Glen Scott Allen

Department of English
Towson State University
e7e4all@toe.towson.edu

 

“Terror: from the Latin terrere, to frighten; intense fear; the quality of causing dread; terribleness; alarm, consternation, apprehension, dread, fear, fright.”

 

—Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary

 

“Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of culture. Now, bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness.”

 

–William Gray in Mao II

 

Terrorism has played an important part in nearly every novel Don DeLillo has written to date. While the terrorists of Running Dog (1978) are essentially cartoon figures in search of a hypothetical pornographic film made in Hitler’s bunker, the more realistic terrorists in Players (1977) assassinate stock brokers and attempt to convert (albeit apathetically) disillusioned upper middleclass New Yorkers. The Names’ (1982) use of terrorism is more complex, positing a terrorist group–or perhaps cult is closer to the mark–whose assassinations are either random or based on an arcane understanding of a “pre-linguistic” language, depending on what they believe that day; and White Noise (1985), with its “airborne toxic event” extends this unpredictability factor and presents terrorism as something perhaps beyond the control of human agency at all. Libra (1989) suggest that terrorism of a bureaucratic but inherently uncontrollable nature lurks at the heart of the Kennedy assassination. And finally DeLillo’s most recent novel, Mao II (1991), returns to an human terrorist, Abu Rashid, and suggests a complex and almost hypnotic symmetry between his praxis and that of a famous but disillusioned writer in the novel, William Gray. This symmetry is of course not unique to Mao II; the extended meditation about “solitary plotters” in Libra posits that both the scheming terrorist and the struggling writer are at root “men in small rooms” seeking to reconnect with a society from which they feel alienated, and so they both must “write” themselves back into the world.

 

Terrorism in DeLillo seems an integral component of the postmodern condition, its ubiquitousness aiding and abetting in the construction of a subject for whom paranoia is not so much a neurosis as a canny adaptive strategy of survival; a strategy which has “evolved” from what we might call its classical form in the works of Thomas Pynchon, especially his magnum opus Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). Terrorism in GR is figured as the product of increasingly omniscient institutional surveillance over the increasingly impotent and isolated civilian. While the agents of this surveillance are obscure, still they are agents, coherent sites of surveillance and control. In DeLillo’s work, however, terrorism seems to have evolved beyond the need of human agency, to have seeped into the very texture of contemporary life. DeLillo’s response to this postmodern dynamic of terrorism and paranoia argues for an almost romantic return to the sovereign powers of the individual, an entity considered essentially extinct in postmodern fiction. This resurgent individualism is in fact not only a rejection of the paranoid strategy for postmodern survival formulated in Pynchon, but it also represents a rejection of the postmodern subject (as figured in the works of critics like Benveniste, Jameson, and Beaudrillard to name only a few) as something nearly inseparable from the semiotic “signal soup” of postmodern life.¹ For instance, Kaja Silverman singles out the writings of Benveniste as an example of the representation of this spectral postmodern subject: “[In Benveniste’s] writings, the subject has an even more provisional status . . . it has no existence outside of the specific discursive moments in which it emerges. The subject must be constantly reconstructed through discourse.” (Silverman, 199). But I will argue that DeLillo seems to feel our only hope for redemption from a self-perpetuating cycle of terrorism, repression and paranoia is in moving away from formulations of the subject which work to deny or subvert classical conceptions of the individual as the primary site of responsibility and authority.

 

Typically when we speak of terrorism we’re referring to violence committed by a minority in demonstration of its status as victim: of political repression or geographic isolation or “cultural ghettoization.” Thus terrorism is fundamentally an act meant to call attention to itself; like postmodern fiction, it is inherently self-conscious. And in order to disseminate its self-conscious image as victim, it must have recourse to the media. Clearly when DeLillo’s character William Gray suggests that terrorists have usurped the role in the public conscious that novelists once held, he is referring to the fact that terrorist acts must be circulated to attain identity, and thus such acts compete for the public’s limited attention span with other circulating “texts.” Much of the debate within the scholarship of terrorism does in fact center on whether or not mass media encourages terrorist acts or is largely irrelevant to them. Two recent articles in the journal Terrorism are good examples of this debate. Ralph Dowling suggests that TV coverage is unimportant to terrorist aims, while Russell F. Farnen argues that terrorism and TV have a fundamentally symbiotic relationship, and that in fact terrorism is “made to order” for the specific requirements of the television media: “Terrorism is different, dramatic, and potentially violent. It frequently develops over a period of time, occurs in exotic locations, offers a clear confrontation, involves bizarre characters, and is politically noteworthy. Finally, it is of concern to the public” (Farnen, 111). Farnen cites what is apparently the majority opinion in terrorism studies by paraphrasing (unfortunately) Margaret Thatcher, to the effect that TV coverage is the “oxygen” which allows terrorism to breathe.

