Page 26 →Chapter 2 Jargon and Genre

Americana is narrated by its main character, David Bell. David is a rising young talent in the broadcast media, where he writes and directs television programs. David narrates the novel at an unspecified date from an island off the coast of Africa. The reader is never entirely sure why David goes there, and the inattentive reader may become confused by the digressions, flashbacks, and even the minor anachronisms that David uses to tell his story (and perhaps to conceal his tracks). Simultaneously uncomfortable and intimate, David’s narration suggests the paradoxical moods that are a trademark of DeLillo’s later literary fiction. Comedy competes in it with violence, and parody with nostalgia. These contradictions also describe the novel’s narration, which is simultaneously distant (an effect often achieved by David’s use of a motion picture camera, and a third layer, in which he describes the film he has made) yet also near (particularly in the flashback scenes). DeLillo disperses this narrative structure over the course of the novel like a scaffold that holds the plot together. We are intended to see the works.

In addition to contrasting narrative moods, Americana also previews other features of DeLillo’s later novels. Its characters are obtuse yet familiar and always observant of detail. Discursions on history, media, disaster, and language, elements cherished by readers of his later fiction, are also present, if not always to the effect we find them in later writings.⁴ There is also a strong temptation, particularly in the early “network” chapters of the novel, to read the novel as a thinly veiled autobiography that DeLillo refined from his years Page 30 →of postgraduate work in the business of commercial advertising. The temptation is substantial and the context true, yet to indulge in biographical criticism is to risk overlooking how the novel portrays a terse romance between American business and American art (a romance whose tension is conveyed in Americana by David’s alternately cinematic and literary narration).⁵

The culture of American business is a context we find in many of DeLillo’s later works, culminating perhaps with the startling novel Cosmopolis (2003). It is an interest that begins with Americana. David Bell is a descendant of a pioneering family of American television advertising executives, and his genealogy offers him an “insider’s view” of the business (and one that he increasingly tries to mediate, using film, as if to turn the medium against itself). His narration is divided into four parts containing a total of twelve individual chapters. The narration combines descriptive prose with long sequences of dialogue, like a film that combines montage with mise-en-scène. As is more often the case in later works, there is some overlap in the relationship between characters and the media; for example, a line from a television commercial migrates to a character’s dialogue in the novel. Despite such recursive moments, several significant flashbacks, and the fact that we are never quite sure about the future from which David narrates the book, the novel is generally linear in its chronology as it follows events in David’s life over a period of several months during which he leaves the media business.

Part 1 of the novel contains five chapters. The setting is largely preoccupied with David’s New York City network office and social life, where he occasionally discusses his family and youth in the fictional town of Old Holly, New York, his college years in California, and the early days of his failed marriage in New York City. The main story line concerns David’s career. An emergent star in network programming, he recently produced a television show entitled “Soliloquy,” which was cancelled after a short-lived success. As the novel begins, he is planning a new documentary about the Native American Navajo tribe.

Two trademarks of DeLillo’s narrative technique appear in these first five chapters. The first is DeLillo’s uncanny sense of comedic timing when writing dialogue between characters. Vernacular speech often combines with technical jargon in scenes such as the following, where three of David’s colleagues (and rivals) trade ideas with and massage the ego of a network executive named Weede Deney:

“Apropos of Grace Tully,” Joyner said, “I have it on good authority that back in the old days she used to make it with some of the biggest names on the coast. Both coasts, in fact.”

Page 31 →“Let’s get together,” Weede said. “What I want to know at this juncture is whether the World War III idea is any more viable than it was a week ago in the light of the recent developments on the international scene.”

“At this juncture,” Richter James said, “the World War III idea is about forty percent less viable than it was a week ago.”

“That’s what I wanted to know.”

“What I want to know,” Walter Faye said, “is why we can’t show the toilet bowl in the effects-of-solitude prison thing.” (72)

DeLillo combines colloquial speech (“prison thing”) with caricatures of technical jargon (“forty percent less viable”) to elaborate the boardroom style. Thomas DiPietro has aptly described DeLillo’s “work as a mystery, born of a street-level love of language and sensitivity to images,” and DiPietro’s hyphenated phrase certainly describes the characterization of the meeting-room conversation.⁶ The scene consists only of dialogue, after all, thereby emphasizing the intonations of the characters’ speech (as when Richter James parrots Weede’s “at this juncture” phrase) and isolating the careless masculinity of their expressions. In addition, the paratactic and ironically repetitive dialogue spoken by DeLillo’s characters, seen here in an early form, often uses linguistic contrast to comedic ends. In this we hear the influence of novelists such as Heller, Pynchon, and Vonnegut, whom literary critics disparagingly described during the 1960s as “Black Humor” writers (a phrase that does not indicate the linguistic variety that is often the basis of dialogue in their works). In DeLillo’s breakthrough novel White Noise, this style of dialogue is refined to unprecedented effect, combining side-splitting vernacular humor with delicate reflections on the random, mortal consequences of human disasters. It should be noted that DeLillo is a perfectionist about such matters, so much so that he removed certain passages from Americana before Penguin reprinted the novel in 1989.⁷

Following the intimate and comedic merging of common speech with boardroom jargon, DeLillo’s second achievement in the early chapters of Americana is that the novel conveys a sharp contrast between the narrator and his environment. The result is not merely comic or technical: by stressing David’s narrative distance, it imbues the novel with philosophical distance and affect. In the passage above, David’s narrative remove brings the absurd details of the business culture into focus, a technique that David Cowart rightly notes belongs to an earlier school of American and European fiction concerned with the “alienation” of young (mostly male) characters.⁸ While it functions here to comic ends, that same distance will later be the source of more sober reflection. Slowly but surely, David drifts along this initial Page 32 →detachment and out of the world of business. This inexorable motion, which continues outside the frame of the book through some unknown locale and date, begins with these simple observations on the interpersonal dynamics of office culture. The comedy eventually dissolves and gives way to a story about David’s more sincere artistic ambitions, and a more serious novel.

The novel expresses David’s metaphorical distance in these early chapters as a motion through space. This is typical of DeLillo’s fiction, wherein novels that begin in the eastern United States then journey westward, leaving behind the conventional postmodern milieu of the cities to enter rural, desert, or suburban spaces (see, for example, his 1978 novel Running Dog). At the end of part 1, David and two friends—Pike and Sullivan—leave New York City. Pike is a business owner and an older man who hangs around David’s younger crowd. Sullivan is a sculptor with a studio on the west side of Greenwich Village; she and David have an implied romantic attachment. They leave together to pick up a camper from Bobby Brand, a Vietnam veteran and aspiring novelist who lives in Maine, with the intention of driving it to the Arizona location where David is expected to shoot his documentary. The novel shifts here from a parody of American business to a road novel, with David occasionally reminding the reader that he is narrating from an indeterminate place and slightly more specific time. (Some critics argue that the novel’s implicit date of narration is the year 1999.) As the movement begins, it is as though the reader were simultaneously traveling across geographic space and literary genres (the latter effect becoming more pronounced in his subsequent novel, End Zone).

