Stephen Bernstein

Department of English
University of Michigan – Flint
bernstein_s@crob.flint.umich.edu

 

Aside from their humor, Don DeLillo’s novels are noted almost as frequently for their brilliant terror, manifested as a frisson at the core of contemporary existence. Frank Lentricchia comments on DeLillo’s “yoking together terror and wild humor as the essential tone of contemporary America” (“American” 2), while Arnold Weinstein observes that “one is tempted to posit terror itself as the ground for the psyche in DeLillo, an indwelling creatural horror that underlies all the codes and systems” (294). The terror is not simply the terrorism with which DeLillo is almost obsessively concerned, but also that of a sublime dimension of experience. Again and again DeLillo’s characters are faced with the inexplicability of events and the giddy suspicion, terrifying in its eventual impact, that a darker force determines reality.

 

The sublime appears in DeLillo’s fiction in several forms. As John Frow has shown, White Noise‘s airborne toxic event and the sunsets it subsequently influences trigger a representational inadequacy on the part of their viewers. Jack Gladney wonders why he should try to describe what the sunsets have become. This is not the eighteenth-century sublime of Kant or Burke, however, but one more specifically postmodern: “the inadequacy of representation comes not because of the transcendental or uncanny nature of the object but because of the multiplicity of prior representations” (176). The sublime of belatedness Frow formulates does not exhaust DeLillo’s excursions into the category; Michael W. Messmer reveals an “activist (Kantian) sublime” (410) in White Noise which centers on the ability of the Gladneys to respond to the terrifying sublimity of the airborne toxic event, to question the gains of science if they produce such aberrations.

 

In Libra DeLillo returns to the more familiar Kantian sublimes of magnitude and ineffability. For Kant the sublime “is to be found in an object even devoid of form, so far as it immediately involves, or else by its presence provokes, a representation of limitlessness, yet with a super-added thought of its totality” (90). The result for the observer is an emotion “dead earnest in the affairs of the imagination . . .a negative pleasure” (91). Kant’s “mathematical” sublime is rooted in cognition, being that “in comparison with which all else is small”(97), while his “dynamically” sublime appeals more to imagination, raising it “to a presentation of those cases in which the mind can make itself sensible of the appropriate sublimity of the sphere of its own being, even above nature” (111-12). DeLillo’s sublime will not share the more transcendental aspects of this model, as his characters are predictably limited, from the postromantic vantage of the 1950s and 1960s, in their ability to appreciate the sublimity of the imagination’s sphere.

 

For Kant “One who is in a state of fear . . . flees from the sight of an object filling him with dread; and it is impossible to take delight in terror that is seriously entertained” (110). Containing as it does the account of terror which is largely absent from Kant’s, Burke’s model is similarly relevant to DeLillo. While DeLillo’s readers may have the appropriate distance from his novels’ terror to appreciate the sublimity of his depiction of a culture about to spin out of orbit, his characters do not. Thus they are more helpfully considered in the Burkean model, which holds that “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger . . .whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime” (39); the imaginative response to the sublime, then, “is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror” (57). What we will see in Libra is a hybrid combination of Kant and Burke, a sublime which is manifested through magnitude and ineffability, exhausting the powers of enumeration or speech to give any representational account of it. At the same time this sublime will arouse a powerful terror, the terror so frequently noted in DeLillo’s work which gestures frantically toward apocalypse.

 

This definition is obviously devoid of contemporary models of the sublime. Frow alludes to Lyotard, but the aesthetic program contained in the last pages of The Postmodern Condition will not be particularly relevant to this investigation of Libra. In a by now quite familiar formulation, Lyotard charges the postmodern sublime to put forward “the unpresentable in presentation itself” (81). By this account we would have to consider DeLillo resolutely modern (in Lyotard’s schema), since his sublime will be that which is more concerned “to present the fact that the unpresentable exists” (78). Probably more to the point in terms of specific periodization is Fredric Jameson’s discussion of a postmodern sublime that can only be “adequately theorized” “in terms of that enormous and threatening, yet only dimly perceivable, other reality of economic and social institutions” (P 38).