 

Whatever one’s opinion about the relationship between TV and terrorism, a far more interesting point is to be found in Dowling’s suggestion that understanding terrorist acts is no more–and no less–difficult than understanding any human attempt at communication. For certainly “understanding” terrorist acts is the one thing the “authorities” must claim to be incapable of doing. By its very definition, terrorism, at least to modern western democracies, is “mad.” To see why this is the case we begin with a quote from a member of Al Fatah on the purpose of their use of violence: “Violence will purify the individuals from venom, it will redeem the colonized from inferiority complex, it will return courage to the countryman” (Quoted in Dowling, 52). Violence for this terrorist is not the medium, it is the message. Violence is the transcendental signifier, the one term that cannot be reduced to any positive correlative within the discourse itself; axiomatic, beyond justification or logical debate; beyond logic. Thus to the logocentric Western sensibility, the terrorists’ use of violence is the most “senseless” of all terms he/she could possibly employ. It is, in terms of cultural linguistics, essentially impossible for most “First World” Western civilians to “read” the terrorist text, to see in it any expression worth interpreting. Farnen quotes the U. S. Ambassador at Large, L. Paul Bremer, who casts terrorism in its familiar Western role of evil incarnate: “Terrorism’s most significant characteristic is that it despises and seeks to destroy the fundamentals of Western democracy–respect for individual life and the rule of law” (Farnen, 104).

 

Though these two authors disagree about the relationship between terrorism and the media, they both agree that terrorism does in fact serve a fundamental rhetorical purpose, like any other form of human communication consisting of the manipulation of symbols. The communicative act is, Dowling argues, the way humans “find a place in the world,” the process of identifying oneself and one’s group as distinct from other selves and other groups. Terrorist acts signal to the terrorists themselves who they are. In Dowling’s view, the cultural effect of mass media-broadcasted terrorist violence is quite secondary to the more fundamentally human need of terrorists to “speak” themselves: “The seemingly senseless killings by terrorists serve the same function for terrorist society that wars and punishment of criminals and dissidents perform for mainstream society” (Dowling, 51). Farnen also believes that terrorism is a form of expression, a text which all the parties involved seek to control.² He uses the example of the kidnapping of Aldo Moro in 1978 by the Brigate Rosse, which Farnen says was “played out” as a classic narrative of sacrifice and tragedy by all the parties involved: government, media, and the terrorists themselves: “The saga was complete with ‘Christians’ (Moro and his martyred bodyguards), BR ‘lions,’ state ‘Caesars,’ media ‘tribunes,’ and the anxious Italian public” (Farnen, 116). In fact, Farnen argues that the terrorists intentionally and specifically “wrote” various symbolism into the entire kidnapping drama, in such forms as the “placement of [Moro’s] dead body in the center of Rome, on a street linking the two major party headquarters” (118). Even more interesting is Farnen’s observation that, though the event was discussed at obsessive length in the media for months, very little was ever said about the terrorists’ possible motivations or rationale. In fact, he concludes that, like many such terrorist acts, the entire event was treated as though it occurred somewhere outside the normal course of human events: “The Moro affair was treated much like an inexplicable natural disaster or an act of God” (118). Finally, Farnen points out terrorism’s usefulness as a dramatic trope, which has made it a mainstay of TV shows and popular spy novels: “With the sudden demise of post-Gorbachev communism as the main enemy, terrorism has become ‘public enemy number one’ in American public discourse” (103). (Certainly this move is evident in the work of Tom Clancy, who began by casting Soviets in the role of arch villain, but has easily substituted terrorists–both narco- and political–in that role in his more recent novels.)

 

While much of Dowling’s argument seems finally rather simplistic–at times he appears to cast terrorists in the role of the misunderstood teens from “West Side Story”–at the very least he works to move the discourse about terrorist acts from reductive tactical debates to a recognition that terrorism is a means of expression. However, by downplaying and eventually denying the role the mass media audience plays in the formation of the “terrorist identity,” he skims over what is clearly for many postmodern writers, especially DeLillo, the most interesting, perhaps the most terrifying aspect of modern terrorism. For if terrorists have become nearly ubiquitous players in the contemporary social narrative, then, whatever the intent of their “expressive” acts, they contribute as much to the formation of our identity as to their own, and their acts of seemingly random and “meaningless” violence have become an integral component of what being a modern individual means. Given that it has become something of a commonplace to say that part of what being a postmodern subject means is a pervasive sense of anxiety and vulnerability, then terrorism’s chief aim would seem to be perfectly consistent with that “meaning.” According to an authority on terrorism, its chief “objective . . . is to convey a pervasive sense of vulnerability”; vulnerability which produces consequent paranoia and guilt in the civilian; guilt which arises “when terrorism proves that societal institutions cannot provide the peace and security they promise” (qtd. in Dowling, 52). Thus in a broad cultural context, terrorism is an all-too material demonstration of the uncertainty principle, i.e., that we cannot absolutely control our environments and destinies, and that our ability to dictate the narrative of our own lives is limited and circumstantial.

 

In order to describe DeLillo’s presentation of this dynamic of terrorism and paranoia, we first need to discuss terrain so often considered Pynchon’s preeminent stomping ground. Pynchon’s chief contribution to literature may well be considered a body of fiction where the legacy of a paranoid style–out of Orwell via Burroughs, Kerouac and Mailer–comes to full fruition in what a character in Running Dog calls the “age of conspiracies.” According to John McClure, the appeal of conspiracy theories in the late 20th century stems from their essentially indisputable, self-justifying, self-referencing hermeneutics: “For conspiracy theory explains the world, as religion does, without elucidating it, by positing the existence of hidden forces which permeate and transcend the realm of ordinary life” (McClure, 103). Though McClure is writing here of the work of Don DeLillo, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow would undoubtedly serve equally well as an example of this conspiracy fiction, with its nearly infinite schemes crossing and crisscrossing nations, continents, and decades, while in the center of these intersecting plot-lines sits forlorn Tyrone Slothrop, like a target in a crosshairs.

