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Apocalyptic Cycles in Don DeLillo's Underworld

2012; Routledge; Volume: 23; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10436928.2012.676920

1545-5866

Liliana M. Naydan,

Modern American Literature Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Even though Catholics affirm the Second Coming in the Nicene Creed, Paul Boyer explains that "Catholic theology ha[s] favored an allegorical or historicist reading of biblical apocalyptic" as a result of Augustine of Hippo's views (62). DeLillo was raised by Italian Roman-Catholic parents who immigrated to New York City; he attended Cardinal Hayes High School, a Catholic school for boys in the Bronx; and he continued his education at a Jesuit institution, Fordham University, where he majored in communication arts and also studied history and theology. DeLillo often portrays Catholics in his works, from nuns working on the periphery of society, as in White Noise (1985) and Underworld (1997), to the president of the United States, as in Libra (1988). Moreover, according to Amy Hungerford, "traces" of DeLillo's Catholicism "can be found everywhere in DeLillo's novels, interviews, and essays: in his choice of words, in his subjects, in his imagery, in the ways he understands faith, belief, agency, guilt, redemption, and human relations" (343). For a consideration of Lenny Bruce's fictionalized apocalyptic monologues in Underworld, see Elizabeth Rosen's "Lenny Bruce and His Nuclear Shadow Marvin Lundy: Don DeLillo's Apocalyptists Extraordinaires." Along the same lines, DeLillo gestures toward the notion that apocalyptic time moves forward and backward simultaneously in "Silhouette City: Hitler, Mason and the Millennium." In DeLillo's words, the millennium "not only looks ahead to the year 2000 but recollects as well" (346). Notably, Albert Bronzini, the Catholic, Italian-American science teacher of DeLillo's Underworld, meditates on the nature of traditional, linear time as it "binds us to aging flesh" (222). Bronzini asks himself metaphysical questions about time: "How deep is time? How far down into the life of matter do we have to go before we understand what time is?" (222). As Hungerford explains, "DeLillo [ … ] transfers a version of mysticism from the Catholic context into the literary one [ … ] through the model of the Latin mass" (343), which historically has been "described by its opponents and its advocates in similar terms: both spoke of 'screens' and 'barriers' and lack of transparent meaning" (357). In conceptualizing the reality of apocalypse, DeLillo would have considered the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as the Holocaust. As DeLillo indicates in "Silhouette City: Hitler, Manson and the Millennium," Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and Its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements (Citation1961) influences his understanding of apocalypse as it emerges in the Cold War era. DeLillo writes that Cohn "traces the secularized form of this ancient longing—for destruction to hammer down, for history to end, for harmony and well-being to sweep the world—directly into the totalitarian core of twentieth century fascism and communism" (346). For DeLillo, Nazis "not only imagined the worst; they did it" (345). In his 1989 essay "The End of History?" that was expanded into the 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama considered the pervasive "feeling that something very fundamental has happened in world history" by the Cold War's conclusion (3), and he suggested that the fall of the Berlin Wall represented the triumph of Western neoliberalism, the "final form of human government" that came to mark history's end in that it signified an end to "mankind's ideological evolution" (4). Notably, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, which to some degree showed that the West had not overcome ideological opposition, Fukuyama revised his claim, but for its focus on government alone. In Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (Citation2002), he focuses on the role of science in history, observing that "there can be no end to history without an end of modern natural science and technology. Not only are we not at an end of science and technology; we appear to be poised at the cusp of one of the most momentous periods of technological advance in history" (15). For a more thorough consideration of apocalypse in End Zone, see Joseph Dewey's "DeLillo's Apocalyptic Satires," which considers End Zone and Ratner's Star (1976) as "companion texts," in that they comprise "coming-of-age narratives in which adolescents edge toward revelation (pun intended)" (54). Replacing the English word "Word" for "logos," the term used in the original Greek text from which the New Testament books of the King James Bible are translated, John 1:1 suggests that "[i]n the beginning was [logos], and [logos] was with God, and [logos] was God." As Augustine argues via biblical exegesis, Judgment Day cleanses man for entrance into God's Kingdom: he suggests that "some shall in the last judgment suffer some kind of purgatorial punishments" and "those who shall be purified shall then please the Lord with sacrifices of righteousness, and consequently they themselves shall be purified from their own unrighteousness which made them displeasing to God" (City of God, Book XX, chapter 25). DeLillo's critique of the mass media as creating a cycle of apocalypse and time dovetails with Baudrillard's suggestion that the news threatens history. As Baudrillard puts it in "Pataphysics of the Year 2000," "[r]ight at the very heart of news, history threatens to disappear" (6). Indeed, for Baudrillard, "[e]verywhere [in the postmodern world] we find the same stereophonic effect, the same effect of absolute proximity to the real, the same effect of simulation" (6). In the Nestor chapter of Ulysses, Dedalus tells school headmaster Deasy that "[h]istory [ … ] is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake" (34). Several works, including, for instance, Patrick O'Donnell's "Underworld" and Donald J. Greiner's "Don DeLillo, John Updike, and the Sustaining Power of Myth," make mention of Bruegel and his apocalyptic painting, but critics have not fully explored the painting's connection to sixteenth-century Catholicism as I begin to explore it here. Essentially everything we know about Bruegel's life comes from a brief biography in Karel van Mander's Schilder-boeck, or Painter's Book, published in 1604. All else is speculation, based mostly on interpretations of his work. As O'Donnell observes in "Underworld," "[t]his 'underworld' of life-always-becoming-death is the world of DeLillo's novel, reflected in the image of Bruegel's The Triumph of Death, the apocalyptic sixteenth-century painting depicting the landscape of death … " (114). For a consideration of apocalyptic thought in the work of Marx and Engels, see Ernest L. Tuveson's "The Millenarian Structure of The Communist Manifesto" in The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature: Patterns, Antecedents, and Repercussions (1985). As Jameson puts it, "[t]he surrender to the various forms of market ideology—on the left, I mean, not to mention everybody else—has been imperceptible but alarmingly universal. Everyone is now willing to mumble [ … ] that no society can function efficiently without the market … " (263). John A. McClure theorizes this kind desire for faith in Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison (Citation2007), observing that "postsecular narratives" like DeLillo's Underworld "affirm the urgent need for a turn to the religious even as they reject (in most instances) the familiar dream of full return to an authoritative faith" (6). As Ismael puts it, "Some people have a personal god, okay. I'm looking to get a personal computer. What's the difference, right?" (813). For Christians, the Millennium is the thousand-year period of peace on earth as it is described in Revelation 20:1–6. Additional informationNotes on contributorsLiliana M. Naydan Liliana M. Naydan holds a lectureship at the University of Michigan. She researches treatments of religious faith in contemporary American literature, and her work on the subject has appeared in The John Updike Review.