Context

Just what in Heaven’s name is going on at the end of DeLillo’s Underworld? I mean, really. The novel’s so centrally concerned with nuclear tests, downwinders, the rise of the national security state, and J. Edgar Hoover’s insight, during the 1951 Dodgers-Giants playoff, that "the genius of the bomb is printed not only in its physics of particles and rays but in the occasion it creates for new secrets." And it’s so centrally concerned with garbage—as food, as foundation for civilization, as found art, as toxic waste. Obviously, then, the dang novel should end with Nick and Brian in the Kazakh steppes, after the fall of the USSR, witnessing Tchaika, the company represented by Viktor Maltsev, detonate toxic waste with nuclear weapons. It is the novel’s logical conclusion: it’s morbid, it’s postmodern, it’s in keeping with the epilogue’s title, "Das Kapital."

But that’s not how the novel ends. The novel ends with the vision—and then, even worse, the apotheosis—of Sister Edgar, who, together with thousands of other New Yorkers, sees the face of the murdered child, Esmerelda Lopez, on a billboard in the South Bronx. Upon seeing the apparition of Esmerelda, the phobic Sister Edgar becomes ecstatic, going so far as to strip off the gloves with which she has protected herself from the world of "submicroscopic parasites in their soviet socialist protein coats." "She feels something break upon her," writes DeLillo. "An angelus of clearest joy. She embraces Sister Grace. She yanks off her gloves and shakes hands, pumps hands with the great-bodied women who roll their eyes to heaven." The next section opens, "How do things end, finally, things such as this—peter out to some forgotten core of weary faithful huddled in the rain?" Here’s how they end: the billboard apparition disappears. Sister Edgar dies immediately thereafter. She ascends to cyberspace, linked forever to J. Edgar Hoover.

So this is how things end, things such as this? And we’re supposed to take this seriously?

No, let me ask that question again, by asking another. Who remembers the final two stanzas of The Faerie Queene? Uh-huh, right, I didn’t think so. OK, we’re in Book VII, the so-called "Mutabilitie Cantos," in which Spenser apparently forgets he’s writing an epic and spins out 114 pastoral stanzas (inexplicably labeled cantos VI and VII, though there’s no I-V) on the theme of change and constancy. Then come two last, straggling stanzas that call themselves "the VIII. Canto, unperfite." Alastair Fowler thinks the whole thing’s a fragment. Northrop Frye says it’s perfectly self-contained, a brilliant coda presenting itself as a fragment. You make the call.

When I bethinke me on that speech whyleare,
Of Mutability, and well it way:
Me seems, that though she all unworthy were
Of the Heav’ns Rule; yet very sooth to say,
In all things else she beares the greatest sway.
Which makes me loath this state of life so tickle,
And love of things so vaine to cast away;
Whose flowering pride, so fading and so fickle,
Short Time shall soon cut down with his consuming sickle.

Then gin I thinke on that which Nature sayd,
Of that same time when no more Change shall be,
But stedfast rest of all things firmely stayd
Upon the pillours of Eternity,
That is contrayr to Mutabilitie:
For, all that moveth, doth in Change delight:
But thence-forth all shall rest eternally
With Him that is the God of Sabbaoth hight:
O that great Sabbaoth God, graunt me that Sabaoths sight.

A fragment? Not bloody likely. I’m with Northrop—this sounds like a closing prayer to me. And why not? I mean, let’s see you write three to four thousand of these monstrous stanzas, with their sinewy ababbcbcc rhyme scheme and closing alexandrine. Did you think the guy could just go on like this forever? Remember how this thing started: Spenser publishes his first three books in 1590, promising twelve, to correspond with "the twelve private morall vertues, as Aristotle hath devised"; and, as he tells Sir Walter Raleigh, if the first twelve go over, he’ll get to work on the twelve political virtues next. So that’s twenty-four books, twelve cantos to a book, roughly fifty stanzas to a canto. Just about 14,400 difficult, nine-line stanzas in all. Well, this plan turns out to be too difficult to complete, and by 1596, when Books IV-VI are published, Spenser is beginning to wonder how things will end—for his epic poem, and for him. Just look how obsessively the fourth book talks about ends and ending. "Discord," says our poet in Book IV, "harder is to end then to begin." The last canto, bemoaning the task of counting the sea’s "abundant progeny," cries, "O What an endlesse worke have I in hand." Canto X, stanza 3 is similarly weary, giving voice to a character who says, "Long were to tell the travell and long toile, / . . . That harder may be ended, then begonne." The end of the travel and long toil, it turns out, may not be the completion of your life’s work, the poetic career you’ve patterned on that of Virgil as deliberately, as obsessively as Tiger Woods has plotted his career against that of Jack Nicklaus. The end may indeed be a fragment, a billboard, a humble prayer to be granted—just before you die—that Sabaoths sight.