 

But a target of what? Certainly the V-2 rocket is one possibility; by the end of the novel we have reason to believe that the rocket is in fact “pursuing” Slothrop, or that he is pursuing it. In any case, they seem bound, through the early experiments of Dr. Jamf with Imoplex-G, in some complicated dance of death. But this “chemical bond” is only conjectural, and certainly not the only candidate for some They out to get Slothrop. In fact, by the time Slothrop wanders the Zone, They has become nearly every postwar institution, regardless its national or ideological boundaries. Finally what pursues Slothrop is the World; but what pursues the reader is the lasting image of a rocket, poised an infinitesimal inch above our heads, completing an arc which began with its vapor trail first witnessed by Pirate Prentice 800 pages earlier. And in a purely physical sense, the greatest terror of the novel is the V-2, the German “terror weapon” that was intended to demoralize the British civilian population. By using the V-2 as a trope of paranoia, Pynchon categorically identified the primary legacy of our victory in WWII as anxiety; anxiety fueled by a world armed with weapons which had transcended all classical theories and strategies of warfare. This fundamentally “material” terrorism is one easily recognized by anyone who lived through either WWII or the 25 years of intense Cold War which followed. As critic John Johnston has argued, the “They-system” of Gravity’s Rainbow “is depicted as arising out of the new bureaucratic needs and technologies of World War Two” (“Post-Cinematic Fiction,” 91); bureaucratic needs and technologies which would come to identify Slothrop’s “time” as the progenitor of this age of conspiracies:

 

There is also the story about Tyrone Slothrop, who was sent into the Zone to be present at his own assembly–perhaps, heavily paranoid voices have whispered, his time’s assembly–and there ought to be a punchline to it. But there isn’t. The plan went wrong. (GR, 680)

 

Though Pynchon’s Theys are depicted as beyond traditional national ideologies, Their politics are clearly identifiable as essentially those of isolation, repression and control. In the post-WWII world of Pynchon’s fiction, the development of modern and efficient state surveillance is a form of terrorism which motivates the civilian to seek out patterns of information which may (or may not) reveal hidden agencies and concealed plots. Thus paranoia is an adaptive reaction formation to omniscient institutional surveillance. And the mass media in Pynchon–radio, TV and print journalism, even the US. postal system–has been largely co-opted by these forces of surveillance and control until they have become little more than state-dominated networks for distributing dis-information. Pynchon correctly predicted that the surviving nation-states, unable to take to the battlefield against foreign enemies, would turn all their powers of surveillance on their own citizens, project their institutionalized paranoia onto these civilians, and thus construct an international and domestic tension where peace in the world was purchased with the disappearance of this very civilian as an independent subject. What Pynchon represents in GR is, for want of a better term, the ascendancy of State Terrorism; not the state terrorism claimed by the PLO as a underlying reality in the foreign policy of the United States and other world powers, but rather an intra state terrorism, i.e., the development of complex and interconnected domestic and international networks of surveillance which depend on the acquisition and circulation of vast quantities of new information.

 

And these new information technologies also become central to the thematics of DeLillo’s novels, but in quite different ways. For instance, the information in DeLillo’s work often seems utterly ahistorical. The characters of DeLillo’s novels often “inhabit” identities whose connection to history–either personal or cultural–is merely theoretical. DeLillo’s fictions seem set in a time when World War II has become a distant influence. In Running Dog, for instance, there is the pornographic film from Hitler’s Bunker, yet nothing else about World War II seeps through into the novel; even Vietnam seems to belong to an entirely other world. Of course, the paranoiac “fallout” from World War II and the stalemate of the Cold War is only one of the trademarks of Pynchon’s fiction. Others include conspiracies whose agencies are dispersed or uncertain, characters who disappear in ways which mirror the dispersal of those agencies, and endings which suggest imminent and perhaps apocalyptic revelation. Yet, while all of these components are evident in DeLillo’s novels as well, they are all warped by this increasing mass of information which shapes, or perhaps is the postmodern subject.

 

In other words, many of DeLillo’s characters seem to be in danger of becoming exactly the sort of postmodern specter to which I referred earlier. In fact, critic Daniel Aaron has suggested that, in all of DeLillo’s novels, his characters are less Cartesian individuals than “integers in a vast information network” (70). And LeClair sees information and its various incarnations as the very essence of DeLillo’s works: “The novels are all about communication exchanges, the relations between information and energy and forces, the methods of storing, retrieving, and using new kinds of information” (“Postmodern Mastery,” 101). How, then, is DeLillo arguing against the acceptance of the dissipated postmodern subject? This is a point I will return to in a moment. But first I want to pursue the ways in which DeLillo re-structures Pynchon’s legacy of paranoia, and the relationship in Ratner’s Star between paranoia and what DeLillo presents as the “new, improved” version of postmodern terrorism.

