29 - Time and Loss: DeLillo and the Imagination of Archaeology

Summary

It seems, in fact, that the more advanced a society is, the greater will be its interest in ruined things, for it will see in them a redemptively sobering reminder of the fragility of its own achievements. Ruins pose a direct challenge to our concern with power and rank, with bustle and fame. They puncture the inflated folly of our exhaustive and frenetic pursuit of wealth.

Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

I have … imbibed the shadows of fallen columns at Balbec, and Tadmor, and Persepolis, until my very soul has become a ruin.

Edgar Allan Poe, ‘MS. Found in a Bottle’

It is instructive to view one's historical moment as archaeology's raw material. What artefacts of the present will enchant the future? Which will occasion pity and contempt for an era's spiritual and aesthetic poverty? These questions loom over one of DeLillo's most oft-invoked essays, ‘In the Ruins of the Future’, which, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, offers archaeologically inflected observations on America's weight in the scales of history. Like the earlier essays ‘American Blood’ and ‘The Power of History’, ‘In the Ruins of the Future’ showcases DeLillo's eloquent ability to place the present in its larger temporal context – as have literati from Shelley to Yeats and Eliot. ‘Time present and time past’, says the last, ‘Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past’ (Eliot 189). The lines invite parody as ersatz sententiousness or ponderous tautology, but they capture something that occurs to anyone who thinks about the course of civilisation – especially to anyone who reflects that every great empire must one day collapse, whether from cultural entropy, tangled-bank geopolitics or simply imperial hubris. Moralists discern lessons in the ruins of such empires, historians and archaeologists perpend the mechanics of decline, and poets affect romantic melancholy: ‘I sometimes think that never blows so red / The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled’ (FitzGerald 4).

Those who think ruins romantic or charming would do well to imagine the actual process of societal collapse, especially the event or events that prove catalytic – failure of the water supply, breakdown in crucial technology, sacking of the imperial city. Emily Dickinson observes that ruin should proceed ‘[c]onsecutive and slow’ (904), but at a certain point it speeds up vertiginously. Like bankruptcy, according to that classic line in Hemingway, ruin happens in two ways: gradually and then suddenly.