294
PARTISAN REVIEW
It
is this stark tonelessness that accounts for the terrible beauty
of much of his writing. DeLillo does not put spin on his words ; he
leaves them hanging- weightless, somber things full of density and
gravity . Disconnected, theirs is the kind of bare , brooding blankness
that suggests not numbness so much as mystery, a world not empty
of meaning, but too full of it, electrically supercharged . The most
conspicuous tic in a DeLillo novel , indeed, is to end chapters with a
paragraph consisting of nothing but a single sentence :
"Panasonic."
"I am the false character that follows the name around ."
"Who will die first?"
Grist for a paranoid or a nihilist , the words simply stand there in
space, mute, momentous, eerie as the pillars of Stonehenge .
DeLillo's other characteristic device is to put together words
and rhythms into patterns , sequences , escalating cadences that build
a mood and gather momentum and pick up in time a hypnotic and
heart-stopping intensity. They turn into riffs , disquisitions , revved–
up harangues . They move with the even , pounding purposefulness
of footfalls down an alleyway .
This dazzle of Promethean language is largely consecrated to a
single driving theme: the rising struggle between tribalism and tech–
nology. DeLillo's novels worry and worry at humanity's fight with
science; DeLillo's characters are caught between the spirits of their
ancestors and the gods of their computer world. The courses in "Eat–
ing and Drinking" he satirizes are no idle joke; in Gladney's world,
primal instincts are threatened by a conception of progress that would
transform men from animals into machines . "The greater the scien–
tific advance , the more primitive the fear," Gladney tells his wife.
Science and fear, those are the antagonists in
White Noise;
we need
our fear to defeat a science that tries to conquer fear. And the most
potent instrument in this contest, the original- and aboriginal–
martial art, is language. DeLillo is fascinated with the ways in which
language creates and recreates the world . Names nail down slippery
identities; chants mass together crowds into forces stronger even
than technology; language is a way, perhaps the only way, of mak–
ing connections, an ordered system that can withstand the entropic
pressure of the world at large . (Like Pynchon, DeLillo everywhere
seeks out networks, circuits , codes, connections ; and, like Pynchon,