 

DeLillo remaps Pynchon’s legacy of paranoia onto a distinctly American, largely urban post-historical landscape. In novels of middle class ennui like Players, White Noise, and even to a certain extent Mao II, the America of DeLillo is not only a land existing completely within this “age of conspiracies,” its inhabitants seem capable of defining themselves only as victims of these conspiracies. Frank Lentricchia believes that DeLillo’s works serve as cautionary tales about such conspiracy and media-bound identity, illustrating “how the expressive forces of blood and earth are in the process of being overtaken and largely replaced by the forces of contemporary textuality. Lives lived so wholly inside the media are lives expressed (in the passive mood) through voices dominated by the jargons of the media” (“Postmodern Critique,” 211). And while the terrorism in DeLillo’s novels often begins as something familiar to us as terrorism–small bands of individuals plotting acts of violence against “innocent” civilians–this “prosaic” terrorism typically metamorphoses into something else: an independent, uncontrolled, mysterious and perhaps even unfathomable force which disrupts the best laid plans of terrorist and civilian alike. Again, the airborne toxic event in White Noise is one example. But the best sustained representation of this “agentless” terrorism is to be found, oddly enough, in one of DeLillo’s earliest novels, Ratner’s Star (1976); a novel unique among his works if only because there is no representative terrorist among its characters; at least no recognizably human terrorist. But we do recognize in Ratner’s Star a “Pynchonian” mise en scene, complete with proliferating plots, daunting intertextual connections, hidden and potentially non-existent agencies, dispersing narrative voices, and, at the center of the plots and counter-plots, a lone and relatively naive protagonist, Billy Twillig, whose task it is to determine whether he is a perceptive victim or a delusional paranoid. In Ratner’s Star, DeLillo rewrites the global plots of Gravity’s Rainbow onto the larger stage of the Universe, which itself becomes both scheme and schemer, as well as the chief “terrorist.”

 

The premise of Ratner’s Star is that we have received a signal from outer space. Fourteen-year-old Billy Twillig, a mathematical prodigy, is summoned to a distant research complex, Field Experiment Number One (FENO), to help decode the message. From the beginning of the novel the uncertainty of Billy’s task and the instability of the fictional world which surrounds him are emphasized: “Little Billy Twillig stepped aboard a Sony 747 bound for a distant land. This much is known for certain. . . . But ahead was the somnolent horizon, pulsing in the dust and fumes, a fiction whose limits were determined by one’s perspective” (RS, 3). From the moment Billy arrives at FENO, he is besieged by what any reader of Pynchon would recognize as an overabundance of signal which threatens to degenerate into noise; and the only scientist other than Billy capable of deciphering the alien message–the aged and venerable Henrik Endor–has run away from the complex and is out in the desert, digging a hole.

 

Billy’s dilemma is not unlike that of Benny Profane or Oedipa Maas or Tyrone Slothrop: to “sort noise from signal,” and determine whether or not there is an intelligent “agency” at the origin of the message; but to determine first of all if there is a message. And like Benny and Oedipa and Tyrone before him, Billy encounters a dizzying array of characters in his search, all with their own interpretation of the message, all with their entirely idiosyncratic agenda of signals and counter-signals. But whereas in Pynchon the “terror” generated by mysterious plots is largely a result of the revealed size and complexity of those plots, in Ratner’s Star the terror arises from the randomness and potential irrelevance of the information with which Billy is bombarded; which is to say, in Pynchon what is learned contributes to the background of terror, while in DeLillo the acquisition of knowledge is problematized to the point where “learning” itself is an experience of random and meaningless violence; the very process of searching is, in and of itself, terrifying.

 

This terrible process of learning is figured as inescapably arising from the dynamics and limits of language. While the later half of the novel is devoted to the revelation of many things Billy doesn’t really want to know (about adulthood and sex, trust and betrayal), the first half concentrates on reducing language, and particularly conversation to something more like hand-to-hand combat than communication. For instance, dialogue between characters is less the revelation of information than an exchange of cliches, a sort of preliminary sizing up of one another for soft spots. A dialogue between Billy and a vaguely sinister man he meets on a plane (an entrepreneur who will turn out later to be the closest thing the novel has to an actual terrorist) goes like this:

 

"How was the bathroom."
"I liked it."
"Mine was first-rate."
"Pretty nice."
"Some plane."
"The size."
"Exactly."

 

Throughout the novel most of the characters play their conversational cards very close to the vest, but Billy’s responses to questions particularly are more like stage directions for speech than speech itself: “My mouth says hello”; “I do not comment.”; “I make no reply” (RS, 11). And when Billy eventually reaches the secret complex FENO, he is almost literally assaulted by a blizzard of scientific jargon from a dozen different fields–biology, child “sexology,” astrophysics, architecture–as well as the apparently secret agendas of everyone he meets. All of this secretive and gestural communication occurs in an atmosphere of instantaneous computer networks, portable communicators, super intelligent computers and hyperbolic referentiality, which makes language something violent, unrelenting, and unpredictable. No communication is simply referential, pointing to any unambiguous signified. In fact, signification in the world of FENO is (in Barthes’ terms) all connotation, no denotation–rhetorical “slippages” alone accounting for what little coherent meaning can be derived. Language here is often so rote as to be almost all ritual, its meaning residing entirely in its context. For instance, when Billy reaches his room in FENO, certain “safety precautions” are read to him by his escort:

 

“The exit to which your attention has been directed is the sole emergency exit point for this sector and is not to be used for any purpose except that contingent upon fire, man-made flooding, natural trauma or catastrophe, and international crisis situations of the type characterized by nuclear spasms or terminal-class subnuclear events. If you have understood this prepared statement, indicate by word or gesture.”

 

“I have understood.”

 

“Most people just nod,” Ottum said. “It’s more universal.” (17)

 

And often language “attacks” occur without any context. In fact, individual words often take on a paranoiac aura which is completely independent of either their denotation or connotation. For instance, Billy feels certain words are threatening all by themselves–words like gout, ohm, ergot, pulp; “organic” words which he refers to as “alien linguistic units.” And his paranoid reaction makes perfect sense: in a world where all quotes are taken out of context, each utterance would indeed seem an “alien linguistic unit,” something whose purpose is suspect and presumptively threatening. Thus the material violence which is the transcendental signifier for terrorists like the member of Al Fatah becomes in Ratner’s Star the abstracted violence of decontextualized and seemingly nonsensical language; language without a logical referent, pointing either to itself or nowhere, or both.

