8 - Where Have All the Writers Gone? Art and Vision in DeLillo’s Later Works

Summary

The Death of the Author in DeLillo's Early Works

In Mao II (1991), acclaimed writer Bill Gray laments that ‘[w]hat terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought’ (157). That novel also chronicles a profound anxiety about the loss of writers’ powers in the face of the increased influence of visual culture. It is significant, then, that Mao II is also the last DeLillo novel in which novelists play a central role. During DeLillo's early career, much of his work chronicled a tension between words and images. After ‘spen[ding] twenty-eight years in the movies’, David Bell, the ‘[child] of Godard and Coca-Cola’, as Mark Osteen felicitously described the protagonist of DeLillo's first novel, Americana (1971), takes up his pen after failing as a filmmaker (Americana 283; Osteen 8). As if to counteract the odious effects of pervasive visual media that ensure that our daily lives ‘[exist] only on videotape’, the novel offers ‘schizograms’ and bedtime stories whose elusiveness is their charm (Americana 23). Running Dog (1978) chronicles the collision of investigative journalism and the world of erotic art, and the very title of The Names (1982), a novel that announces the importance of film in the twentieth century, establishes the primacy of language. By Underworld (1997), however, writers in the conventional sense have all but disappeared from DeLillo's novels. Words are still important, of course, but primarily embodied by the controversial improvisations of Lenny Bruce or the stylised graffiti of Moonman 157. Subsequent novels yield an even bleaker terrain for the writer who doesn't even bother to show up, save for a brief appearance by The Body Artist's (2001) Rey Robles, a filmmaker who kills himself while trying to complete his memoir. Even the spareness of DeLillo's prose in the past twenty years suggests that the written word is disappearing. Depictions of art and artists are certainly pervasive in DeLillo's later work, with art increasingly limited to visual and performance art, a sleight of hand that seems to have gone unnoticed. It is as if Bill Gray's prognostication has proven true: writers have ceded their place to terrorists – or to visual artists.