On The Silence by by Don DeLillo (Scribner, 2020)

....As long as the pillars of capitalist society seemed unshakable, say up to the first world war, the so-called avant-garde danced with the fetishes of their inner life. Some writers, it is true, saw the approach of the inevitable catastrophe (Ibsen, Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, etc.). The gaudy carnival, often with a ghastly tone from tragic incidental music, went on uninterrupted. The philosophy of Simmel and Bergson and much of the literature of the time show exactly where things were heading.

     Many a good writer and keen thinker saw through the intoxication of carnival to the fact that the fetishized ego had lost its essence. But they went no further than to sketch tragic or tragi-comic perspectives behind the garish whirl. The fetishized bases of life seemed so beyond question that they escaped study, let alone criticism. If there were doubts, they were like the doubt of the Hindu who questioned the accepted doctrine that the world rests on a huge elephant; he asked modestly on what the elephant rested; and when told it rested on a huge tortoise, he went his way contented. Mind was so formed by fetish thinking that when the first world war and the subsequent series of crises called the very possibility of human existence into question, giving a new tinge to every idea, and when the carnival of isolated individualism gave way to its Ash Wednesday, there was still virtually no change in the way that philosophical questions were asked....

- Lukacs, "Existentialism" (1949)

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The Silence by by Don DeLillo

(Scribner, 2020)

Is every Don DeLillo novel like this? 

By "like this" I mean like observing a performance of "No Exit" in the world of the film Cloverfield.

The five middle class Manhattanites DeLillo draws together are ciphers unmoored from the consequences of the germinating global disaster. DeLillo suggests people have been remade by technology: blank slates with a thin patina of social media screen time substituting for consciousness. (And never mind an Unconscious). 

One of the characters, a high school physics teacher, begins reciting quotes of Einstein in a German accent.  I assume DeLillo is thus suggesting that social media technology has superseded atomic energy as a threat to life on earth.

Middle class intellectuals seem to share and enjoy this kind of insight, assuming the technology that reshaped their habits of work has also remade the world for everyone else.

The world of The Silence is Superbowl Sunday 2022. Three characters are in an apartment preparing for dinner party guests and an evening of enjoying the game. A second couple is flying from Paris to NYC to attend that dinner party.

DeLillo's characters freeze-up as soon as the power fails. Those in the apartment take no action, apparently resigned to regurgitate abstractions as pantomime of agency in face of a crisis.

Diane Lucas decides to say something, although she has no idea what might come spouting out.

     "Staring into space. Losing track of time. Going to bed. Getting out of bed. Months and years and decades of teaching. Students tend to listen. All those different backgrounds. The faces dark, light, medium. What is happening in the public squares across Europe, the places where I've walked and looked and listened? I feel so simpleminded. A college professor who quit too soon. A would-be inspiration to my students, one of whom sits next to me here and now. The end-of-the-world movie. People stranded in a room. But we're not stranded. We can leave anytime. I try to imagine the vast sense of confusion out there. My husband does not want to describe what he has seen but I am guessing bedlam in the streets and why am I so reluctant to get up and walk to the window and simply look? But didn't this have to happen? Isn't that what some of us are thinking? We were headed in this direction. No more wonder, no more curiosity. Totally impaired orientation. Too much of everything from too narrow a source code. And am I saying all this because it's way past midnight and I haven't slept and have barely eaten and the people here with me are barely listening to what I'm saying? Tell me I'm wrong, someone, but of course no one speaks. I want to resume teaching and return to my classroom and speak to my students about the principles of physics. The physics of this, the physics of that. The physics of time. Absolute time. Time's arrow. Time and space. Before I shut up I will quote a stray line from Finnegans Wake, a book I've been reading on and off, here and there, for what seems like forever. The line has stayed secure in the proper mind slot, the word preserve. Ere the sockson locked at the dure. Just one more thing to say. To myself this time. Shut up, Diane."

*     *     *

The last hundred years have given us many "machine stops" stories. Few have been as airless and underpowered as The Silence. It's moral, for only moralizing could be the goal of such a slight tale, is that technology has wrecked the human race - or at least its privileged petty-bourgeois heights. 

Compared to Devolution by Max Brooks (Del Rey, 2020), The Silence is small-beer defeatism and self-pity. 

Jay

3 April 2021