 

Of course much postmodern fiction depends on this technique of decontextualization for its disorienting effect. But typically accompanying this technique is the employment of intertextual references which signal to the reader exactly what sort of larger context–often ironic–is to be used to “ground” signification. Throughout Ratner’s Star, however, what we would typically refer to as the intertextual references are made not to individual texts at all, but rather to vague “sites” of cultural signification. These sites are in turn reduced to single tropes, what we might call “signature” tropes, the decoding of which depends on the reader’s possession of a repertoire of contemporary cultural trivia: cliches from classic films, one-liners from TV shows, characters and quotes from comic books, popular novels, newspaper headlines, tabloids, the jargon of Scientific American, the newspeak of federal bureaucrats, the glib argot of tabloid journalists . . . all of these idiolects existing side-by-side as equally valid discourses. Thus “texts” are less discrete and more continuous, terms which Ratner’s Star uses with considerable frequency; something like subatomic particles, which aren’t really “particular” at all but rather fields whose density fades vaguely off into other fields. And very often these “fields” of reference merely deflect the reader to still other “tropic fields” (to coin a perfectly awful phrase) until the paths of reference become so intricate that any map of this referentiality would look like the tracings of subatomic collisions produced in particle accelerators.³

 

In such a miasmic communicative environment, traditional boundaries between “texts” are dissolved. The result is more chaotic tropic plasma than orderly intertextual network. In this new form of intertextuality, the process whereby texts make contributions to the intertextual langue are best thought of as something like a field of signification, something one measures with probabilities and approximations rather than certainties and units. The characters of Ratner’s Star move through clouds of such tropes, charged with the reflexive urge to find some sort of order, to arrange these signals into “spectra” based not on the content of the original text from which the signature trope is derived, but rather on the degree to which each trope serves as a vector pointing toward a potential agency at the message’s point of origin. For instance, even when Billy believes he has finally decoded the message from space, he is admonished for working toward the wrong goal: “Content is not the issue. So don’t go around telling people you broke the code. There is no code worth breaking” (416). Robert Softly, the character who has conceived of the perfectly logical, perfectly useless language called Logicon (a language for which one of the key rules is “i. All language was innuendo.”) often speaks with every word–even articles and prepositions–in quotes: “‘It’ ‘is’ ‘time’ ‘for’ ‘me’ ‘to’ ‘get’ ‘out’.” Each word is thus partitioned by an ironic valence even from its immediate, syntagmatic context. Thus severed from all context global and local, much of the language in the book does indeed seem like the “alien linguistic units” which so terrorize Billy. To what do such “alien linguistic units” refer? For Billy at least, that common direction, the principle which he uses in an attempt to bring shape to the tropic plasma, is the discourse of mathematics–the only discourse which he does not find threatening. Language which is not simply “alien” is “comforting” to the extent that it can be translated into mathematical equivalents. And what Billy finds comforting in mathematics is the distinct quality of its constituent components–at least its integer components: “Words and numbers, writing and calculating. . . . Ever one more number, individual and distinct, fixed in place, absolutely whole” (7). Fractions, we are told, have always made Billy feel “slightly queasy.”

 

The typical Pynchonian reaction to such a state of paranoia would be a dispersal of agency. By dispersal of agency, I mean both the figurative way in which the plots in Pynchon’s novels are always potentially agentless and self-perpetuating, and the literal manner in which Pynchon’s protagonists have a tendency to disappear: we recall Benny in V. disappearing into the sunset of Malta, Oedipa in Lot 49 disappearing into the auction room, and, most significantly, Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow, who disperses into the plot itself, becoming a “pretext” and a concept which is “just too remote” to hold together. We might also remember the way in which Slothrop merges with the symbol of what’s been pursuing him–the V-2 rocket–by becoming Rocketmensch just before he merges with the plot ever further and becomes vaguely visible (at least to Pig Bodine) but insubstantial; before he becomes, that is, a specter. And such a move is, again, perfectly in keeping with the paranoid logos of the novel, as the other trademark of Pynchon’s plots is their undecidability, their sense of imminent but unrealized revelation. In one sense, revelation ought to be the ultimate moment for the paranoid, as it is the moment when the “truth” of his world view is substantiated, made incarnate; but of course this ultimate moment is also the final moment–for if paranoia is more the state of seeking agency than the moment of finding it, then revelation threatens the paranoid’s very raison d’etre. Thus the most dedicated paranoid would be the one able to forever defer this moment of revelation.

 

At this point I need to briefly discuss the idea of tropes. The root of the word trope is the Greek tropaion, which was a marker left to indicate where an enemy had been turned back. We might ask, then, what “enemy” is it that tropes turn back? As tropic or figural language is, at least in a basic sense, considered the opposite of literal language, a first order answer might be that tropes mark the place in language where literality is “turned back.” What is literal is “made up” of letters; and literal reading is after all an effort to reduce the ambiguity of a term to a single meaning; to transform signifiers into signals whose meaning is constant across all possible contexts. Tropes, on the other hand, tug language in the opposite direction, toward a multiplicity of meaning and thus toward an uncertainty of interpretation. With this understanding of the tension between literal and tropic reading in mind, I would suggest then that the paranoid reader is in fact a very literal reader, one who works to reduce the ambiguity of the signifiers about him to mere signals which can all be traced back to the same and central agent–the agency at the center of the “plot.”