Part 2 of Americana deviates from the friends’ trip into a single long and fragmentary chapter. It starts with David narrating from the island in the future and continues through a series of flashbacks. Most of these depict his hometown of Old Holly. A series of vignettes, each describing a friend, family member, or event in David’s life, unspool over the chapter’s course. Cinematic techniques begin to emerge as narrative devices. For instance, the chapter’s first page suggests he is projecting and watching a film on his island; on the last page, David and his sister Jane watch television commercials with their father on a projector in the basement of the family’s home.

While part 2 of the novel implicitly moves forward (David is narrating from the future, but may be watching footage shot on the road trip to Arizona) and backward (David’s youth), part 3, which consist of five chapters, returns to the four friends’ cross-country journey (Bobby Brand decides to join them). A second deviation takes place when the characters stop in a small midwestern town named Fort Curtis. (It is implied to be close to Chicago, yet it is presumably a fictional town, although there is a historic military fort named Fort Curtis in Arcadia, Missouri.) Anachronistic and quaint, Fort Page 33 →Curtis seems like a Norman Rockwell painting come alive. David recognizes in it the vestige of his small-town youth in Old Holly. He abandons his documentary project. The turn is sudden but plausible: David was impulsive and unpredictable as a student filmmaker in college. In addition, he cannot resist using cinematic terms to describe himself and his life. Because the town resonates with him in powerful ways, he decides to use his equipment to make an experimental, autobiographical film using residents as doubles for people in his New York family and life. To quote the collegiate football player who is the narrator in DeLillo’s subsequent novel End Zone, David wishes “to remake memory as a work of art” (70).

In part 3 David recruits townspeople to act in his film. They include a hardware store owner who fought in the Pacific battles of World War II (as did David’s father). David recruits the veteran’s son as well as an aspiring male actor and his girlfriend, who works in the local community center. Combining random street footage of the town with carefully staged interviews in the local hotel room he has modified, David’s film re-creates scenes from his Mount Holly youth, with the actors playing the parts of David, his ex-wife, his father, and so on. In this way part 3 of Americana shows David making an experimental film about his own life, or at least his memory of it, as the film he makes in part 3 comments upon the vignettes he narrated in part 2. David’s film eventually consumes him. He leaves the broadcast network. The film drives the friends apart. Bobby and Sullivan are revealed to be carrying on an affair, and they return east with Pike. David continues west with his film reels; he is dislocated, a drifter in time and space.

Like part 2 of the novel, part 4 consists of a single long chapter. (DeLillo frequently alternates long chapters in his novels with sequences of shorter ones, bringing to mind the cinematic distinction between montage and mise-en-scène.) In this chapter, David continues traveling west, where instead of finding meaning he descends into a violent and dystopian world. Picked up by Clevenger (a man who sells auto parts around the Southwest and owns a race-car track in Texas), David crosses the Plains and the Rockies. Landscapes reminiscent of Nabokov’s Lolita appear: they are littered with motels, truck stops, and communes inspired by science fiction. Everything appears vulnerable, transient. The novel’s weird hilarity and cinematic nostalgia turn cold, even sinister. In the conclusive scenes, Clevenger hires David to work on his Texas race track. Upon arriving there, a scatological, drunken orgy breaks out among the employees (reminiscent of scenes from Salò, Pasolini’s infamous and brilliant 1975 film). Leaving the track, David is picked up on the road by a one-armed sailor who threatens to rape him. After escaping to Dealey Plaza in Dallas, David flies back to New York, and the novel ends.

Page 34 →As noted earlier, David narrates the novel from an indeterminate island on an African coast. The fact that he does so implies an additional movement, from New York across the Atlantic. Hence, David’s age and location at the time of the novel’s narration are not entirely clear. Along the way, the attentive reader will pick up clues to David’s age and the years of events that take place in the novel. We know he was divorced at the age of twenty-three, and that at one point he refers to himself in the past tense as having been twenty-nine years of age; at other points he is twenty-seven years old, and thirty. The disorienting, anachronistic effect defers David’s story to a future from which David projects his life onto the past. The answer to “When is it set?” may very well be “Here and now” on an endless loop. The answer is not as important as the means by which the question is posed. DeLillo clearly uses cinema as a trope to frame literary narrative, and the novel is always indicating its own construction through David’s cinematic narration. As a metafiction, Americana offers a strong early example of DeLillo’s interest in combining and adapting techniques from different arts. One might even call it mixed media, were it not for the fact that its primary medium is linguistic.

Hence DeLillo regards the blank page as a sort of narrative surrogate for the film screen. On it David projects his life. The effect is augmented by the doubling features of David’s film, which seeks to visualize the novel. Peter Boxall recently noted in a lucid summary of the matter: “The idea that animates David’s film . . . is that one might use this power [of the motion picture camera] to produce a new kind of autobiography that transfigures one’s life rather than simply recording it. David is imagining here a new version of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927) that uses the annihilating power of the camera in the place of the recuperative power of narrative.”⁹

Boxall’s comments sum up the matter, but they also raises a difficult question that appears frequently in readings of DeLillo’s fiction: is DeLillo a late modernist, or a postmodernist who recycles literary modernism in the way that a sculptor might recycle everyday objects into “found art”? DeLillo’s use of modernist narrative techniques and how he incorporates cinematic elements into his fiction constitutes a field of extensive literary inquiry, and not only in the study of DeLillo’s works. When a character refers to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in Americana, critics prompt readers to consider the author’s influences on DeLillo (and call on DeLillo’s citation of those influences to support the claim). The matter at hand involves source studies but only to a limited degree. (A character invokes Charles Dickens in White Noise, but no one would cite Dickens as a major influence on DeLillo’s fiction.) The more prominent question that arises in such moments is that of whether DeLillo’s “embrace of a modernist avant-garde,” as Philip Nel calls it, can be regarded Page 35 →as an extension of modernism or whether it falls under the postmodern predilection for “recycling” elements of previous cultures (in this case, literary modernism of the first half of the twentieth century, including but not limited to writers such as Proust and Joyce).¹⁰

Irrespective of varied positions on the matter, the critical debate surrounding modernism and postmodernism in Americana nonetheless illuminates how David, his film, and the novel itself inhabit a world in which people, art, and business have become unmoored. Drifting in and through genre, history, and memory, DeLillo’s Americana ambitiously attempts to render that very same motion into something artful. It does not suggest a concession to the disruptive forces that shape contemporary American life but, rather, a willful attempt to render those forces into aesthetic forms that would affirm that art and the artist might work in critical relation to a time-bending and dislocating consumerism. This is true even in the lighter early chapters of the novel, where DeLillo’s focus is fixed on the dialogue of interpersonal capitalism. There is always a serious intonation in those scenes whereby not only persons but also office machines (elevators, mimeographs, telephones), office décor (coffee tables), and even entire city neighborhoods (Gramercy Park, Greenwich Village) carry a hidden and elusive significance. David senses it, seeks it out, and discovers in his attempt to find it (through cinematic re-creations of his memory) that wild, dangerous relics (memories, outcasts, drifters) inhabit the spaces between such objects, and that he too has become one of those things. Whether considering office décor, characters, idyllic small towns, or sprawling, opulent cities, Americana is very much a novel about a young man who attempts to make his art at a remove from the absurdity of American business culture. DeLillo’s later novels will not be so diffident as Americana with respect to that relationship. It should be noted, however, that Americana stands apart from its precursors in literary fiction about American business. Certainly, it shares Sinclair Lewis’s eye for small-town detail and combines it with Jon Dos Passos’s penchant for using narrative techniques borrowed from cinema. Yet it departs from those traditions in significant ways. It combines technical and profane variants of American speech as if to provide a new language for a new form of capitalism, a parlance suited for the staccato frenzy of a society moving away from small-business commerce and even large corporations into an age of ephemeral information and images. In that emergent world, slogans and sound bites jump into the consciousness without source or warning. They colonize memory and distort history, personal or otherwise. In trying to detach himself from that world, David Bell would appear to seek, perhaps naively, a sanctuary in the cinema, only to find it ironically in the novel.

