The Space of the Page in the Writing of Don DeLillo, or The Writer as Advanced Artist (Ph.D dissertation, MIRIAD, Manchester Metropolitan University)

'The Space of the Page in the Writing of Don DeLillo,

or The Writer as Advanced-Artist'

Submitted by David Price, for the award of PhD

MIRIAD, Manchester Metropolitan University

2012

BEST COPY AVAILABLE

Contents:

Page 1- Introduction and Glossary

Page 10 - Chapter 1: Don DeLillo and Criticism

Introduction

1. DeLillo's relationship to criticism 2. Tendencies in critical writing on DeLillo

3. Ratner's Star and its effect on DeLillo criticism

4. The artworks within the novels

5. Concluding notes - DeLillo as inheritor and inheritance

Page 60 - Chapter 2: Advanced-Art

Introduction

1. The relationship of Advanced-Art to criticism

2. Diderot and Vernet

3. Christopher Williams

4. Written and unwritten histories of art 5. For Example: Die Welt ist Schön (final draft)

6. A definition of the Advanced-Artwork

Page 97 - Chapter 3: Libra as a Work of Porous Modernism

Introduction

1. The Archive of Libra

2. Libra's plots

a. There is a world inside the world b. 'In Moscow'

c. '2 July'

d. 'In Minsk'

3. Libra and DeLillo's oeuvre 4. The depository

Page 137 - Chapter 4: The Draft

Introduction

1. The drafting process 2. The notion of drafting

3. 'The book-filled room' 4. 'The page is crowded with words' 5. 'It means assassin' 6. 'The room of lonely facts'

7. A final draft

Pages 186 - 217 contain typewritten pages of visual work The Draft

Page 218 - Conclusion

Page 222 - Bibliography

David Price, PhD, 2012

The Space of the Page in the Writing of Don DeLillo, or the Writer as Advanced-Artist

Abstract

What happens when fiction is considered as a space for art, and when art is considered

as a space for fiction? This thesis addresses these questions through a practice-led study

of the fictional writings of Don DeLillo.

DeLillo has been publishing novels since 1971, each of which have engaged with

aspects of art production and art criticism. The formal implications of this have played a

polarising role in the criticism that has gathered around his work, with some critics

reading DeLillo's fictional artworks as evidence of a highly post-modern and plural

production, whilst others have seen these works as more modernist reflections on the

writing process. In this thesis I propose that by reading DeLillo's writing through the

art-historical oeuvre of Thomas Crow, and his notion of the 'advanced-artwork', that a

new model of practice can be defined, where writing becomes the site for the production

of visual art, and visual art becomes the site for writing. The 'advanced-artwork',

-aGGAFdiIb }-ýFßVK-ýS-ýORý1ed u1 Ell e ma SOBA

and incorporates elements of critical thought within its physical production - qualities in DeLillo's fiction that have energised his critics, but have yet to be analysed using an

analogous model from another field.

After a review of the aspects of DeLillo criticism that that set the ground for these

questions, and a parallel review of Crow's art-historical writings, I address the potential for synthesising these areas on two fronts. Firstly, by a detailed study of DeLillo's 1988

novel Libra, reading it through art-theory and proposing that the novel fulfils many of

the criteria of the advanced-artwork, as well as showing how this reading allows many

of the problematic questions in existing DeLillo criticism to be addressed. My second

means of approaching Libra in these terms is the practical component of my thesis. This

takes the form of a visual artwork made up of writing, produced in response to an

archive of DeLillo's drafts and working papers. Using a manual typewriter, like DeLillo

himself, I reproduce successive drafts of sections of the novel that are conceptually

related to the questions that in the rest of the thesis I have addressed in theoretical terms.

In using this dual method of questioning of art's potential relationship to writing, I have

attempted to use the work of a single author to reflect on the possibilities of writing as a

medium for contemporary art-practice, and the potential of art to become a site of literary criticism. But by grounding my critique of DeLillo's fiction in the raw materials

of the medium I have also attempted to question the space of the page in wider terms, as

an expansive site of inter-disciplinary practice that allows its component parts to be set

in critical discourse.

Introduction

The space of the page in fiction can exist as a site for art, and the space of art as a site for fiction. This is the conceptual question with which this thesis engages.

My thesis takes the form of a practice-led critical study of the fiction of Don DeLillo. It

uses contemporary art practice as a framework to question the relationship DeLillo's

fiction has to visual art, as well as exploring ways fiction might be engaged in art

criticism. It then goes on to occupy the space of the page itself, putting its theoretical

conclusions into practice in the form of visual work.

DeLillo's writings, from the publication of his first novel Americana in 1971 through to

his most recent works, prominently feature works of art produced by a varied group of disciplines, from those that are invented by DeLillo to real-life works and version of

works. The theory-based elements of my thesis analyse the role of'DeLillo's artworks' in the literary criticism that has grown around his writing, and argue that the idea that forms my thesis' title -'the space of the page - remains under-researched as a way of

considering the context that his writing creates for such 'other' work. I propose a set of

critical ideas and models for artistic practice deriving from art-history as a way of

answering this absence in DeLillo studies. These include Denis Diderot's art writings of

the 18th century, through to contemporary artists such as Christopher Williams. The

practice-led elements of my work, however, build upon this meeting of academic disciplines to produce a body of visual work that engages with DeLillo's writing, as a

way of testing the theoretical conclusions of my work in creative form. This inter-

disciplinary approach reflects a theme running through my research, as well as through

the individual works I analyse: the potential for collaboration between creative and

critical practice, and between writing and the visual.

The subject areas I engage with are all potentially quite broad, and so there are a

number of ideas that, whilst conceivably relevant to the material I have used, are absent from my research due to the limits of space and the selectivity that must be applied

1

when bringing expansive critical fields together. Such ideas might include, from the field of literary theory, the notion of a writing a history of the depiction of art in fiction,

as a way of then observing how DeLillo's writing perhaps differs from conventional form of representing other forms of artistic work in fiction. I have not taken this

approach largely because, as I detail in my first chapter, the use of art in DeLillds

fiction is already an area in which significant academic work has taken place, and it

does not require an introduction. The space for new work in this field instead requires

the application of a model of thought from elsewhere in order to move beyond the

existent secondary literature. My interjection of ideas from contemporary art-criticism into this field stems from a desire to consider the space of DeLillo's page using the

formal methods of art-theory, rather than through the traditions of literary criticism. I

am not interested in the narrative significance of his use of art per se, but in the way in

which this relationship with art tests the space of the page. As an artist, not a student of literature, DeLillo's fiction appeared to me to be inherently suitable for an inter-

disciplinary critical reading due to the formal similarity it has to the examples of visual

art I use throughout the thesis. The absence of such a reading in the field of DeLillo

studies gives the potential for a new way of approaching his writing.

Within the equally broad area of art-history that I have used to this end, there are also

numerous critical fields and ongoing formal arguments that I have likewise occluded. In particular, the origins and development of critical attributions such as modern and

post-modem could have supplied the theoretical material for a thesis that catalogued

the appearance of artworks in DeLillo's fiction. But again, what I have been pre-

occupied with is the formal nature of DeLillo's writing as a composite practice that

combines many forms of work, and which adjusts and expands the space of the page in

order to do so. In light of this I have remained within areas of art-history that describe

quite specific examples of such internally-collaborative practice within the visual arts. As I argue in my second chapter, the formal concerns of this strand of criticism mirror

many of those of the area of DeLillo studies that my work addresses, and so provide an

analogy between these two distinct fields. However, rather than positioning itself in

either of these disciplines at the expense of the other, the overriding objective of my

2

work has been to set the ground for a creative application of critical thought.

Due to the inter-disciplinary nature of this project, which begins by tracing DeLillo's

contact with art, and ends by producing an artwork out of his writings, it traces several lines of enquiry that gradually intersect. The thesis is made up of four chapters, each of

which has a different methodology and point of entry into the work:

Chapter 1 is a review of literary theory relating to DeLillo, and focuses on the question

of his fiction's relationship to art. I trace this relationship through the effect it has on the

major critical works on DeLillo, by Mark Osteen, David Cowart and Peter Boxall

amongst others. This chapter uses the differing role that DeLillo's artworks play in

these critical works to identify a set of conflicting readings of his fiction, and to set the

ground for the space in this field that the use of art-history might illuminate. It argues

that the'new term' that the radical form of DeLillo's writing calls for, according to his

critics, must account for the formal relationship his writing has to the 'other' work and

practices that feed into it, especially artworks. It also argues that this relationship is

problematised by the conflicting poles of modernism and post-modernism, which come

to bear on both DeLillo's prose itself and the criticism that it has prompted.

Chapter 2 forms a second 'literature review' from the the perspective of art-history, and is drawn largely from the work of the critic Thomas Crow. As well as tracing the

development of modem art into the post-modern moment, his oeuvre focusses more

specifically on the way advanced-art, his term for a broad span of modem art, is

structured around a dialogue with'othee works, vernaculars and cultural dialects. It is

these concurrent lines of thought in his work that are analogous to the critical concerns I find in secondary literature on DeLillo. This chapter details the development of

advanced-art throughout the span of Crow's writings and beyond, and also analyses the

combined critical and creative impulses that characterise it. In the course of this

analysis I have developed the notion of 'porous modernism', a term that results from my

reading of the formal structure of the work Crow's art history collects, and which I

propose may fit the critical gap that in Chapter 1I identify in DeLillo studies.

3

Chapter 3 considers DeLillo's 1988 novel Libra as representing a synthesis of these

concerns: as an advanced-artwork that uses literary means within the framework of a historical account, a framework that the novel challenges. This argument is framed

around Libra's intertextual use of archival sources. The use of such sources is one of

the novel's main narrative themes, as well as a technique performed in practice by

DeLillo in its writing. The chapter records the breadth of authorial voices and forms of

pre-existent text that feed into the novel, and centres its critique around the character of

a fictional historian whose problematic relationship to the novel's intertexts stands in

contrast to DeLillo's, using this comparison to argue that Libra records a negotiation between the aesthetic and critical/historical poles comparable to the advanced visual

artworks discussed in Chapter 2. The historian character, in particular, marks this

negotiation, and DeLillo's depiction of his fictional practice both stands apart from and

refines my reading in Chapter 1 of DeLillo's fictional practitioners and the works-

within-works they produce. The chapter concludes by describing the centrality of the

act of writing, DeLillo's use of a typewriter, and his interaction with the space of the

page as being the ground of his engagement with these concerns.

Chapter 4 introduces the visual work that concludes the thesis, The Draft. This is

formed of a body of typewritten reproductions of DeLillo's drafts of Libra collected at

the Ransom Center at the University of Texas. The Draft focusses on sections of the

novel that are conceptually related to the critical concerns of the thesis so far, as well as

to the act of writing and the use of intertextual sources. The chapter expands in depth

on the practical and theoretical genesis of elements of The Draft, giving examples of

the reproductions throughout. It uses DeLillo's descriptions of his writing process, both

from interviews and from letters also housed at the Ransom Center. The reflections in

this chapter use the ground set by the theoretical concerns of the previous chapters, but

also stress the deeper access to these questions made possible by a practical

engagement derived both from the methods of advanced-art and from DeLillo's own

habits. As such it is the theoretical conclusion to the thesis but also takes the form of an

artist's account of the process of using DeLillo's'script'. The term 'script' is understood

4

in this chapter in both critical and creative terms: writing as a form of mark-making to

be subjected to analysis using the tools of art-theory, but also as a set of instructions for

its re-performance. The chapter argues that the construction and themes of Libra make both such approaches viable means of addressing the questions posed by my earlier

chapters. The Draft follows these chapters, as a type-written'book' within the thesis. It

presents the full thirty pages of my reproductions as a visual advanced-artwork.

Glossary

Throughout the thesis there are certain key terms that circulate, derived from both the

literary and art-historical reading I have undertaken, and coloured by the experience of

producing the concluding visual work. These terms are therefore subject to a degree of

translation or explanation due to the inter-disciplinary nature of the project. Whilst they

are explained as they appear, and my use of them is refined and expanded upon as the

thesis develops, I will provide here working definitions of the sense in which I have

understood and used them in the form of a critical glossary.

Advanced-Art

Advanced-art appears as a term throughout Thomas Crow's art-historical writings, as

well as in the writings of Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, in the latter cases as a

means of describing the self-referential critical nature of modernist artistic practice. For

Crow, however, especially in the writings collected as Modern Art in the Common

Culture, the term comes to denote work that incorporates 'other' work and vernaculars

as part of its critical structure. This work incorporates post-modem traits such as these

within its'modemisf self-appraisal. Crow applies the term to artists and critics from the

18th century to the present day, and emphasises in his description of both the possibility for theorists and practitioners to work to comparable ends.

5

Archive

'Archive', whilst being an expansive term and an idea that resonates in much

continental theory, is one that I have used in particular response to the work of Christopher Williams, the artist whose work provides the concluding material for

Modern Art in the Common Culture, and whose use of library and museum archives as

the vernacular with which his advanced-artworks engage is explored in Timothy

Martin's essay 'Undressing the Institutional Wound'. I have applied the model of this

practice in my critique of what I call the'archive of Libra', an institution I see

comprising both the intertexts that form significant parts of that novel, and the archive

of the novel's drafts and research materials housed at the Ransom Center. This archive is also what I see as both the site and material for the visual work that forms The Draft.

Circumscription

I have used this word in almost its literal sense, to 'write around' rather than to cut out

or isolate, and contrary to its sense as a restrictive term. I apply the idea of

'circumscription' whilst describing the way in which advanced-artworks engage with

their vernacular source materials, and in particular when addressing the ways that Libra

demonstrates a comparable practice undertaken by writing. The term appears in

descriptions of critical practice by both Crow and Maurice Blanchot, which I note in

Chapter 2, but the imperative to make use of the word in its literal sense derives

significantly from the practice-led elements of my project.

Draft

The word 'draft, as well as referring to the archive of Libra as a work-in-progress that I

address in Chapter 4, is also a titling system used to describe the ongoing nature of

Christopher Williams' recent projects, where an exhibition is adjusted and partially

remade across a series of venues. A given exhibition title, For Example, being one such

body of work I examine in Chapter 2, is subtitled First Draft, Second Draft, Final

6

Draft, etc. in its various iterations. Timothy Martin's essays on these exhibitions have

also followed the same system of titles. However, in Chapter 4I also consider the

metaphorical possibilities of the word's origins and multiple meanings (imbibing,

accessioning, slipstreaming, as well as the revising of text) for describing the

conceptual structure of advanced-artworks. These meanings serve as practical inspiration as well as theoretical reference points for the visual work.

Porous Modernism

I develop the idea of'porous modernism' as a way of responding to Boxall's claim that

the writings of DeLillo demand a new critical term to account for their combination of facets of modem and post-modern practice. My notion of the'porosity' of this work derives from the observation that advanced-art as described by Crow relies upon the

exploitation of the gaps between such critical attributions as'modern' or'post-modern',

as well as the gaps and spaces produced by the combinations of practices by which

such works are formed. As I also note, in the writings of DeLillo these practices tend to

resist each other, creating another kind of critical space between them. I argue that

written and visual productions such as these are created by the act of working gaps into

their structures, in a manner that, to use Boxall's term, is a 'counter-functional'

application of methods that otherwise show signs of the medium-specificity associated

with modernist practice. The term 'porous modernism' accounts for the way this method

works space into the artworks I describe through their engagement with other forms of

practice, acting as a modernism that functions within the post-modern.

Ventriloquism

I use the term 'ventriloquism' in place of 'quotation' as a way of accounting for the way in which DeLillo's writings, and advanced-artworks in general, allow their secondary,

counter-functional practices to remain active in the context of new works, rather than

using them as fixed or'dead' references. I observe them as remaining active as 'voices!

that are carried by the central voice of DeLillo's writing, a voice from within, or to use

7

the word ventriloquism in its literal sense, from the belly of his writing. My

understanding of this way of reading DeLillo derives from the analysis I make in

Chapter 1 of the role of the intertextual, inter-cultural elements of artistic practice that

are worked into his fiction. However, the term also comes to bear on my understanding

of the circumscriptive possibilities of advanced-art - as a means of writing around or

making space for an intertextual source in such a way that it remains unfixed, and 'vocal' in the role it plays within and without the voice of another work.

Note on the methods of citation and reference used:

Citations of works are given in footnotes, referenced by author's name then page

number. When a work is cited multiple times in sequence subsequent references are

given as'ibid'. There are three exceptions to this system, however. Firstly, references to

the collected interviews with Don DeLillo (Conversations With Don DeLillo, edited by

Thomas DePietro, with multiple interviewers) are given as'Conversations', followed by

the page number. The central role these interviews play as a primary as well as

secondary source, and hence as a single work, is detailed in Chapter 1. Secondly,

references to the novel Libra in Chapters 1 and 2 are given in brackets after the

quotation, due to their frequency. They are referenced as 'L', followed by the page

number, e. g. '(L 35)'. Thirdly, references to documents from the Ransom Center archive

of DeLillo's papers are given as'Ransom Center', followed by the box then folder

number, e. g. 'Ransom Center, 29.2', indicating box 29, folder 2. In addition to these

exceptions, in Chapter 4I have inserted as illustrations examples of typed sheets from

The Draft, and one example of the pencil record I made on the Ransom Center's yellow

paper as an initial record of the drafts. As in The Draft itself, these appear in

typewritten form, or as scanned documents in the electronic copy of the thesis.

In summary, what I have attempted in this project is to use the work of a single author in order to address the wider question of the space of the page. Rather than attempting

to survey this space as a neutral observer I have taken examples that directly contest it,

and have used them to inform my own practice. The thesis makes a telescopic study of

S

DeLillo's prose, from an analysis of his writing in critical context, through its formal

structure as a literary art-practice, and into its physical materials; typed ink and paper. But the aim of this zoom into the basic structures of his writing is to break new ground in the space of the page, to pass through the conventions of fictional language and

reconsider it as the medium for a radical form of art practice.

9

Chapter 1: Don DeLillo and Criticism

In light of the varied and subtle practice that DeLillo's fiction presents, this chapter

considers his equally varied and subtle relationship to criticism. It does so through

plotting the emergence in the field of DeLillo studies the key ideas that run through the

other parts of the thesis: the way in which his writing seems to require a space beyond

the straightforward attributions of'modemism' or'post-modernism', the deployment of

multiple voices within the singular voice of the writer himself, the role of the artwork

within his writing, and the blurring of distinctions between fiction, criticism and theory.

