Introduction - Ways of Seeing / Don DeLillo and the Arts

Summary

It takes close attention to see what is happening in front of you. It takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at.

Point Omega 13

The optic nerve is not telling the full truth.

Zero K 45

No one sees the barn.

White Noise 14

For over fifty years, Don DeLillo, indisputably one of the most important writers of our age, has been chronicling the complexity of human existence and the exigencies of contemporary American living. As a novelist, short story writer, essayist and playwright, he does this not least via a consideration of the ways in which art, in all its forms, can reflect, activate and resist the pressures of our technology-inflected lives. His fiction and plays contain numerous artists and artworks, and from his earliest interview onwards, DeLillo has spoken openly about the artistic influences on his writing, which include European film (e.g., Jean-Luc Godard and Federico Fellini), American art (e.g., the Abstract Expressionists), American music (e.g., jazz), American poetry (e.g., Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens) and European theatre and fiction (e.g., Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Hermann Broch). For DeLillo, the arts represent ‘a form of counterhistory’ (‘The Power of History’), a way of seeing the world that involves close attention not just to the particulars of everyday life, but to the ways in which our very vision is directed by the apparatus of power.

Art is one of the consolation prizes we receive for having lived in a difficult and sometimes chaotic world. We seek pattern in art that eludes us in natural experience. This isn't to say that art has to be comforting; obviously, it can be deeply disturbing. (‘An Outsider’ 74)

DeLillo's art is comforting because it points to the extraordinary things that language can achieve; disturbing because it sharpens our perception of the ordinary ways we waste our own potential, or bend it towards damaging ends. As Linda Kauffman has acknowledged, DeLillo confronts us ‘with myriad forms of misrecognition and unknowing: ignorance, amnesia, blindness, denial, disavowal’ (359), reminding us that ‘what you see depends on how it is framed’ (365). Indeed, sometimes the frame is so distracting as to inhibit vision of what is right in front of us – as Murray Jay Siskind comments to Jack Gladney regarding ‘the most photographed barn in America’, so bombarded are viewers with the significatory contexts of the barn that ‘it becomes impossible to see the barn’ (White Noise 14).