Actually, things are a little more complicated than that. The Spenser fans among you will remember that Book IV of The Faerie Queene sets out to "complete" one of the Canterbury Tales—and not just any Canterbury Tale, either. Literally begging Chaucer’s pardon, Spenser sets out to finish, of all things, the Squire’s Tale. This is a tale so inept, so disjointed and antinarrative a narrative (remember, before 1400 this was widely considered a bad thing) that the Franklin actually cuts him off, more or less clapping him on the back for a tale well told just after the Squire has promised to expound on another four or five long tangents. Well done, my boy, that was just great, now, moving right along. . . . And then something really curious happens. The Host cuts off the Franklin in turn, apparently Not Getting It with regard to the Franklin’s discreet use of ye olde shepherd’s crook on the Squire, and insists that the tales must go on, for

wel thou woost
That ech of yow moot tellen atte leste
A tale or two, or breken his biheste.

Now, wait just a second. A tale or two? That’s not what the Host said back in the General Prologue, when he’d insisted that each of the twenty-nine pilgrims would tell four tales—two on the way to Canterbury and two on the way back. One hundred sixteen tales in all, which is, as the great William Empson once wrote, "a real lot." It’s not a coincidence that the Host rewrites the tale-telling contract—uh, maybe we’ll have, like, maybe forty or forty-five stories, okay, if there’s time—right after the Squire has offered a cautionary example of the possibility that a narrative, once begun, may be too hard to end.

You can take this in any number of ways, but perhaps all of them will lead you back to Underworld in the end. You can, for instance, juxtapose the Squire’s tale to the Knight’s, which—opening the Canterbury Tales—is simply a masterful performance, a virtuoso demonstration of how a well-ordered narrative can impose coherence on what appears at first to be formless chaos. (And Chaucer whittles down his Boccaccian source—Il Teseide—from a chatty 10,000 lines to a lean, economical 2,200, at that.) So you’ve got this little generational narrative about how the Squire has to learn the device of occupatio, become a mature storyteller in command of his material, blah blah blah. But that’s not what fascinates me. What fascinates me is overhearing Chaucer hearing the footfalls of his own mortality: gotta scrap that plan to outdo the Decameron by sixteen stories. This thing might not be finishable. And how do things end, finally, things such as this?

We know how Chaucer ended his own poem, the poem that was supposed to crown his career: ironically, yet with piety. We don’t get four tales from each pilgrim; we don’t get "a tale or two" from each; we don’t even get a tale from every pilgrim. Turning to the Parson as the sun is sinking low (that would mean, allegorically, that the "sun" was "sinking low"), the Host says, "every man save thou hath toold his tale," but only twenty-three of twenty-nine have spoken up, and only twenty-one have actually gotten to finish their stories. The Parson replies, "I wol yow telle a myrie tale in prose / To knytte up al this feeste and make an ende." He then launches on a most unmerry sermon that, taking Jeremiah 6:16 for its text, sets forth the good way, the way we should follow to arrive at a good end. Then the sermon ends. Then Chaucer writes his Retraction of all his works except his translations of Boethius and "othere bookes of legendes of seintes, and omelies, and moralitee, and devocioun." Then Chaucer dies, to live again in cyberspace.

You see the pattern by now, surely, even if you don’t have Spenser’s mathematical, late-medieval mind working for you. You embark on an epic narrative; halfway through, you feel the creaking of your bones and the ephemerality of every verb tense and the sheer impossibility of tying it all up so that everyone lives happily ever after; you start writing narratives about how narrative will exceed every plan, while the narrative of your own human life will fall short of every plan. And then you break the frame: from merry tales to a somber sermon, from epic grandeur to pastoral meditation. And then, at the very end, you offer a prayer.

