Tony Tanner's take on P & D

[tess marek]

At the risk of repeating what may have been already
endlessly pointed out, in all this DeLillo is engaged
in a prolonged and repetitious quoting, or reworking,
of Pynchon (for whose work he has stated his
admiration). Just to remind you--in Gravity's Rainbow
Pynchon diagnosed two dominant states of
mind--paranoia and anti-paranoia. Paranoia is, in
terms of the book, "nothing less than the onset, the
leading edge of the discovery that everything is
connected, everything in the Creation, a secondary
illumination--not yet blindingly one, but connected."
Of course, everything depends on the nature of the
connection, the intention revealed in the pattern; and
just what it is that may connect everything in
Pynchon's world is what worries his main characters,
like Slothrop. Paranoia is also related to the Puritan
obsession with seeing signs in everything,
particularly signs of an angry God. Pynchon makes the
connection clear by referring to "a Puritan reflex of
seeking other orders behind the visible, also known as
paranoia." The opposite state of mind is
anti-paranoia, "where nothing is connected to
anything, a condition not many of us can bear for
long." As figures move between the System and the
Zone,
they oscillate between paranoia and anti-paranoia,
shifting from a seething blank of unmeaning to the
sinister apparent legibility of an unconsoling
labyrinthine pattern or  plot. In V these two
dispositions of mind are embodied in Stencil and Benny
Profane, respectively (and behind them are those
crucially generative figures for the western
novel--Don Quixote and Sancho Panza). And there is the
poignant
figure of Oedipa Maas at the end of The Crying of Lot
49: "Either Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true
paranoia, or a real Tristero. For there either was
some
Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy of
America, or there was just America and if there was
just America then it seemed the only way she could
continue, and manage to be at all relevant, was as an
alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some
paranoia." Pynchon is a truly brilliant and richly
imaginative historian and diagnostic analyst of
binary, either--or thinking, and its attendant        
 dangers. DeLillo, by contrast, rather bluntly
disseminates a vaguely fraught atmosphere of defensive
voices, sidelong looks, and intimations of impending
eeriness. And, crucially, Underworld has no Tristero. 
The real protagonist of this novel is "waste." I don't
know when garbage moved to center stage in art (as
opposed to occasional litter). In a recent exhibition
I came across "Household Trashcan" by Arman dated
1960, and it was, indeed, trash in a Plexiglas box. A
book called Rubbish Theory by Michael Thompson came
out in
1979, and I made use of it in a small book on Pynchon
I wrote shortly thereafter.
  For Pynchon is the real lyricist of rubbish. No one
can write as poignantly or elegiacally about, for
example, a second-hand car lot, or an old mattress.
And what other writer, in the course of a long and
moving passage about Advent in wartime, would consider
embarking on a curiously moving meditation triggered
off by the thought of "thousands of old used
toothpaste tubes" (in Gravity's Rainbow)? Many actual
rubbish heaps or tips appear in his work-not as
symbolic wastelands (though those are there too), but
exactly as "rubbish." One of Tristero's enigmatic
acronyms
is W.A.S.T.E., and by extension Pynchon's work is
populated by many of the categories (or noncategories)
of people whom society regards as "rubbish," socially
useless junk: bums, hoboes, drifters, transients,
itinerants, vagrants; the disaffected, the
disinherited, the discarded; derelicts, losers,
victims--collectively "the preterite,"
all those whom, for the Puritans, God in His infinite
wisdom has passed over, overlooked. Pynchon forces us
to reassess, if not revalue, all those things--and
people--we throw away. And DeLillo follows in the
master's footsteps. 

  There is a memorable trash bag in White Noise: 
An oozing cube of semi-mangled cans, clothes hangers,
animal bones and other refuse. The bottles were
broken, the cartons flat. Product colors were
undiminished in brightness and intensity. Fats, juices
and heavy sludges seeped through layers of pressed
vegetable matter. I felt like an archaeologist about
to sift through a finding of tool fragments and
assorted cave trash. ... I unfolded the bag cuffs,
released the latch and lifted out the bag. The full
stench hit me with
 shocking force. Was this ours? Did it belong to us?
Had we created it? I took the bag out to the garage
and emptied it. The compressed  bulk sat there like an
ironic modern sculpture, massive, squat, mocking. ...
I picked through it item by item. ... why did I feel
like a household spy? Is garbage so private? Does it
glow at the core with  personal heat, with signs of
one's deepest nature, clues to secret yearnings,
humiliating flaws? What habits, fetishes, addictions,
inclinations? What solitary acts, behavioral ruts? I
found crayon
drawings of a figure with full breasts and male
genitals. ...I found a banana skin with a tampon
inside. Was this the dark underside of consumer
consciousness?
Terrific! DeLillo absolutely cresting. But in
Underworld it all gets rather labored and repetitious.


"Don DeLillo and 'the American mystery'": Underworld
Tony Tanner


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