The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Underworld by Don DeLillo
Irving Malin

Don DeLillo. Underworld. Scribner, 1997. 827 pp. $27.50.

The word underworld suggests many associations: (1) The criminal element of American society (the mobs in the Bronx, including Nick, his bookie father, and their desire to fashion a private world); (2) the regions of hell; (3) the repressed memories of the past (an underworld of murder, victimization, shame); (4) the “waste” of language itself (including the change of the Latin of the Church and the street dialect of Italian). And to complicate matters there is the exploration of “under” as failure (as represented let’s say by the losing Dodger, Ralph Branca) and success. It is possible to read any page to see references to unknowing, undoing and other words using this prefix.
DeLillo is, in effect, posing philosophical questions about the nature of knowledge and ontology. Underworld suggests the notion of mystery, occult, and secret forces. But is there an underworld opposed to the “world”? What are the limits or boundaries of “under”? Is there any routine, known “world” which the “under” subverts? Perhaps the linkage of Branca and Thompson—the loser and the winner—recur throughout the novel to remind us that opposites are somehow always linked. High and low are relative—are, indeed, married.
I want to quote two passages that demonstrate the careful and subtle “logic and metaphor.” The first is from the prologue in the Polo Grounds in the 1951 baseball game. J. Edgar Hoover, Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra—all successful “heroes”—sit close to the action of the game. When Thompson hits his home run the fans in the cheap seats (the failures in our capitalist society?) throw down papers of various kinds onto Hoover: “In the box seats J. Edgar Hoover plucks a magazine page off his shoulder, where the thing has lighted and stuck. At first he’s annoyed that the object has come in contact with his body. Then his eyes fall upon the page. It is a color reproduction of a painting crowded with medieval figures who are dying or dead—a landscape of visionary havoc and ruin.”
Almost every word explodes with associations, and these associations recur throughout the entire novel. Hoover regards people, texts, files, and bodies as things. He opposes thing and being. He hates “contact.” He wants pure distinction. His eyes—his perceptions—are distorted. They don’t see the full picture. The reproduction is of The Triumph of Death, Breugel’s painting. It is a visionary (remember Hoover’s vision) work of havoc and ruin. The novel is also a work of havoc and ruin. There is a connection between text and painting. Significantly, the prologue is called “The Triumph of Death.”
Much later in the novel, Klara, an artist and the mistress of the adolescent Nick, attends a secret showing of a lost Eisenstein film called Unterwelt (consider the relation of film to painting to text). The German title, of course, brings to mind DeLillo’s obsession with Nazi havoc in White Noise and Running Dog. Klara is told by her friend: “I think you ought to see the film and figure it out for yourself. I’ll only tell that word got around, early on, that Eisenstein made a film with a powerful theme and the footage has been hidden away all these decades because the theme deals on some level with people living in the shadows, and the government, or the governments, the GDR and the Soviets, have suppressed the film until now.”
The words reverberate with meaning. Eisenstein is known for his use of montage and the DeLillo text is a montage, a layering of levels. Eisenstein was homosexual. Nick, the protagonist, by using Klara as his woman years ago was, in effect, seducing the woman married to his teacher, his substitute father. The homosexual’s “world” is coded, secretive, and subversive. Notice that the film is full of shadows; it deals with the shadows of the repressed masses. The entire passage forces us to recognize that power is perhaps the “real” theme of the novel. [Irving Malin]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Underworld by Don DeLillo Irving Malin Don DeLillo. Underworld. Scribner, 1997. 827 pp. $27.50. The word underworld suggests many associations: (1) The criminal element of American society (the mobs in the Bronx, including Nick, his bookie father, and their desire to fashion a private world); (2) the regions of hell; (3) the repressed memories of the past (an underworld of murder, victimization, shame); (4) the “waste” of language itself (including the change of the Latin of the Church and the street dialect of Italian). And to complicate matters there is the exploration of “under” as failure (as represented let’s say by the losing Dodger, Ralph Branca) and success. It is possible to read any page to see references to unknowing, undoing and other words using this prefix. DeLillo is, in effect, posing philosophical questions about the nature of knowledge and ontology. Underworld suggests the notion of mystery, occult, and secret forces. But is there an underworld opposed to the “world”? What are the limits or boundaries of “under”? Is there any routine, known “world” which the “under” subverts? Perhaps the linkage of Branca and Thompson—the loser and the winner—recur throughout the novel to remind us that opposites are somehow always linked. High and low are relative—are, indeed, married. I want to quote two passages that demonstrate the careful and subtle “logic and metaphor.” The first is from the prologue in the Polo Grounds in the 1951 baseball game. J. Edgar Hoover, Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra—all successful “heroes”—sit close to the action of the game. When Thompson hits his home run the fans in the cheap seats (the failures in our capitalist society?) throw down papers of various kinds onto Hoover: “In the box seats J. Edgar Hoover plucks a magazine page off his shoulder, where the thing has lighted and stuck. At first he’s annoyed that the object has come in contact with his body. Then his eyes fall upon the page. It is a color reproduction of a painting crowded with medieval figures who are dying or dead—a landscape of visionary havoc and ruin.” Almost every word explodes with associations, and these associations recur throughout the entire novel. Hoover regards people, texts, files, and bodies as things. He opposes thing and being. He hates “contact.” He wants pure distinction. His eyes—his perceptions—are distorted. They don’t see the full picture. The reproduction is of The Triumph of Death, Breugel’s painting. It is a visionary (remember Hoover’s vision) work of havoc and ruin. The novel is also a work of havoc and ruin. There is a connection between text and painting. Significantly, the prologue is called “The Triumph of Death.” Much later in the novel, Klara, an artist and the mistress of the adolescent Nick, attends a secret showing of a lost Eisenstein film called Unterwelt (consider the relation of film to painting to text). The German title, of course, brings to mind DeLillo’s obsession with Nazi havoc in White Noise and Running Dog. Klara is told by her friend: “I think you ought to see the film and figure it out for yourself. I’ll only tell that word got around, early on, that Eisenstein made a film with a powerful theme and the footage has been hidden away all these decades because the theme deals on some level with people living in the shadows, and the government, or the governments, the GDR and the Soviets, have suppressed the film until now.” The words reverberate with meaning. Eisenstein is known for his use of montage and the DeLillo text is a montage, a layering of levels. Eisenstein was homosexual. Nick, the protagonist, by using Klara as his woman years ago was, in effect, seducing the woman married to his teacher, his substitute father. The homosexual’s “world” is coded, secretive, and subversive. Notice that the film is full of shadows; it deals with the shadows of the repressed masses. The entire passage forces us to recognize that power is perhaps the “real” theme of the novel. [Irving Malin]