6 - L’objet trouvé and the Pressure of History: DeLillo’s Aesthetic of Found Things and the 1970s

Summary

From collectors and sorters-through of waste to alienated ascetics retreating into sparsely furnished rooms as if in flight from the world of objects itself – for decades, Don DeLillo's characters have lived fictional lives in which finding, curating and contemplating things appears central to the material and existential practice of American life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Those of us who read DeLillo, meanwhile, encounter in his work denotations of both everyday things and objets d’art recycled from other times and places in the aesthetic culture of (post) modernity: the eponymous Warhol triptych in Mao II (1991); the Morandi still lifes in Falling Man (2007), imported from Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960). Partly for these reasons, this chapter turns to DeLillo's early novels of the 1970s, the theoretical oeuvre of Fredric Jameson, and developments in conceptual art inaugurated by Marcel Duchamp, to consider what it might mean to think of DeLillo as an artist of the found object, a category of art-making that has long sought to trouble any presumed distinction between ordinary, everyday things and objets d’art. For the fact that DeLillo is a novelist who has his characters curate things while doing something analogous in the making of his own art points to an intriguing parallel in aesthetic practices, albeit one that must be approached with some care. It is one thing, after all, to note the emergence of an aesthetic of ‘found things’ in a writer whose work assumed more mature form in the 1980s and 1990s; it is another to confuse the art of literature with the aesthetic practices of other arts.

With this in mind, I pursue in what follows a generative analogy between DeLillo's early curatorial literary aesthetic of the objet trouvé and similar aesthetic practices in other media, based on the premise that there is, in DeLillo's aesthetic of found things as it was developing over this period, a fundamental tension between transposition and transformation. For while DeLillo is an artist, his medium remains language, and as he has himself insisted, he is above all a maker of his own written things: sentences, paragraphs, books (DePietro 91, 107).