It also considers the inbuilt suitability DeLillo's fiction has for such a broad reading,

and how it can be read with as much of a sense of multiplicity and plurality as seems to

have been present in its writing. The breadth of this reading, and the scope of material

that DeLillo's writing provides for critical interpretation, necessarily resist a scholar's

attempt to assume a historical position of any certainty when approaching his oeuvre. The discipline of writing about DeLillo changes, as his earlier writings age and can

come to appear either historical or prescient, and as he continues to publish novels that

at times reprise earlier themes, whilst others seem to acquire new concerns entirely. His

fiction both resists and incorporates elements of critical thought, and attracts such

criticism to itself across a wide academic spectrum. 'DeLillo studies' is also an

emergent field, whose progress is gathering pace, with new essays appearing regularly.

The sources cited here, however, are predominantly the book length studies of DeLillo,

which tend to offer an image of his work as whole, its aesthetics and career-wide

preoccupations, and which also have the scope to include considerations of his work in

the light of art and art-criticism. The work of Mark Osteen and Peter Boxall in

particular address this area; indeed the use of art in DeLillo's novels provide a central

element to their conflicting arguments. The moments when critics consider the

deployment of and dialogue with art in DeLillo's fiction, despite being in the

background or at the edges of the majority of what has been written about him, are

significant to this thesis in that they allow both the form and content of his work to be

addressed at once, through an emphasis on the 'space' of the page as well as the

contents of that space - they consider the writing as a context for or a container of art.

10

This critique approximates an art-historical perspective, at one remove from the object in question, and from the thematic content of that object; and therefore given to

considering that object in context. In considering the novels of DeLillo, such a vantage

point is enabled by the prominence of fictional content that takes the form of 'other'

work, and by the fact the novels as a whole are engaged in a critical and formal

dialogue with that work. This relationship to'other work', as a form of dialogue with

culture resulting in a markedly plural artistic production, is at the heart of the field of

visual art considered elsewhere in the thesis, and indeed the method of this project as a

whole -a dialogue with what the art-historian Thomas Crow's calls'common cultures'.

The aim, then, of this chapter is to search DeLillo criticism for indicators of his points

of contact with art. The objectives and manner of this enquiry, sensitised and

corroborated by the other chapters of the thesis, will draw it towards the boundaries set

by the present work on him, the backgrounds and edges of DeLillo criticism. The thesis

as a whole will attempt to renegotiate these boundaries, and argue for the centrality of

art and art-history to DeLillo's writing, as well as considering the practical and critical implications of this. As Mark Osteen puts it when describing the formal plan for his

book on DeLillo:

"Just as DeLillo borrows his narrative forms from the idioms of his chosen subject, so

each chapter of this study draws its methodology from the discourses and institutions

depicted in the text. "'

To follow this method to another remove, the sections of this chapter take their lead

from moments in DeLillo criticism where the'depicted institutions' in his novels, which

often take the form of art, lead the critics in question to the edges of their studies, and

to the the edges of fiction and the page. One of the distinctive peculiarities of DeLillo's

writing is his dedication to idiom, not least to the idiomatics of art-production. The

frequent appearance in his novels of both artworks and their producers are one way in

which his writing is in constant dialogue with culture, but also keeps that culture at a Osteen, American Magic and Dread, p3. Further citations of this work are referenced by X)sftn!, and the page number

11

remove, speaking through it in a manner that can be thought of as a kind of cultural

ventriloquism. The metaphor of ventriloquism, and the strong importance of the idea of

a 'voice from within' that it alludes to are concerns that will be returned to throughout

this chapter. The critic Frank Lentricchia observes an 'overwhelming cultural density' in

DeLillo's writing, ' and it is perhaps due to this density, what Peter Boxall calls a'poetic

excess', 3 that DeLillo's dialogue with culture is carried out in unexpected ways, in off-

voices and through the ghosts of other media. David Cowart writes: 'One must honor

DeLillo's instinct for indirectness', and in keeping with this it might be argued that the

edges and limits that this review is in search of may best be reached circuitously, however clear the objective of addressing the space of his page. 4 This trajectory will

take in critical responses to several of DeLillo's novels, especially focussing on those

that challenge, as well as those that confirm, orthodoxies that have developed in

DeLillo studies.

The first part of this chapter, 'DeLillo's Relationship to Theory' will assess literary and

theoretical concerns that affect DeLillo the writer - the critical field that informs his

writing practice. It will consider the ways in which critical thought and theory have had

some effect on DeLillo himself, and ask if he is as responsive to critical thought as it is

to him. There are two axes around which one might consider his relationship to

criticism and theory: firstly, the small group of writers that DeLillo himself refers to in

the interviews collected in Conversations With Don DeLillo, which includes James

Joyce, Hermann Broch, Faulkner and Nabokov, and those who, like Wittgenstein,

appear there in the guise of'writers' even when they might be considered theorists. As

in his assessment of much fiction, DeLillo's comments in the Conversations reflect on Wittgenstein in terms of the formal qualities of his language. The form of idiomatic

languages of many kinds are central to DeLillo's writing, as I will discuss throughout

the thesis.

s Lentricchia, New Essays on White Noise (introduction), P7. Boxall, Don DeLillo - The Possibility of Fiction, p16. Further citations of this work are referenced 'Boxall', and the page ntmmber. Cowart, Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language, p9. Further citations of this work are referenced 'Cowart', and the page number

12

DeLillo's somewhat epigrammatic remarks on these writers often set the tone or even form the chapter headings of much of the DeLillo secondary criticism, an indicator of the centrality of the Conversations to DeLillo criticism as a whole. The scarcity of DeLillo interviews, and apparent similarity between his writing and his voice in

transcript have made this book something of a bridge between DeLillo fiction and

criticism -a theoretical and practical discussion of his writing, but in the distinctive

voice of its author. 5 The second of these axes, about which DeLillo is more reticent, is

the body of thought that has been used to speculate on the relationship his writing has

to contemporary theory; indeed how his fiction could fit into abroad category of theory

that marks a critique of the postmodern where, in the words of David Cowart, language

forms the'site' of this critique. Cowart's earlier work on Thomas Pynchon, The Art of Allusion, also provides a reference point in the discussion of the use of art by DeLillo,

which, I will later argue, is something other than 'allusionary', and something closer to

the essence of his writing's critical dynamic. The ideas in this section regarding DeLillo's own 'literary theory' will be developed further in Chapter 4, which will look

even closer than at the novels themselves, at his working papers and drafts; into the

writing 'itself .

This consideration of his relationship to theory will continue in the second section, 'Tendencies in DeLillo Criticism', by a reading of the preoccupations that emerge throughout the major monographs on DeLillo's work, those of Osteen, Tom LeClair,

Cowart and Boxall. Their work sometimes contrasts, and sometimes expands upon, DeLillo's own stated literary interests, and, especially in the case of Boxall's Don

DeLillo - The Possibility ofFiction, reflects a vital body of thought in its own right, a literary history that sets much of the background to this thesis.

5 In recent years, especially since the publication of his essay In the Ruins of the Futue (Harper's And Queen, December 2001), DeLillo has given more interviews, particularly in the press as well to academic interviewers. However, these tend to reiterate the formal and technical appraisals of his writing methods given in the Conversations. Much Wie DeLillos other scholars, I have primarily used the Conversation's original iteration of his statements, with the exception of elements of his personal correspondence with other writers. These are examined in Chapter 4.

13

A key aspect of Boxall's analysis is the intervention of the artwork in DeLillo's

narratives. The third part of this chapter, 'The Artworks in the Novels', explores this in

some detail. DeLillo uses the'space of the page as a context amenable to the

exploration of an expansive range of media and artistic-practices. They are made

accessible to the reader at one remove due to their depiction or placement within text,

but they tend to be presented distinctly, as constructed events, objects or other such

artistic tableaux: fictional films are'screened', and artworks looked at, performed or

even reviewed. ' The occurrence of these practices within fiction also demands that their

'critical space' be written, for a context to develop in which they are viewed, as it were,

as well as simply referred to. By writing artist characters, and extrapolating artworks

from their invention, rather then making artworks in the real world, outside of fiction, it

is in one sense as if DeLillo is simultaneously the curator, maker and critic of these

works. Part of his expansion of the space of the page, then, is not only the depiction of

'other' work, but the provision of a space akin to criticism within which that work

occurs. The section'The Artworks in the Novels' will consider his critics' responses to

these meetings of media and overlaps of practice, and examine the critical as well as

aesthetic role of the artwork in his fiction.

The aim of this chapter as a literature review is to take these three ways of looking at DeLillo and criticism as axes that, when plotted together, offer a background and

starting point for the thesis' other chapters. A study of the prominence of the artwork's intervention in DeLillo criticism goes some way to illustrating the prevalence of other

media, other work, to his writing. The use of the artwork, more specifically, in his

fiction might be described as the crystallization, the most tangible example, of his

work's ability to adjust in some way the space of the page. But a consideration of this

other work leads back, of course, to DeLillo's use of his own form, his own medium,

writing. This, after all, is the space that he is in some way transforming in order to

6 In The BodyArtist, for example, the final chapter is a fictional review of the performance the the titular artist has prepared in response to the events of the novel. Her late husband's career in film is also reviewed in pieces of fictional journalism. In this case, both sets of 'reviews' are of events that do not themselves appear in the course of the novel. The novel is bookended, as it were, by scenes that conjure for the reader artistic space in the form of criticism - one example of DeLillo 'exhibiting' artworks at one (or mom) remove in the course of writing fiction.

14

engage with other media. The question must then be asked of his core practice, of

writing; how he is able to extend the page so as to write almost independent,

autonomous artistic structures within it, without seeming simply to represent these

structures? One answer from the work of Boxall seems to be that their embedding in

the text is a result of the 'excessive' tendency with which this text is written, the

richness with which it engages with a polyphonic world of almost unlimited

representation. Whilst generating his fiction's plurality, however, this excession is also

the mark of DeLillo's singularity, his close engagement with his medium. The studied

importance to DeLillo of the workings of his own medium is an example of his

continuity with ideas of literary modernism, yet the polyphony through which this

method is expressed is simultaneously proper to the postmodern. DeLillo's place within

and between these two apparently conflicting forms is an important strand in the

criticism of his work, especially Boxall's reading of DeLillo's prominent use of the

artwork as a self-reflexive device. It is this negotiation of other disciplines within that

of writing that is the the starting point, but also the practical theme of my project. Part

of its aim, then, is to offer some kind of definition for what Boxall suggests is the'new

term' that DeLillo's negotiations of form propose. Tom LeClair, in the introduction to

his book The Art of Excess hints at this encounter between the modern and the post-

modern in a certain kind of contemporary fiction.

In his definition of what might constitute a contemporary 'masterwork' he refers to

books that: 'flexibly employ postmodern methods to displace the priority of the

individual and to deform the conventions of realism which encode an ideology of the

local'. ' This description accounts for the way in which novels such as DeLillo's draw

other fields of knowledge into the 'systems' they create, that they are inclined towards

the encyclopaedic rather than the psychological, and that the individual importance of

characters is in some way reduced. Yet in other ways DeLillo seems to evade a clear definition of post modem writing, as Peter Boxall's exploration of the modernity in his

writing demonstrates. So the'new term' that DeLillo's writing suggests, a modernism of

richness that alerts the reader to its medium through excess, must sit somewhere

LeClair, TheArt ofExcess: Mastery in ContemporaryAmerican Fiction, p2.

15

between the poles that his critics negotiate. The final part of this review will consider

the field of writing that DeLillo's has in part mapped out for others, and the

contemporary writers who write within it. In observing how a later generation inherit

the work of DeLillo's, just as he inherited that of the modernists who precede him, it

may be possible to better define this 'new term', from a perspective that considers both

the past and future of his writing.

The excessive quality in DeLillo's writing, akin to Lentricchia's'overwhelming cultural density', enables DeLillo's novels at times to contain parallel histories of artistic

practice, scenarios in which, for example, a Beckettian writer, a photographer, a

terrorist and the real world artist Andy Warhol all 'produce' or exhibit works within one

novel, as is the case in Mao II. It is this opening up of artistic space, as well as the

fictional appearance of artists and artworks, that brings DeLillo into dialogue with the

practice of contemporary visual-art, and which points towards an area not yet marked

out by the present critical works on his writing. The breadth of his project, and his

inclusivity of art-practices and histories, is precisely what brings him more precisely into contact with the notion of advanced-art postulated by Thomas Crow. This breadth,

expressed through advanced-art's deployment of the vernacular in fine-art practice, is

the explicit focus of Crow's work, and the following chapter, forming a parallel critical

review, traces these same themes from the perspective of contemporary art history. The

present chapter will illustrate this expansive network of media and cultural production by considering aesthetic tendencies in DeLillo's writing as well as the artworks he

writes into his novels. These writerly tropes, literary mannerisms that are key to his

writing, often make elusive gestures towards the 'other' cultural systems, idioms and

artefacts that permeate his fiction, as much as they make 'hard' examples of them, in the

form of direct references to art. This means that the concerns of this thesis can be found

in DeLillo's writing as subtle echoes as well as sharp images; in the channelling of

distant artistic voices as well as the 'screening' of films and the appearance of artworks.

However, before considering DeLillo's'production' of other work, this critical review

begins with the origins of DeLillo's writing, and how these origins have produced a

writing that is so inclined to engage with art and culture.

16

1. 'DeLillo's Relationship to Theory'

The disparate and conflicting approaches taken to DeLillo studies illustrate the way in

which his writing provides a field upon which theoretical thought and interpretation

have been projected quite freely, which can be seen in the variety of contributions to

the recent Cambridge Companion. This is also reflected in the aesthetic tension that

Boxall refers to when considering the use of artworks within DeLillo's fiction; that

there seem to be multiple fields of thinking and writing occurring at once, narratives

and counter-narratives sitting alongside one another. It may also be due in part to

DeLillo's tendency towards the plural and, to use Boxall's term, the 'multiphonic' - qualities inherited in part from James Joyce, one of the writers who first alerted DeLillo

to the 'possibilities of fiction'! This tension is arguably the fundamental characteristic

of DeLillo's writing, the generator of so many of its own possibilities, including, as this

thesis will show, its multifarious connections to a broad field of artistic practice.

When considering the literary origins of DeLillo's writing, it might be said that within its expansive plurality there remains the sense of a very singular hand, a distinct voice,

which despite its clear intonation is at times opaque and uneasy. The slight tremor of

ambiguity that DeLillo's voice creates is the reader's first indication of the formal

experimentation at work within it. The opaque quality to DeLillo's language exists despite its very crafted precision: it is as if DeLillo attempts to use writing to make a

clear image of something blurred. This is the cause, perhaps, of Boxall's sense that 'we

are living in a time that is at once finished and unfinished' and that the contemporary

novelist or artist must address this strange context on its own terms. ' A notable example

of DeLillo's practical engagement with ambiguity, and a key text in thinking about his

literary style, is the novel Players. In this book DeLillo experiments with a form of dialogue that reflects the intimacy of spoken language, which in hyper-realised

representation becomes strange and unfamiliar. 10 This emerges not, however, as clarity,

9 See Conversations With Don DeLillo, p10. Further citations of these interviews are referenced 'Conversations', and the page comber.

9 Boxall, p230. 10 See Conversations, p92-93 for DeLillo's account of this experiment.

17

but as what might be termed a concealing realism; an uncanny verisimilitude that has

the effect of disguising meaning. The dialogue is formed of broken sentences and ideas

left unfinished. An example of mundane conversation rendered thus is a vague discussion between two of the central characters on the subject of a holiday:

"We have nothing planned, " she said. "Lyle doesn't think he'll be able to get away. It's

very hair-raising right now, I gather. He's talking about not before October. "

"That's a nice time really" "I think it would be specially nice if we did something together. "

"Where? "

"Wherever.,,

"Values of time and space. "

"I think it would work very well, Ethan. It can be wearing, just two. We all get

along. ""

The effect here is subtle, the focus just slightly wrong. Yet the disjunction is enough to

communicate a blur at the very point of meaning, a tired ennui that suggests the

appropriateness of Boxall's image of the exhausted form of fiction at some quite deep

level; an example of what he calls the'withdrawn articulation' at work in DeLillo's

writing. " Yet the precision with which this is rendered itself sets up a problem, a

tautology: the multiplicity of voices within DeLillo's fiction are clearly heard, yet their

transcriptions often defy an easy reading. As he describes it, referring again to the novel Players: 'It is my theory that if you record dialogue as people actually speak it, it will

seem stylized to the reader. "3 This example of his writing shows just one way in which

clarity and obscurity, sharpness and translucence, are used in equal measure by

DeLillo. It is demonstrative of the wide expanse, both inviting and treacherous, that he

provides for his critics, and that quite aside from the wide field of culture that he writes

about, there is also the enactment of so many of these concerns deep within the writing itself.

" DeLillo, Players, p42. 12 Boxall, p49. 13 Conversations, p33.

18

The form of this writing, and the material body of text it produces, is arguably an

under-represented concern in DeLillo criticism. It is a central part of this thesis'

research that an investigation of the'other work' that fills DeLillo's pages also leads to a

consideration of those page's matter, their words. This is the armature that builds the

space of DeLillo's page, his language, which in the introduction to his book arguing the

centrality of language to DeLillo studies, Cowart says'reveals itself as a system defiant

of systems, a system whose complexity is at least as vast and inexhaustible as that of

the world it constructs or attempts to represent'. " The visual work that concludes this

thesis is in part a response to this notion of DeLillo's writing being 'defiant of systems',

and proposes that it might therefore be approached by 'unsystematic' critical tools, or

rather tools that qualify their use of systems, and the partial survey that their

approaches make - those made available by the artworks considered in Chapter 2.

DeLillo's unerring use of idiom, which in Players takes the form of a subversive

consideration of the effect of realism, is a developed form of this 'system within a

system'. Another novel, Running Dog for example, illustrates the layers of this

structure: it is ostensibly a spy or detective narrative, with a narrative based around a

central 'artistic' artefact (a film). The medium of film and the medium of genre-fiction

are both subjected to formal consideration, and are both installed as systems within the

system of DeLillo's language which, as Cowart and Boxall would assert, is itself

critical. A sense that all writing produces an artifice, a system, is echoed in DeLillo's

subject matter, as that subject matter is so often another kind of artifice, another

construction.