 

Who or what is this agent? To quote first from Gravity’s Rainbow:

 

“There never was a Dr. Jamf,” opines world-renowned analyst Mickey Wuxtry-Wuxtry–“Jamf was only a fiction, to help him explain what [Slothrop] felt so terribly, so immediately in his genitals for those rockets each time exploding in the sky . . . to help him deny what he could not possibly admit: that he was in love, in sexual love, with his, and his race’s, death.” (861)

 

By the end of Ratner’s Star, Billy Twillig feels “there was something between himself and the idea of himself . . . and what he knew about this thing was that it had the effect of imposing a silence” (RS, 361). Is Death, then, the elusive agency at the heart of both Pynchon and DeLillo’s paranoid plots? After all, a paranoid’s literal reading of Revelation–as in the revelation of agency–would necessarily dictate that it be followed inevitably by the completion of apocalypse, i.e., annihilation. And here we might remember the ending of Gravity’s Rainbow, with the tip of the rocket suspended above our heads and the words, “All together now” uniting us in the paranoid’s penultimate embrace. But in Ratner’s Star, DeLillo again raises the stakes of this near moment of revelation: for, while the imminent apocalypse in Gravity’s Rainbow is global, the imminent apocalypse of Ratner’s Star is “literally” universal.

 

Ratner’s Star posits something in space called a “mohole,” where all the recognized laws of physics cease to apply. “‘If I had to put what a mohole is into words’ (asks the reporter, Jean, who is chronicling the development of Logicon)’what would I say?’ ‘You’d have a problem,’ Mainwaring said” (365). By the end of the novel, the earth seems to be in just such a place, to be “mohole intense,” as it is cast into darkness by an “unscheduled” solar eclipse. Though the gathered scientists predict that life in a mohole will be radically different, they have no idea how to explain or describe the difference: “I don’t feel any different,” Softly said. “Rob, we don’t know. That’s it. We don’t know what it means. This is space-time sylphed. We’re dealing with Moholean relativity here. Possibly dimensions more numerous than we’ve ever before imagined” (410). Thus DeLillo gives Pynchon’s formula of dispersed and uncertain agency a boost by moving his imminent apocalypse into an area of potentially absolute dispersal and infinite uncertainty. Perhaps at the conclusion of Ratner’s Star we are on the verge of a literal apocalypse; that is, an apocalypse of literality; and, potentially, the genesis of an entirely “figural” universe where there is absolutely no consistent, predictable relationship between one experience and the next, between any word and any thing, between cause and effect. At the very least, such a universe would mean, in Ambassador at Large Bremer’s words, the end of “respect for individual life and the rule of law”; i.e., the final and complete triumph of terrorism.

 

So perhaps Slothrop’s disappearing act could well be considered a maneuver intended to outflank this revelation of universal uncertainty and thus omnipresent terrorism: a countering of the “reign of terror” engendered by the dispersal of agency by mirroring it and becoming the dispersed subject. And this dispersal of the subject is also found in Ratner’s Star–but again, with a twist. While Slothrop disperses into the narrative, still the narrating voice of Gravity’s Rainbow remains relatively coherent. However, in Ratner’s Star, while Billy Twillig retains his coherence as a character, what had been the third person omniscient narrating voice of the novel essentially disperses into the characters, moving in the same sentence between locales, even between thoughts:

 

Softly stopped reading here, thinking I am old, I will die, no one cares, her upper body slumped forward on the desk and what an implausible object it is, she thought . . . the photoelectric command at the end of Bolin’s hand, thinking I am old . . . Wu’s middle ear conveying vibrations inward . . . the implausibility of my parts, she thought. . . . (425)

 

In this final section of the novel, sentences intrude on one another like filaments of conversations overheard on car phones, as if the very atmosphere of the novel were filled with detached segments of dialogue drifting about, looking for a conversation to link up with. Thus it is the “voice” of Ratner’s Star which disperses, and which anticipates and evades the imminent revelation that its own end implies but does not quite reach.

 

DeLillo particularly seems interested in the link between death as the final paranoid revelation and the act of authoring itself. One of the entries quoted from Oswald’s diary in Libra expresses Oswald’s greatest longing, which is to cease being Oswald the individual and to merge into a spectral identity called “the struggle”: “Happiness is taking part in the struggle, where there is no borderline between one’s own personal world, and the world in general” (quoted in Lentricchia, “Postmodern Critique,” 197). Lentricchia sees in Oswald’s banal desire something other than merely one soldier of the revolution wishing to become one with the army of the revolution. Rather, he suggests that Oswald wishes to exchange places with Win Everett (the former CIA agent who is “plotting” Kennedy’s fake assassination), to become the author of the plot in which he is only a character–or perhaps to become an author, period: “Oswald, in his desire for a perfectly distilled, scripted self–propelled by itself as its own novelist/prime mover–is a figure of the assassin as writer, a man isolated by his passion, room-bound, a plot schemer” (“Postmodern Critique,” 209). Lentricchia suggests that in his feelings of impotence, victimhood, and insubstantiality Oswald is the perfect representation of the spectral and manipulated postmodern subject: “Self-constructed, constantly revised, Oswald’s narrative is a search for the very thing–a well-motivate, shapely existence–whose absence is a mark of the negative libran . . . Oswald’s patched voice produces the presiding tone of the postmodern absence of substantial and autonomous self-hood” (Lentricchia, “Postmodern Critique,” 209).