Underworld opens, like the Canterbury Tales and Book I of The Faerie Queene, with a brilliant set piece: the shot heard ‘round the world. Make that two shots: Bobby Thomson’s ninth-inning, three-run homer off Ralph Branca to beat the Dodgers in the epic National League playoff, and the Soviet Union’s second nuclear test, both occurring on October 3, 1951. The sense of an ending is everywhere in the opening pages—how the game will end, how the season will end, how the Cold War will end. The Prologue (yes, that’s right, a general prologue) is, after all, titled "The Triumph of Death," which at first blush seems an odd way to introduce the Giants and Dodgers, not at all the way ESPN Classic would promote the game. And just before Thomson’s shot sends the Polo Grounds into delirium, as distraught or distracted fans are tossing paper throughout the stadium, a fan in the upper deck starts ripping pages out of his copy of Life magazine. One page lands on J. Edgar Hoover’s shoulder, "a color reproduction of a painting crowded with medieval figures who are dying or dead—a landscape of visionary havoc and ruin," and Hoover, repelled and fascinated, wonders "why a magazine called Life would want to reproduce a painting of such lurid and dreadful dimensions." It is Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death, and it touches Hoover to his core.

Don DeLillo, last of the great medieval masters? Not exactly. He follows the Prologue with a tale told backwards, in reverse chronological order. You get the meeting between Nick and Klara Sax in the New Mexico desert before you know who they were to each other back in the Bronx. You get Marian’s affair before you get Nick’s, to which it is almost certainly a response. You get a series of Thomson and Branca photos with Presidents Bush, Reagan, Nixon, Kennedy, Eisenhower, in that order. You find out what happened to the Thomson home run ball, kind of—since its, what-do-you-call, lineage never really does get verified completely. You find out about Albert Bronzini and Matty as the novel ravels into the past, as their ends lie in their beginnings. You never do find out who the Texas Highway Killer is, what happened to Manx or Cotter Martin, what became of Chuckie Wainwright, what’s going on in that Greenland. All told, it doesn’t seem to be the kind of narrative in which aesthetic order gives shape and meaning to scenes of visionary havoc and ruin.

And isn’t there a sense in which the opening is a false start, anyway? The fine play with life and death is all fine play, yes, but, as every schoolboy knows, the Giants went on to the World Series in 1951, riding high off Thomson’s epochal homer—and fell to the damn Yankees in six anyway. Not much cosmic significance there. As for that Soviet bomb, well, yes, it did help to organize the world into Us and Them for another forty years, but to what end? As Nick asks Viktor, looking out over the debris of the Kazakh Test Site in the 1990s, "does anyone remember why we were doing all this?" "Yes, for contest," Viktor replies. "You won, we lost. You have to tell me how it feels. Big winner." Damn Yankees, you know. Neither of the shots heard ‘round the world in 1951 hold a clue as to how their larger narratives will end. For all that moveth doth in Change delight. It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.

But there is an order at work here, an order on the order of the Classics of Western Lit. The great Sabaoth sight in Underworld is not a vision of the sublime, of the mushroom cloud that will consume us all, but the apparition of the face of a murdered homeless girl on a Minute Maid billboard in the Bronx, when the ad is illuminated at the right angle by passing elevated trains. And yet that billboard vouchsafes to one of the novel’s minor characters, J. Edgar’s ghostly Sister, a vision of beatitude. DeLillo could be pulling our legs, of course. Is the billboard a sign of transfiguration, of the holy transformation of the profane by the sacred, or a sign of how sorry and sordid our ideas of salvation have become, that a mere trick of the light can lead us to embrace Sister Grace? But this much could also be asked of Chaucer and Spenser: the Parson is yanking our chains by promising us a merry tale, and as for Spenser, let’s not even pretend that that "fragmentary" eighth canto is "unperfite."

Maybe DeLillo’s novel gives us only a sham sacrament, and not a Sabaoth sight. And it’s a fair bet, too, that even if Underworld is meant to be a postwar epic of sorts, Don DeLillo isn’t feeling his mortality quite as keenly at the end of the twentieth century as Chaucer was at the end of the fourteenth or Spenser at the end of the sixteenth. But I’ll say this much—I know we’ve got us a novel here that draws on narrative strategies that have nothing to do with what people like :to call postmodernism. Working backward toward beginnings, making and unmaking our sense of an ending, opening onto the possibility of the sacred, and asking, with its last breath, how do things end, finally, things such as this? Under the aspect of mutability, or of eternity?

I can’t wait to see what this DeLillo does next.

CONTEXT is a triquarterly publication intended to create an international and historical context in which to read modern and contemporary literature. Its goal is to encourage the development of a literary community.

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