Page 36 →If our hypothetical bookstore patron were to continue reading DeLillo’s subsequent novels of the 1970s, that reader would encounter many of the strands developed or introduced by Americana. Characters will continue to offer commentary on how media technologies alter literary-narrative experience and art in general (although not always using the cinematic techniques that structure David’s narration in opposition to the world of television advertising). By different means the goal would be the same: characters in DeLillo’s novels would seek what Frank Lentricchia later described as “the desire for a universal third person” that suggests a “new self because a new world.”¹¹ While individual characters in DeLillo’s fiction might not ever attain the perspective of that universal third person, our reader would move closer to it, as each of DeLillo’s novels would provide new, increasingly kaleidoscopic narratives of the relations between people, words, and things, relations by and against which we measure the spectrum of contemporary experience.

Don DeLillo’s second novel is entitled End Zone (1972). Where Americana might have appealed to the cineaste and the reader of experimental fiction, End Zone appealed, at least on its surface, to another audience: the sports fan interested in genre fiction. On the one hand, it extends many of the elements of Americana. First, it has obvious structural similarities. It is divided into three parts, with the first and third parts sectioned into short chapters; the middle part, a centerpiece of sorts, consists of a single long chapter. (We find the same tripartite structure in the later White Noise.) Second, it resembles its predecessor in that it is narrated by a young man. Here he is named Gary Harkness, and like David Bell, he hails from a small town in upstate New York. Gary also seeks to define himself by a combination of activities—in this case, collegiate football and academic life.

Third, the novel takes place and is narrated from the present time, and it is very much attuned to world events beyond the immediate frame of its action (perhaps more so than Americana). It is primarily set in a small college town in the American Southwest (and not unlike the college that David attended in Americana). More so than Americana, End Zone uses that context to survey social conflicts in American culture. These include race relations, class difference, gender inequality, and the ideological and military contests of the Cold War. Perhaps more than any of these, it is a novel about American youth during the final, brutal years of the Vietnam War. In these ways End Zone moves through the culture, as did Americana, but at a more urgent pace.

In other important ways, End Zone is completely unlike Americana in that it is perhaps the most generic of DeLillo’s novels. In the first place, it belongs Page 37 →to the genre of the campus novel (a uniquely modern genre tied to an era of more accessible higher education, but also an offshoot of the bildungsroman, or coming-of-age novel). As such, it is a novel about Gary and his social circle in the small Texas campus of Logos College. A self-conscious and self-defined “exile,” Gary gravitates towards and befriends other characters who live on the margins of that small college world. The novel devotes more attention to ancillary characters than did Americana, thereby creating a narrative that at times resembles a faux-sociological case study of American college youth. Characters include Gary’s roommate and teammate Anatole Bloomberg, a young Jewish American man who wishes to “unjew” himself so as to become “super rational” and “non-ethnic” (186). There is also Myna, an overweight young white woman and devotee of science fiction, who later loses weight and changes her appearance to adapt to social norms. There is Robinson Taft, an African American football recruit, who reluctantly plays the role of the athletic star (and with whom Gary rarely speaks). A tertiary cast includes a host of student athletes whose pastimes include ribald, scatological parties, absurd discussions of intellectual matters, and maniacal locker room gossip. Rounding out the cast are two college instructors—Major Staley and Alan Zapalac—as well as several football coaches. Major Staley teaches a course on the history of air power and leads the campus Air Force ROTC. Zapalac teaches exobiology, a popular course in which he gives thoughtful, rambling lectures that often turn to personal anecdotes. Whereas Major Staley is somewhat aloof, Zapalac is gregarious. Ever sensitive to the physical world, Zapalac recognizes that his students have invented a kind of figural anti-matter: a student who does not exist, yet nonetheless takes tests, answers roll call, and the like. Zapalac allows the prank. Major Staley simulates war games in his hotel room; Zapalac rambles on subjects ranging from theology to organ transplants. Over the course of roughly six months that begin in late summer and end during the early spring college term, Gary socializes with this cast, seeking an identity or an epiphany, as must all young characters in a campus novel.

In all this End Zone may appear unremarkable. Indeed, it may even seem antithetical to the cerebral moods and wild narrative experiments of Americana. DeLillo’s contemporaries, as well as his later readers, did not take well to it. In an early review, Nelson Algren described End Zone as having betrayed the promise of Americana. Later critics imposed an allegorical interpretation on the novel. In a 2011 study Paul Giaimo argued that End Zone is a veiled “anti-war” novel in that it uses the culture of college football to illustrate how a culture of conflict erodes and finally destroys its narrator’s ability to think in an ethical way. In Giaimo’s thesis, the novel asks: if the world is Page 38 →going to end in nuclear holocaust, of what use is morality?¹² A grim critical reputation precedes and reinforces Giaimo’s point. Daniel Aaron argued that the novel’s narrator is a figure of “catastrophe” and his football coach belongs among “Sherwood Anderson’s sad grotesques.”¹³

Allegory requires another text—something outside itself to which it refers (such as the Vietnam War or Winesburg, Ohio). Other critics such as Tom LeClair, an important DeLillo critic and one of DeLillo’s first academic champions among academics, described End Zone as a form of “polar fiction.”¹⁴ In this way, LeClair does not interpret the characters in an allegorical manner. Rather, he notes the function of genre in DeLillo’s novel. In an oft-cited interview with DeLillo, Anthony DeCurtis called End Zone a novel of “alienation,” a keyword that invokes the modern tradition (one hesitates to call it a genre) of literary fiction inspired by European writers and existential philosophy. In this way we are reminded of the earlier discussion of the role of modernism in DeLillo’s writing. And we ask, what could writers such as Kafka, Sartre, or Camus have to do with a campus novel about an American football player? To further complicate the matter, in that very same interview by DeCurtis, DeLillo describes End Zone as a book “about extreme places and extreme states of mind.” In making the claim, DeLillo noted that End Zone “wasn’t about football.”¹⁵

Yet End Zone is very much a novel about football. As we shall see, it revels in particular in the language, as well as in the visual kinesis, of the televised sport. DeLillo’s denial of the novel’s subject points the reader away from a literal, generic reading of End Zone as a novel belonging to yet another genre: the sports novel. Ironically, it is a book that has found a following among readers of American sports fiction, and one might argue that its long middle chapter is the best ever written about a college football game. (A section of the book was reprinted in the April 17, 1972, issue of Sports Illustrated.) By turning away from its subject matter, we risk overlooking DeLillo’s remarkable capacity for writing literary fiction about American sports, a talent he has developed over the course of a long career of writing on baseball and football as well as on ancillary economic activities such as sports betting. One could make a convincing case that there is not a single writer of contemporary literary fiction who writes about American sports in a manner that even approximates DeLillo’s originality and inventiveness, and furthermore that DeLillo’s literary writing about sports paved the way for writers of a later generation to engage the subject. One has only to consider David Foster Wallace’s celebrated “tennis” novel Infinite Jest (1996), the best-selling work that made Wallace into a literary superstar, to recognize the consequence of Gary Harkness’s “catastrophe.”