 

And DeLillo’s most recent novel Mao II centers on another “room-bound” plot schemer, a writer whose infrequent books are considered vastly intricate and dauntingly knowledgeable (which is of course also reminiscent of Pynchon). The writer’s name is William Gray–a fine name for blending into the background. ⁴ Gray is a recluse, in the style of J. D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon. In the novel, Gray has become something of a cultural “trope,” whose usefulness to his culture resides in the very insubstantiality of his celebrity. However, Gray feels his best work is behind him; or rather, that the best role of the author in society is behind him, and that authors as enactors of literature no longer have any effect on society. “Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of culture. Now, bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness” (Mao II, 87). Yet the “plot” Gray eventually becomes involved with is one authored by terrorists, not novelists; a plot which leads him to the realization of what seems to be his ultimate desire, which is not so much a merging into the struggle, as Oswald wanted, but a disappearing altogether into an anonymous death. There is the suggestion that Gray trumps the terrorist Abu Rashid’s plans for him by dying before he can be victimized, by making his sacrifice his own statement rather than allowing it to be shaped to Rashid’s purposes. But of course this is a statement no one reads, which we can think of either as an act of supreme idealization.

 

Or supreme futility. Mao II hardly endorses Gray’s self-willed abdication of self, his “devout” wish “to be forgotten,” as any sort of positive solution to the problem of postmodern terrorism and paranoia. For one thing, Gray’s anonymous death does not end the novel; we see the various characters adjusting to Gray’s disappearance, using it, shaping his absence to their own ends: his friend Scott settles into Gray’s house, becoming a simulacrum of the absent author; the photographer Brita who sought to “reproduce” Gray shifts her aim easily to the terrorist instead, in a move both opportunistic and smoothly adaptive (and one which models the very sort of symbiotic interdependence Farnen suggests between those who “write” violence into the text of everyday life and those who disseminate it). Gray’s dispersal leaves only a vacuum which others rush in to fill, without giving a second thought to the “message” intended by his disappearance. Thus the novel poses a subtle, even tragic question: what are the limits of dispersed subjecthood? If one seeks to evade the terror of random violence by blending into the background and denying the terrorist–whether individual or Universe–a coherent, identifiable site of violence, what is sacrificed? To what extent is Gray’s preemptive vanishing a death not only of potential victimhood, but also of personal identity, of responsibility, and thus of legacy? How thoroughly can the author disown author-ity before also surrendering integrity; the ability, in the words of Gravity’s Rainbow, to appear as any sort of “integral creature”?

 

Lentricchia suggests that, in the traditional American novel, the author provides a stable point of reference from which the reader can take society’s “critical measure,” that the reader can find relative detachment “within the value of the ‘omniscient’ author who displays the workings of the dynamic but is not himself subject to them. The author, then, is a transcendent figure, someone the reader is implicitly asked to identify with . . . that constantly throws us forward into some other, some imagined, existence” (“Postmodern Critique,” 210). Lentricchia goes on to say that this “exit” is “sealed off” in Libra. Johnston makes essentially the same observation about Ratner’s Star, which he sees as refusing to grant authority to any univocal narrator or point of view: “[Ratner’s Star] refuses to privilege any single ‘authoritative’ version or to subordinate its varied stories and discourses to a higher or more englobing authorial narrative discourse, which would amount to yielding to precisely those powers and functions that it wants to lay bare. Instead, it inscribes an uncertainty and indeterminacy in its own narrative structure, and plays with how we might know certain connections between events” (“Post-cinematic Fiction,” 91). I would point again to the novel’s last section, when what has previously been a coherent and recognizable narrating voice disperses into the “text.” Thus Ratner’s Star robs the reader of the comfort of any transcendental authorial figure who might otherwise serve to “make sense” of the random violence of decontextualized language; who might, that is, provide relief from the terrorism of meaninglessness. And this absence further denies the reader any detached platform from which he/she might, with impunity, take his/her society’s “critical measure.” Thus, in the absence of the narrator and author, the reader is forced to construct some central embodying principle to grant overall context to the otherwise terrifying uncertainty of the novel; to build upon an interpretive principle which is secretive, elusive, coded, with a potentially totalizing or “universal” agenda and capable of explaining vast and obscure connections. . . . In other words, the reader must write a plot. He/she must actively engage the terrorism of meaninglessness which seeks to overwhelm the novel; to assert, that is, his/her individual strategies of sense-making.

 

However ambiguous the endings of DeLillo’s novels, there is almost always at least one character who “models” this sort of adaptive strategy for the reader: one thinks of Pammy in Players, moving away from the violent ennui of her husband-become-terrorist toward an alternative she can’t quite articulate; or the final image in Ratner’s Star, which is not the ascendancy of the dispersed voice of the narrator (as in Gravity’s Rainbow), but rather the frail and oddly exuberant image of Billy Twillig–who has spent the last half of the novel almost paralyzed with terror–exuberantly pedaling a tricycle into the “reproductive dust of existence” (120). While DeLillo’s representation of terrorism in novels like Ratner’s Star and Mao II seems even more universal, insidious and hegemonic than Pynchon’s in Gravity’s Rainbow, his work finally does not seem to completely accept Pynchon’s solution, i.e., that we abandon the field to the ablest postmodern paranoids. In fact, I would argue that DeLillo’s characters often embrace the plots which surround them, which perhaps construct them, and work–against all reasonable odds–to adapt to such a statement of existence so that they might in turn alter the statements of that existence. They seek some alternate way of existing within a world admittedly filled with random violence and meaningless communication, to resist both the role of surveilled and terrorized subject and paranoid, dispersed specter. Though there is certainly an overlay of despair and futility in DeLillo’s work, there often seems too an indefatigable energy, a belief just as strong that the production of plots we call novels might not be completely futile or always already culpable. DeLillo himself has expressed a willingness to embrace rather than resist what other writers see as the terrorism of technology and technological modes of existence in postmodern society: “Science in general has given us a new language to draw from. Some writers shrink from this. . . . To me, science is a source of new names. . . . Rilke said we had to rename the world. Renaming suggests an innocence and a rebirth” (LeClair, “Interview” 84).

