Eight Theses On Underworld

Philip Traylen v. DeLillo, Kakutani, Kushner, et al

Dear Republic,

Oh, who can resist Philip Traylen reviewing not a book but the reviews of the book? Certainly not ROL. It’s very unlikely that you will understand every word of this essay but almost impossible that you won’t have the tiniest bit of fun reading it.

-ROL

EIGHT THESES ON UNDERWORLD BY DON DELILLO

I

While trying to review Underworld by the American writer Donald DeLillo, I came across Michiko Kakutani’s review of the same in The New York Times. Her review seemed to me so profoundly evil that I became distracted; it seemed to me that it would be better to review her review of the book; after all, she — and many other people — have already reviewed the book. Moreover, I’ve felt for a long time that it’s not possible to review books; I have always admired Walter Benjamin’s approach, wherein he avoids the book in question as much as possible, and if the book does somehow manage to sneak in, it does so only at the last possible moment, as if the book were an animal which had suddenly manifested out of the night of his review of it, only to let out a single inchoate cry at the end of his headlights — as if the animal had interpreted his review as a mating call or warning sign which it felt compelled, if not to match, then at least to respond to, albeit it in heart-wrenchingly last minute sort of way.

II

Underworld opens, says Michiko, with a ‘breathtaking passage’ that ‘seamlessly captures the experience of 35,000 people’ watching a baseball game. But for Michiko to know this, wouldn’t it be necessary for her to have had, in advance of reading Donald’s book, a superior internal model of the selfsame event, against which she could measure his descriptions? But if that were the case, what would be the point of reading the book, or of reading any book, or even of, say, breathing? The more I read of Michiko’s review of Underworld by Donald DeLillo in The New York Times, the more I felt like a character in one of those post-coital Glück poems: how can I be content / when this review / exists in the world? “Not only,” Michiko says, does Donald “give us a vivid sense of how things have changed — and endured — in Nick’s old neighborhood in the Bronx, but he also conveys a visceral sense of the surreal weirdness that has infected contemporary life.” But if Michiko is already aware that a surreal weirdness has infected contemporary life, what is the point of it being viscerally conveyed to her? Or rather, since that which is to be viscerally conveyed to Michiko already exists, perfectly viscerally, in the world, wherefrom it must have already, at least once, been viscerally conveyed to Michiko, since she is perfectly familiar with it, why must it be viscerally conveyed to Michiko again, this time by means of a book, which, her system would seem to suggest, can never be more than a fragmentary mnemonic prompt?

I stopped thinking about Donald and Michiko and went outside, just to walk around for a bit, to tread off my unease, my growing feeling of ‘review sickness.’ I found peace in looking at things, buildings, train stations, people’s clothes, some tight, some loose. But it was precisely the clothes items which had previously been loose that were now tight, precisely the clothes items which had previously been tight that were now loose; I began to have a vivid sense of how things have changed. At one point, I stopped in front of a bakery which I’d once visited as a child; you see, some things have also endured. They had a new lead baker, a beautiful bare-armed Italian lady, who was promoting a new kind of marble cake she’d just invented, even handing out little chunks to passersby. She even gave one to me. Amazing, I thought: just as marble cake, when sliced, reveals the inscription of its genesis, so Donald’s novel, under the Michiko knife, gives up the secret of its genesis, which, coincidentally, is indistinguishable from the genesis of reality as such. In a perfect inversion of the true, Proustian theory of cake-consumption — only true because it’s not a theory at all — for Michiko, reading a book is like ‘trying to remember something about a piece of cake you already ate.’ Her review of Underworld interminably braids an imaginary isomorphic ‘middle space’ between life and art, which, were it real, would render both life and art obsolete. If art exists, it exists precisely at the point where this ‘mutually assured contextualised interpenetration’ method most obviously fails; pace Kamala Harris, the work of art is that which really did just fall out of the coconut tree. Because, as Hegel said, the coconut is the refutation of the coconut tree.