In the wake of the many critical speculations his work generates, DeLillo's writing

would seem to represent a point at which many practices, histories, voices and literatures come to meet, doing so in a highly singular form, a writing that is distinctly

sculpted and tuned. The precision of his language can be noted even in person, as the

printed text of the Conversations have shown. In short, DeLillo's writing is

multifarious, plural, and generates a critical field in its own image. In light of this it is

14 Cowart, p6.

19

useful to consider not only the relationship the critics have to DeLillo, which is

discussed in the next section of this chapter, but the relationship DeLillo and his writing have to wider criticism and theory. The aim of this is to try and deduce DeLillo's own

sense of his literary field, and attempt to gain a perspective on his personal 'literary

theory'.

There is perhaps the reversal of a norm at work in the relationship between DeLillo and

criticism: his critics have at times read his prose almost as theory, as post-modern

comment that happens to use the form of fiction. But there are moments at which DeLillo himself seems to read theory, and everything else in fact, as fundamentally a form of literary prose. This kind of reading emerges, for example, in the use of Wittgenstein in the novel End Zone, in which philosophical writing is transformed by a

new context into poetry. As Boxall has pointed out, Wittgenstein's' understanding of

the tautology as truth is central to much of End Zone's language. 'S DeLillo himself

explores this notion when he talks about the language of Wittgenstein in terms of form,

its surface almost; rather than its meaning:

'I like the way he uses the language. Even in translation, it's very evocative. Ifs like

reading Martian. The language is mysteriously simple and self-assured. It suggests

without the slightest arrogance that there's no alternative to these remarks. The

statements are machine tooled. i16

This is a reflection of the importance placed by DeLillo on the form and shape language takes - his appreciation of Wittgenstein is not a mis-reading of philosophy on DeLillo's part, but a refinement of the practice of reading, and of making new meaning

out of a delicate displacement: appreciating that something may read well out of

context. The language is moved to a place where its meaning becomes slightly less

important, and its form more-so. An effect of this is that the production of form

becomes a kind of meaning in its own right, a self-contained surface. His reading of Wittgenstein is also perhaps an object lesson in how DeLillo's own writing can be read; 19 See Boxall, p43-46. 16 Conversations, p10.

20

as if superficially, as if overheard. In many ways this reflects the quality inherent in all

the uses of vernacular cultures, or what Crow calls'common cultures', art included, that

DeLillo draws into his writing; that a voice from outside can be drawn into the writing,

and allowed to generate new meaning in a re-contextualized state. "

It happens that DeLillo's sense of this superficiality is exaggerated and heightened, both

in the multiplicity of external voices that he deploys from within his writing, and also in his own personal literary voice. If DeLillo's novels form a language, then it is one that is made up of many dialects, and which reflects an almost Warholian quality of the deep appreciation of surfaces, even if these surfaces are in fact an interface with which

to interact with ideas and cultures of some depth. It is as if there is depth itself in the

shallows of the superficial, a sense of the sublime mundane. Like Warhol's film Empire,

in which the Empire State building appears in an eight hour long still shot, it is in the

act of paring down that the artist/author is able to achieve a form of excess.

Cowart's Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language is, as its title indicates, a central text in thinking about the linguistic workings and structures that underpin DeLillo's writing. His thesis is that DeLillo's engagement with an expanse of theory, particularly the post-

modern, takes place through language itself, rather than through that which his

language talks about - through form rather than content. Within these undercurrents he

is in search of the 'fictive strategies by which the author contrives to make language

yield up its secrets'. Much of DeLillo scholarship arguably attempts the opposite,

presuming that the'secrets' lie in the'fictive strategies', and that it is language that must be passed through in order to access them. DeLillo, however, seems to implitictly agree

with Cowart's approach, stating that he 'began to suspect that language was a subject as

well as an instrument' - that through the process of producing narratives he is engaged in a critical relationship to his medium. 19

17

is

19

DeLillo's notion of a form of prose that appears to be 'machine tooled' will be explored in more practical terms in Chapter 4 and the visual work that follows it, in terms of the importance of the typewriter to his writing method. Cowan, p6. Conversations, p5.

21

The'sound' or'look' of language, its form rather than that which it describes, is to a large extent the subject matter of the novel The Names. The use of the idea of language

in this novel is, like many of the paradoxical or conflicting dualities that appear in

DeLillo criticism (silence and noise, critique and non-critique, the modem and the post-

modern), seemingly a defence of the notion that language may be a'space' and nothing

more. Reflecting the roundabout way in which Boxall's DeLillo uses excess to produce 'nothing', or rather a space of critique within his prose, Frank Lentricchia describes the

use of lyricism as subject matter and medium in The Names as a'connoisseur's form of

catatonia', an extravagant way of saying, or getting to, nothing. The role of the fictional artwork as the voice that expresses this space within his writing will be

returned to in the section of this chapter on 'The Artworks in the Novels. 20

Language then, as Cowart suggests, is the'site' of engagement between DeLillo's own ideas and those of theory, the ground on which everything else sits. As he points out, despite DeLillo's insistence that he doesn't read much theory himself, 'to read DeLillo

without theory would be to reinvent wheel after wheel'. 21 Like Boxall, Cowart also

sees the discrepancy between the modem and the postmodern poles in DeLillo's

writing, presenting him almost as an agitator, 'a spy within the post-modernist citadel'

whose writings 'probe language for evidence of an epistemological depth largely denied

by poststructuralist theory'. 22 Cowart's work on this subject continues into the essay DeLiAo and the Power of Language, which appears in the Cambridge Companion,

which again traces the centrality of language, as'subject as well as instrument'

throughout DeLillo's work. Like Boxall, he finds the relation between DeLillo and

theory far from straightforward; and producing a rich but unresolved dialogue.

To a large extent the relationship to language that forms DeLillo's'literary theory' can be traced to its points of origin, those writings that come closest to setting the ground

20 Lentricchia, New Essays on White Noise (intlOduction), p11. 21 Cowart, pl1. 22 Cowart, p12-13.

22

for his highly distinct literary style. These writings might be termed his aesthetic and formal, rather than theoretical, sources, and centre around major modernist figures;

Joyce, Beckett, Broch. The genealogies of these literary styles are central to much of Boxall's thinking, not only in his work on DeLillo, but earlier in his book on Samuel

Beckett. Given the quite narrow strand of classic or seminal modernist writing that

DeLillo seems to refer to most frequently in the Conversations and in the fiction itself,

it is appropriate to read this element of DeLillo's relationship to criticism and critical

thought through Boxall, as it is DeLillo's response to a modernist inheritance that

energises Boxall critique.

The modernism he finds in DeLillo is a qualified or even negative one, that can be

described as an exhausted imperative to return to the medium, rather than an aesthetic

choice to do so. His undertaking of this modernism, according to Boxall, manifests itself in the silent artworks that occur in his narratives, and in the space of tautology

and cliche these artworks open up, all of which appear in formal contrast to the writing in which they are situated. These elements of earlier literary modernism, are explored

thoroughly in Boxall's Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot/Endgame, and especially his

essay Since Beckett. Both of these works address the writer's deep engagement with both language and the medium, and their characteristic of speaking out of a point of

stasis or exhaustion; the 'tiredness of the author' rather than his death. 23 Since Beckett

considers this ambiguous stasis in terms of DeLillo's inheritance from Beckett, and in

turn through Beckett's own such inheritances; from Joyce and from Shakespeare in the

form of the 'exhausted Hamlet. The sense that the figure of Beckett presents both an

personified ending (according to DeLillo the'last writer', who'presides over the last

gasps of Modernism'), and an aesthetic means of addressing the very notion of the end,

is the thesis of the literary theory that DeLillo presents in the novel Mao II, through its

use of a writer character concerned with the end of his medium. 2` The implication of

this on DeLillo's understanding of the role of the artwork, and more specifically the

relationship between his writing, the artworks within it, and especially Beckett, is

described in more detail in the section 'The Artworks in the Novels'. In the context of a 23 Boxall, p3. 24 See Boxall, Since Beckett, p303.

23

discussion regarding DeLillo's relationship to theory, Boxall's Since Beckett alerts the

reader to both DeLillo's historical perspective on the'end of Modernism' as well as the

aesthetic examples of that form embedded in his writing. The poles of DeLillo's

aesthetic inheritance of modernism, the diminishing voice of the artwork and the

polyphony of the novels in which the artworks appear, can be measured in terms of

Beckett on the one hand, and on the other Joyce. ' It is the tension between these poles,

as Boxall goes on to argue in The Possibility of Fiction, that is the context that

generates DeLillo's fictional artworks, and which gives them their critical imperative,

as forms of writing that seem to oppose one another even as they are produced within

the same text. '

My understanding of the structure of this very multiple writing is that its contesting

elements are voices within a critical conversation. The idea of voice is key to

understanding DeLillo's sense of his medium, and the varied deployment of

specialisms and registers of idiomatic detail that produce the'other work' or'other

practices' within his writing. As Cowart states, as an example of this, DeLillo'seems

little invested in politics per se. Rather, he focuses on the fine grain of American

consciousness under the various stresses to which it has been the subject" This'fine

grain', that which is both behind and in the details of culture, is what might be termed

the voices of things that DeLillo's sense of idiom, what Cowart calls his'excellent ear' for language, is notable for its ability to pick out. The use of voice is the medium for

DeLillo's dialogue with culture; and is at the very heart of his language and writing. If

DeLillo's commentary on the role of the author is inherited from Beckett, then it

follows Boxall's thinking to conclude that his practical application of the medium of language comes from Joyce, from a counter-aesthetic that produces 'excess'. The

u 'Joyce the father', as Boxall calls him in this context. Since Beckett considers the idea of inheritance as the subject matter of Becketts autobiographical novel Company, alongside the literary inheritance that stretches through Beckett and DeLillo to the protagonist of Mao II, and avid reader of Beckett, Bill Gray.

16 An alternative relationship between the expansive and the silent is Nabokov and Beckett, whose works, as Brian Boyd writes, 'were polar opposites. Or rather, Beckett's was polar, Nabokov's tropical' (Nabokov's Butterflies, p1). In this analysis DeLillo might be said to occupy a space between the two, a kind of temperate' writing that is sensitive to the tension between polar regions it sits in the centre of.

27 Cowan, DeLillo and the The Power ofLanguage, p154.

24

critical tension in his writing is that the polyphonic, Joycean language includes

opposing voices within it. In much the same way as he experiments with the vocal

register of speech in Players, DeLillo explores the formal elements of language as

manifested in writing in one of the works-within-a-work that appears in The Names.

DeLillo describes the short story written by the son of one of the central characters

thus:

"... the father is transported by what he sees as a kind of deeper truth underlying the

language his son uses in writing his stories. He sees misspellings and misused words as

reflecting a kind of reality that he as an adult couldn't possibly grasp... It's a fabricated

language which seems to have a certain pattern to it. ""

The sense DeLillo has, then, of a writing that is somehow Joycean, alert to its flaws and free form, is channelled here into a piece of'othei' work within a novel. Yet this

sensitivity to voice is also present in the way in which every kind of'othee work

appears in his writing. When television, film or music appear in his novels it is as if

they too are voices; a contemporary equivalent to what might be termed the

psychological polyphony of Joyce, the voices of consciousness. In DeLillo's novels the

detailed and closely observed babble that makes up the writing's 'fine grain' are to a large extent the voices of culture rather than those of individuals. This will be detailed

in more depth in the section titled 'The Artworks in the Novels', but in describing

DeLillo's own relationship to literary theory, it can be noted that the critical field set by

his writing is a conversation of polyphony, inclusive even of voices that tend toward

the silent and flawed amid the articulate.

28 Conversations, p72.

25

2. 'Tendencies in Critical Writing on DeLillo'

A prevalent view amongst DeLillo scholars is that his writing can be used as a kind of interface with which to read the postmodern, and in particular its more sinister or

negative qualities - and that as such it is a reflection of, and on, an American present in

which image and representation substitute 'reality'. This is certainly reflected in the

concerns of White Noise, which was to become his first popular book, and which

makes, in effect, a study of the study of popular culture, of a kind of 'aesthetic

consumerism', and of the intervention of the simulacrum into everyday and domestic

life. In White Noise the responses to this are heightened, almost to the point of

religiosity, and the effect of this strand of DeLillo's writing on his critics is typified by

Mark Osteen, in both the title of his work American Magic and Dread Don DeLillo's

Dialogue with Culture, and what he describes as:

"... the bombardment of consciousness by cinematic and consumer images; the

fetishisation of secrecy, violence, and celebrity; the fragmentation of the grand

narratives of history, heroism and high culture all (combining) to induce a paralysing dread. "z9

The 'symptoms' or responses to this dread seem, for Osteen, to manifest in one form or

another as artworks, be they primarily visual, forms of performance, or passages of

prose that appear cinematic. The prevalence of such works has not been missed by his

critics: the artworks within his novels are, when dealt with in the major critical works,

offered as either the'magic' to counter postmodern 'dread' (Osteen), or as quasi-

modernist artefacts that counter the postmodern excess of the writing in which they

exist (Boxall). Whilst Osteen's reading of DeLillo deals with the areas of his fiction that

might draw him into this thesis' art-historical debate - the works-within-works that the

novels contain, and DeLillo's ability to'imitate the discourses of different cultural

milieux' - Osteen gives them a moral, rather then formal significance. ' However, I 29 Osoeen, pl. 10 Ibid.

26

would argue, DeLillo's ability to'imitate' other discourses is, from a broadly art-

historical perspective, a formal rather than political or moral achievement, and what

these imitations might do to the definition of the novel's form is the overarching theme

of my project.

The existential fervour that is sensitively depicted, but also perhaps gently mocked, by

DeLillo in White Noise, seems to be reflected in Osteen's critique. He states that

DeLillo presents art as the soundest magic against dread'. 31 However, whilst his search for this redemptive 'magic' in DeLillo reveals elements of his fiction that directly

address his use of and connection to art, they do not enter into art-historical debate as

such. What this chapter's review of DeLillo's critics is in search of are readings of

DeLillo that begin a conversation about the challenge this use of art makes to the space

of the page; what art does to the fiction, and what the fiction does to the art.

Whilst in many of DeLillo's novels the artworks appearing within them can still make

some sort of aesthetic and critical sense when removed from the context of the novel,

such moments in White Noise are more complicated, more bound up in the sort of

quasi-mysticism that Osteen describes with the terms 'magic' and 'dread'. Indeed, the

moments of great aesthetic refinement in the novel, such as the sweeping cinematic

choreography of the main character and his family's trip to a shopping mall, or the

deadpan, Ed Ruscha-like'most photographed barn in America', offer an aesthetics of

the consumerist world, of a place where something can become invisible from having

too many photographs taken of it. These examples, along with the academic disciplines

that the novel depicts (the study of food packaging, the celebrity of Hitler) can't help

but corroborate Osteen's thesis: in a novel whose underlying subtext is a fear of death,

moments of redemption and hope come as art issued from the capitalist machine, like

the sleeping incantation of the word'Toyota Celica', words invented to name a car, by

the main character Jack Gladney's young daughter. Whilst this strange unconscious

prayer is undeniably a little sinister, I would argue that to focus on DeLillo's critique of

consumer, or capitalist society is limiting. The aesthetic appreciation that White Noise

31 Osoeen, p7.

27

demonstrates for the appearances of these aesthetic apparitions mark DeLillo out

almost as a collector or curator in the mould of Warhol. Osteen correctly states that

'White Noise is a book of spells, but it is perhaps equally a book of packages -a thesis

on the kinds and uses of intellectual, linguistic, commercial, personal and televisual

packaging'. 32 These'packages', as well as depicting the extent to which consumerist

society has become a world of appearances, also offer the reader highly refined images,

like textual works of pop-art. The made-up word'Celica', as well as its capitalist

symbolism and origin, is also something beautiful, a short poem that is a kind of

abstract onomatopoeia. DeLillo says of it:

'If you concentrate on the sound, if you disassociate the words from the object they

denote, and if you say the words over and over, they become a sort of higher Esparanto.

This is how Toyota Celica began its life. It was pure chant at the beginning. Then they

had to find an object to accommodate the words. 133

To ignore the significance of placing such 'work' within fiction, indeed of identifying

such capitalist linguistics as poetic, is to miss something key to DeLillo's practice; how

the many forms of artworks within his fiction adjust the space of the page, and make it

a repository for other practices. ' The anti-consumerist, 'resistant' DeLillo that emerges

in much criticism tends to ignore this use of space, and the possibility that there is

artistic intervention as well as satire in his depictions of contemporary aesthetics, as

superficial as the things he depicts may seem to be. One of the key contentions of this

thesis is not just that DeLillo places elements of other artistic practices within his

fiction, but that thinking about his fiction in terms of art-history is a productive way of

unpacking some important aspects of what it does as fiction.

Boxall warns against the wholly post-modem reading of DeLillo that the depictions of

consumerist aesthetics in his writing have generated, suggesting that it has 'skewed the

32 Osteen, p166. 33 Conversations, p97. 34 The idea of individual words functioning as kind of'ieadymades' to be deployed c uriatDrially by a

'assassin'. writer is addressed in Chapter 4, in the section that exploms DeLillo's use of the word

28

critical reception' to him. 35 Instead, Boxall tends to see DeLillo in critical relationship

to his medium, as well as to his cultural context - as a an active critic of his form

generating'a new kind of critical possibility'. 36 This new possibility is, for Boxall, a

way of using fiction almost to write criticism, to produce a'critical negativity', a form

of writing that contests its own possibility as well as its formal scope. 37 This negativity is manifested, to a large extent, by the use of artworks within DeLillo's fiction, which

often stand in aesthetic opposition to the writing in which they occur.

This 'skewing' of his relationship to criticism also occurs when critics tend to read DeLillo as writing in response to theory. Boxall argues that his novels, through being

'tremendously referential, suggestive, and multiphonic', defy a straightforward critical

reading, even if these qualities might at first glance indicate an arch post-modernist. "

Boxall's reading serves as a point of departure for this thesis, suggesting as it does that

DeLillo's writing has a complexity of critical layers that not only makes it perhaps

more suitable to generating theory than responding to it, but that it also produces a 'world' in which practice and theory, and the creative and the critical, might exist

together. The 'new kind of critical possibility' that Boxall refers to is what might also be

recognized as a new kind of critical or fictional space, where a strong engagement with both art-theory and art-practice occur, and where one practice engages with another. This critical conversation begins, for Boxall, with the conflicting modernisms that form

the poles of his prose.