 

Now this “other reality” is immediately recognizable to readers of DeLillo. It is the “world inside the world” ofLibra (13), the massively structured shadow machinery which so covertly scripts the possibilities of quotidian existence. Jameson acknowledges in DeLillo “the formal dilemma” presented by “a totalized world . . . finally unavailable for perception” (Rev. 122), but in a slight departure from his model I would like to suggest that DeLillo’s most important sublime occasions in Libra go beyond configurations of “economic and social institutions” and the “totalized world” to become attempts at the comprehension of history itself. For the committed Marxist, of course, there is no difference between the terms, and I am merely performing a willful mystification of the great motor of culture. Nevertheless, DeLillo’s novel offers visions of society and economics which are at variance with another and much larger operator, and this is where levels of the text’s sublime must be discerned.

 

There is, in fact, some difficulty in stratifying the sublime in Libra since it is so consistently present. In the chiaroscuro world of covert operations men are “light-sensitive”; the interruption of a past plot by internal security is fancifully allegorized as “Light Entering the Cave of the Ungodly” (22, 24). Thus the various CIA and former-CIA agents inhabit an unrepresentable world of darkness, a gloom the magnitude of which is ungraspable by the isolated intellect. Win Everett’s plot spins out of his control almost immediately, largely because he fails to foresee its ability to expand to fill the larger magnitude of the plotters’ darkness. When Everett first unfolds his plan to T. J. Mackey and Larry Parmenter it is under a Texas sky which “towered unbearably” (25), yet another reminder of the eighteenth-century sublime and its predeliction for natural settings which “make our power of resistance of trifling moment in comparison with their might” (Kant 110).

 

Parmenter’s wife Beryl appears in Libra on only a few occasions, the “domesticated version” (Cain 282) of the rarified intelligence-gathering absurdity of the career CIA operatives. She runs “a small picture-framing shop” (124) and corresponds with friends by sending them newspaper clippings, isolated vignettes “that tell us how we live” (261). Toward the end of the novel she watches replays of Oswald’s televised murder. “[T]his footage only deepened and prolonged the horror,” the narrator comments; “It was horror on horror” (446). This horror arises from the fact that Oswald’s death is “not at all like the news items she clipped,” that is, Beryl is unable to decontextualize it from the magnitude of the exterior world: “She didn’t want these people in her house” (446). Oswald’s death provides the sublime alternative–“The far reaching ‘something’ that . . . can never be named” (Cain 287)–to her earlier desire to find “Refuge only in irony” (259). In the videotape she is confronted again and again with a terror too present and unprecedented to be clipped and folded. But even this gives way: as anyone knows who sat through several days of coverage of the Challenger explosion, Tiananmen Square, or a host of other recent news stories, repetition begets numbness. As Beryl perceives, “After some hours the horror became mechanical. They kept racking film, running shadows through the machine. It was a process that drained life from the men in the picture, sealed them in the frame. They began to seem timeless to her, identically dead” (447). The sublime is finally subsumed, framed, by the numbing repetition of the image as DeLillo pinpoints the moment in which one form of the sublime gave way to the other–the moment when the terror of Kant’s mathematical sublime (Oswald and the world too vast to enumerate) recedes into the sublime Frow discusses, that which leaves its subjects edgy through their inability to develop an appropriate specificity representation.

