DeLillo’s Contemporary Uncanny: A Closer Look at JML 42.1

This post is part of a series that takes a closer look at the scholarship behind IU Press Journals. Primarily written by journal editors and contributors, posts may respond to articles, provide background, document the development process, or explain why scholars are excited about the journal, theme, or article.

Laura Barrett’s article, “‘[R]adiance in dailiness’: The Uncanny Ordinary in Don DeLillo's Zero K,” from the Journal of Modern Literature’s newest issue, is now available on JSTOR & Project MUSE. Below, Laura explores DeLillo’s reliance on the uncanny to investigate the limits of the human condition and to bridge the tension between the transcendental and the everyday.

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The uncanny isn’t something that immediately comes to mind in connection with Don DeLillo, contemporary American writer of cool, stylized, and ironic prose, an author so sensitively attuned to current events that his plots often seem like prophecies. DeLillo has experimented with a host of genres, including college satire, thriller, science fiction, political conspiracy, and mystery, but horror—the typical venue for uncanny motifs—does not sit comfortably in his oeuvre. So, my research on the uncanny and DeLillo proceeded apace and apart for many years.

It wasn’t until I was writing a conference paper on Americana that I began to sense the uncanny in DeLillo’s work. David Bell’s description of himself as living in the third person and as roughly interchangeable with a host of other young, handsome faces recognizable from film and television echoed Otto Rank’s concept of the double. The only impulse more compelling for Bell, a narcissist with a not-so-subtle Oedipal complex, than his desire for pleasure is his relentless drive towards death. The more I thought about DeLillo’s novels, the more uncanny they seemed with their pseudo-divine technologies, spectral sunsets, and unhomely homes (culminating in America, the most unheimlich space of all). Echoing Terry Castle’s observation that the uncanny erupted in a moment dominated by reason, irrational forces continually undermine DeLillo’s characters’ stultifying desire for order, ultimately breaking them or providing the possibility of escape.

White Noise is a virtual compendium of uncanny motifs. Its spaces, including the Gladney home, Murray’s boarding house, the supermarket, the Mid-Village Mall, the highway, and overpass, are haunted by “psychic data,” which is transmitted by characters in their sleep or episodes of inexplicable crying. The human body is so alien that Babette teaches classes about routine physical functions, illness is only ascertainable at the cellular level, and what seem like memories may only be déjà vu.

These themes (and, in some cases, characters) are recycled throughout DeLillo’s career in what can only be called a form of repetition compulsion. Not only are his characters haunted by their pasts, the demons of American consumerism, and the ghosts of American crimes; his later novels are haunted by earlier ones. His protagonists, usually male, grapple with gender performances heavily influenced by Hollywood and television as they search for patterns and meaning in their daily interactions. These men drift, a common word in DeLillo’s novels, throughout their environments, coolly detached, keen observers, implacably decoding and arranging symbols and people. The Names’ James Axton, White Noise’s Jack Gladney, Underworld’s Nick Shay, Zero K’s Jeff Lockhart bear more than a passing resemblance to David Bell.

DeLillo’s characters are formed by TV commercials, films, news, and, more recently, the internet, searching for authority and origin, swirling aimlessly in a vortex of meaninglessness. If, as Anthony Vidler notes, the fundamental form of the uncanny is the fragment, then DeLillo’s characters are its manifestation, their dialogues testament to incompletion, their thoughts the truncated mantras of American advertising. The strange spaces in which they travel – deserts and cities, hotels and bunkers, automobiles and buses, laboratories and college campuses – remind us of the unhomeliness of the uncanny, the simple fact that home, at least as we collectively remember it from its representations in film and literature, seems to have disappeared, and we are left to navigate the mazes of inner and outer landscapes. Houses in DeLillo’s fiction may not be haunted in the traditional sense, but they are overflowing with the senseless utterances of unconscious dreamers and clamorous interruptions of household appliances. The specters keeping us up at night are not spirits of the long dead so much as machines, memories, and mortality itself.

In DeLillo’s hands, however, the uncanny is not just a metaphor for the modern condition of rootlessness and disorientation. It provides an opportunity to pierce the façade of contemporary life, to recognize the limits of representations, to accept what it means to be human, fragmentary, incomplete. The uncanny is not a door to transcendence but a window (an image that figures prominently in Zero K) whose access to other worlds prevents isolation, solipsism, and entropy. While we cannot escape our mortality, we can engage with our imperfect world by seeing the extraordinariness of the ordinary, by acknowledging our neighbors whose motives, desires, regrets, and sorrows we’ll never truly know, and by accepting that uncertainty.

The manifestations of DeLillo’s uncanny are ambiguous. Are the technicolor sunsets that mesmerize Jack Gladney caused by environmental contamination or our efforts to combat that contamination? It surely matters for the sake of the planet, but in White Noise those sunsets seem less a symbol of environmental degradation (though they certainly remind us of the perils of mindless experimentation) than a reminder that we will all die and an exhortation to spend what time we have in community.

Laura Barrett, professor of English, is dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at SUNY New Paltz.

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More from the Journal of Modern Literature 42.1

From Modernism to the Avant-Garde: Form, Gender, and the Everyday

The Forms of War: Pocket Diaries and Post Cards in Jacob's Room 
Emily James and Rachel M. Busse

The Walls that Emancipate: Disambiguation of the “Room” in A Room of One's Own
Sheheryar B. Sheikh

The Eye, the Mind & the Spirit: Why “the look of things” Held a “great power” Over Virginia Woolf 
Michael R. Schrimper

The Poetics of Domestic Space in Proust's In Search of Lost Time 
Juliette De Soto

Textual Frustration: The Sonnet and Gender Performance in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Brian Clifton

“The Crash!”: Writing the Great Depression in F. Scott Fitzgerald's “Babylon Revisited,” “Emotional Bankruptcy,” and “Crazy Sunday” 
Heather L.N. Hess

“I preferred her asleep”: Gabriel García Márquez Reimagines Briar Rose 
Kathleen McEvoy

 • READ FOR FREE • 
“[R]adiance in dailiness”: The Uncanny Ordinary in Don DeLillo's Zero K 
Laura Barrett

Forms of Attention: Notes from Harryette Mullen's Tanka Diary 
Rebecca Hamilton

Is There a Feminist Allusion? 
Elizabeth Savage

The Politics of the Forum in Feminist Avant-Garde Magazines After 1980 
Sophie Seita

Book Reviews

“Attention is all”: The Quotidian in Contemporary American Poetry
Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture by Andrew Epstein
Review by: Orchid Tierney

Extremely Slow and Incredibly Close: How to Read Modern American Novels
Mere Reading: The Poetics of Wonder in Modern American Novels by Lee Clark Mitchell
Review by: Doug Battersby

Science, Technology, and Literature
Modernism, Science, and Technology by Mark S. Morrisson
Review by: Jincai Yang