31 - ‘Bird Lives’: The High Art of Graffiti in Don DeLillo

Summary

Signatures of all things I am here to read …

James Joyce, Ulysses

Bird Lives’: it's a single note, played just once near the middle of Don DeLillo's Underworld (1997), but it resonates with almost every other note in the entire novel, and it leads to pretty much every theme and character in the work. Even shorter and sweeter than that famous Second World War graffiti ‘Kilroy was here’, the tag ‘Bird Lives’ says, like all other graffiti, to cite Jean Baudrillard, ‘I am so-and-so and I exist!’; that is, it is ‘free publicity for existence’, an ontological shout in the streets, an affirmation of life and existence (Beauchamp). But ‘Bird Lives’ can also today be read, precisely, as saying something rather different from ‘I exist’ or ‘Kilroy was here’. It can be read as the affirmative trace of a life that lives on now only in writing, a trace of what exists now only as writing, as graffiti, but also, and this is perhaps the sweetest part, as a signature form of literature.

There is much debate in the secondary literature on DeLillo about the role played by graffiti in his work. Indeed, there is almost something of a turf war over the role and function of graffiti in his corpus, with those on each side marking their territory with their unique argumentative tags. There are some who, as we will see, consider it to be a form of resistance to the dominant culture of capitalist consumerism, an art form that challenges the assumptions of older forms of art and the power structures that support them, and others who see DeLillo to be resisting and contesting this form of art, and embracing only the forms of social activism sometimes promoted by its practitioners. But then there are those who, and I will be among them by the end, wish to consider DeLillo's work itself as graffiti, and DeLillo as using the techniques of graffiti to craft his own novels, beginning with Underworld.