 

In the world of the plotters and the experiences of Beryl Parmenter we see two versions of a socio-economic sublime, a sublime dependent upon the mental formulations of human actors fixed in social and historical specificity. This sublimity differs markedly, however, from the sublime as we might apply it to Oswald and to the actual mechanisms of history in the novel. DeLillo himself mentions “coincidence and dream and intuition and the possible impact of astrology” as motivating forces in the novel (DeCurtis 55); he also speaks of “a sense of something extraordinary hovering just beyond our touch and just beyond our vision” in contemporary life (DeCurtis 63). “This extraordinary wonder of things,” he goes on, “is somehow related to the extraordinary dread, to the death fear we try to keep beneath the surface of our perceptions” (DeCurtis 63). This dread is activated in Libra as DeLillo gives it dimensions it never had in White Noise. It is certainly true, as Weinstein points out, that with the earlier novel’s airborne toxic event DeLillo sheds light “on our deep-seated need to believe in the supernatural. In so doing he gives the disaster . . . the authority of subject not object, of agent not setting” (303). But in Libra this role is transferred to history itself, with an effect far more vast than Jack Gladney’s fear of death.

 

As Daniel Aaron notes, “Subways figure in the educations of both Billy Twillig and Oswald” (79). The protagonist (in DeLillo’s novels hero seems far too strong a word) of Ratner’s Star is shown the “substratum” by his third-rail inspector father; it becomes an important metaphor for the novel’s constant dualities, its mirror worlds and the idea that “existence tends to be nourished from below” (RS 4). But this below is also “the fear level, the plane of obsession, the starkest tract of awareness,” and the walk Billy and Babe take through the subways is made for “the sheer scary fun of it, a sort of Theban initiation” (RS 4). The sublime traits of this chthonian realm are suggested in the earlier novel; in Libra the subway metaphor is even more fully developed. The novel’s first sentence, “This was the year he rode the subway to the ends of the city, two hundred miles of track” (3), introduces the image immediately and its sublime characteristics are not far behind.

 

The subway is of course symbolic of the “world within the world” that Oswald seeks throughout the novel, the inner workings of the external real. Win Everett suggests that “when the world is no longer accessible” one might be moved to “invent a false name, invent a destiny, purchase a firearm through the mail”(148). And as Thomas Carmichael puts it, assassination for Oswald becomes one way to escape “all that which would undermine the illusion of an unmediated access to the real and the sound assumption of a coherent and stable subjectivity” (214). In the sublime experience of the subway Oswald already has intimations of such an approach to the real. In the train his “body fluttered in the fastest stretches. They went so fast sometimes he thought they were on the edge of no-control” (3). The sublimity of rapid movement is evoked as the novel’s primal gesture and finds its own echo when one of the metamorphosed assassination plot’s mercenaries, Wayne Elko, speculates that “They were making a crash journey over the edge” (379-80). So from the very first we understand Oswald as someone craving a literal rush, one which will have to be metaphorically converted into the rush of history as it sweeps by. Oswald thinks “the only end to isolation was to reach the point where he was no longer separated from the true struggles that went on around him,” and that “The name we give this point is history”(248). The point of no separation, the point of going over the edge, these become the novel’s metaphysical analogia for the actuality of history.

 

Seen in this light, Oswald is, in Frank Lentricchia’s words, “an undecidable intention waiting to be decided” (“Libra” 201), the object of Weinstein’s formulation above waiting to be acted upon by history as subject. But what sort of subject is history? Certainly on one level history is the plot, conceived by Win Everett and modified by T. J. Mackey, against Kennedy. But on a hazier and more complicated level there is something else happening in Libra, a causality seemingly too eerie, too sublimely ineffable to be reducible to human intention. While Everett plans to “Create coincidence so bizarre they have to believe it” (147), this intention is not enough to explain Oswald’s status as “a fiction living prematurely in the world,” word made so fleshly that it arouses “the eeriest panic” in Everett himself (179). DeLillo reaches for a more comprehensive mode for depicting this strangeness; as the novel’s title suggests this will be astrology. Thus, to quote Lentricchia again, “astrology is the metaphor in Libra for being trapped in a system whose determinative power is grippingly registered by DeLillo’s double narrative of an amorphous existence haphazardly stumbling into the future where a plot awaits to confer upon it the identity of a role fraught with form and purpose” (“Libra“202).