Page 39 →End Zone also introduces elements of great import to DeLillo’s later fiction. Foremost among those elements is the “crowd.” It appears in the stands, at the edges of Gary’s perception, or in implicit forms (as when the reader follows a radio broadcast of the big game, a broadcast that places the reader in the listening audience, if not necessarily the stands near the field itself). The figure would take more substantial form in DeLillo’s later fiction where the dynamics of spectatorship venture close to replicating the fragmented perspectives of Cubist painting. In Mao II, a confused mother and father watch from the crowd as their daughter participates in the mass wedding organized by a religious cult at Yankee stadium. Later still, the frontispiece to one of the novel’s sections reproduces a photograph of fans being crushed against a barrier at a European soccer match. In these instances readers are placed in a position where they are asked to consider how they consume mass culture, how our physical space (a stadium) is organized to enhance (or obscure) that experience, and the role that technology plays in mediating how we watch a game or other event, whether on a broadcast or from the stands.

In the more well-known and well-wrought examples cited above, baseball most often appears as a mass-culture double for modernity. In End Zone football appears instead as the postmodern sport par excellence, a game of kinetic televisual power, of fragmented regional rivalries between schools and states, and of the emergent media and marketing juggernaut that translated the collegiate form of the sport to a unified and successful professional league on a national scale during the late 1960s and early 1970s. With these qualities in mind, End Zone depicts the game’s tactics, strategy, history, and psychology in convincing detail. It would almost seem realistic.

Yet there is also truth in DeLillo’s claim that End Zone is not “about football.” Critics are also right to perceive that the novel exceeds the genre of the sports novel in significant ways. We might ask, if it is not a sports novel, or a campus novel, or a novel about war, then what is it?

As we saw with Americana, DeLillo elaborates certain narrative techniques to make literary art. That novel relied on narrative sleights of hand to embellish its narrator’s distance. Anachronism, geographic dislocation, and a densely layered narrative perspective (does David Bell’s narration provide voice-over, in the form of a novel, to his experimental film?) combine to generate a restless and disaffected mood. They were techniques drawn primarily from cinema. End Zone adopts a different technique insofar as its narrative models and experiments work with literary materials. (To be fair, however, DeLillo’s cinematic influences never entirely vanish from his fiction.) Understood in this regard, End Zone’s subject matter (football) may appear incidental in and of itself, but it is by virtue of its combination with the materials of Page 40 →a second literary genre—the war novel—that End Zone marks an important early turn in DeLillo’s career insofar as his novels begin to experiment not only with narrative technique but also with the conventions of genre.

This is not to say the DeLillo begins writing within a specific genre. John McClure has published several important essays and book chapters on DeLillo’s writings. In an important 1991 essay entitled “Postmodern Romance: Don DeLillo and the Age of Conspiracy,” McClure described DeLillo’s approach to genre as follows: “DeLillo crafts his fictions out of the forms of popular romance: out of the espionage thriller, the imperial adventure novel, the western, science fiction, even the genre of occult adventure. He may conduct us, in one novel, across several genres.”¹⁶ McClure does not discuss End Zone in his essay, devoting his attention instead to DeLillo’s espionage novels of the late 1970s, yet his description of DeLillo’s use of genre applies to the earlier novel insofar as End Zone deliberately juxtaposes two specialized languages (those of football and science, and specifically military science). The result is metaphorical, an incongruity of simultaneous genres. In rhetorical terms we might say that End Zone’s combined genres elaborate a “symbol” or individual figure of speech at the more level extensive plane of narrative organization. A reader might have inferred as much from the novel’s title, with its overt allusion to Samuel Beckett’s 1957 play Endgame, its English translation referring to the concluding moves of a chess match. DeLillo’s title refers both to the literal space of the end zone on a football field—the rectangular space where athletes score touchdowns by crossing a threshold—and also a philosophical plane that Gary, the novel’s narrator, ultimately reaches as he crosses the genres of the sports novel, the war novel, the campus novel, and so forth. This is what many of DeLillo’s readers refer to as “metafiction,” a term that has lost its currency but adequately describes fiction that integrates and comments upon other fictions. In this case and others in DeLillo’s career, the point is not merely to combine other genres. In his essay McClure describes how DeLillo’s writing seeks “sites within capitalism, and discovers there the materials for new forms of romance.”¹⁷

As with Americana, the reader is made conscious of a story being told, but in End Zone we are asked also to consider the relationship between genres and tradition, and to do so from the novel’s opening lines. For example, when describing the racially charged recruitment and arrival of a star African American college football player named Robinson Taft, Gary tells the reader, “The mansion has long been haunted (double metaphor coming up) by the invisible man” (3). In technical terms, the reference to Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) is an allusion and not a metaphor. The “double metaphor” lies instead in the narrative splitting of the text into separate modes: the narrator’s Page 41 →parenthetical address to the reader ironically exposes the artifice of the narrative’s mixed genres. In this case the immediate matter is not only race relations during the post–civil rights era but the relationship of the sports novel to the African American literary novel. By and through this ironic narration, End Zone begins its metalinguistic experiment whereby the juxtaposition of specialized languages functions as a “double metaphor” to reveal some other order of experience that the reader can access through literary fiction. This Brechtian technique in which a narrator addresses both the audience and the artificiality of the art is a common one in postmodern literary writing, and to DeLillo’s credit he avoids using it to excess in End Zone. The reader is notified from the start, and the novel proceeds.

As noted earlier, the novel’s centerpiece is the long chapter that constitutes its second part. In that section, the consequence of the parenthetical aside is amplified to a remarkable scale. The context: in preceding chapters, the Logos College football team has practiced for and played its games with its eye on a single opponent—Centrex, a violent and ruthless team that dominates the sport in the region. This is going to be the “big game,” the coaches tell Gary and his teammates, the one that defines them as athletes and young men. As the game begins, the narration places the reader in the crowd: “(The spectator, at this point, is certain to wonder whether he must now endure a football game in print—the author’s way of adding his own neat quarter notch to the scarred blue steel of combat writing. The game, after all, is known for its assault-technology motif. . . .)” (111).

Over the course of two pages, the parenthetical passage contains descriptions of future scenes in the novel and commentary on forms of social organization and the role of the spectator (is it the reader, or someone in the crowd?), concluding with affirmation of the “author’s permanent duty to unbox the lexicon [of sports “gibberish”] for all eyes to see—a cryptic ticking mechanism in search of a revolution.” And then abruptly the paragraph ends, and we hear the quarterback calling a play from the field: “Blue turk right, double-slot, zero snag delay” (113). The cut to the play call at the line of scrimmage returns the narration from the “author” to Gary’s point of view. Yet in this heightened view that uses paratactical sentences, as if to split Gary into observer and observed, Gary sees the game but also sees himself in it. The linguistic incongruity of the narration, divided between literary artifice and the juxtaposition of “real” languages, begins to fragment Gary’s being. The sudden cuts in the narration, as we jump from dialogue to narration of the action, convey a violent effect: Gary, we sense, is being torn apart, whittled down by repeated blows, and forced into a condition he would refuse.