Boxall's placement of DeLillo alongside earlier generations of writers, and especially Beckett, is his radical break from the bulk of DeLillo criticism, although this is

thoroughly supported by the context in which the normally reticent DeLillo places himself when interviewed, a discrepancy alluded to in Philip Nel's essay 9DeLHIo and Modernism'. Both Nel and Boxall return DeLillo's writing to its declared origins, in the

modernisms of Joyce and Beckett, and the'voices' that these authors made distinct -

35 Boxall, p15. " Ibid. 37 Ibid. " Ibid

29

DeLillo's 'sense that a word has a life and a history'. 39 As I will expand upon later, the

aesthetics of reduction and elimination that DeLillo's fictional artworks often employ

emerge in Boxall's critique as Beckettian. But in another sense, DeLillo's own distinctive voice also takes something of the atmosphere of Beckett's work, its ability to

alert the reader to the workings of the medium. Deleuze describes this quality in

Beckett as an access to a kind of foreignness that disrupts writing, 'ceaselessly placing it in a state of disequilibrium'. However for Deleuze this is not simply due to Beckett

often writing in French, but is more specifically a readjustment of language, a voice

that changes it: 'a minor use of the major language. This quality, the ability to

'minorize', which Deleuze applies to all great writers ('like a foreigner in the language

in which he expresses himself, even if this is his native tongue'), is an important

element of what DeLillo does with much of his writing, and which crystallizes in his

use of the voices of other work within it4° This issue, of DeLillo's language itself, will

be the subject of Chapter 3, and its analysis of Libra and the novel's intertexts, notably

the Warren Report. In that historical document it is the poetry of vernacular language

that generates DeLillo's own work, that sets the ground for what I will describe as his

extra-textual response to it. This brings to mind another of DeLillo's responses to

Beckett, that'out of the words come the people instead of the other way round!. ̀ In

DeLillo's writing, this foregrounding of the medium produces not only 'people, but

their works and critical perspectives; and through them critical conversation.

39

40

41

Conversations, P88. DeleuM Essays Critical and Clinical, p109. Quoted in Gary Adelman, Beckeu's Readers: a Commentary and Symposium', Michigan Quarterly Review, Winter 2004, p54.

30

3. Ratner's Star and its effect on DeLillo criticism

A more formal view of DeLillo, taking this critical conversation into account,

characterises both Boxall's work and that of Tom LeClair. In his work on the'systems

novel', In The Loop, LeClair explores the novel Ratner's Star as a primarily formal

experiment. Boxall also takes a formal perspective, reading the novels as the work of

what might seem to be a quasi-modernist, albeit one working at the heart of the post-

modern context. His reading of this context is distinct from that of Osteen, for whom DeLillo's use of'postmodern cultural forms' is satirical, but undertaken, however, 'from

within', from a wholly postmodern perspective. 42 Whilst there may be satire in

DeLillo's ventriloquism of both the modern and the post-modern, the intention of this

chapter is trace the ways that this ventriloquism resonates against the form of the novel,

where it appears in the form of embedded artworks that lead the reader to consider the

page's space as an art context. DeLillo's place in the critical landscape of the modem

and postmodern is another, connected, issue, and will also be discussed. However, in

taking these positions critics have been assisted by the fact that Ratner's Star is perhaps DeLillo's most abstract work, a book which, despite its mass of detail and plot, the

author most succinctly describes in terms of its shape, as one of a historical group of books that seem to'bend back on themselves' 43

Ratner's Star can be seen as a polarizing work in DeLillo scholarship, magnifying

preconceptions about his writing. The novel's central project represents an aesthetic failure in Osteen's critique, yet its intertextual depth is celebrated by LeClair in In The

Loop. DeLillo has referred to it as the'monster at the centre' of his work, and as such it

can function as a kind of litmus test for DeLillo critics - their reaction to it tends to

belie their position on the sprawling, excessive quality in his writings, as well as his

novel's tendency to incorporate other forms of practices within their narratives. ' It is

therefore useful to note some of these responses, to use his most'difficulf book to

expose some further tendencies in the field of DeLillo criticism.

42 Osteen, p5. 43 Conversations, p12. 44 lbid, p95.

31

Osteen states that Ratner's Star seems to 'blend (not always successfully) numerous

aims and genres', rifling as it does through a'covert history of mathematics', told

through a story whose structure is derived from Alice's Adventures In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass. 45 These intertexts form the setting for myriad occult,

artistic and scientific practices to function. The aesthetic overload that makes this

possible, Boxall's 'poetic excess', has a negative register in Osteen: it provides only 'a

makeshift bridge over a pool of dread!. ' It is this very intertextuality, however, that

provides the key to LeClair's study. The formal experiment that the novel initiates gives

a reading of DeLillo's'dialogue with culture' not as a means of imaging its malaise, in

the form of'dread', but as the underlying structure of an edifice of both critical and

creative integrity. As a'systems novel' Ratner's Star deploys the intertextual alongside

the original in a complex, sprawling work that nonetheless retains a sense of its

singular form - hence DeLillo's comments regarding its shape and overall structure,

that it's'a book in which structure predominates'. 47 The notion of a dialogue with

culture begins to emerge here as a means of literary practice in its own right, the novel

'bending back on itself to create a space in which cultural intersections occur. One such

intersection is that of religion and science, but the book also comprises the work of fictional artists, linguists and economists. LeClair demonstrates the marriage that

DeLillo makes between form and content, and disengages him from the symptomatic

reading of culture that Mark Osteen's work points towards. DeLillo himself says of Ratner's Star simply that: 'I wanted the book to become what it was about'. 4 The image

of the novel as a total work, as a something that exists in critical reaction to its own

content, is at the heart of LeClair's criticism. The'systems novel' is a form that provides

the data for its own analysis, and which is somewhat disengaged from content as such.

LeClair argues that'denied the text's cause, the reader must return into the looping

structure of the effect, the system of the novel itself. i49

45

46

47

43

0

Osteen, p61-62. Ibid. Conversations, p95. Ibid, p11. LeClair, In The Loop: DeLillo and the Systems Novel, p21. Further citations of this work ate referenced'LeClaii+, followed by the page nnmbet

32

However, the space of the page, and the ways in which DeLillo tests this, do not

register as such in LeClair's analysis. DeLillo's engagement with the visual, and with

artworks especially, form only one element of a particularly expansive form of post-

modern or're-modem' writing (he states that DeLillo [and the other 'systems novelists]

- are 're-moderns', who have a'continuity with modernism'; that theirs is a literature

that requires the 'referentiality' of systems as their material). " The idea of the re-

modern is, as I see it, one possible means of supplying the'new term' that Boxall's

critique of DeLillo calls for. The field of literature that DeLillo's work presents requires

a term that recognises a post-modem context, but is qualified by this 'continuity with

modernism'.

Ratner's Star is, as Boxall describes, 'driven by a hunger for knowledge, by a frantic

need to know everything, to divine the mechanics of the universe'. 51 LeClair seems to

argue that this conception of the whole is a modernist trope (the tracking of multiple

voices, as in Joyce), and that a conception of the fragment, or the process of fragmentation is the post-modem equivalent to this polyphonic simultaneity. His

suggestion is that the pursuit of fictional 'systems' provides '... an eddying of the

modernist's stream of consciousness', a destination for the journey initiated by a

modernist literary method. 52 DeLillo is characterised here as a writer whose

experimentation with form and medium has something of the structural character of the

modernist, but whose material is necessarily post-modem, given the keen attention he

seems to pay to the culture in which his works appear. Where the modernist requires

referentiality to the medium in which the work at hand exists, LeClair's're-modems'

have the added necessity of a post-modem, intertextual culture to include in their

referential gaze, in which the transmission of images and information is far more

pervasive. This, therefore, creates conditions where reference must reference itself. The

're-modern' writer, in LeClaies analysis, develops a form in which this expanded

medium can be'worked into' using the methods or dialects of modernism. This is

reflected in the quasi-modernist artworks within DeLillo's novels, which offer, as

50 LeClair, p9. 51 Boxall, p55. 52 LeClair, p10.

33

Boxall puts it, an affirmation of artistic practice when'the space of literature has been

occupied and commodified'. S3 This space must, in other words, be worked into in order to remain vital as a medium. The imperative then, to make work that is in some

practical way modernist, and yet sits in a context that is post-modern, and which therefore combines the formal desires of two different kinds of artist. It is a form of

practice that I will later, using the model of the visual artworks described in Chapter 2,

call 'porous modernism': a method of making artworks that have gaps and holes worked into the fabric of their multiple frames of reference, and which are energised by the

tension between their multiple elements and practices.

The engagement that DeLillo's writing makes with other forms of practice emerges out

of this impulse, what LeClair calls the'art of excess', and Boxall calls its'poetic excess'. LeClair states that'the art of excess as practised by Don DeLillo and other systems

novelists works when the reader realizes that what is too much for one set of

expectations is appropriate and functional for another set, when one paradigm is

deconstructed and another reconstructed in its place!. ' The artworks in DeLillo novels

are one of the examples of this principle at work. If'working into' the medium in

DeLillo's case means working other work and practices into writing, offering a critical

glance at the writing in which they appear, then Raiser's Star has a multiplicity of such 'other' media or disciplines that give it structure and form. The primary practice it

engages with, however, is mathematics. Mathematics becomes a kind of mysticism in

this novel, mystical partly due to its foreignness for the author - like many of the

disciplines DeLillo writes about, his sense of mathematics is not primarily from

personal experience, but acquired as one might a foreign language, or in fact as one

might simply overhear the sound of a foreign language. He describes it as 'a language

almost no one speaks', and uses it's foreign-ness as a means of accessing language

itself, of getting to language otherwise. " The idea of the subterranean that permeates Ratner's Star in both theme and plot bring to mind the observation Deleuze makes of

the language of Herman Melville's Bartleby, that the author: 'invents a foreign language

ss Boxall, p37. " LeClair, p121. " Conversations, p11.

34

that runs beneath English and carries it off. r56 This metaphor, of the inverted, of an

underworld of language, fits the jarring effect of DeLillo's employment of idiom, most

often manifested in the voices of media, of other work. These voices, art included, are,

as Deleuze puts it as he continues his description of Melville, 'deterritorialized' in

writing.

The use of a foreign language, a code almost, to write the sort of 'covert history' that

Osteen refers to is an example of DeLillo writing'extra-textually' within a framework

of intertexts - implicating the language and tone of another discipline in such a way

that it resembles a mass of quotation, even if it is in fact new writing written in the

'voice of another. Cowart describes the link between DeLillo's use of idiomatic'other

work' and his conception of fiction, that 'both are symbol-systems, exercises in

signification that supposedly differ in their precision'. However, he goes on to say that

'both economies afford DeLillo the opportunity to gauge the capacity of any language

to accommodate a reality construed as something of extraordinary complexity'. 57

Mathematics, for Cowart, is used by DeLillo as a voice that his fiction takes on in order

to test the capacity of the fictional page.

The chapter of Osteen's book dealing with Ratner's Star is troubled by these

extremities. In his final analysis he finds the looking-glass world of self-reference to be

something that must be escaped from; as producing a post-modem funk. He sees the

self-perpetuating bafflement of science (the setting of unsolvable problems; something

that the novel's main character is subjected to) as directly metaphorical for DeLillo's

displacement of the reader: We read ourselves reading it, just as DeLillo represents

himself writing it' . S8

However, the problematic reading that Ratner's Star presents for Osteen presents one of

the limitations of DeLillo criticism that this thesis is concerned with. Divorced from

the problematics of faith, and the human consequence of a journey out of meaning

ss Essays Critical and Clinical, p72. Cowan, p152.

58 Ostecn, p97.

35

(down the Ratner's Star's intertextual rabbit hole), a vastly expanded'space of the page'

is made evident. This expansion is what LeClair describes as the'runaway' quality in

the systems novel; the sense that the book is leading the reader to another space

through its restlessness of form. The 'art of excess' that LeClair refers to alerts the

reader to this space; gives him the sense that the book is prone to displace itself in some

way, suggesting, to readers such as LeClair and Boxall, that the space of the fictional

page has been challenged. For Boxall, as we shall see in his discussion of the artwork

in DeLillo's writing, this expanded space is one of critique, ultimately of the medium of

writing itself, 'beyond the far limits of the novel, towards the deathly space of a critical

margin'. 59 In the case of Ratner's Star this happens to the novel itself, and that the book

does indeed'becomes what it is about' - in looping back on itself the novel takes on the

form of one of its persistent metaphors, the boomerang and its long, arcing trajectory of

return. The novel's critique is formed by its ongoing formal description of itself.

s9 Boxall, p128.

36

4. 'The Artworks Within the Novels'

It is this 'critical margin' that the formal experiments of DeLillo's writing lead to, and in

which the'space of the page is tested. As I have said, the critical thought in his novels is often indicated by the artworks that appear within his narratives. The fictional artists

who produce this work are a varied group: in addition to those who are, broadly,

traditional fine artists, there are film-makers, a musician, writers, and many other kinds

of practitioners whose'work' is presented in terms of art. An example of this, one of

many, is one of End Zone's american football player/university students, Taft Robinson,

whose campus bedroom takes the form of a carefully arranged installation. Peter Boxall

describes it as a'minimalist, late modernist space, in which there is'beauty and historical significance in the angles that the room creates, in the pure relation between

its various planes and the objects and bodies it contains'. 60 Boxall all but calls this an

artwork, although instead he relates it to Beckett's Rotunda spaces, works of stage design rather than gallery installation.

As well as these fictional artists there are several examples of'real-life' artworks, or

versions of artworks, that enter from outside the book: the quasi-Warhol work that

frames the novel Mao II is described in this section, but a list of such works would also include the Brughel paintings of Underworld, as well as that novel's fictional Sergei

Eisenstein film (the titular Unterwelt), the Gerhard Richter installation Atlas, which forms the setting for the short story Baader Meinhof, or Douglas Gordon's 24-Hour

Psycho which frames the plot of his recent novel Point Omega. In these cases, however, art is used as setting, rather than in the radical, critical way that the fictional

works produced 'in' the novels are.

In a recent essay, 'DeLillo's Dedalian Artists', Osteen considers the inherited persona of Joyce's Stephen Dedalus in some of these fictional artists (Osteen regards the'novels

about artists' to be Great Jones Street, Mao II, and The Body Artist). He especially

considers their adoption of the Dedalian 'silence, exile and cunning' that has now

60 Boxall, p41.

37

become a famous quote of DeLillo's, using it to describe the tools needed to become a

writer. Through these three novels about artists, Osteen plots DeLillo's own critique of

the 'modernist aesthetic principles' that the Dedalan artist upholds: from their failure in

the hands of Great Jones Street's Buddy Wunderlick, to their nuanced mastery in the

performance given by The Body Artist's Lauren Hartke. 61 Osteen goes on to read this as

a dramatised turning away from such modernist aesthetics by DeLillo himself, also

reflected in his increasingly frequent work for the theatre, which Osteen sees as an

'embrace of social engagement'. 62 This essay provides one of the few accounts to date

explicitly focussing on DeLillo's use of artists, but most importantly for this thesis it

makes a strong argument for a critical dialectic between the fiction as a whole and the

art within it - to use DeLillo's engagement with art as critical reference point for his

fiction. This means of polarizing his writing into practises that seem to resist each other is one way in which the reader sensitive to art criticism is made aware of the possibility

of space in DeLillo's fiction: is it revealed as a context for artworks that are somehow

critically engaged with the space in which they are displayed.

This argument is developed more fully by Boxall, in his account of the critical role of DeLillo's art and artists, explored through a nuanced understanding of DeLillo's

'modernism' and'post-modernism', and the complexity of DeLillo's relationship to a

straightforward genealogy of writing. In The Possibility of Fiction he reasserts LeClair's'continuity' between DeLillo and modernism, albeit a modernism operating deep within a post-modem context. However, unlike Philip Nel, for example, Boxall

does not depict DeLillo as an essentially modernist writer working with the postmodern

as his subject matter. 63 Instead, the artworks within the novels begin to emerge in The

Possibility of Fiction as 'counterfunctional' voices, that oppose the context of the page

as Beckettian acts of silent protest. This link to a Beckettian aesthetic is indicated by

the example cited above, of the bedroom installation' appearing in . rid Zone. Again,

the novel is in this case the context, and the artwork its content (a form of content that

is itself a space, a context). Boxall characterises the role of other work in this

61 Ostgien, DeLillo's DedalianArtists', p140. 62 Ibid, p149. 63 See Nel, DeLillo and Modernism', p16

38

'counterfunction' through Blanchot's statement that'literature is the work of death in the

world', and suggests that this theory is presented, in a kind of miniature form, by the 'works' that take place within DeLillo's fiction. ` This theme appears prominently in the

chapter of The Possibility of Fiction that deals with the early novels of the 1970's, part

of whose theme, Boxall argues, is the very impossibility of art, the'prospect of the

failure of art'. 65 Boxall sees this in the'collapse of the modernist project' of Americands

film, and the undermining of the 'artistic and dramatic capacities of football' by the

college institutions of End Zone, despite the artistic inclinations of its main protagonists (along with the character of Robinson, building Beckettian spaces, the main character

of Gary Harkness is, like DeLillo, an aesthetic reader of Wittgenstein, and the coach of

their football team is presented as a kind of tactical aesthete). " These examples highlight the idea of a critique-from-within in DeLillo's writing, that Boxall first

identifies in his essay Since Beckett: that DeLillo is engaged in a narrative that is both

historical and critical towards not only writing, but towards the principle of artistic

production.

Boxall presents a critical field of 'negative literature to contextualise this, including

Blanchot's Orpheus and the prose-writer Beckett of Deleuze's The Exhausted. This field

is the setting for Boxall's great claim for DeLillo, that his fiction is at once the

representative of a new form of the possibility of critical thought, and 'an extended

performance of a kind of critical exhaustion'. 67 Beyond arguments and debates between

schools of critical thought, beyond the 'false' oppositions that have'skewed' the critical

reception of DeLillo, Boxall argues that his fiction represents a new form of critique, of the continuation of thought even in the face of the immanent end presaged in the work

of Beckett and Blanchot. 68

64

65

66

67

a

Boxall, plO. Ibid, p35. Ibid, p34. Ibid, p8. The exhaustion that Boxall describes here seems to suggest that DeLillo inverts Deleuae's idea that Beckett's characters'play with the possible without realizing it' (Essays Critical and Clinical, p153). For Boxall the 'possibility' of fiction is more knowingly tested by DeLillo and his fictional practitioners.