 

The novel’s chief proponent of astrological explanation is David Ferrie, one of very few characters who look to an explanation for events external to the world of humans. Astrology for Ferrie is “the language of the night sky, of starry aspect and position, the truth at the edge of human affairs” (175) and thus is linked to what Everett thinks of as “whatever force was out there, whatever power ruled the sky, the endless hydrogen spirals, the region of all night, all souls” (148). But astrology’s truth is sublimely ineffable. “We don’t know what to call it, so we say coincidence,” Ferrie says at one point (172), effectually assigning a linguistic version of Kant’s mathematical sublime to the problem of causality. Kant suggests that “In the case of the logical estimation of magnitude the impossibility of ever arriving at absolute totality by the progressive measurement of things of the sensible world in time and space was cognized as an objective impossibility, i.e. one of thinking the infinite as given, and not as simply subjective, i.e. an incapacity for grasping it . . .” (108). Thus Ferrie suggests that beyond the world of plots there is a level of cause that cannot be adequately cognized. The resultant effect is that of the sublime. “[W]hat history consists of,” Ferrie claims later, is “the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us” (321). In this formulation ineffability still plays the central role. The shadowy “they” who “aren’t telling” are politicians and the media in this context, but given Ferrie’s usual tenor throughout the novel, the agent is far closer to the ominous and sublime “Them” of Gravity’s Rainbow.

 

Ferrie eventually attributes all control over the assassination to the forces alluded to above. “Truth isn’t what we know or feel,” he claims, “It’s the thing that waits just beyond” (333), so that the explanation of how everything converges on Dallas is also ineffable: “We didn’t arrange your job in that building or set up the motorcade route. We don’t have that kind of reach or power. There’s something else that’s generating this event” (384). Now if it were only Ferrie who felt this way in the novel we would have to attribute such a conception of causality to his extreme peculiarity as a character. But similar thoughts, not so clearly articulated, appear elsewhere. “Summer was building toward a vision, a history,” Oswald thinks several times during 1963 (322), while the crowd around the Kennedy motorcade is “a multitude, a storm force” producing “the roar of a sand column twisting” (393, 394).

 

Perhaps most striking in the novel as a sublime indicator of history’s presence, however, is the Dallas disc jockey Russ Knight, the Weird Beard. Not only does his name allude homonymically to the darkness which resists attempts at causal explanation, but what his radio persona says provides some of the strangest passages in the book. In the novel’s first transcription of his show, the Weird Beard is on the radio in Jack Ruby’s car: “Who is for real and who is sent to take notes? You’re out there in the depths of the night, listening in secret, and the reason you’re listening in secret is because you don’t know who to trust except me. We’re the only ones who aren’t them” (266). The passage’s relevance to Ferrie’s usual concerns are obvious, and the Weird Beard acts too to link several of the narrative’s numerous characters. His listeners include Win Everett’s daughter and wife as well as the men Mackey sends to Dallas for the assassination. Knight is also present at an abortive press conference the Dallas police try to arrange for Oswald. Even Nicholas Branch, the novel’s beleagured historian of the assassination, has a note that “The Dallas disc jockey known as Weird Beard was Russell Lee Moore, who also used the name Russ Knight” (301).

 

The Weird Beard’s genealogy in DeLillo’s fiction goes back to his first novel, Americana. In that work Warren Beasley (who even shares the Beard’s initials), fired from his job as a television weatherman after announcing that “the true weather report had been concealed from the public all these years. Storm warnings up and down the subconscious” (94), has a radio program called “Death Is Just Around the Corner” (93). Beasley’s show is pure talk – “I know you’re out there somewhere, all you prankish gunmen, pacing your scurvy rooms, making lists of likely targets with your Scriptomatic ballpoints, thinking incredibly in your wistfulness of the grandeur of state funerals” (232) – talk which gives the narrator David Bell “frightening dreams” (235), just as the Weird Beard inspires strange behavior in the Everetts’ daughter.

