10 - DeLillo in Colour

Summary

In an interview for the Paris Review, Don DeLillo responded as follows when asked whether he read as a child: ‘No, not at all. Comic books. This is probably why I don't have a storytelling drive’ (Begley). In addition to its impact on DeLillo's well-established renunciation of conventional plot structures, the comic book genre may have had a formative influence on a less widely recognised aspect of his writing. Colour was one of, if not the defining, characteristics of American comics during its Golden Age in the 1940s. A garish gallery of superheroes in harlequin hues – Superman and Captain Marvel, Batman and Robin, the Flash and the Green Lantern – captured the roving eyes and imagination of an impressionable audience. DeLillo, of course, did not go on to become a graphic novelist, but it is important to acknowledge the extent of his literary engagement with colour. To date, the DeLillo oeuvre includes approximately three and a half thousand colour terms. Around a quarter of these references are to the colour that combines all wavelengths from the visible light spectrum. White is the most conspicuous (over 900 references) and complex presence on the DeLillo colour wheel. The second most prominent colour is another achromatic hue: black (almost 600 references). After white and black, DeLillo's ‘primary’ colours we might say, a second tier includes the following (listed in order of frequency with each between 200 and 350 references): blue, red, green, grey (not counting the two ‘Mr Grays’ who appear in White Noise and Mao II) and brown. A tertiary tier of colour (appearing between 50 and 100 times and again listed in order of prevalence) comprises those associated with the precious metals silver, gold and bronze alongside pink, yellow and orange. Finally, DeLillo's fiction is flecked with intermittent references to a range of minor colours (fewer than twenty appearances) such as copper, lime, magenta, ochre, purple and scarlet.

DeLillo's colours are often nuanced by modifiers. Two characters in the film Game 6 discussing their favourite colours plump for ‘burnt sienna’ and ‘cobalt blue’. The yellows of Underworld include shades of ‘Mikado’ and ‘Rust-Oleum’ while the greens are ‘mustard’, ‘patina’ and ‘sage’. An assiduous precision of tone is accompanied by a painterly attentiveness to the quality of light.