39

He develops the notion that it is the artworks within the novels, or certain other

aesthetic voices within them, are in turn 'the work of death', acting as such within the book rather than the world, hence DeLillo's fiction appearing to Boxall to be a place of

critique. It is in the course of this, I would argue, that the space of the page begins to

emerge as significant. It follows from Boxall's thinking about the critical space that

DeLillo's writing forms that the means of this space coming into being must be

considered. Boxall acknowledges, as we shall see, that the artworks within the fiction

forms a significant part of this critique. The thought that my thesis begins with is that

this observation can lead to an enquiry into the space of DeLillo's page; that its

containment of artworks make it as different from a simple conception of the page as

the container for words as an art gallery is from a container of objects. With the

addition of the critical faculties that run through DeLillo's writing, it becomes, like the

gallery, a space alive to the conceptual possibilities of context as well as content. The.

counterfunctional, artistic voices in DeLillo's fiction not only makes themselves heard,

but sound echoes as well, as they resonate against the edges of the page. My

understanding of the space of DeLillo's page follows from this metaphor, suggesting

that the prominence of other work to his writing challenges, enhances, and draws

attention to this space.

My thesis is concerned not only with DeLillo's under-researched, yet prominent,

relationship to art, but with the structural resemblance of this relationship to the

workings of the'advanced-artwork', an art-historical term which is described in more detail in chapter 2. The advanced-artwork is constructed as a play between content and

context, often effected by the use of one medium's voice in the midst of that of another. It is in this that such work can be thought of as using a form of ventriloquism, and

which DeLillo seems quite clearly to practice through his persistent deployment of

'other' work within his fiction. Whilst he is not unique as a novelist in using and

referring to the work of other media, the use of other work is especially central to

DeLillo's writing.

40

A digressionary comparison to illustrate this centrality can be made here, between

David Cowart's early work on Thomas Pynchon, The Art ofAllusion, which attempts to

unravel that author's literary relationship to art and artworks, and the differences

between such 'allusion' and the way in which extra-textual work emerges from

DeLillo's novels. The Art ofAllusion is set out using one of the principle observations

that this thesis makes of Don DeLillo: that each of the novels has a consistent

allusionary subtext or set of subtexts that the novels can be read through and against. In

Cowart's book on Pynchon, this is denoted through two chapters marrying a novel or

novels to a medium (Paintings in V and The Crying of Lot 49, 'Film in Gravity's

Rainbow'), and two more general chapters, about music and literary allusion. There are

similarities between these 'allusions' and those of DeLillo's, in that these bodies of

reference go beyond being mere references or catalogues. For DeLillo, as Cowart goes

on describe in The Physics of Language, these 'other' media and practices take on a

deep role, not only alluding and referring to art but in the case of the 'pseudo-Warhol' of Mao II, producing'a mise en abime of the larger fiction, a textbook example of the

simulacrum, the copy without the original'. ̀ The'copy', however, can also become an

original: this work, Gorby 1, is, to quote its description in the novel, 'even more Warholish than it was supposed to be, beyond parody, homage, comment and

appropriation'. 70 The full description of this work appears as a quotation in the Cowart

text, occupying almost a page, and seems to survive in this new context, asserting itself

as a work rather than an allusion, and appearing rather like an illustration would in a

work of more typical art-criticism.

Cowart is noting here the'production of space' that occurs through DeLillo's use of the

artwork, not only formally, but in its conceptual collaboration in Mao IN wider

concerns of pitting the individual against the crowd, and of depicting the warping of the

sense of self in the hall of mirrors created by fame, reproduction and representation.

This is similar to the description of film and its embedding in Pynchon's Gravity's

Rainbow, which Cowart writes about in terms of its dissolution of the differences 69 Cowart, p125. 11 From Mao II, p134-135, quoted by Cowan, p125.

41

between 'reel' and 'real'. He writes that 'art, however supposedly illusionary, precedes life' in the phantasmagoria of Pynchon's fiction. " DeLillo's earlier writings share many

qualities with the Pynchon novels discussed in the Cowart book. Americana, Great

Jones Street, and some of the early short fiction (In the Men's Room of the 1& Century,

for example), paint comparable counter-cultural picturesques, which serve to describe

the end of the American 1960s through somewhat abstracted protagonists. Whilst

Pynchon continues to reflect on this period and its remnants in 1990s Vineland,

DeLillo's fiction quickly moves away from it, returning to it only historically, such as in

the 1960s New York art-world of Underworld. This move away from the 'mess' of the

60s is perhaps reflected in the difference between DeLillo's 'art of allusion' and Pynchon's; that at some point DeLillo's employment of the artwork becomes more

refined, removed, and at once more central. This is evident when the designation of

artwork is stretched (by DeLillo) to include the documents that bring the Kennedy

Assassination into his fiction; the CIA's Warren Report, and the Zapruder film of the

assassination itself. The first of these is described by DeLillo, in novelistic terms, as Joycian ('I asked myself what Joyce could possibly do after Finnegan's Wake, and this

was the answer'), ' and the second is presented in Underworld at an artist's film

screening. These two artefacts, originally belonging more to bureaucracy, vernacular

record and later to conspiracy-theory than to art, are recast as both artworks and intertexts by DeLillo; their employment deeper than a blurring of the'reel' and the

'real'. 73 Rather than'alluding to other works, DeLillo demands a critical response from

them. Not unlike the visual artworks of Christopher Williams, whose work will be

addressed in chapter 2, DeLillo achieves this critical response through a deployment of

the cultural voices and vernacular, pastoral and local character of his sources.

In addition to moments at which DeLillo makes unambiguous reference to art, more

obscure gestures towards the artwork begin to emerge throughout his fiction, which 71

72

73

Cowart, Thomas Pynchon: The Art ojAlluslon, p61. Conversations, P62. The use of these historical artefacts as visual and literary artworks is noted in Boxall's chapter Becoming Historical'. My approach to the role such work plays in Libra is the focus of Chapter 3, and the visual work described in Chapter 4 (re)sets them in motion through practical means.

42

suggest the possibility of extending the definition of his engagement with art. An

example of this are the short narratives that book-end the novel Players. These consist firstly of what DeLillo titles as a'movie' rather than a chapter, that precedes the first

'chapter' of Players. This is somewhere between a prologue or introduction to the book,

although it might be best described as an overture, as it introduces the themes of the

book, in an abstracted setting. DeLillo, in fact, describes it as a'model' for the book,

remote from it somehow: 'This piece is the novel in miniature. It lies outside the novel.

It's modular - keep it in or take it out'. 74 The movie takes the form of a narrative in

which some of the book's main characters are passengers on an aeroplane, as apparent

strangers. They then watch the in-flight film, which depicts a surreal scene of terrorism.

Without having any apparent narrative effect upon the book that follows, this'movie'

exists as a work both apart from and within the novel. A similar text appears at the end

of the book, after the end of the numbered sequence of chapters. This is, more

obliquely, called'The Motel', declaring only its location and not a nominal 'other'

medium. This narrative is mysterious and unresolved, but like the introductory 'movie'

it contrasts with the intimate observation of dialogue and relationships that Players is to

a large extent an exercise in. As such these documents offer a context for, or critique of,

the novel, somehow: they place the rest of the book in an abstracted space, as if either

the movie is a study of the book, or the book is an extrapolation of the movie. 75 The

presence of the movie, as part of the book, but not the novel as such, extends the

novel's space through self-reference, however illusionary this extension may be. The

topic of space is referred to in a broken sentence at the end of the 'motel' section:

'Spaces and what they contain no longer account for, mean, serve as examples of, or

represent. 176

In a subtle way, this half-statement, and the modified form of the novel in which it

74

73

76

Conversations, P93. DeLillo returns to this book-ending form in the recent novel Point Omega, using Douglas Gordon's Twenty-Four Hour Psycho. In this case the book-ending work itself is already an abstraction, of Hitchoock's original film, and so DCLillo goes even further than in Players by de-0onlexhudizing an existent recoatextualization. Players, p212.

43

appears, address the notion of fictional space in the book. It is at moments such as these

that the'space of the page' is subtly adjusted in some way. Indeed, DeLillo has referred

to the importance of space in his writing, of the play between context and content. In

reference to the protagonists of his books, he says:

"I try to examine psychological states by looking at people in rooms, objects in rooms.

It's a way of saying we can know something important about a character by the way he

sees himself in relation to objects. ""

This statement indicates the imagination of space that takes place in DeLillo's writing - the way in which a context is written in order to extract meaning from its contents. It is,

again, a means of writing the conditions in which the voice of a given source, artefact,

or character, is able to speak from the page, as it were; a method which is closely

related to the advanced-art of chapter 2. These examples serve here to show the breadth

of the ways in which DeLillo's writing employs less easily defined artworks as well

those that are instantly recognizable. It is using more orthodox forms of art-production

within the novels that Boxall makes the most pointed critical assessment of this aspect

of DeLillo's writing. Through his essays on Beckett and DeLillo, in addition to The

Possibility of Fiction, Boxall catalogues the moments that resemble an'art-practice'

within DeLillo's literary practice, and places the two into critical dialogue with each

other.

In the article'Since Beckett', Boxall isolates both the writing-practice and the literary

criticism of the fictional novelist in DeLillo's writing (the character of Bill Gray in Mao

II), and the disjunction this creates. Bill Gray's hypothesis that "Beckett is the last

writer" (a fictional novelist's asserting that fiction had, in fact, ended even before his

own writing had begun) sets up a paradox, a temporal disjunction, an "evacuated time

after the end". Boxall paraphrases Hamlet: "time is doubly out of joint". '' If the novel Ratner's Star becomes so distorted and difficult due to its ventriloquism of a kind of " Conversations, p14. 78 Boxall, 'Since Beckett', p302.

44

renegade science - in effect, science-fiction - then Mao II is perhaps at the opposite

pole of DeLillo's writing. Here the distortion, the disjunction, takes place due to the

close proximity of the medium that undergoes DeLillo's scrutiny; an author plausibly

and knowingly similar to himself. The role of such a writer, Nicholas Branch, who in

Libra begins as another kind of plausible double to DeLillo, will be considered in more

detail in Chapter 3.

The disjunction created by DeLillo the writer on the one hand, and the fictional 'work'

within his books on the other, is developed more fully by Boxall in the essay 'DeLillo

and Media Culture. It forms a clear dialectic which he uses to describe DeLillo as

performing a sort of critique-from-within, the fictional artworks standing in aesthetic

opposition to the text in which they are written. The essay as a whole traces the

'accommodating spirit' within DeLillo's writing, that allows a'merging of consumer

culture with high art', and which allows the novels to themselves contain artworks. "'

This 'accommodation' is, for Boxall, the site of DeLillo's engagement with high

modernism, especially its Joycean, polyphonic pole. Yet this occurs through the key

disjunction within DeLillo's inherited modernism: that while 'comprehensiveness' (an

inclusivity of culture) is 'clearly a central and crucial aspect of DeLillo's work, it is also

paradoxically the case that DeLillo's writing... is animated by many of the ideals that

Beckett lays out so enthusiastically'. 80 Boxall is referring here to the paring down, the

'elimination' of language that Beckett describes in a 1937 letter quoted at the beginning

of his essay, in which a young Beckett seems to anticipate the paring down that his

work will go on to enact more and more rigorously, culminating in the highly minimal

works of the 1960's; which, as we have seen, Boxall has also related to the Beckettian

space' of End Zone's aesthete athlete Taft Robinson. The dialectic between DeLillo's

inheritance of Beckettian 'elimination' and the 'excessive' novels in which this aesthetic

appears in the form of other work is made evident when Boxall contrasts the two. He

notes that'DeLillo's work starts big and gets bigger', that it'offers a means of absorbing

79 Boxall, 'DeLillo and Media Culüne, p44. 91 lbid, p46.

45

and articulating an entire culture, and'uses words to make a world. " These qualities,

especially that of'articulating a culture', point towards the use of the artwork within

DeLillo's writing, to its need to articulate other voices alongside and within its own.

They also points towards its expansiveness, to the sheer plurality of his fiction. Boxall

confirms this with another stark contrast to Beckett: 'It does not tend towards silence

but towards speech; rather than a failure of expression, this work tends towards a

sublime articulacy'. 82

The Beckettian aesthetic, however, finds its place within this plurality, as one of its

voices. A move towards an elimination of language occurs, Boxall goes on to describe,

as being dramatised in the fictional artworks at the heart of DeLillo's early novels Americana and Great Jones Street. These works, respectively a film that becomes

'darker and more silent as it progresses', and an album of songs described as'silence

fashioned by noise' are 'in production' during almost the whole course of these novels'

narratives. ß3 The fictional works that move towards silence reflect not only a contrast

between their own aesthetic and that of the language in which they are situated, but also

the quieter play between absence and presence, and form and content, that can be seen in much of the visual art that I will go on to describe as 'advanced'. Describing

Americana's film, Boxall says that it 'fails to materialize, remaining dormant and

unscreenable'. 84 Yet its appearance in the novel, indeed the way in which its production

frames the novel, does in a sense provide it with a screening, in the sense that it

'screens' the film's silent thesis. It is this form of a representation at one remove that

DeLillo shares with the art described in chapter 2; what Boxall goes on to describe as

'withheld eloquence', a means of representing voices whose source seem absent, but

who are vocal nonetheless. 85

As so often occurs in DeLillo criticism, a disjunction is opened up here, between the

81

82

83

84

85

Boxall, I)eLillo and Media Culture, p43. Ibid, p44. ibid, p50-51. ibid, p50. Ibid, p50.

46

modern and the postmodern. Before discussing in further detail the artworks of American and Great Jones Street, Boxall makes a succinct summary of where these

apparent aesthetic and formal paradoxes ('the difficult coincidence in DeLillo's

writing')" place him; concluding that DeLillo is neither'given up' to the postmodern

nor clinging to the modern, but that his writing: 'suggests a new term in the relationship between high and low, between the parsimonious and the extravagant, between the

speechlessness of the artwork and the articulacy of the marketplace'. B"The idea of the

'marketplace' as that which functions where art does not is where my analysis finds a break with Boxall. Whilst I concur with his formal extraction of the artworks in the

fiction from their context, I propose that the model of the advanced-artwork presents an

economy in which art remains a marketplace in which other art may remain articulate,

or even gain articulation.

The essay 'DeLillo and Media Culture' clarifies the model set by Boxall for bringing

DeLillo's artworks and the fictional contexts in which they appear into dialogue with

each other, and as such it is a crucial work within DeLillo scholarship, setting a

precedent for seeing the novel as a form that DeLillo subjects to critique through the

pursuit of conflicting aesthetics within its writing. The adjustment I hope to make to

this precedent is to consider how the space of the page is affected by it; to look at the

shadow of DeLillo's fictional artworks on their gallery walls, so to speak. However, in

order to do so the stage that is set by Boxall's conclusions is crucial: that the

representation of artworks within fiction produces a dialogue between the two aesthetic ideals that polarize DeLillo's writing: the total, the 'excessive', that which is inherently

inclusive (the'post-modem'), and the move towards silence and elimination (the

'modern'). The artworks within the novels therefore serve in this critique as critical

context for the novels themselves, and reassert the modernism at work within DeLillo's

image of the post-modem moment. Even more crucial is Boxall's notion that DeLillo's

'suggests a new term' in so many critical and cultural relationships. This new term is in

part what this thesis will use the tools of art-history to propose a definition for. It will ' Boxall, DeLillo and Media Culture', p46. 87 Ibid, p47.

47

aim to offer a name for what Boxall calls the'mode of artistic production that is not

nameable under any of the existing cultural categories and that is endowed with

acoustical properties that we are still able only faintly to hear. '88

However, in order to pick up these 'acoustic properties', a better sense of the walls

against which DeLillo's Beckettian 'silence resonate must be developed. It is here,

considering the space of his fiction, that the present criticism falls short. In the work of Boxall, for example, the artworks are not so much extracted from the novels as

reflected back at them, and the space generated on their behalf by the writing is not the

main consideration. It is a little like the idea of the art gallery before its modem

redefinition as a'white space, before it has been thought about as something other than

primarily a room, a physical rather than conceptual space. Yet the space of the page is

eminently suitable for consideration in terms of being spatial context for art. It is also a

white space, a'white cube, with the exception that its third dimension is in the mind of

the reader, in fictional space. What the prevalence of art in the novels of Don DeLillo

alert the reader sensitized by art to is the way in which these two white spaces might display similar work in &fferent ways. This will be the focus of Chapters 3 and 4.

Despite the lack of discussion surrounding this, the production of such space in

DeLillo's fiction is surely an idea that the critical works discussed so far rely upon: it is

the provision by DeLillo of these artworks that alert the reader to so many of the

critical and aesthetic ideas that run through his writing. Peter Boxall's critique,

especially, seems to point fairly directly toward this matter - he argues for the centrality

of the artwork in understanding DeLillo's place in his own literary history - but seems

not to have the imperative to fully map out the space of DeLillo's writing. I propose to

take the space of DeLillo's fiction as one of what Boxall calls its 'possibilities' to be

looked at more closely. With the present criticism's ultimate concern being DeLillo's

relationship to the field of fiction, to its'possibility' as a medium, some avenues toward

art-history have perhaps been missed, maybe even due to their obviousness or

simplicity. It is logical to think about a space in which artworks are produced as an art-

88 Boxall, DeLillo and Media Cuüute, p52.

48

space, a context which, as we shall see in Chapter 2's discussion of the advanced-

artwork, is part of the work itself. The present criticism of DeLillo has, it might be said,

tended to address content, without making use of the potential of context as a medium.

This has meant analysing what DeLillo seems to be writing about, about what his

books seem to address, rather than what his writing is; what kind of a space it is. The

intertextual and extra-textual elements of DeLillo's writing - that weave other works into the writing, and back out again - are employed by his critics as internally critical

props, relating back to the form of the novel. Whilst Boxall, especially, uses DeLillo's

writing of artworks to consider what such a writing does to the form of the novel

through an'articulation of culture', the consideration of the space necessary for, and

created by this phenomenon remain at the edges of the present criticism. It does so

much as the artworks in question sit somewhere at the edges of the novel's plots,

invisible but heard, despite their centrality to the writing itself.

To re-iterate, this thesis contends that DeLillo's fiction has not yet been looked at as a

space within which a set of artworks exist, both as narrative props but more

significantly as formal arrangements, and therefore that an important perspective on his

radical experiment upon the form of the novel remains occluded. The artworks

primarily allow Boxall to place DeLillo' work as a novelist in context, but in focussing

on the artworks themselves, and on DeLillo's broader engagement with art, it is perhaps

possible to look into, rather than out of, DeLillo's writing, and its unique ability to

propose other cultural forms within itself. This possibility represents a gap in DeLillo

scholarship, one that the present criticism is beginning to bridge but which has the

scope for further work. It is at this point, in the gaps and points of tension that these

critiques identify within DeLillo's writing, that the space for my own work is, and

where the very concept of the'space of the page in DeLillo's fiction, rather than the

content or form of the writing as such, can be brought under scrutiny. In the following

chapter I will develop the ideas from art-criticism that in chapters 3 and 4I will apply

to DeLillo's fiction more directly. In doing so I will propose the notion of 'porous

49

modernism' as a term that might account for the difficulty in attributing either the ideas

of modernism or post-modernism to his writing, and indeed to other work (my own included) that gives a vocal role to other works and practices.