III

Michiko’s literary critical method, wherein art and life are banged against each other like two conkers until one, or preferably both, falls to pieces, exemplifies the pseudo-ethics of contemporary progressivism, which, with a ‘surreal weirdness’ all of its own, ‘has infected contemporary life’. Qua ethics, contemporary progressivism has two ideas, i) the less reason you have to stay alive, the more ethical it is to continue living and, ii) the passage of time is self-redeeming. In shorthand, contemporary progressivism might be defined as the opposite of everything Walter Benjamin ever said, the opposite, especially, of thesis fourteen of Über den Begriff der Geschichte (On the Concept of History):

History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the here-and-now. Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome incarnate. It cited ancient Rome exactly the way fashion cites a costume of the past. Fashion has an eye for what is up-to-date, wherever it moves in the jungle of what was; it is a tiger’s leap into the past. This jump, however, takes place in an arena where the ruling class give the commands. The same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical one, which is how Marx understood the revolution.

That’s how it is for Benjamin, but for the contemporary progressivist there can be no ‘tiger’s leap into the past’ because the wound of the past is sealed by aestheticisation (‘The Western Canon’). And there is no continuum of history, only a scarified hinge; on our side is the playpen of ethics, on theirs (1875-1945) the playpen of art.

IV

Underworld, the respected American novelist Rachel Kushner says, “is filled with grace, furnished of experience, of wisdom, of sacrifice, of insights that continue for hundreds of pages, all different, perfect and true.” Continues for hundreds of pages, who talks like this? No one, in fact, because Rachel cannot mean this; she offers Donald the consolations of good character because she can afford him no admiration qua artist. As a novelist, she knows perfectly well that had the rhetoric of consolation formed any part of the lit crit idiom of German-Czech-Yiddish-speaking Mittelböhmische kraj in the late 19th century, Kafka would simply not have left the womb.

Elsewhere, Assistant Professor James Chandler, having over the course of several paragraphs established that Underworld is the book he wishes he could have written, the one book to end them all, the final and greatest utterance of the human mind, at last shows his hand:

“What’s so impressive about Underworld is how DeLillo manages to tie these themes together within a richly layered narrative.”

Imagine informing Dostoevsky, Goncharov, even little Turgenev, that he had ‘managed to tie his themes together…’ if someone told my mother she’d tied some themes together, my God, swords at dawn! But no, not at all, because the function of such comments, like the infamous ‘negs’ of late-nineties pick-up artistes, is to lower the stakes so fantastically that you can almost hear them hit the floor (“but at least it’s our floor… our ground zero”).

Back to Rachel’s review, towards the end of which she devises what must be the Platonic ideal literary-critical negging device, congratulating Donald on having included a higher density of nice sentences in Underworld than in any of his other books, even though it’s his longest. What’s most noteworthy is Rachel’s mirror-smooth transition from nice-sentence-bro neg to quasi-religious awe:

“Some authors go for sweep, others for sentences, and yet Underworld is both. Sentence by sentence, it may have the highest density of great sentences of all DeLillo’s novels, at two or three times as long as the rest. How did he sustain it? I have no idea, and the how is not for me to wonder.”

But the point — as Rachel would surely admit if the discursive setting was even vaguely ‘modernist’ — is not to wonder at any particular how but to wonder at the fact that, as Beckett would have said, there is no how. Rachel’s performative awe is symptomatic of the bad faith which enables all three reviewers — Michiko, Rachel and James — to maintain simultaneously that (i) Underworld is perhaps the greatest novel of our time, the most amazing achievement, the Sprachgeist of the American Century and ii), it’s not really even a novel, not really even a book, it’s nothing at all… And this is exactly what they want; the miasmic effluvia of the craft-ridden present — the slosh of themes, insights, wisdom, representation, ‘sacrifice,’ — breaks again and again on the outer wall of playpen-fortress Aesthetica. No erosion occurs, which is exactly the redemption they had planned.