Page 42 →At one point Gary describes his own play on the field using the third-person narrative voice. In this passage, he adopts the tone of a color commentator in a radio or television broadcast as he calls “a hard earned first down for unspectacular Harkness” (116). There is a comparable visual moment from contemporary American football culture. During the second half of Super Bowl XLIII, Larry Fitzgerald, a wide receiver for the Arizona Cardinals, caught a pass near midfield. He outpaced his defender with a burst of speed and raced toward the end zone; as he did so, he looked up at the large video monitor above the field, thereby watching Larry Fitzgerald make the play. If Fitzgerald’s helmet had been equipped with a wireless microphone that was connected to the broadcast booth, and had he called the very play he was making during the live broadcast of the game, we might have something that approximates the divided consciousness of Gary’s persona in this scene.

In this scene and others, the narration of End Zone splits its narrative perspective into a multiplicity of viewpoints. They are refracted through the prisms of the narrator, the mass media, and the crowd. There is no equivalent scene in Americana, although its cinematic narration implies a similar distancing as well as DeLillo’s early willingness to experiment with complex modes of storytelling. As was the case in Americana, where metacinematic narration provides David with a refuge from commercial art, the metalinguistic narrative in End Zone indicates Gary’s movement towards an isolated, highly aestheticized form of narrative expression.

As is sometimes the case in DeLillo’s novels, that movement is expressed in terms of a search for spiritual significance or mystical revelation. This is true of End Zone, as Gary leans increasingly in that direction, yet never seems to escape his secular predicament. Gary’s gradual movement away from the football team’s social structure takes different forms. They include solitary walks in the desert, visits to Robinson Taft in which the two do not converse, and apocalyptic fantasies in which Gary imagines himself inhabiting an irradiated and ashen postnuclear landscape. Yet these do not provide solace, as Gary finds he is not alone in his condition, and therefore he is not privy to an experience or secret that would differentiate him from others. For instance, some of Gary’s teammates and friends express similar thoughts of detachment and escape. Anatole seeks to evade his ethnic identity, regarding assimilation as the best option. Others vanish into the classroom jargon of business and advertising. Myna Corbett, a classmate of Gary’s in Alan Zapalac’s exobiology class (and Gary’s eventual girlfriend for a short time), offers the best example. Myna describes herself as an overweight young woman who wears mismatched clothing to conceal her blotched skin. A science fiction enthusiast, Myna is enchanted by the writings of a fictional Mongolian author named Page 43 →Tudev Nemkhu. In chapter 20 of the novel, Myna summarizes Nemkhu’s writings with eloquence and authority, explaining his sources, characters, and narrative methods. These offer to Myna what Gary thought football would offer to him: an identity and purpose. Myna anticipates later women characters in DeLillo’s works who perceive male characters with a rigorous and critical independence of mind. Few critics have defended DeLillo against the claim that his characters are superficial (meaning that they lack realistic psychological “depth”). Tom LeClair makes an exception for Myna in this regard: “In her final confrontation with Gary, Myna previews these later figures, although she suffers the same malaise as does Gary during the ‘science fiction’ phase that constitutes the majority of her role in the novel.”¹⁸

In the end Myna finds a role to play when Gary cannot, and she remains in what we might best describe, given the novel’s obvious models in modern French art, a malaise. The French term does not translate well into English from the French. In Latinate languages it connotes an illness in one’s essence, an existential imbalance of sorts. The pathological “disease,” vaguely medieval “ill-humor,” or the casual “ill-at-ease” do not suffice to capture the word’s philosophical connotations. The French term is used often in English, however, even if its ontological connotation, which communicates a disruption in one’s being or “essence,” is sometimes lost. The term nonetheless describes Gary’s mood as the novel proceeds: it is the “end” to which his divided narration works over the novel’s course. Yes, we must admit, End Zone is not a novel “about football”; it is instead a novel about language and specifically how specialized languages—jargon, acronyms, diagrams—limit experience, imagination, and history, forcing them into spaces they cannot occupy without becoming restless, withdrawn, and degraded. Try as he might, Gary cannot find a way out. DeLillo described the ultimate effect in his 1982 interview with Tom LeClair: “Some of the characters [in End Zone] have a made-up nature. They are pieces of jargon. They engage in wars of jargon with each other. There is a mechanical element, a kind of fragmented self-consciousness. I took this further in Ratner’s Star.”¹⁹

Hope rests with art, or at least its potential to illuminate and reinvent the language we use to narrate a human experience. In dramatizing jargon and specialized language, giving it a physical form as a character, for instance, DeLillo’s novels do not merely give themselves up to the overdeterminations of technical variants of American English. For example, in Americana DeLillo deferred a good deal of the novel’s narrative responsibility to the conventions of film, but the strategy had a reciprocal effect in that it provided David with a new way to narrate his own biography. One might also take the positive view and note that despite Gary’s bleak prospects, End Zone confidently Page 44 →acknowledges language as its primary medium, and in it we see DeLillo expanding his craft as a writer by placing the narrative burden on language rather than a cinematic substitute. Take, for example, the trademark “lists” that appear briefly in Americana and become a more coherent presence in End Zone. In the latter novel they assume the mantric qualities recognized by readers of DeLillo’s later novels. Characters recite words rather than speak; slogans appear randomly, without warning, as if commercialism had combined at some genetic level with religious faith.

In these instances DeLillo’s literary fiction does not merely “mimic” language in order to make it real. In the case of the mantric slogans or euphemisms that constitute specialized jargon, End Zone illuminates the dehumanizing and corrosive force of language, and Gary embodies its existential effect. While we recognize its abjection and despair, we also begin to note the absurdity and comedy of contemporary American English. In this way the movement of characters through a metalinguistic narrative space is allegorical in that it approximates the reader’s movement through the novel’s language. It is a physical experience of the texture of words. At one point early in the novel, Gary speaks to Anatole Bloomberg in his dorm room, and describes the matter as follows: “Words move the body into position. In time the position itself dictates events. As the sun went down I tried to explain this concept to Bloomberg” (45). As the novel proceeds, however, Gary cannot escape the idea that this movement is a trap; the reader, placed in a position to consider the novel as artifice as well as art, may see it otherwise, as a state of being we can endure and even enjoy.

