30 - Going Up in the World: Architecture in the Works of Don DeLillo

Summary

Born in the Bronx and a lifetime inhabitant of the city, Don DeLillo is one of the great novelists of New York. Even before one opens the pages, DeLillo's recurring preoccupation with New York's iconic skyline, and with the literal size of the buildings, is shown on the dust-jackets of the novels in their first published form. The jacket of Libra (1988) depicts skyscraper architecture; Cosmopolis (2003) features the Empire State Building; Falling Man (2007), an inverted residential street-scene with a passing train pictured to look like a skyscraper; and on the jacket of The Silence (2020), the Chrysler Building. All are shots of skyscrapers taken from low camera angles, so that the viewer/reader feels the smallness of people. Most famously, the original jacket of Underworld (1997), DeLillo's most celebrated novel, shows the twin towers of the World Trade Center. It is only on the jacket of the first edition of Ratner's Star (1976) that the pictured skyscrapers are seen from above. Vantage points are crucial to how DeLillo examines the world.

In these novels, DeLillo explores the dilemmas of living with the past and the future, of success and failure, bigness and smallness, and of the transformation from immigrant to American. This is seen most clearly in the case of Underworld's protagonist Nick Shay, and it is a trajectory that is evidenced by the physical spaces in which the characters live and hide, bury and contain their secrets and their trophies. This chapter will look at the built environment, the space and spaces we imagine, construct and occupy, and how DeLillo's portrayal of the physical city atomises the immigrant dream of going up in the world.

Building New York

Architecture is about space and how we use it. As Gaston Bachelard argues in his influential study The Poetics of Space, the containment of space offers protection from heat, cold – any and all elemental forces. In creating protective shells, architecture demarcates the difference between inside and outside (Bachelard 227–46). The barriers that are erected suggest safety from forces that are hostile to the individual, be those enemies, neighbours (foreign or domestic), weapons or pathogens. Architecture is also about power.