V

In 1973, an artist from America called Michael Asher made a hole in a gallery wall. The making of this hole, according to Professor Linda Hutcheon, revealed both the ‘unacknowledged power of the gallery’s invisibility’ and various artists’ ongoing ‘collusion’ with the gallery. Such a reading of Michael’s wall-hole depends — in broken Lacanese — on the subject supposed to not know, the deafblind pre-postmodern subject who somehow does not know that galleries are buildings with walls which you can find on certain streets. But what if the average nineteenth-century bourgeois subject already knew that ‘a gallery is an institution,’ that ‘some people have money,’ that ‘buildings are generally located on streets’ — what if they knew this, but also knew that the condition of action is forgetting action’s conditions? But this kind of critique plays directly into the hands of ‘conceptual art’; historically speaking, it is not that remembering has been added but that forgetting has been taken away. In The Uses and Abuses of History, Nietzsche says:

Cheerfulness, good conscience, joyful action, trust in what is to come — all that depends, with the individual as with a people, on the following facts: that there is a line which divides the observable brightness from the unilluminated darkness, that we know how to forget at the right time just as well as we remember at the right time.

What the conceptual artist lacks is the strength to forget that, once, he was just an artist; his refusal to make art is what his concepts grieve.

VI

Although contemporary art and contemporary literature are anti-Benjaminian to a similar degree, they became so as if across a mirror. Literature deployed processes and contexts to establish book-to-world isomorphism, which craft was invented to mediate, while art deployed processes and contexts to circumvent the rigours of technique. To be a little baroque about it, it was as if, while the baby of art was tossed out ‘in the direction of literature,’ the baby of literature was likewise tossed out ‘in the direction of art,’ but, with both babies still in the air, it was decided that ‘time should stop.’

The problem is not that processes and contexts don’t exist but that they are psychological-emotional expressions of inverted agency; a man is as processual-contextual as he is willing to be, or rather, a man is processual-contextual insofar as he fails to do or become anything else. If a man can’t fall out of a coconut tree of his own free will, then yes, eventually, out of sheer milky bloatedness, he will simply fall. And perhaps something analogous happened with ‘French thought’ in America, of which processual-contextualism is the ‘frog-level interpretation; when French thought, its milk-rotted inertitude too much for the branch, finally dropped from the coconut tree, it landed directly on the head of the United States of America. This event is called postmodernism.

VII

A man too weak to love things will love instead the relations between things. In some cases, this can be turned into method, e.g., sociology, but it cannot be applied to art. An artwork has no relations; its surface is the gaze of its annihilated origin, its contortions are the scars of its escape. To exist, the artwork must have the courage to forget why it exists; the critic must do the same, must forget, at the very least, ‘why they became an art critic.’ But that is barely a beginning; true criticism must squeeze itself through the hole the artwork invented to escape, in vita et aeternitate, the downsuck of its origin. Instead, contemporary reviews typically begin with some variation of:

‘As I write these words to you, I am in Belgium eating crisps (Salt and Vinegar; Walker’s) with my nephew Timothy (my sister’s in Nairobi on business, hehe) and my Eurasian shorthair cat, Paulus IX, at my side. Directly in front of me is the last crumb of my deceased husband’s birthday cake (a banoffee pie). He died yesterday —’

In other words, the function of the contemporary review is to explain why it is not a review; its I refers not to a subject position but to subjectivity’s inability to forget itself (the precondition of reviewing anything).

VIII

The serious critic thus finds himself somewhere between two poles. With Nietzsche, he says: a person who has lost the power to forget will never do anything to make other people happy; with Flaubert, he says: few will be able to guess how sad one had to be in order to resuscitate Carthage. He settles on a plan: to tickle open the continuum of history with the limit-stretched lash of his grief.

Philip Traylen is a diarist-philosopher from London. He writes the Substack oldoldoldoldnew.