Purists might resent DeLillo’s attempt to transpose the high-modern style of Beckett and Brecht to the idiom of American sports culture. Ambition has seldom had allies in history; perhaps the risk exceeds the reward. Yet from End Zone through White Noise, DeLillo’s novels would increasingly render and comment upon the specialized variants of American English (football, military intelligence, pop music, mathematics, and so on). Like a mad lexicographer, DeLillo would expose their pretense in combination with their generic narrative forms (such as the sports novel, the spy novel, and the disaster novel) so as to reconfigure the reader’s relationship to literary fiction. One might recognize in this type of experimentalism the optimism of a generation seeking alternatives to convention. Like the protagonists of these early novels, the novelist decrypts contemporary words, logos, and signals. While there is irony and experiment, comedy and violence, there is also urgency and a forward-looking sensibility in DeLillo’s early fiction. It is not so much concerned with revising the past as it is with working through the present towards some goal that is beyond the reach of the very languages he must use to attain it. Page 45 →Over time the urgency of that mission would take new forms in DeLillo’s activism on behalf of imprisoned writers, the emergence of “history” as a more complex subject in his writing and the eventual diminishing of overt “meta-narrative” strategies in favor of a more poetic narrative sensibility. That trajectory may very well begin with the grim finality of End Zone, a novel whose linguistic incongruities would extend to other narrative forms and moods in DeLillo’s subsequent novels of the 1970s.

Don DeLillo published six novels during the period 1971–78. In chronological order, these were Americana (1971), End Zone (1972), Great Jones Street (1973), Ratner’s Star (1976), Players (1977), and Running Dog (1978). As noted, Americana and End Zone are characterized by the plasticity of DeLillo’s narrative style. Of the first two novels, End Zone is more representative of the four remaining novels of this period. In the first place, its meta-linguistic sensibility permits DeLillo to combine variants of American English in unique ways, a quality generally found in his novels of the 1970s. In the second place, the novels betray a heightened and increasingly refined sense of how to combine genres. Whereas End Zone awkwardly combined the sports novel and the campus novel, later novels would combine genres with greater ease. Cinematic analogy may serve to make the point: DeLillo would become like the American film director Howard Hawks, who made excellent films in all the major narrative genres of his time. The later novels would show that DeLillo could clearly elaborate the expected conventions of a single genre, move from one genre to another, and combine them in a single novel with deliberate ease.

“Pastiche” is the term sometimes used by literary critics to describe this technique. In this view DeLillo does not “reinvent” genres by adding new elements to them (as, say, Hammett or Chandler transformed the classical detective from genteel Victorian into a street-hardened tough). Rather, in pastiche we find the recycling of older forms (such as genres). The term does not describe a new genre; for instance, a genre such as “steampunk,” which combines Victorian science with a twentieth-century pop sensibility, is a type of pastiche, but pastiche is not in itself a genre. It is a mode of composition, in the literal sense of the term, resulting in a composite work of art. It may contain elements of older generic forms in a nongeneric work, or, as in the case of steampunk, take on the attributes of a “new” genre. Pastiche suffices to some extent as a descriptor of DeLillo’s novels, the exception being that they contain an essayistic or discursive element similar to that found in the films of Jean-Luc Godard.

Page 46 →In addition to the physical assembly of the metafictional narrative, pastiche has an affective sense. Critics generally consider nostalgia to be the primary emotional register of pastiche. Nostalgia results from the recovery of old forms whereby the reader or viewer experiences a sense of history (or its absence). It is unlike the Romantic obsession with classical ruins, whereby the observer was meant to experience the languid passing of historical time. History does not seem to pass in the same way in pastiche, if at all. Rather, the emotional effect may be akin to being trapped, or frozen in time. It is history without future or past. Genres, literary forms with set conventions that communicate a kind of narrative architecture, offer the artist the ideal plane for experiment. When Gary Harkness narrates a combined campus/sports novel in End Zone, he appears not only as a young person trying to avoid the impositions of language, but he is also attempting to avoid the identities that are consequent to those impositions. Anatole strives to become a gentile, Myna gives in to the pressure to conform, but for some reason Gary cannot follow convention. Like a work of art frozen in a timeless state that has no future or past, he is caught between conformity to tradition and a future alternative that will not appear to him. Encased in genre, he refuses to become generic.

Pastiche, nostalgia, and genre do not, however, fully explain the result that DeLillo achieves with the novels that follow End Zone. In those modes, anachronism functions as a weak substitute for history. In DeLillo, by contrast, the anachronism of a genre’s persistent vitality and relevance becomes part of the narrative form. One might say that DeLillo’s genres are not merely dead forms that we recycle into new combinations. They function instead as histories of the present time. Readers and critics have often used the term “paranoia” to describe the result. But whether it is Thomas Pynchon’s parody of Richard Hofstadter’s famous study The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964) in Pynchon’s own The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) or whether it is the post-JFK culture of “conspiracy theory” that DeLillo skillfully avoided in his novel Libra, the term paranoia does not ever fully capture a well-written novel’s ability to combine generic elements so as to escape, and even ridicule, the cataleptic, hopeless consequences of pastiche. One might point to the “open-ended” conclusions of DeLillo’s novels of this period (the “conclusion” of his 1978 novel Running Dog comes to mind) as a means by which they avoid the “trap” that closed End Zone.

DeLillo’s third novel, Great Jones Street (1973), exemplifies how the rather academic matters described above are useful in helping us understand DeLillo’s fiction, if only to a point. Like its predecessor, Great Jones Street is a novel about language. Its plot revolves around a drug known as “the product” that disrupts the human brain’s ability to coordinate words. And as in Page 47 →Americana, the novel’s protagonist is a creative artist living in New York City and negotiating a world of mass media (in this way, Great Jones Street approximates also the Warholesque sensibility of DeLillo’s later Mao II, in that it is concerned with the media culture of celebrity). The artist in question is named Bucky Wunderlick, a rock star who has suddenly left his bandmates in the middle of a concert tour. Bucky has retreated into private life only to be drawn into a plot in which a number of competing individuals and organizations force him to hold “the product” even as they compete with one another to analyze it, obtain it, and synthesize it for mass distribution and sale. In this way DeLillo combines elements of other genres—the mystery, the thriller—into a narrative that resembles something “new.” This effect may result from the cohesion of the different genres that constitute Great Jones Street (a sure sign of DeLillo’s growing expertise as a writer). It may also be attributed to DeLillo’s increasingly sophisticated ability to depict the subtle forces that shape the present time, as if genres and history were not dead ends but apertures. Regardless of the cause, there is a decisive turn in Great Jones Street, a novel that marks a turning point in the narrative strategies that constitute the fundamental work of DeLillo’s literary career.

Contemporary literary scholar Florence Dore has recently offered a thesis that helps explain DeLillo’s Great Jones Street. Looking back over recent American literary fiction, she defines a “new subgenre” that she calls the “rock novel,” one whose mature form appears after the year 2000.²⁰ Novelists working in this mode (Jonathan Lethem is her primary example) combine elements of popular music and blues-derived rock and roll. Conventions include song lyrics and allusions to musicians, as well as visual elements of music commodities such as the liner notes to a compact disc or the covers of vinyl records (features that appear in Great Jones Street in the form of the lyric sheet and the music-industry press release). Placing the genre in a historical context, Dore invokes Ian Watt’s famous discussion of the “private orientation” of the modern novel. (Here one might also recall Georg Lukacs’s contention that the novel confirms the “inner life” of the modern subject.) Dore argues that “rather than simply killing off the novel, contemporary American novelists who make use of rock and roll preserve the genre, update it to make it suitable for life in the twenty-first century. Rock novelists revivify the novel by reanimating, precisely, ‘private experience.’”²¹