Boxall's reading of the fictional artworks as works of critique within the novels also

suggests the production of this space, the writing into existence of a space in which art

occurs, as a product of DeLillo's'inclusivity', his'poetic excess'. The object of this

thesis is to develop the notion of how the space of the page is expanded or otherwise

adjusted to make DeLillo's connections to art-practice possible; to address the art-space

of the page (the context it creates) rather than its contents per se. In other words, to ask

what this writing does in order to produce art and an artistic context, rather than to

pursue the disjunction in literary style that this art creates. Boxall's 'inclusivity' and

'poetic excess', David Cowart's'language as site', LeClair's idea of a literature that

'requires referentiality', and that proposes the field of the're-modern' - these are all

clues in the present criticism to as to what kind of space DeLillo's fiction creates. The

other chapters of this thesis will seek to better define both the production of this space,

and the production of the critical disjunctions that make it possible. The visual work

that will conclude the thesis will aim to build upon this space, and test it in practical

terms.

The first step to charting this space has, then, been marked by Boxall. He describes the

qualities in DeLillo's writing, that'might take us past the theoretical impasse marked

out by postmodernism' as well as making the'new category' of cultural production that

allows other work to be included in his fiction. S9 A key element to Boxall's reading of

these artworks is resistance - that they offer counter-narrative and counter-critique.

However, he refines the notion of this resistance discounting the simple'redemption' of

Osteen's analysis, instead discovering a writing in which the cultural malaise that the

books emerge from is addressed on its own terms, 'within the blank horizons of the

10 Boxall, p16.

50

tautology... or in the depths of the cliche'. 90 This is quite distinct from the redemptive 'magic' of Osteen, which is offered to fictional characters encountering'dread' - in

Boxall the redemption-of-sorts is offered to the form of the novel itself. It is here in

Boxall's reading of DeLillo that a writer-critic, or critic-practitioner figure begins to

emerge, who 'articulates, despite himself, the failure of critique'. 91 In the novel End

Zone, as Boxall points out, the cliche is a shroud that counters silence, or'deathliness'. Yet it is, once again, the artwork that truly addresses this silence:

"it is as this void opens up, as the artwork performs its poetic capacity to hold within it

something which remains unsaid, that the novels rehearse both their critique and their

non-critique of American culture". '

Within this field of DeLillo's'critique and non-critique' there are moments that bring it

in line with the practice of cultural or national history, and in turn with the practice of historiography. Yet in using artworks so often, reflexively, as they function in Boxall's

literary reading, or not, DeLillo also offers an alternative art-history. A catalogue of his

art and artists would map the art of the late 20te century with uncanny subtlety, given its

remove from the institution of the gallery. The prescience of art of the old world (Bruegel), the more recent past (Warhol, Richter) and the underground and

counterculture are all registered in DeLillo's fiction, and the workings of their

aesthetics are also subjected to critique. This writing of a quasi-art-history is perhaps

the practice that lies in the gap between Boxall's ideas of critique and non-critique, focussing as it does on mediated works-within-a-work that sit somewhere between the

writer and his reader. The historical imperative in DeLillo's writing, and its sense of

counter-narrative, an aspect of which is its art-history, is explored more fully by Boxall

in The Possibility of Fiction. In the chapter'The Historical Counterfunction' he uses the

'movie' that precedes the main text of Players to discuss that novel's close relationship

to the cinema, to both its machinery and its narrative tropes. For Boxall the cinema's

mechanical means of not only registering but altering time become metaphors for the

90 Boxall, p45. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid, p47.

51

disjunctions that he reads across DeLillo's fiction. He uses the term'weightless history'

to describe film in the context of DeLillo. 93 But to paraphrase his application of this

term, to imagine a weightless art-history is perhaps a way of thinking of DeLillo's

fictional curatorship of so many creative disciplines. The idea of a weightless history is

in some way paradoxical: despite its abstraction into fictional narrative it is nonetheless

subject to the weight of the past, of memory, and of interpretation. DeLillo's close

reading of culture ensures this proximity to historical responsibility. But the invention

of historically interpretive artworks such as DeLillo's perhaps proposes a solution to

this paradox, at least in Boxall's view. His later chapter'Becoming Historical' expands

on this problem most completely, both due to the centrality of the DeLillo text in

question, Libra, to the very idea of writing history, and due to the historically jarring

event that Libra circuitously plots, the Kennedy assassination; a'moment in history at

which narrative fails to cohere'. 94 This incoherence, and the ways in which Libra has so

many connections to the aesthetic model of the advanced-artwork will form the basis

for the enquiry of Chapter 3. This chapter will hope to show how the idea of a 'weightless art-history', emanating from my reading of DeLillo criticism, is also an apt description of the work that comes to epitomise the advanced-artwork in Thomas

Crow's work, and that art-historical thinking can spring quite naturally from a study of DeLillo.

" Boxall, p79. " lbid, p133.

52

5. Concluding Notes - DeLillo as Inheritor and Inheritance

Just as, in Boxall's critique, DeLillo has absorbed two conflicting poles of classic

modernist writing, his own writing has come to represent a kind of fictional bequest in

the work of a younger generation of admiring authors. These writers have been grouped

together for the way in which their fiction addresses wider cultural issues through the

medium of characters, and for the apparent encyclopaedic ambition of their work (that

their writing should 'contain multitudes'): 95 traits they share with much of DeLillo's

writing. From the self-reflexive writer-protagonist of Richard Powers' Galatea 2.0,96 to

the post-modern history writing of William T. Vollman's Ice Shelf, to the brilliant

narrator of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, 97 evidenced in DeLillo's

correspondence with Jonathan Franzen, and his contribution to Jonathan Safran Foer's

collection of writer's blank working papers, DeLillo's work is both contemporary and

yet already forming a mass that casts a literary shadow. 98 In the recent history of his

own discipline, as well as in his writing itself, DeLillo brings to mind Boxall's idea of a 'time after the end', where his work has started to become canonical, and yet is still in

the process of being written. Indeed, as well as simply continuing, the form of his work is beginning to make radical shifts, into the shorter and more pared down novels that

follow the lengthy Underworld.

Stephen J. Bum, whose extensive work on this more recent group of writers (including

the Reader's Guide to Infinite Jest, Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism,

and the co-editorship of Intersections - Essays on Richard Powers) considers this

genealogy in his early work Generational Succession and a Possible Source for the

title of David Foster Wallace's The Broom of the System. In this short text (which, as

the verbose title suggests, takes an aesthetic lead from Wallace's interest in artful and

95

96

97

96

This description of an encyclopaedic literature comes from Michael Ondaatje, quoted on the cover of the paperback editions of Underworld A novel that, like Ratner's Star, is both concemed with the oscillating relationship of art and science, and has an overarching intertext in the form of the Pygmalian story. Which ends with a return to the beginning of its narrative, like Ratner's Stir (see Bum, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest A Reader's Guide, p22). See Safran Foet's article mess' for a description of this collection (Playboy, January 2004, pages 148-151).

53

elevated trivia) Burn alludes to the subject of a writerly inheritance much as Boxall

does, citing Infinite Jest's references to Hamlet, and 'the presence of powerful dead

fathers'. 99 He goes on to suggest that Foster Wallace, paraphrasing DeLillo's first novel, 'offers what Americana calls a "true American artform": combination and innovation as

a form of generational succession'. " He is suggesting that Foster Wallace's generation

propose a literature which had begun to appear as fictional works-within-works in

DeLillo's writing. Bum's work on this group of writers is emblematic of the kind of

criticism they produce, inclined towards the significance of details, reference and a

polyphony of voices. In contrast, the critical possibilities made apparent in Boxall's

work on DeLillo tend to use subjects such as these to think through DeLillo's own

critique of his medium. Standing between the personal modernism that incites him to

write, and the postmodernity that his writing often depicts, trivia, reference, other, fictional work within the novels all become instruments with which DeLillo plays out his modernist critique using post-modem means.

The difference between the criticism surrounding DeLillo and that of his inheritors is

reflective of not only of the contrasting fictions that generate it, but also of different

historical contexts, of moments at which writing, and its possibility for radical thought,

have quite different significations. Where Boxall sees DeLillo as an intermediary of

sorts between modernism and the writing that follows it, the recent fiction analysed by

Stephen Bum is determinately'post', as the title to his book on Franzen indicates. If

DeLillo belongs to an earlier group of writers to'encyclopaedicise', 101 to consciously

write, a priori, in order to'turn the book into a world' (as DeLillo says of Joyce)" then

this group of later writers are perhaps, rather like Infinite Jest's Hal Incandenza reading

the Oxford English Dictionary, readers of an inherited encyclopaedia, of the 'textbook'

Burn, Generational Succession and a Possible Source for the Title of David Foster Wallace's The Broom of the System, p9.

100 Burn, Generational Succession and a Possible Source for the Tide of David Foster Wallace's The Broom of the System, p11.

101 The subject of Burn's doctoral thesis, At The Edges of Perception: William Gaddis and the Encyclopaedic Navel from Joyce to David Foster Wallace, which also includes DeLillo amongst its encyclopaedic authors.

102 Conversations, p101.

54

provided by early postmodernists whose work they have inherited. 'o3

Like the earlier writers from whom DeLillo himself inherits aesthetic or theoretical

imperatives, his work is singular, and highly-worked: his voice is distinct, even as it

allows other voices into dialogue with it, as evidenced by the critical dialogue between

artwork and novel that runs through his fiction. But what, then, happens to a

subsequent generation of writers whose 'literary inheritance' is writing that, like

DeLillo's, is already engaged in a critique of its own inheritance? It might be argued

that precisely because these contemporary writers have inherited, rather than

discovered by practice, as it were, a culturally-ventriloquial form of writing, that what

they achieve is fragmentary, rather than encyclopaedic. The singularity of DeLillo's

writing may in this case be reflective of one of the key themes of this thesis, that his

medium is, along with modernist conception of the act of writing, voice. As LeClair

says of DeLillo, 'paper gives way to spoken words'. 104 The work of his successors is

more concerned, perhaps, by the sound of this voice, by its speech, whereas DeLillo

remains the operator of the 'instrument' of language, turned on itself, at the 'word

beyond speech' but also the work behind it. This is illustrated by the fact that the

practical, physical discipline of writing is what DeLillo homes in on, even as his fiction

acquires the dialects of so many other practices. His biography tells us that he discovers

the classic works of modernism on a park bench as teenager, that he goes on to work as

a copywriter on Madison Avenue (itself a training, perhaps, in the potential to be found

in a pithiness of language, its economical use), before giving this job up so as to write. The stereotypical poverty and asceticism of this is satirically memorialised in the tiny

New York apartment in Great Jones Street, and in the isolated writer figures in Mao H

and Libra. It is therefore from a simplified, almost purified, position of a'writee that

DeLillo establishes a fictional set of other practitioners in his fiction, who engaged in

other work that critically reflects on his own. This seems to stand in contrast to Richard

103 Burn has discussed the problems inherent in being'taxonomical when confidently applying the prefixes late, early, pre, post, or even post-post to the temº'modernism'. See the introduction to Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism, or his review of Jeremy Green's Late Postmodernism (in Modern Fiction Studies, Spring 2006).

104 LeClair; p15.

55

Powers, or to David Foster Wallace, who like the gifted caricatures of a Wes Anderson

film, turn to writing from science and philosophy, or even tennis in the case of Foster

Wallace, and for whom fiction seems to come more easily, or more as a choice of lifestyle. Wallace's description of his process of becoming a writer is suggestive of this:

'So what I did, I went back home for a term, planning to play solitaire and stare out of

the window, whatever you do in a crisis. And all of a sudden I found myself writing fiction. "°5

This is not to suggest, however, that DeLillo's successors are lesser writers, merely that in comparing them with DeLillo the reader is once again alerted to the intersectional

point from which his writing emerges. 106 The conditions of the literary context that the

later writers mentioned here find themselves in demands a different approach to a Gaddis, a DeLillo, a Pynchon, for whom the mid-point of the 20, century is a staging-

post, and whose personal discoveries in fiction writing included works of 'classic'

modernism, works that can, in the case of DeLillo, offer material to apply critical

thought to within their own. The writers who follow them are necessarily post-post-

modern, for want of a better term, and find themselves writing in a culture that has

come to share many of the qualities of what were called the'paranoid' imaginings of DeLillo and Pynchon.

There is an element of poetic irony in this, given Boxall's thinking about how DeLillo

is apparently concerned with the possibility of continuing to write, of renewing the

medium - perhaps these younger writers fully inherit the means to renew the medium

through the process described in this thesis; the possibility of applying another

discipline, ie. historical writing, without it having to be'ventriloquised - it is simply

part of their work. This is reflected in the injunction'To historicise' that Richard Powers

105 David Foster Wallace interview, quoted in Burn's ate Jest' reader's guide, pl 1. 106 Although Wallace seems to worry about this in his con; espondence with DeLillo: in a 1995 letter he

writes 'Because I tend both to think rin uniquely afflicted and to idealize people I admire, I tend to imagine you never having had to straggle with any of this narcissism or indulgence stuff.... Maybe I want a pep-talk.. '. Quoted by D. T. Max in the essay 'Final Destination', regarding the Ransom Center Archive (The New Yorker, 11'k of June 2007)

56

makes in an interview with Tom LeClair, which indicates the imperative of this

contemporary generation of writers to incorporate the workings of history, the work of history into their writing as a de facto part of what locates it in the culture. 107 This

approach is evidenced in William Vollmann's Seven Dreams cycle of books, and the

long 'dream' passage historical fiction in Franzen's Strong Motion. Unlike DeLillo, it is

the voice of history rather than that of a history of a multiplicity of practices that

emanates from their writing. This prompts another question about the difference

between these generations: of what is it that prompts the more explicitly social

concerns that lie behind their fiction. Although DeLillo is clearly interested in social

matters, interested in and concerned for the culture in which he writes, even in this

respect he is drawn back to a critique of the act of writing, to the medium, and to the

place of that medium in culture.

The answer may be simply that they are at less of a literary intersection; that they are

more thoroughly reactive to, rather than creative of, the post-modern, unlike the

generation who adapted the classic modernism that formed them. Whereas DeLillo

writes grand narratives, the 'systems' that LeClair focusses upon, describing the

construction of cultural and economic or political systems, these other writers tend to

create grand narratives of the destructive effect of such systems, of the globalisation of knowledge and secret machinations of power. DeLillo tends to show these things as

they are happening, with J. Edgar Hoover being informed by a whisper of the Russian

nuclear bomb test in the opening to Underworld, or across almost the whole of Cosmopolis, in which the very process of the financial markets is shown in highly

staged real time, as the thought process of its protagonist. 108 The subsequent generation

of writers show such global systems having already happened: this is evident in the

environmental and economic concerns of Franzen, or the treatises on violence and war-

torn states of William Vollmann. Where DeLillo uses the systems of the postmodern

107 Quoted in Scott Hermanson's Nome: A Conversation With Richard Powers and Tom LeClair. 108 In contrast to which that book's major artwork is a performance piece in which the fictional artist stages a scene in which his performers (including Eric Packer, the novel's stockbroker protagonist, are, literally, stripped and put in stasis. This artwork itself reflects the novers main setting -a trafic jam holding up the incessant motion of Manhattan.

57

world in part as voices to work into an critical adaption of literary tradition, the writers

who follow him arguably write in reaction to those systems.

The difference, then, is in the extent to which DeLillo on the one hand and these

younger writers on the other are engaged with experimentation with their medium, but

more importantly the extent to which the context they write in demands such

experimentation. Both have a strong interest in elements of writing that expand the text

of the novel, in extra-texts and inter-texts, although as Boxall shows, DeLillo uses this

to critique his medium, whereas Franzen, Powers, Wallace et al seem less concerned

with such fundamentals, with concerns inherited from modernism. Indeed, as Burn

argues in his Reader's Guide to Wallace's Infinite Jest, a kind of exhaustion with formal

concerns even applies to his thoughts about his own generation, that'the only way forward... is to effect a break with postmodern practice, and abandon protective irony

and risk sincerity'. 109 Wallace's attempt, if indeed it is an attempt, at sincerity and the

removal of irony, results in work that seems eminently postmodern, as if post-modem

culture inevitably prompts such work. The difference between DeLillo and these

younger writers is often tied into a difference of earnestness, as Burn has indicated both

in terms of their social concerns and use of characterisation - an area in which

DeLillo's production is notably opaque. 10 Bum seems, here, to be defending these

seemingly more conventional approaches as being 'post-postmodern', as he reluctantly

comes to call this field of writing. 'Post-postmodern' is yet another term that may fit

into the gap identified by Boxall, another kind of 're-modem'. The term 'porous

modernism', which I will develop in the following chapter, is another way of describing

work that both follows and is reactive to modernist practice, but one which co-opts and

writes itself into such gaps and ambiguities, rather than papering over them with a

return to more conventional practices.

A comparison between the effect of the respective methods of these literary generations

on the formal aspects of the novel might be made when considering the role of the 109 Burn, David Foster Wallace's liinite Jest A Reader's Guide, p17. 110 See Burn, Jonathan Franzen at the End of Pasbnodernism, p23.

58

footnote, a detail that in one way adds to a work's actualism, creating a encyclopaedic

world within and around the book. In DeLillo, where the text remains visually 'pure',

laid out according to the authors desire for clarity, "' the artworks become like cultural footnotes, always self-critical, as Peter Boxall has shown, offering a chiasmic glance back at the medium of writing through the ventriloquised contexts of other work. 12 A

novel like Infinite Jest, on the other hand, uses footnotes so prominently that they become almost an parallel text that splits the novel, and therefore a visual intervention.

Whilst this alters, inevitably, the capacity of the page, and the density of its content, I

would argue that it expresses a greatly different thought about the medium than

DeLillo's extra-textual way of writing alters this same space. The poles of modernism

that are absorbed into DeLillo's postmodernity allow such concerns to be consolidated into the polished formality of words from a typewriter reacting to the space of the white

page. This is one way in which DeLillo's writing is closer to the way that the advanced-

artworks of Chapter 2 are produced than it is to the more recent forms of fiction that follow it.