 

Much of DeLillo’s work, especially Ratner’s Star, points toward a strategy of adaptation and rebirth particularly of our sense of individual identity and responsibility as, perhaps, the only counter to becoming the dispersed and irresponsible postmodern specters. But his work also recognizes that such a rebirth of our sense of self and community involves a considerable struggle; a struggle Jacques Derrida seems to have had in mind when, writing about the importance of a new formation of European cultural identity in response to terrorism–whether it be religious, political, or ethnic–he calls for a postmodern subject which is informed by rather than frightened of our increasing and inescapable connectedness; a cultural identity “constituted in responsibility” shaped by, in a quite traditional way, the anticipation of one’s cultural legacy. “For perhaps responsibility consists in making of the name recalled, of the memory of the name, of the idiomatic limit, a chance, that is, an opening of identity to its very future” (Derrida, 35). Perhaps such an interpretation reads DeLillo (and Derrida) as more neo-existentialists than postmodernists; perhaps it even suggests that DeLillo’s work needs to be re-examined for its links to modernism, even romanticism, in its representation of the theoretically obsolete individual as the only viable site of resistance to the ubiquitous terror of postmodern life.

 

Notes

 

1. See, for instance, Emile Benveniste’s Problems in General Linguistics (1971); Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1992); and Jean Baudrillard’s In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, or The End of the Social (1983).

 

2. Farnen also has a second and more interesting point to make, which is that the portrayal of terrorism in the media has created a false trope. He quotes at length statistics which show that, especially in the last five years, terrorists acts have become so rare that “[I]n the United States, a person is more likely to die as a victim of an asthma attack than as a victim of a terrorist attack” (101).

 

3. See John Johnston’s discussion of the heavy use of cinema in the works of both Pynchon and DeLillo in “Post- Cinematic Fiction: Film in the Novels of Pynchon, McElroy, and DeLillo,” where he suggests that “the interest in cinema revealed in these novels seems to respond to a sense of the cinema as an apparatus for producing and disseminating images which both construct and control a new kind of subject.” A subject, I would add, which is a product not of the accumulated content of interrelated texts, but rather the transient acontextual moment of intersecting tropes.

 

4. In fact, it is rumored that Bill Gray is the name Don DeLillo often used when traveling incognito.

 

Works Cited

 

• Aaron, Daniel. “How to Read Don DeLillo.” Introducing Don DeLillo. Ed. Frank Lentricchia. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. 67-81.
• DeLillo, Don. Ratner’s Star. New York: Vintage Books, 1980 (1976).
• —. Players. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.
• —. Running Dog. New York : Vintage Books, 1978.
• —. The Names. New York: Vintage Books, 1982.
• —. White Noise. New York: Penguin Books, 1985.
• —. Libra. New York: Penguin Books, 1989.
• —. Mao II. New York: Penguin Books, 1991.
• Derrida, Jacques. The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe. Tr. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael B. Naas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.
• Dowling, Ralph E. “Victimage and Mortification: Terrorism and Its Coverage in the Media.” Terrorism 12-1, (1989): 47-59.
• Farnen, Russell F. “Terrorism and the Mass Media: A Systemic Analysis of a Symbiotic Process.” Terrorism 13-2, (1990): 99-123.
• Harris, Robert R. “A Talk with Don DeLillo.” New York Times Book Review, 10 Oct. 1982: F26.
• Johnston, John. “Generic Difficulties in the Novels of Don DeLillo.” Critique 30-4, (1989): 261-275.
• —. “Post-Cinematic Fiction: Film in the Novels of Pynchon, McElroy, and DeLillo.” New Orleans Review 17-2, (1990): 90-97.
• LeClair, Tom. In The Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. Chicago: U. of Illinois Press, 1987.
• LeClair, Tom. “Interview with Don DeLillo.” Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists. Ed. Tom LeClair and Larry McCaffery. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1983. 79-90.
• LeClair, Tom. “Post-Modern Mastery.” Representation and Performance in Postmodern Fiction. Ed. Maurice Couturier. Nice: Delta Press, 1983. 99-111.
• Lentricchia, Frank. “Libra as Postmodern Critque.” Introducing Don DeLillo. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. 193-215.
• McClure, John A. “Postmodern Romance: Don DeLillo and the Age of Conspiracy.” Introducing Don DeLillo. Ed. Frank Lentricchia. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. 99-115.
• Price, Andrew Jude. “The Entropic Imagination in 20th Century American Fiction: A Case for Don DeLillo.” Dissertation abstracts, ’88 nov 49-5, 1143A.
• Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking, 1976.
• Silverman, Kaja. The Subject of Semiotics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.