Dore notes Great Jones Street as an important precursor to the subgenre she defines, and it is useful to recall that DeLillo’s novel engages the matter of privacy in contemporary American life (and implicitly, the novel’s function). The novel introduces the matter by way of a minor character named Skippy, who represents the “Happy Valley Commune,” an experimental group who Page 48 →seek to recruit the novel’s protagonist as a symbol of their movement (and also as an accomplice to their theft of “the product”). In an early scene, Skippy defines the group’s mission as that of “returning the idea of privacy to American life” (17). Bucky, the novel’s protagonist, has recently abandoned a public career as a musician and retreated into a quasi-monastic seclusion. That seclusion is continuously interrupted, however, by agents who seek to drag him back into the media spotlight or use his celebrity to some other end. In his first interview (given to Tom LeClair in 1982), DeLillo replied to LeClair’s question about the novel in the following terms: “I think rock music is a music of loneliness and isolation. The Doors work very well at the beginning of Apocalypse Now. A man with a half-shattered mind, alone in a rented room. Noise, excess, electricity, Vietnam—all these things are tied together in Great Jones Street, and a certain tension is drawn out of the hero’s silence, his withdrawal. Bucky Wunderlick’s music moves from political involvement to extreme self-awareness to childlike babbling.”²² It is then useful to regard this generic element of Great Jones Street as one that confirms the novel’s orientation towards individual subjectivity.

As such, Dore’s argument defines a genre of writing that is missing from the spectrum of LeClair’s “polar fiction” that I discussed in the previous section. There I described how End Zone initiated DeLillo’s turn to writing in and about genres, whereby he combined them so as to achieve the “metafictional” effects that typify his work of the 1970s. The key feature there was that of a metaphorical incongruity inflated to narrative scale. At that narrative level, the inward-looking gravitation of Great Jones Street finds its counterpoint in a kind of centrifugal, public motion: a movement through private life yet always away from it into the sphere of public life, language, and history. On the novel’s opening page, that motion is described as “the circumstance of one man imparting erotic terror to the dreams of the republic” (1). In subsequent novels characters will entertain this possibility and abandon their privacy to venture into a public experience. It is an experience they initially wished to avoid only to find that the public world and its constituent features—historical events, crowds, commerce, language—are entirely different from that which they initially retreated, expected, or imagined. “Paranoia,” in the literal sense, is a distracted state of mind, but in DeLillo’s protagonists in and after Great Jones Street, it does not appear so much as a division between “fact” and “fiction” than as a division between the inner life of the individual and that individual’s thoughtful interaction with public life.

In this way the narrative features, generic elements, and linguistic incongruities of the earlier novels achieve a more stable and focused form in Great Jones Street. When chapters of conventional narrative prose (Bucky’s tenuous Page 49 →privacy) give way to excerpts from lyric sheets and press releases (the public, commodified form of Bucky’s inner life), the two qualities join to confirm the work of an artist who regards the novel as an experimental form that, to borrow Dore’s term, “reanimates” the dramatic condition of the individual in the present time. Most important of all, perhaps, is the fact that DeLillo will use the novel as a literary form to dramatize, elaborate, and affirm its urgency and relevance. This line of thinking would seem to culminate in the character of Bill Gray in Mao II (1991), but it continues through DeLillo’s fiction as well as his role as a public artist and intellectual. The latter includes his activism on behalf of persecuted writers and his work among patients with Alzheimer’s disease, but it also appears in dozens of important characters and scenes throughout his later writings (and not only in novels). These are amplified by the gregarious reticence of his interviews and the somber performances of his readings and other public appearances. In sum, it is useful to regard the characters, concerns, and generic features of Great Jones Street as offering a glimpse for the first time of DeLillo’s later career as a novelist and also as an involved citizen and public advocate of the arts. If one were to listen for some biographical tension at the fiction’s core, this dynamic exchange between private and public life, an exchange that is dramatized by the narrative plasticity of the early novels, and Great Jones Street in particular, would seem a better conduit for it than would allusion, setting, or fictional character.

On its surface, Great Jones Street is characterized by a casual style. Its idiom is an easy vernacular peppered with elements of music-industry slang. Syntactic ordering of sentences is idiosyncratic at times, with the occasional inverted sentence suggesting an urban, ethnic linguistic scene. Dramatization of character and place is also lucid as other qualities of DeLillo’s prose appear in relief against the diminished narrative apparatus. The latter has not been removed but rather integrated into the dramatic elements of the plot. While the characters still observe and comment upon the world (and the plot itself), the narrative distance that typified Americana and End Zone is no longer a perspective to be attained outside the novel or within it by some movement across space. Here too the role of genre becomes more subtle, as the terse urban vernacular of the modern detective novel is mixed together with the psychedelic jargon of the counterculture, without excessive dramatic contrast (that is, embodiment in characters such as Professor Zapalac and Major Staley in End Zone).

Bucky Wunderlick, the reluctant rock star protagonist who narrates the novel, is a more sympathetic and congenial figure than previous narrators, moving the plot along at a leisurely pace. The reader meets principal characters without delay, and the novel begins, as did Americana, in media res but Page 50 →without the extensive flashbacks that require the set-up of David’s family history or Gary’s quixotic travels from one college to another. We meet Globke, Bucky’s manager, a self-professed “philosopher of bad taste,” and Azarian, Bucky’s taciturn and anxious former bandmate. There is Opel, whom Bucky regards as a sort of muse. Bucky notes that her “mind was exceptional” (12), and that she is driven from wealth by a restless desire to experience music and travel. There is also Hanes, the office courier of Bucky’s record label, Fenig, the frustrated pulp writer who lives in the apartment above Bucky, and a widow named Micklewhite, who lives downstairs with her cognitively impaired adult son. The son has no name because the parents “never figured he’d live past four months with a head like his head” (134). The novel introduces these characters in its early chapters, which are not divided into “parts” but, rather, are interrupted after the tenth chapter by a “media kit” (including lyrics, press release, and transcripts of interviews) released by Bucky’s music management to the press. Several other important characters appear in the ten chapters that follow the “media kit” interchapter: they include Watney, a retired British rock star (and DeLillo’s first sketch of the “international” businessman), and Bohack, the leader of the Happy Valley Commune. A second music-industry publication entitled “The Mountain Tapes” follows chapter 20, consisting entirely of lyrics to Bucky’s planned release of unreleased songs. And then there is Dr. Pepper, to whose dissembling character I turn below.

Events in Great Jones Street follow the sale of “the product,” a drug alleged to have been developed by the U.S. government. Its effects are at first unknown but later described as targeting “a particular region in the left hemisphere of the brain, it seems. Where words are kept” (228). The Happy Valley Commune, the group who try to adopt Bucky as a symbol of their ideological return to privacy, have stolen “the product” from a Long Island laboratory and delivered it to Bucky for safekeeping in his apartment on Great Jones Street in the Manhattan neighborhood of Greenwich Village. The commune members wish to sell “the product” to the highest bidder, the news of which precipitates a race to obtain the drug that ultimately involves the majority of the novel’s characters. Bucky, who alternates between catatonic disinterest and mild concern, muses on their attempts while considering the path his musical career may take following his departure from the band. Bucky’s manager and record company ultimately decide to release Bucky’s experimental music, known as “The Mountain Tapes,” and his manager Globke plans a tour, telling Bucky: “Don’t think of it as a performance. Think of it as an appearance” (198). As it turns out, Hanes, the office courier from the headquarters of Bucky’s record company, has used his access to Bucky to strike out on his own and shop “the product.” Unbeknownst to Bucky, a series of furtive exchanges Page 51 →and failed sales attempts has taken place, all of which derive from the fact that Hanes had stolen “the product” from Bucky’s apartment and traveled to “fifteen cities in three countries” trying to sell it (210). Hanes confesses these facts in the first of the novel’s final five chapters. He returns the product and asks Bucky to beg the Happy Valley Commune’s pardon for his having stolen the drug.