11 This visual aspect to the construction of DeLillo's writing is the subject of Chapter 4. 112 See T. Jefferson Kline's essay Last Year at Marienbad. High Modern and Postmodern' for a

cinematic wading of a dichotomy not unlike Boxall's u denstanding of DeLillo's'Modern' artworks: he suggests that Resnais' film offers a high-Modernist treatment of Alain Robbe-Grillet's postmodern novel, and that'... the second of these events minor(s) chiasmically (that is, the way a minor reverses its visual field) the first'.

59

Chapter 2- Advanced-Art

This chapter forms a critical review of Thomas Crow's development of the theory of

'advanced-art'. In doing so it will aim to define the quality in advanced-art, namely its

engagement with artistic and critical practices outside of a given work's primary discipline, that can be brought to bear on the relationship between art and fiction that

the thesis as a whole addresses. I will set out to show that the work assembled here

under the banner of advanced-art provides an analogy to this relationship, and another

means of approaching the literary theory considered in Chapter 1. The examples that I

will use to draw out the critical implications of'advanced-art' span the poles of Crow's

art-history: the 1767 Salon writings of Denis Diderot, the relatively recent photographic

and curatorial practice of Christopher Williams, and some examples of more recent

contemporary work that I will argue is'post-Williams', and which is consistent in many

respects with the art that Thomas Crow considers as'advanced.

Whilst these examples are drawn from disparate eras and artistic contexts, they are linked, quite apart from their place in Crow's art-historical narrative by several

common negotiations. Firstly, between the visual and writing; both critical and fictional. Secondly, between the creative and the critical, and between the production of

new work and a tendency to historicize works that precede them. The third common

theme between these works is the aesthetic product of such negotiations, and the

interdisciplinary form that it takes. I will argue that, like the writings of Don DeLillo,

these examples of advanced-art fall outside of the continuum of the modem and the

postmodern, and require what Peter Boxall, in describing DeLillo, calls a'new term', a

means of describing work of a composite, negotiating nature, and which problematises

critical terminology. These qualities in advanced-artworks are most clearly present in

their tendency to form relationships between practices and institutions: between

painting and writing, photography and the archive/museum, and indeed between fiction

and a multiplicity of artistic practises. These relationships become the frame of the

work, and ultimately it is the practice of negotiation between its constituent elements

that I consider to be the advanced-artists' medium.

60

The intention of this review, then, is to offer a more rounded definition of the complex

and multi-disciplinary aesthetics at play in all the artworks, visual and textual, that set the ground for this thesis, with the aim of finding in visual art an analogy to the

negotiations between creative and critical disciplines at play in the literary work

considered in the project's other chapters. This aesthetic is the result of what I will call the 'porous modernism' of the advanced-artwork. Like a work of 'traditional'

modernism, it engages in a critical relationship to its form and and medium - it is

rooted in some way to the autonomy of the artwork that signals the modernism of Clement Greenberg, however much this work's composite production resembles a

conversation rather than a monologue. On the other hand, like work that might be said

to be typically post-modern it makes use of irony, quotation, reference, and what in

literary terms might be called the intertextual; the use of 'other' work within it. It is, as Lyotard says, a form like the essay: a discussion which 'searches for new presentations',

a means of thinking through a set of ideas by their representation rather than the

production of singular artefacts. 113 I would argue that neither term, 'modern' nor 'postmodern', are sufficient to describe this work. To take the example of Diderot's art

writings, their engagement with medium (with paint and its attendant pictorial illusions) would seem to extend the modernism emergent in the works they describe.

Yet to over-stress this element would be to ignore the re-contextualisation that takes

place as the paintings arguably become the frame of a discursive text, rather than their

object. It is the gap between the attribution of these terms that constitutes advanced and

porous artworks.

This work is perhaps most distinctive for the gaps not only between such critical

attributions but between parts of the work itself, and the potential for these parts to

collaborate. An example of this is the presence within Christopher Williams' work of

elements as diverse as conceptualist methodology, commercial photography, and source

material drawn from a vernacular source quite distinct from the visual traditions of

113 Lyotand, 'Answering the Question What is Postmodernism? ', p149.

61

these practices, as in his Kodak Three Point Reflection Guide work, for example. ' 14

Williams' strategies for using such disparate means to produce an overall critique in his

works - what Crow calls an'unwritten history' - will be discussed in greater depth later

in this chapter.

The critical thought that takes place in this work (what I will go on to describe more

specifically as its historical approach conducted through practical means), resides in the

discrepancy between elements. These qualities both sharpen and blur the form of the

work - it tends to employ context as content and vice-versa, to attempt to be neither one

thing nor another. The result of this is to make a porous artwork: a work that produces

new spaces within itself. If porosity is the measure of voids in a material, then the

advanced-artist is the producer of such voids, of work that contains gaps between its

constituent practices and aesthetic elements. The'advanced' implications of the work lie

in the way these gaps have been worked by the artist. Crow describes the culture that

results from 'developed capitalism' (the modern moment) as displaying 'both moments

of negation and an ultimately overwhelming tendency toward accommodation', and that

Modernism exists in the tension between these two opposed movements'. The

negotiation between these two 'movements' allows Crow's art-history to encompass the

modern, in the guise of the formal and negative, and the postmodern in its room for

'accommodation', terms which echo those applied to the competing aesthetic drives in

DeLillo's fiction. The term'porous modernism' describes the practical application of

such negotiation in art. Crow continues to say that 'the avant-garde, the bearer of

modernism, has been successful when it has found for itself a social location where this

tension is visible and can be acted upon!. ""Social locations', I would argue, are

essential in the conception of any advanced-artwork, as they act in relation to another

discipline or cultural source: advanced-art is made not in a critical or creative void, in

relation only to the development of itself and the history of its medium, but in the

'social location' of another practice. 114

115

The full title for this photogWh (part of a larger work) is: Kodak Three Point Reflection Guide, AC 1968 Eastman Kodak Company, 1968. (Miko laughing), Vancouver, B. C., April 6,2005. The subject of Williams' long titles will be addressed later in the chapter. Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture, p37. Further citations of this text are referenced 'Crow',

followed by the page number.

62

An example of this can be seen in the recent work of Walead Beshty, one of a number

of artists whose work arguably owes a debt to that of Williams, and whose practice forms an important part of Nicolas Bourriaud's'altermodern' theory and curatorial

work. 16 The altermodern idea proposes some analogous thoughts to my concept of

porous modernism, albeit from a sociological/historical rather than formal perspective.

Beshty's Fedex series of work ally on the one hand the production of an object deriving

from minimalist sculpture (a set of glass cubes, resembling the sculptures of Sol Lewitt

or Robert Morris), with the use of the vernacular of international trade and

commerce. "' The cubes were made to the dimensions of Federal Express delivery

boxes, and then sent on a specified commercial journey; either from studio to

exhibition, or between exhibitions (both dimensions and itinerary are made available to

the viewer). The glass cubes bear the marks of the damage that these journeys subject

them to - indicators of the social location that the work's formal element has

encountered. A recent statement of Beshty's describes a sensibility that is key to the

continuing spirit of advanced-art: 'I'm more interested in thinking of objects as part of

an active system, seeing the political or social meaning of an object as inseparable from

its material existence'. "'

In keeping with the composite form and inter-disciplinary quality of works-within-

works such as this, or of Diderot's Salon texts, or the conceptual art re-staged by

Christopher Williams, a sense of cultural ventriloquism becomes the practical as well

as theoretical theme of this project. It is the subtle slippages between the media in

question, along the borders between art and writing, that are common to all the

artworks that are discussed in this thesis, be they written or visual, or more often a

combination of the two.

116 Beshty has also recently shown alongside Christopher Williams, at the China Ails Objects Gallery in Los Angeles, 2009 for example.

117 An example of these wort; s titles suggests this technical vernacular: Fedex® Kraft Box®2005 FEDEX 157872 REV 10/05 CC, Feder 2 -Day, 2009.

116 Behty, quoted in the article 'Depth of Field', by Christopher Bedford (Frieze, September 2009, p113).

63

In the course of this process I would like to suggest that the advanced-artist appears

somewhat like a 'character' that can be extrapolated from the writings of Thomas Crow,

and that the relationship this character has to his criticism is comparable to that of the

fictional art and artists addressed in the critical review that forms the first chapter. This

reflects one of the primary concerns of all the work considered here: the relationship

between authorship and critical thought; between the creative and the critical. As I will

go on to illustrate, the critical and historical practitioners discussed here are often the

'author' of art and artists, and the creative practitioners themselves are often the author

of critical or historical theses. This dual-practice is key to my understanding of

advanced-art, and as Chapter 1 shows, to my conception of fictional writing as a

producer of space for art. My use of the term 'author' as a collective description for this

parallel art/historical production relates to Foucault's notion of 'discursive practice'. He

describes the idea of the discursive practitioner in literary terms in the essay 'What Is

An Author? ': 'that they produced not only their own work, but the possibility and the

rules of formation of other texts'. 1' The advanced-artist, like the writings of DeLillo,

enacts this possibility: his work produces new texts out of others, out of new readings

of vernacular practice. He authors both a singular work and a means of thinking about

the context this work provides for the cultural content it employs. Unlike the discursive

practitioners that Foucault refers to however, these new texts do not always issue from

'great' works of modern thought. Advanced-art, as mapped out by Crow, is often

pointedly unhierarchical in its choice of source material with which to engage in

'discursive practice'. As he explains,

"While advanced artists must acknowledge that their practice cannot exist without

highly specialized learning and patient application, they have habitually recognized a

pressing need to incorporate the expressions of vernacular culture; in effect, to admit to

their creative endeavor a multitude of anonymous collaborators". "I

19 Foucault, Language, Counter Memory, Practice, p131. 120 Crow, pVf.

64

The notion of porous modernism reflects this recognition of collaboration in formal

terms, describing work that makes visible to the viewer both a refined, finely-worked

production resulting from'learning' and'application', and the image of a more complex

cultural scenery underpinning it. The artwork that the advanced-artist produces can be

seen as the framing device for this process, and the critical voice that brings these

elements together. The historical 'movement' of advanced-art, which begins for Crow as

an engagement simply between art and the'populae (the'common culture to which the

title of his major work Modern Art in The Common Culture alludes) is refined in the

course of his criticism into the employment of art itself as a culture with which to

engage. This more self-critical aspect of advanced-art, as practised by Christopher

Williams especially, forms the conclusion to Modern Art in the Common Culture, and

sets the ground for the latter parts of this chapter, detailing both more recent Williams

work (made after the publication of Crow's book), and contemporary work that

emphasises the qualities in'Crow's' advanced-art that this thesis focusses on: dialogue

with 'other' work, with critical and fictional writing, and the sense that the porous edges between these elements is where the ambitions of 'advanced' work are most

concentrated.

65

1. The Relationship of Advanced-Art to Criticism

Crow's art-criticism follows a chronological course through the proto-modernism of

181 century painting, to the qualified post-modernism of Christopher Williams. This

history pays relatively little attention to modernism itself in its 'classic', formalist visual

mode, although the movements it concerns itself with bracket what might be thought of

as the modernist paradigm in the visual arts; the work from which the writings of

Clement Greenberg (and his one-time adherent Michael Fried, who traces modernism

further back into the 18' century) issue. Broadly speaking, this period is bookended by

Edouard Manet at one end, and the Formalism of the 1960s at the other. The reason for

this is evident in the title of Modern Art in the Common Culture, a description of the

dialogue formed by the meeting of cultural forms - this particular'modern art' is made both in reaction to, and out of, 'other' forms of culture, rather than by an a priori

referentiality to its medium. However, as I will go on to describe, the process of

negotiating this meeting becomes the medium to which a new kind of medium-

specificity is applied.

Throughout his art-historical narrative Crow deploys the term 'advanced-art', to

describe artists whose practice encompasses elements of vernacular culture, and who

build these structures of reference into the fabric of their work. The critical, curatorial

and editorial ways in which they do so are precisely what makes their art 'advanced,

reaching beyond the singularity of its production of artefacts and into and out of the

culture in which they sit. In Crow's analysis, Williams seems to represent the

contemporary (to the writing of Modern Art in The Common Culture) fruition of this

technique, fulfilling the critical and historical aims of Crow's project. Williams

achieves this through both a light touch when using vernacular sources of information,

and through the rigorous and highly selective way in which he filters and deploys them

- qualities that are common to the field of advanced-art, but are refined in the work of

Williams. The hand of the artist is at once removed and everywhere, treading a fine

between objectivity and authorship that is perhaps more familiar territory for the

historian or the critic than for the artist. It is this artistic ideal in Crow's criticism that

66

most closely represents a point of comparison with the fiction discussed elsewhere in

the thesis, producing work that allows other fields of knowledge to be heard as voices

within its own, but whose ventriloquism of them is conducted within a qualified

continuation of modernist practice. For Crow this is work that comes'closest to non- fiction', a phrase from Clement Greenberg, although in the hands of Christopher

Williams the demand of 'non-fiction' has as much to do with an imperative to historicize, to use allusion, reference and to enquire into the nature of 'fact', as it does

with avoiding the tropes of pictorial illusion which concern Greenberg's earlier

conception of modernist painting. 121

As well as visual artists engaged in such work, the advanced-art-practice that Crow

maps out also includes reference to critics and curators whose practice is comparably inclusive, and is in search of'an object that already enacts the disturbance necessary to

interpretation'. "' This criterion of Crow's describes artworks that critical thought can

recognise their own practice within. The first of these is Denis Diderot, whose writing

makes a potent demonstration of the capability of text to'play host to an artwork, both

representing it and leaving its visual workings intact in some way, in a radically

recontextualised form.

Crow's criticism is a producer of a peculiar critical space for art - by plotting a history

of art's engagement with other cultures his writing allows space for the artworks within it to reach out both to'high' art, and to the'common culture', identifying the points at

which cultural exchange occurs. He arguably creates a new category for art in doing so:

of work that foregrounds this exchange. In this respect his critique mirrors the

interdisciplinary communication in much of the work he writes about, and as such is an

example of art-criticism's ability to provide a context for artworks to develop meaning

within; a'possibility' of criticism that I relate to the self-critical 'possibilities of fiction'

that Peter Boxall describes - that the artworks in DeLillo's early fiction, for example,

are works of 'silence' in the verbal, and that the'novels organise themselves around this

121 Quoted in Crow, p210. 122 Crow, The Intelligence ofArt, p23.

67

silence, as a form of internal counterpoint. '23

Crow addresses this idea of critiquing the self-critical in The Intelligence of Art, asking 'whether there can be objects of study for the art historian - individual monuments or

circumscribed clusters of works - where the violent acts of displacement and

substitution entailed in making any object intelligible are already on display in the

art'. '24 The relationship between practice and criticism in this field relates to what Blanchot calls 'inseparability'. For Blanchot this inseparable relationship is cyclical - 'through its disappearance before the literary work, criticism recovers itself again in the

work as one of its essential moments'. "

The advanced-artwork demonstrates this critical recovery in a consolidated form, in

that it has both a critical and creative aspect, either buried or hidden one within the

other, or in contest. The elements remain, however, accessible to negotiation: like the

'initiators of discursive practice' for Foucault (Marx, Freud - authors of 'modem'

intellectual thought), the advanced-artist'is responsible for more than his own text'; he

initiates a discourse of some kind, forming, as it were, a literary text from vernacular languages. ' In partaking in the discourse of advanced-art as well as describing it

Crow's writing has the role in this chapter of both a primary source as well as point of

access to certain artworks: it allows a set of work to be accessed through itself, much as

the works themselves allow access to another layer of vernacular production. He not

only collects references to artworks that are 'advanced', but, like the possibilities of

literary criticism that Blanchot proposes, he makes visible their advanced quality due to

the formal sympathy this work has to criticism: when the'indefinite reality of the work is momentarily transformed and circumscribed into words!. 127

123

124 125

126

127

Boxall, p47 Crow, The Intelligence ofArt, p5. Blas hot Lautreamont and Sade, p5. Foucault, Language, Counter Memory, practice, p132. Blanchot, Lautreanont and Sade, p4.

68

'Circumscription' is an apt term for this: the artworks are 'written around' by a critique

that makes a delimited space for them to go on functioning. The space in which

artworks are viewed is therefore, for this thesis, in critical writing, including, as was discussed in Chapter 1, the writings of Don DeLillo. This critical writing produces a form in which advanced-artworks are allowed to function on the level of their 'text' or

thesis as much as their visual presence. The text of the work is the result of advanced-

artworks circumscribing in turn their own constituent works and practices, and so having a critical intention, a'thesis' of some kind. The image of this network is

something that critical writing has the means to display in a manner that is innately

sympathetic, and beyond the illustrative; what I see as a map rather than an itinerary.

This nuance of the term 'circumscription' will be developed further in the analysis and

production of the text-based advanced-art that I address in Chapters 3 and 4.

Whilst Crow's thoughts on art's response to a'common culture' frame the conception of

the advanced-artist as a character, the following examples are intended to show that the

formal sympathy between advanced-artworks and their presence in critical thought can be extended beyond the remit of his art-history. The works described in this chapter

maintain the relationship between the visual and writing, history and criticism and, following the model of Williams in particular, stand at the borders of cultures, facilitating communication between them, and using the idea of the border, the porous

yet discernible connecting edge, as their medium. The kind of biography-through-

critique that produces the archetype of the advanced-artist in Crow's writing manifests

itself as a composite creation, equal part practitioner and critic. This will be shown in

the elaborations on Verret in the writings of Diderot, and in the way in which William's

work confirms the thesis of Modern Art in the Common Culture, as well as in the

relationship to critical and historical thought in more recent works by Williams. The

writings of Diderot, however, form the earliest artefacts of Crow's history of this field,

and so begin the narrative of advanced-art.