 

Both disc jockeys attest to Norman Wacker’s assertion that in “DeLillo’s novels, mass culture is a spectral presence haunting and disorienting every appeal to grounds outside its protean representational fields” (69). For listeners of both the Weird Beard and Beasley, this disorientation is sublime. Unlike the numbness Beryl Parmenter develops to the televised image of Oswald’s murder, the eeriness felt by the radio listeners is unabated. To the assassins traveling west to Dallas the Weird Beard is “an eerie voice rid[ing] across the long night,” a voice speaking uncanny versions of the future: “Tell you something,dear hearts, Big D is ner-vus tonight. Getting real close to the time. Notice how people saying scaaaary things. Feel night come rushing down. . . . Danger in the air. . . . Some things are true. Some are truer than true. Oh the air is swollen. Did you ever feel a tension like right now? . . . All the ancient terrors of the night. We’re looking right at it. We know it’s here. We feel it’s here. It has to happen. Something dark and strange and dreamsome. Weird Beard says, Night is rushing down over BigD” (381-82). The deadpan summation of this passage is the sentence “Raymo, Wayne and Frank had never been to Dallas and they wondered what this creep could mean” (382), but the sentence is perfectly apposite to the operation of the historical sublime in the novel. Since the three men are carnal manifestations of the larger ineffable, they are properly unaware of the greater force, the “subject not object” in Weinstein’s coinage, which directs their actions.

 

What is by now abundantly clear is that DeLillo signifies the operation of history through the sublime at nearly every step. The operations of the plotters are sublime at one level; the gradual shaping of the actual assassination sublime at another. For the former the organization of the plot on the president’s life is a project which gradually gets out of control due to what is considered an inherent fault in human protection of secrets: “The thing that hovers over every secret is betrayal” (218). The plot veers away into the sublime darkness of plotting, but that darkness is to a great degree the product of human manipulation, the cloaking of cloak and dagger men. But the historical forces which gather their sublime strength in the areas of the novel I have just been reviewing operate on a far different level, on a literally awesome plane of ineffable cause.

 

A remaining question, however, is just what we can make of such a text, a historical novel with an ineffable model of historical process. The tendency toward unspeakability in DeLillo’s writing has been maligned: John Kucich, writing before Libra‘s publication, criticizes DeLillo’s “lack of clarity, “which is actually, Kucich believes, “a symptom of his own postmodern inability to reason out an alternative politics” (340-41). And Theodor Adorno, criticizing not DeLillo but the American attraction to irrational explanation, cites the “type of irrationality in which the total order of our life presents itself to most individuals: opaqueness and inscrutability. Naive persons fail to look through the complexities of a highly organized and institutionalized society, but even the sophisticated ones cannot understand it in plain terms of consistency and reason, but are faced with antagonism and absurdities . . . . Who wants to survive under present conditions is tempted to ‘accept’ such absurdities, like the verdict of the stars, rather than to penetrate them by thinking which means discomfort in many directions” (20). In the cases of both Kucich and Adorno the problem is, of course, mystification. The mysterious or ineffable can only mask a level of shrugged-off analysis and wind up as an opiate for the reading public.

 

Surprisingly even DeLillo himself, in “American Blood,” the article that was Libra‘s genesis, writes that there is “No need” to “lapse into mystical fatalism” in quest of the truth of the assassination (24). As he goes on, “Dallas remains unique in its complexity and ambiguity, in the sinister links, the doublings, the organized deceits, but we tend to see it now as simply the first of a chain of what we might call instances of higher violence–violence with its own liturgy of official grief, its own standards of newsworthiness, with its built-in set of public responses” (“AB” 24). In this view the “complexity and ambiguity,” the very things which have helped mark the event’s historical sublimity, recede before the ritual level of American violence. But there is a marked shift between “American Blood” and Libra, a shift that is again helpfully elucidated through DeLillo’s own account. “My books are open-ended,” he tells an interviewer, “I would say that mystery in general rather than the occult is something that weaves in and out of my work. I can’t tell you where it came from or where it leads to” (DeCurtis 55). Here, succinctly, we find the very ineffability which characterizes Libra‘s historical sublime. “I can’t tell you” resonates with Ferrie’s conjecture that history is “the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us,” and again questions of process are left in limbo.

