Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997)

“Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) comes close to being an all-inclusive novel for the Nineties.
It starts on October 3, 1951, with the shot heard round the world. Bobby Thomson’s home run in
the ninth inning that gave the New York Giants the victory over the Brooklyn Dodgers in the
pennant playoff. The ball Thomson hit becomes perhaps the most famous baseball in history,
and the way it moves through America and touches a multitude of people forms the spine of
DeLillo’s book. He traverses vast distances, but so does that single shot, that ball, that day, that
event, making it a day people remember the way they recall where they were when John F.
Kennedy was shot. The two shots, at some point, become interchangeable, one killing the
President, the other killing the Dodgers and their fans’ hopes. In one sequence, in fact, some
people distantly touched by the Thomson shot watch the Zagruder tape, speeded up,
slow-motioned, played at regular speed in which Kennedy’s head is blown apart, seemingly from
the front (which fits the conspiracy theory). Similarly, Thomson’s shot is played and replayed at
different speeds in people’s minds, as baseball becomes an insistent emblem of larger
American life.

Yet a baseball and a shot are not the sole metaphors DeLillo hangs Underworld on—another
is waste, or, simply garbage. Garbage is everywhere; it appears to be the means by which our
society survives.Entire civilizations are constructed on how they responded to garbage disposal,
and no civilization more than America depends on waste disposal. Floating through the novel,
as it did through the waterways of the world, is a garbage-laden barge of New York waste,
turned away at every port and somehow indicative of how consumerism had led to waste-ism.
Garbage is linked, of course, to excrement, each being what is forced out, an emblem of how a
society turns matter into waste, substance into filth.

By way of narrative process with baseball and waste matter as his twin metaphors, DeLillo
has continued the Mega-Novel. Underworld fits the model; it is both spatially and temporally
adventurous, with time shifts as well as geographical changes. The novel roams the country, in
different time zones, in differing years, and by the end it roams the world, in an epilogue about
nuclear bombs being used in Kazakhstan to blow up the world’s nuclear waste. If there were a
third emblem in the novel, it would be nuclear power, its actuality and its potential. On the day
Thomson hit his historical homer, the Soviets exploded a nuclear device. But the bomb, which
broke the American monopoly on nuclear power, had to take second place to the demise of the
Dodgers and the Giants’ victory. In a way, the threading of the nuclear threat through the novel,
culminating in the Epilogue, firs well into the Mega-Novel dimensions of Underworld: nuclear
potential suggests vast space, countries warring in the heavens, and the Mega-Novel
is nothing if not spatial, vast, oceanic, with no possibility of completion or resolution.

But the novel is far more than a free flowing, interrupted, often skewed narrative. There are
brilliant set pieces, all continuous with DeLillo’s ability to find emblematic scenes that capture
the odd ‘underworld’ as aspects of American life. Klara Sax, connected to the main characters
by a kind of string theory, has organized a crew which paints World War Two planes that have
been decommissioned by the Air Force and given to her for refurbishment. Deep in the desert,
she works to bring something inorganic and rusting back to life—to give the planes some of the
grandeur they once had, and to remind the viewer that the planes, now dead on the ground,
were once saviors of the American dream. DeLillo recreates this bizarre scene without
sentimentality or even nostalgia, but with a hard-edged wit: that the woman, slightly off balance
and not a little obsessive, yet has a grand vision. And that vision is one of the country, not to let
brilliant metals decline into rust, not to make things part of a throwaway culture, not to permit
everything to decline into waste. The theme of refurbishment of the old and useless is part of
the waste theme; only here it is to delay waste, deep in a desert area where possibly no one
cares except Klara and her motley crew.

In a later scene, which mirrors this one, DeLillo moves his main figure, Nick Shay to
Kazakhstan, described as a forlorn place, a desert, deep into nowheresville, like Klara Sax’s
location. In Kazakhstan, the ‘waste’ is more sinister throwaway, nuclear matter, and it is
imported from all over the world by an organization called Tchaika (seagull, ironically recalling
Chekhov), a capitalistic venture in the new Russia. Once the nuclear waste is organized, it is
destroyed, seemingly, by nuclear blasts, although the implication is that even more waste is
created. The blasts are underground, but as DeLillo demonstrated in White Noise, toxic fumes
have already transformed towns and villages into horror stories of disfigured babies and
children. Here, waste not only overtakes civilization it destroys as much as weapons themselves
do.