Enter Dr. Pepper, a narco-pharmacist of legendary stature, who lives underground. Characters in pursuit or possession of “the product” seek Dr. Pepper. They regard him as a prospective buyer or a chemical analyst. The term “character” does not quite apply to Dr. Pepper. Readers first meet him early in the novel, twice, yet neither they nor Bucky know it. When he finally appears as Dr. Pepper more than halfway through the novel, we learn that he also seeks “the product.” Styled in the role of an eccentric entrepreneur, he plans to synthesize and mass produce the drug on a global scale, a final pharmacological intervention in mass culture. (He also expresses a desire, common in the novel, to change careers.) In the novel’s final chapters, we learn that the person we had earlier thought to be Dr. Pepper may not be Dr. Pepper. In chapter 22, the person speaking as Dr. Pepper offers Bucky an ultimatum: deliver “the product” to him within twenty-four hours, or he will “make arrangements to extend your [Bucky’s] sabbatical. You won’t leave that room is what I am saying. It will become your past, present and future” (219). In retrospect, the words used in the threat become significant: they describe “the product’s” effect.

These varied lines converge in the novel’s final two chapters. In the penultimate chapter, Bohack, leader of the Happy Valley Commune, expresses his group’s disappointment with Bucky’s planned return to music and public life. They have located Hanes and “the product”; in exchange for his life, Hanes, who was upset with Bucky for refusing Hanes’s request to return “the product” to Happy Valley, has betrayed the confidence of the record company and revealed the location of the plant where Bucky’s new record is being pressed. Bohack offers Bucky the option of suicide and, presumably, a celebrity death that will be romanticized and consumed by his fans and simultaneously preserve the group’s desire to maintain Bucky’s “privacy” for their own ends. Bucky refuses and follows Bohack to the commune’s building. Upon his arrival Bucky is introduced to Fred Chess, who is going to inject “the product” into Bucky. At a certain point Bucky asks, “Are you Dr. Pepper? You’re not, are you?” The man replies, “Look, if I were Pepper, it would mean I knew all along what kind of drug was in the package. Any longstanding intimate connection between Happy Valley and Pepper would mean that I, as Pepper, had knowledge of the drug from the very beginning. You’d have to revise Page 52 →everything that’s happened. It would mean that I managed not only Bohack but also Hanes and Watney. If I’m Pepper, it means everything’s been a lie up to now. . . . It would mean that you’ve been the victim of the paranoid man’s ultimate fear. Everything that is taking place is taking place solely to mislead you. Your reality is managed by others” (253–54).

The truth regarding the mystery of Dr. Pepper’s identity is never revealed. Is he Fred Chess, after all? And if so, does that necessitate “revising” one’s understanding of the novel’s plot? Has Bucky been unwittingly placed in the role of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, the young man who embarks in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship on a journey of self-discovery, only to discover that his travels and encounters have been “managed,” to use DeLillo’s word, by his elders?

And if Dr. Pepper has orchestrated the plot, then has he also orchestrated Bucky’s retreat into privacy? How can one preserve a self or remain “individual” before such deception? Is our privacy a prank we play upon ourselves, a novelist’s gimmick to reassure us that we can achieve separation from history? And what if the novelist exposes the artifice of that illusion by turning the conventions of beloved genres against themselves? The possible answers exist simultaneously. They do not offer closure; they defer the responsibility of considering them to the reader, who may wonder, “Have I become a participant in the telling of this story?” In this way Great Jones Street replaces the sophisticated yet obtuse narrative scaffolding of DeLillo’s prior two novels with more subtle gestures. One hesitates to extend to the reader the “product’s” unexpected effects on Bucky, after which Bucky feels that he is “sinking into history” (264), but the effect might be said to anticipate a sort of communion whereby DeLillo’s novels begin their long, inward turn, a process that will show its first complete and mature result in the later White Noise.

DeLillo’s early novels revel in the incongruous possibilities of contemporary American society. Music and business, war and football, cinema and autobiography—they are not paired to offer a panoramic view but to surprise the reader. DeLillo described his choice of subjects to interviewer Anthony DeCurtis: “I’ve never attempted to embark on a systematic exploration of American experience. I take the ideas as they come.”²³ DeLillo’s subsequent novels would use other jargons and dialects, other subjects and settings, refining his experiments with language, genre, and narration to different ends; in discussing Ratner’s Star (1977) in that same interview, he says that “the structure of the book is the book.”²⁴ All the while, the other dramatic elements of his work will also grow in other directions, taking unexpected turns at times and elaborating earlier techniques at others. The later accomplishment might be said to begin with the narrative experiments of these early works, yet reach Page 53 →past them, as if the writer were working even against himself so as to be consistently incongruous with respect to genre and convention.

In the final chapter of Great Jones Street, Bucky Wunderlick wanders the streets of lower Manhattan. He is accompanied for a short time by Sandy, the commune member who had brought “the product” to him at the novel’s start. Bucky does not speak with her, but his silence has nothing to do with “the product”: its effects were temporary, and his brain once again recognizes language. His ability to speak is also restored. He simply chooses not to speak with her. It is unclear whether Sandy still belongs to the Commune or whether the Commune continues to exist at all. She appears ill. Why is Bucky reluctant? Is Sandy shadowing him, a spy monitoring the silence the Commune imposed on him, an enforcer of his involuntary silence? We do not know, we cannot know, but it seems to be the case. If we suspect it, we have become paranoid. Bucky describes the miasmic streets, the proliferation of urban life, with hushed awe. He does not allow anyone to know “the product” failed. Identification with the group or the genre has become suspect to him. Through the reader’s proximity to narration, the novel suggests an awkward intimacy: Bucky may be restored to public life, but this is a novel and an individual keeps that secret.

Anthony DeCurtis, a long-standing scholar of DeLillo’s fiction, has published one of the few scholarly essays devoted entirely to Great Jones Street. DeCurtis admits the book is “not one of DeLillo’s more highly regarded novels” and then proceeds to elaborate Bucky’s “drawing inward,” a process that “would seem to suggest the movement of American society from the political upheavals and turmoil of the late sixties to the dreadful cynicism, deep alienation, and desperate privatism of the seventies.”²⁵ Using quotes from Bob Dylan and Axel Rose as bookends, DeCurtis illustrates how the novel’s movement from rock music to “entrepreneurship” illustrates that it is has become increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to find refuge from the joined spheres of publicity and commerce. The problematic anticipates DeLillo’s novels of the 1980s, and by the time it has reached its full development in White Noise (1985), DeLillo’s depiction of the individual’s relationship to 1980s consumer culture will result in what is widely considered to be one of the twentieth century’s most influential and accomplished novels.