 

What Kucich, directly, and Adorno, indirectly, criticize is the authorial refusal to confer a predetermined ideological closure on a given narrative. Lentricchia has noted that “The telling assumption of DeLillo’s media right reviewers is that he is coming from the left” (“American” 5). In the left critique the telling assumption is that DeLillo is a bourgeois apologist, writing from the “obvious privilege of the liberal middle-class intellectual” (Kucich 334). But it is consoling to few members of the middle-class, I would guess, to be told that history is a mixture of chaos and fearsome sublimity. This is the message of Libra, a model of history beholden to theories of chaos and the lack of certainty which has haunted Western science throughout this century.

 

DeLillo is not alone in such conjecture either; Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and T. Coraghessan Boyle’s World’s End both feature models of causality which finally rest on the random or the ineffable. For Morrison the chaotic carelessness which results in the naming of the first Macon Dead (18) has vast historical consequences absolutely relevant to the name’s literal and punning meanings, while the never explained scent of ginger haunts several of the novel’s moments of historical revelation (185, 241, 324, 339). In Boyle’s novel, indebted both to Pynchon and to Grass, the historical currents of an upstate New York town are controlled by a grotesque dwarf, the Dunderberg Imp. Though the Imp resembles a character in the novel’s present no confirmation of this link is ever made and the Imp’s meaning or purpose is never fully revealed. Yet he governs traffic on the Hudson, metaphorically the movement of time, a “capricious gnome . . . deranged and irresponsible” (170).

 

Political motivation is not lacking in this company. Morrison’s novel is part of a larger project involving the reclamation of unwritten history and the nomination of the African-American subject. Boyle uses World’s End as a satire of 1960s pop-existentialism while simultaneously hypothesizing a history of betrayal within the American labor movement. All three novelists seek some purchase on the Sixties, the decade in which all the novels are chiefly set, and all three find that a level of sublime ineffability is central to such a project. It may be that despite a widespread effort by novelists, historians, and others there is nevertheless a strong current of feeling that we are not sufficiently distant from the Sixties to be able to historicize them with any accuracy.

 

But in DeLillo’s case there is an additional impetus for the sublime: a sense on the novelist’s part of a larger and indescribable system at work. “It is just my sense that we live in a kind of circular or near-circular system,” he tells DeCurtis, “and that there are an increasing number of rings which keep intersecting at some point, whether you’re using a plastic card to draw money out of your account at an automatic teller machine or thinking about the movement of planetary bodies. I mean, these systems all seem to interact to me. . . . The secrets within systems, I suppose, are things that have informed my work. But they’re almost secrets of consciousness, or ways in which consciousness is replicated in the natural world” (61). This quasi-mystical formulation again finds its predecessors in Kant (“Sublimity . . . does not reside in any of the things of nature, but only in our own mind” [114]) and Burke (“the idea of bodily pain . . . is productive of the sublime; and nothing else in this sense can produce it” [86, emphasis mine]). Libra‘s awesome historical sublime may simply have its roots in the related sublime of consciousness itself, and the impossibility of understanding the latter is writ large in the impossibility of encompassing the former. The resultant conceptual implosion leaves us with a better understanding of Libra as it points directly toward David Ferrie’s implicit description of the novel itself: “Think of two parallel lines . . . One is the life of Lee H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of theself. It’s not generated by cause and effect like the other two lines. It’s a line that cuts across causality, cuts across time. It has no history that we can recognize or understand. But it forces a connection. It puts a man on the path to his destiny” (339).