In the earliest segments, DeLillo presents a different kind of scene, one that is balletic,
graceful, and witty, recalling to some degree the choreography of Jerome Robbins in West Side
Story. Instead of gangs dancing their way toward the audience, DeLillo has a group of young
black kids running to the turnstiles of the Polo Grounds, hoping to gain free entrance by jumping
the turnstiles. While many try, only a few will get through, and Cotter Martin is one of them. He is
the key figure, since once he is positioned in the stands, he grabs the ball Bobby Thomson has
hit to win the pennant for the Giants. The ball, having become one of the most prized of
collectibles, is secured by an inner-city kid, whose father—one of the few stereotypical figures in
DeLillo—steals the ball and sells it for drinking money. The sneaking into the ballpark, the
maneuvering for a seat, the struggle for the ball, the chase by a white man into Harlem, the
father’s theft of the baseball—all these activities come as the consequence of a legendary
event, one that grows in the American mind and in the meta-narrative of the novel itself.

The seemingly skewed individual scenes gain strength because, with typical DeLillo
indirection, they link up with the major lines, about waste, the making of a legend, the weirdness
of American life, the psychodrama being played out in unlikely locations, in activities which
enable people to go on who otherwise might not. We recognize that the sense of America lies in
individual lives, not in a sum total. DeLillo has caught the Nineties, angular, bifocaled,
subcultured, divisible, lacking center or core, caught in a drift that neither fervent religion, nor
morality, nor discipline, nor prosperity can salvage. There is the whiff of death, as expected
when a country is ending, but DeLillo suggests the death starts much earlier, not in the Nineties,
but in the Fifties, the time of seeming recovery.

One way to read the Thomson homer is of course as victory under extreme circumstances,
but another way is to see it as defeat at the last moment, a monumental defeat especially for a
Dodger team which late in the season had a 13½-game lead over the Giants, only to blow it.
That the shot heard round the world came as the Soviets set off their own shot indicates, not
triumph, but a world complicated beyond redemption. In brief, predictability vanishes, triumph
and defeat are intertwined.

Underworld speaks of that ‘other,’ nether world, suggested by Sergei Eisenstein’s silent film
Unterwelt, whose footage was hidden away in an East Berlin vault. Since it deals with people
living in the shadows, the film is subversive of all normalizing behavior, another emblem for
DeLillo of how life is being played out beneath America’s bourgeois surface. Unterwelt, made in
the thirties, satirizes totalitarian regimes, whether Stalin’s or Hitler’s; Eisenstein as a revered
Russian showing the ‘other’ side of Stalinism, but using a German title to implicate a rising
Hitler. Eisenstein’s creatures, DeLillo writes, ‘humped and scuttled through the shadows,
hump-lurched with hands dragging, and you can always convince yourself it’s okay to laugh at
cripples and mutants if everybody else is laughing…’ One thinks of Dolin’s Alexanderplatz,
Berlin (1929), which, when made by Fassbinder for German television, was all shadows,
underworld life, people slinking and scuttling through streets.

What connection, we ask, does this have to DeLillo’s main line, especially to baseball? Like
so many other scenes—one involving a wall of death and a graffiti artist, the doomed young
craftsman Moonman—there is a skewed, marginal linkage to waste, to a game lost as well as
won, to the suggestion of entropy, a running down, a transformation of consumerism into
garbage-ism. DeLillo has always been noted for creating that ‘other’ world—the Reverend Moon
traducing the sense of marriage by marrying at time thousands of couples, or a toxic cloud
upsetting a comfortable bourgeois life in a college town, or a professor of Hitler studies at a
university, an expert on German history, who does not speak German, or a vast conspiracy
working to make Oswald the fall guy in the Kennedy assassination.

The Moonman, mentioned above, creates an art form out of graffiti on a wall commemorating
young lives ended abruptly. Here, too, is waste, only here preserved in a memorial on an inner
city wall, not to be forgotten as waste normally is. Moonman also does subway cars, not to
desecrate them, but to turn them into carefully painted art objects, dressing up an underworld
into something transformed. As sixteen, Moonman--Ishmael Munoz—attempts to light up with
neon paint what is gloomy and otherwise lost to death and burial. The wall is permitted, but his
work on the subways is obviously illegal—and yet it follows another law, that of art transforming
the world’s dross, even resurrecting the dead.

Once again DeLillo has spread his network of skewed interests, so that Moonman is somehow
a distant relative of Cotter Martin, another inner city boy who becomes alive when he grabs the
son-to-be legendary ball. Klara-Cotter-Moonman, and a horde of others, are linked in that nether
world DeLillo depicts as somehow more intense and emotionally crowded than the more
mundane world lying above ground. He leads us into the new century, not with a straightforward
story, but with dark possibilities.”

Mr. Mahendra