completeness of the things supplemented. The distinction between text and commentary breaks down, along with such distinctions as work and frame or—more to the point—those invoked to defend the idea that speech, as self-sufficient vehicle of ‘presence,’ is superior to writing, supposedly doomed to rehearse ‘absence.’ Derrida shows that all language is writing. All language, that is, masks absence as presence and endlessly defers the encounter with the thing named. Critiquing the doctrine of writing’s inferiority to speech, Derrida makes writing the umbrella concept for all language” (Cowart 168).

“Owen comes to that insight of the postmodern episteme: there is only surface, only language, only words, only ‘characters’—all of them in a fiendish conspiracy against fixed meanings, final signification, the very idea of depth. Owen’s experience suggests a terrible irony in the famous opening of the Gospel of John: “En arche en ho logos.” In the beginning was the word—and nothing else” (Cowart 168-169).

“But where the cultist may think they can recover, as with some alchemical formula, the absolute bond between word and thing, Owen is trapped in the opposite condition, where one lives only with epigraphy, writing on the surface, never with whatever exists under that surface. Owen in chains” (Cowart 169).

“So does DeLillo come to insist, over and over, on the something numinous and redemptive in language. DeLillo trusts the medium in which he works and has his creative life. Conceptualizing language at some frontier of the immutable and the ephemeral, DeLillo seems actually—in this matter and in others—to tease the reader with what one might call imitations of essentiality” (Cowart 180).