 

Any supposed evasion of politics or history by DeLillo is thus a misreading of what we might call a depth politics; history’s intention is the sublime intention of subjects, billions of them, and what novelist would want to claim certainty about what those intentions might be? Perhaps, as a line in Mao II asserts, “The future belongs to crowds” (16). Still, we should not be quick to blame DeLillo for not wanting to predict the future, to divine the intentions of these crowds. Libra finally makes the same case for history that chaos theory has clarified about weather forecasting: the impossibility of grasping the plurality of details inherent in initial conditions renders any human attempt at understanding the present or forecasting the future proportionally deficient. Like other aspects of the novel (the Nicholas Branch sections for example) and indeed the Kennedy assassination itself, Libra‘s sublimes are variations on the theme of uncertainty, variations which drive home a stunning postmodern inheritance: what Arnold Weinstein terms “a special purgatory of epistemological murk, of never again seeing clear, of permanent exile in the realm of information glut and data overload” (311). If this is an evasion of political realities and a prescription for bourgeois comfort, then many of us should feel shortchanged. Instead it appears that DeLillo has successfully transferred the infinite of the classical/romantic sublime to the postmodern conception of history itself. History is not acausal but too complex, too immense, to be reckoned by the unitary subjective mind. With the lens turned the right way, DeLillo’s conversion of an eighteenth-century aesthetic to a postmodern analytic has the terrific–in every sense– flavor of whatever might remain as truth.

 

Works Cited

 

• Aaron, Daniel. “How to Read Don DeLillo.” Introducing Don DeLillo. Ed. Frank Lentricchia. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. 67-81.
• Adorno, Theodor W. “The Stars Down to Earth: The Los Angeles Times Astrology Column.” Telos 19.1 (1974): 13-90.
• Boyle, T. Coraghessan. World’s End. New York: Penguin, 1988.
• Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enguiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Ed. James Boulton. London: Routledge, 1958.
• Cain, William E. “Making Meaningful Worlds: Self and History in Libra,” Rev. of Libra, by Don DeLillo. Michigan Quarterly Review 29 (1990): 275-87.
• Carmichael, Thomas. “Lee Harvey Oswald and the Postmodern Subject: History and Intertextuality in Don DeLillo’s Libra, The Names, and Mao II.” Contemporary Literature 34 (1993): 204-18.
• DeCurtis, Anthony. “‘An Outsider in This Society’: An Interview with Don DeLillo.” Introducing Don DeLillo. Ed. Frank Lentricchia. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. 43-66.
• DeLillo, Don. “American Blood: A Journey Through the Labyrinth of Dallas and JFK.” Rolling Stone 8 Dec. 1983: 21-2, 24, 27-8,74.
• —. Americana. New York: Penguin, 1989.
• —. Libra. New York: Penguin, 1989.
• —. Mao II. New York: Viking, 1991.
• —. Ratner’s Star. New York: Vintage, 1980.
• Introducing Don DeLillo. Ed. Frank Lentricchia. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. 175-91.
• Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
• —. Rev. of The Names, by Don DeLillo and Richard A, by Sol Yurick. Minnesota Review 22.1 (1984): 116-22.
• Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement. Trans. James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Clarendon, 1952.
• Kucich, John. “Postmodern Politics: Don DeLillo and the Plight of the White Male Writer.” Michigan Quarterly Review 27 (1988): 328-41.
• Lentricchia, Frank. “The American Writer as Bad Citizen.” Introducing Don DeLillo. Ed. Frank Lentricchia. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. 1-6.
• —, ed. Introducing Don DeLillo. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
• —. “Libra as Postmodern Critique,” Introducing Don DeLillo. Ed. Frank Lentricchia. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. 193-215.
• Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington, and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.
• Messmer, Michael W. “‘Thinking It Through Completely’: The Interpretation of Nuclear Culture.” Centennial Review 34 (1988): 397-413.
• Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. New York: NAL, 1977.
• Wacker, Norman. “Mass Culture/Mass Novel: the Representational Politics of Don DeLillo’s Libra.” Works and Days 8 (1990): 67-88.
• Weinstein, Arnold. Nobody’s Home: Speech, Self, and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.