69

2. Diderot and Vernet

The inherent similarity between the nature of art-critical writing and the art that Crow

writes about is reflected clearly and richly in this early subject matter. He initially

develops the artist-critic-writer figure through his work on French painting from the

middle of the 18' century, a period that Michael Fried describes as seeing'the invention

of art criticism as we know it'. 128 In his work on this period, including Emulation:

Making Artists for Revolutionary France, just as in Fried's, the figure of Diderot is

central. Crow's introduction to the Salon reports of 1767 describes the nature of

Diderot's importance to the development of modern art, and the self-conscious thought

that modernised it as a critical as well as practical enterprise, saying of the Salons:

Diderot announces to the old order the coming of the modem condition of viewing,

which remains our own'. 129 This 'modern condition', I will go on to argue, is

inaugurated by Diderot's critical writings, which, in their aesthetic collaboration with

the paintings of the Salons, also offer a more specific precedent for the advanced-

artwork: forming an aesthetic that combines the creative and the critical into a

consolidated work. Crow's history of this critical art practice begins not only with the

depiction of artworks within text, but with Diderot's unique embellishment of the

process, in which the'condition of viewing itself, the way in which the artwork is seen

both by and through writing, is brought to the viewer/reader's attention. The negotiation

that Diderot's writing makes with the paintings produces, like the later Manet does for

Foucault, a'discursive field' -a reconsideration of the artwork in the act of its being

seen 130

The manner in which Diderot writes has the effect of extending the presence of the

Salon's artworks through the text: he writes 'out' of the paintings, in a sense, as much as

he writes about them. This, Crow says, is distinct from the more'incidentally aesthetic'

128 Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, p2. Further citations of this text are referenced Tried', followed by the page comber.

129 Diderot, Diderot On Art, The Salon of 1767 (introduction by Thomas Crow), p xvii. Further citations of this text are referenced 'Diderot, followed by the page comber

130 See Nicolas Bourriaud's introduction to Foucauh's Manet and the Object of Painting, p13.

70

method of writing about art that Diderot's predecessor as a Paris exhibition reporter, La

Font de Saint-Yenne practised. 131 As Fried argues, Diderot's writings not only reflect, but have a tangible effect on the medium he is writing about, and that they are 'central

to the evolution' of painting. "' It is not only an early example of a sustained literary

relationship to art, but as a collaborative body of criticism and aesthetic engagement,

that make Diderot's Salons the establishing artefacts of advanced-art. In setting the

ground for a review of the principles of creative and critical practice that advanced-art

represents, it is in particular the sense that visual art and writing might intervene on

each other's production on a conceptual level that is most significant to this thesis, and

the way in which one medium can be used to extend itself into another. However the

role that Diderot's writing had in influencing the technical practices of the painters

contemporary to it is arguably the less extraordinary element in this relationship. What

is more significant to the narrative of advanced-art is the way in which the Salon texts

were not only required to describe the paintings to the point of representing them, but

that in doing so they expand upon the paintings to the extent that a new, proto- interdisciplinary work is made from their combination.

This synthesis is made most clear in Diderot's texts describing the landscape paintings

shown by Joseph Verret in the Salon of 1767, to the extent that in the course of his

texts he retitles the works. 133 These descriptions allow the reader, through the medium

of Diderot's pen, an aesthetic engagement not only with the work, in the form of a walk

through the painting's imagined three dimensions, but with the very moment at which

the creative and the critical interface. '34

13' Diderot, P )d. 132 Fried, p3. 133 The first six of the seven landscapes become 'sites! - The Abundant Spring becomes First Site, and

so on. The seventh landscape simply becomes Seventh Picture. "' The lyrical element of Diderot's art writing has strong echoes in much of DeLillo's early novel's

picturesque - the memories of place in Amazons, for example, or Americana: "I can remember that night well, a perfect August night with a warm wind raking the tops of the big oaks, with lawn sprinklers hissing and the silver couples standing near the tares, the men in white dinner jackets and their girls in chiffon and silk, each couple sculpted in the dim light, almost motionless, and the distances between them absolutely right so that the whole scene obeyed an abstract calculus of perspective and tone, as if arranged for the whim of a camera... Once again, as on so many occasions in my life, I was stirred by the power of the image. ' (Americana, page 30).

71

In Fried's words, Vemet's landscapes are some of the few canvases in the Salons that

pass the'almost behaviouristic test' set by Diderot's aesthetics, to'attract, surprise and

stop the beholder'. 135 In doing so they allow Diderot almost to sublimate this ideal into

fiction, to bring not only the material painting into writing, but also its effect on the

viewer. The painting as an artwork taking hold in the mind of the critic, as well as a

remote object, is captured in prose; he fictionalises the moment of their being seen. This fictionalisation of the critical experience becomes a kind of writing performance

that collects the paintings as one. '36

Diderot departs almost entirely from description of the painting itself, and instead

makes an excursion not only 'into' the paintings, but also away from the act of viewing

and writing about them. This disjunction is made apparent in the text that introduces the

sequence of Vernet's'sites', which presents the illusion of Diderot's act of writing as a

digression from the practical business of reporting on the Salon:

'I'd inscribed this artist's name at the head of my page and was about to review his

works with you, when I left for a country close to the sea and celebrated for the beauty

of its sites. ' He continues: My companion for these walks was thoroughly familiar with

the lie of the land, and knew the best time to take in each rustic scene... We were off,

and we chatted as we walked. I was moving along with my head lowered, as is my

custom, when I felt my movement suddenly checked and confronted with the following

''37 site...

Quite apart from Diderot's blending of more than one form of writing (criticism,

fiction, and something approximating fictional travel-writing), these passages hint at

the advanced-artwork in the manner in which they un-fix the painting from its role as a

simple work of representation. In Diderot's texts the paintings take on the role of a

135 Fried, p92. 136 Indeed, the text was known independently from the Salons as the Promenade Vernet, as'Vernet's

Walk' See Kate E. T unstall, Diderot's Promenade Verret, or the Salon as Landscape Garden'. 131 Diderot, p86.87.

72

more fluid frame, a fulcrum around which artist, critic and viewer revolve. Rather than

becoming secondary literature to the painting, Diderot's text is reciprocal to it, and in

the painting's very singularity, and to a large degree due to its success as a painting, it

becomes part of a larger work. This is in keeping with the qualified modernism that

emerges throughout this thesis, in that the 'voice' of the painting is strong enough to

emerge, even in the dialect of writing, and even when the edges of the work become

blurred and porous; a space in which the reader sees his narrator become not only a

viewer but an actor in the extended space of the artwork. This extended space is the

new text that has resulted from another, the result of Diderot's dialogue with 'other'

work. Diderot has circumscribed the painting of Vernet, fulfilled or completed it

through critique in the manner that Blanchot implies, yet this his circumscription is not

total - it has gaps, 'leaks' of meaning. In presenting the painting as a digression from

the act of writing about it, he builds an insecurity into the composite work.

The insecurity that he uses to circumscribe the painting is later dealt with in more

theoretical terms in the same text. After the extended series of 'excursions' into Vernet's

paintings, Diderot begins to form more abstract speculations on the nature of beauty

and of language, and the veracity of the latter when describing the former. 138 He goes

on to defend, however, the success of Vernet's paintings in depicting the scenes, the

'sites' of the paintings, that they are a good representation of their subject. 139 This

evaluation is the basic professional objective of Diderot's reports, but by framing this

praise through writing that has already called into question the nature of its own critical

representation, he encourages the tendency of a composite work (with a creative and

critical aspect intermingled) to be porous, to become a qualified circumscription. He

says of the paintings:

133 These speculations suggest the trai ibnIDatlon he arlwoli undergoes in its critical clanumsipfiIon

and re-co ntextualisation, that 'the number of words is limited, while that of accents is infinite', that something new will be produced in each citation of a work See Diderot, p117.

'39 This praise is given in despite of the fact that \brnet painted his landscapes out of pictorial motifs, rather than as observations made in the field.

73

"... the resulting effect is achieved discreetly. There is incident, but no more than the

compass and moment of the composition require... truth is everywhere; one feels this,

reproaching and missing nothing; everything is equally pleasurable. "140

It is, then, the balance of Vernet's composition that most impresses Diderot, and

prompts him to go to extraordinary descriptive lengths to acknowledge this. But his

acknowledgement is also an echo of that which he admires in the painting, an

enactment of his conviction in the images. The event of the painting functioning so well

on its own terms is the cause of Diderot's extended expansion of it. This, I would argue,

also extends the sense of balance he so admires, as the painting becomes part of the

architecture of a composite work; of writings that are now better remembered that the

paintings upon which they are based, and upon which they rely. His writing in turn

strikes a'balance', between a representation of aesthetic conviction and one of narrative

unreliability and illusion. He ends his account on an abstract note, with images that will be seen echoed in the actualism, the world-view of later advanced-art, especially that of Christopher Williams:

Magnificence is beautiful only in disorder. Pile up many precious vases; envelop these

piled-up, overturned vases in precious fabric, and the artist will see only a beautiful

grouping, beautiful forms. ""

This idea is one of the ways in which Diderot sounds a pre-echo of not only a

postmodern way of thinking about images, that everything becomes equal in depiction,

but also of the work that follows the post-modern, and which this thesis traces into the

writings of DeLillo. The 'disorder' that Diderot imagines returns strikingly in the ideas

central to Nicolas Bourriaud's Alter Modern exhibition concept, for example. In

describing the idea of the alter-modern Bourriaud uses the image of the archipelago to

describe visual culture after the postmodern. The alter-modern artist, according to

Bourriaud, makes work that provides an image of this archipelago, and unites it as a 10 Diderot, p119. 141 lbid, p127.

74

group of fragments that are separate or separated, but nonetheless grouped together.

This grouping is facilitated by the way in which the work foregrounds the connections between its constituent parts, in spite of any harmony in this grouping rather than

because of it. For Bourriaud, this sense of connectedness is the result of an aesthetic

response to a globalised visual culture, and is therefore sociological or historical. He

uses the work of Walead Beshty, cited earlier in this chapter, as an example of this.

Despite the significance of this aspect of contemporary culture in prompting more

recent advanced-artworks (such as Williams' For Example project, which will be

addressed in detail later) the connectedness of the advanced-art presented in this

chapter differs to that cited by Bourriaud. It is more preoccupied with form, and identifies gaps and spaces between highly developed aesthetic elements. This is the

porous modernism of the composite work that results from Diderot's heightened

composite of painting and writing: worked into the space between the site of Diderot's

writing (his desk, at which he is'about to review' the paintings), and theSites' of Vernet's paintings.

In the context of this thesis, where art and writing become intimately collaborative -

writing as the circumscriber rather than describer of art - Diderot leads us to engage

aesthetically in the process which Fried uses as the critical strategy of his Absorption

and Theatricality. Fried writes that his study is'a double process of interpretation by

virtue of which paintings and critical texts are made to illuminate each other, to

establish and refine each other's meanings'. 142 Whilst for Fried this describes a strategy for historical work, it is striking that Diderot's inauguration of modem art-criticism

makes such a process an aesthetic act, a circumscription rather than a de-scription. '43

This correlates the 'advanced' quality in Diderofs art writings to the fundamental idea

of pictorial modernity present in Fried's study, namely the adjustment that art of this

142 Fried, p3. 141 Anotl r'scriptive' term that might apply here is Jean-Luc Nancy's'exscription': that writing

'exscibes' the sense of that which it signifies. Diderot's simulation of the 'seeing' of'*rnet's work rather than describing the work itself evokes this teen - what lan James calls in Nancy's writing the 'passage to the limit of thought or signification'. See James, The Fragments y Demand, p204.

75

time made to the relationship between artwork and viewer. Whilst Fried is preoccupied

with this relationship for the most part in terms of the ways in which the painting 'faces'

its beholder, I would argue that it is when the Salon texts are taken together as a larger

work, as a form of 'written-painting, spacialized by fiction, a more advanced practice is

realized. «Along with their attendant aesthetic and critical speculations, the composite

nature of Diderot's texts prefigures the highly plural works-within-works that

Christopher Williams goes on to produce.

Diderot offers a new, porous 'modern' condition of viewing, that thanks to the

intervention of writing I would argue prefigures even the pictorial modernism that

comes to fruition in the later work of Edouard Manet. If, as Foucault tells us, the object

of painting had until Manet been to'forget' the materiality of the artwork, to'make the

viewer forget, to try to mask and sidestep the fact that painting was put down or inscribed on a certain fragment of space, then Diderot's writing can be seen as another,

earlier way of ending this forgetting, and of bringing the painting into space. 'as

Whereas Manet, according to Foucault, 'reinvents (or perhaps he invents) the picture-

object' by directing the viewers gaze onto its artificiality, Diderot's writing identifies the

'fragment of space' in painting by entering into it, and by showing it to be porous. 146

This porosity comes about through a conceptual approach to the object of the painting,

through the space identified when the painting's artificiality is exposed by his knowing

pretence of writing about its depicted space literally, as if it were a'site' around which he could walk, with the artist as his guide. His writing encloses and extends the picture-

object, and his circumscription produces another work, another site. If, as Nicolas

Bourriaud states in his introduction to Manet and the Object of Painting, Manet's'first

audacity' consisted of'making a witness out of the viewer', then Diderot's art writing

already includes this moment of audacity. The painting has already been witnessed, and

Diderot's text places the reader one step further from it; at the testimony of this

'µ The issue of 'facing', as Fried explains in the introduction to Manet's Modernism or the Face of Painting in the 1860's, is central to his nuanced critique of modernism's 'prehistory', as much as the 'flatness' that is central to G eenberg's notions of modium-specificity. (See p. 15-17 of that book for his overview of these concerns).

'+S Foucault, Manet and the Object ofPalntin& p29. "* Foucault, Manet and the Object of Painting, p31.

76

witnessing. "'

The adjustment that Diderot makes to the relationship between artwork and beholder as

regards advanced-art is to allow the mediation of the artwork, indeed of cultural information in general, to appear to be a practice in its own right, as a way of showing

more than the painting even as he conceals it. In doing so his work produces new,

reciprocal space in both the page and the painting. The armature of the larger work that

is shared by these spaces is identified by the gap between the visual and writing, as

Diderot's text insists that we are not reading about a painting but a place, a'site', but

also that we are not even reading his description of a painting. Instead he presents us

with what he is writing in place of this description, his digression. This mediation, and

the space created between the mediator and the mediated, is the common element, both

practically and thematically, in all the work which is collected together here under the

banner of advanced-art. In this early example, however, it is in the tension between his

writing and Vernet's painting that Diderot makes the porosity of the advanced-artwork

visible in protean form.

147 See Foucault, Manet and the Object of Painting, p15.

77

3. Christopher Williams

The practical and theoretical concerns of Crow's criticism reach a point of convergence in his analysis of the work of Christopher Williams, where the qualities of advanced-art

that are anticipated in the pre-modem writings of Diderot are both mirrored and

adapted to a more recent, post-modern context. Of all the aspects of advanced-art that Modern Art in the Common Culture explores, the two that provide a common thread to

this thesis are the engagement by a given artwork with 'other' work, and the relationship between creative and critical thought. Williams' approach to the first of these will be

dealt with on two fronts: firstly, the use of common vernacular visual works (institutional and press photography) in his earlier work, and latterly the use of fine art

as a vernacular much closer in historical context to his own. In regards to the

deployment of critical thought, Crow identifies a historical imperative in Williams'

work, and the way in which his quotation of visual culture is critical and historical,

even as it takes place in a highly refined aesthetic form. This aesthetic, like Diderot's

and DeLillo's, produces porous artworks that are vividly realised even as their gaps and

spaces reveal discrepancies in which an art-historical critique takes place. As Crow

describes when addressing his own art-historical project more generally, the theoretical

study of advanced-art is fundamentally concerned with seeking such work:

"The proposal [of Crow's survey of criticism, The Intelligence of Art] is that latent in

the best examples of art-historical practice are overlooked guides to a way forward. It

asks whether there can be objects of of study for the art-historian - individual

monuments or circumscribed clusters of works - where the violent acts of displacement

and substitution entailed in making any object intelligible are already on display in the

art. " gas

The'displacement and substitution' that Crow is referring to here are the moments

where an artwork becomes something other than visual when it is placed in critique;

that it incites critical thought by displaying its own. The criterion that advanced-

148 Clew, The Intelligence ofArt, p5.

78

artworks necessarily have such circumscriptive traits within them is key to my

employment of his critique, not least for the way in which it matches Boxall's reading

of the artworks deployed in DeLillo's fiction. Christopher Williams' work becomes the

logical conclusion to the project of Modern Art in the Common Culture for its emphasis

on this reciprocation; because the displacement that takes place in this kind of criticism (the 'circumscription' of a body of work) is inherent to Williams' artworks. His practice is one of considered representation rather than production as such - the'acts of displacement in his work, rather than its images per se, form his production. This is

consistent in his use of found imagery, original photography, the conceptual artworks of

others, or his employment of non-'art' photographers to act as collaborators, and equally

consistent is his use of these fields of practice as'common cultures' as well as

producers of individual works or images.

This representational engagement is especially concerned with image making,

specifically photography and its technical and artistic traits. However, if photography is

the physical medium most central to Williams' practice, his carefully constructed

exhibitions (which are, in effect, 'works' that comprise mainly photographs) also

manifest in a variety of other means of display: sculpture, configurations of gallery

space, curated film screenings, and, connecting these elements, expansive, paragraph- length titles. The emphasis that Williams places on the institutional framing devices

that surround the visual is a key indicator of the'discursive practice that his work

embarks upon, the'wielding of frames' that allow his works to have an art-historical

text that circumscribes other work.

These long titles contain apparently exhaustive lists of the physical elements of either

an installation or the situation in which a given photograph was taken, and in their

extreme factualness can seem almost to undermine or resist the suggestive and

sometimes emotive content of the images and objects on display. This can be seen, for

example, in the full title for the Bouquet, For Bas Jan Ader and Christopher

D'Arcangelo work, which I will talk about in more detail in the following section,

Written and Unwritten Histories of Are:

79

'Bouquet, for Bas Jan Ader and Christopher D'Arcangelo, 16 "x 20 " (print), 120 "x

180 "x4 3/4 " (wall), archival corrugated board, archival photo corners, compound, 4-

ply conservamat, 8-ply conservamat, dry wall, dye transfer print, glass, lacquer-based

finish, linen tape, nails, Northern maple, plastic set back strips, primer, screws,

seaming tape, paint and wood, 1991149

The dichotomy between this exhaustive, mundane list of photographs and their gallery

furniture and fittings on the one hand, and the poetic and art-historical work that they

describe on the other, is indicative of the way in which Williams' advanced-artworks

are constructed. He presents a mass of detail, in part cultural (the reference to two

disappeared artists, Ader and D'Arcangelo), but also descriptive of the politics and

technical conventions of exhibition displays. It is unclear in the items listed where any

hierarchy of information is applied, which is a central theme of his practice. Every part

of the work is in play, is part of his critique, from the historical contexts of the works

and images he employs, to the materials used in their installation. This reflects the way

in which what at first view would seem to be the central artefacts on display, in this

work the photographs, are unfixed from their conventional status, and become part of

larger work, leaving what Colin Gardner has described as'a series of classifications that

act as floating signifiers'. 150

Williams' use of these 'floating signifiers' as his unifying medium, belied by the

deceptive list of secondary component materials that his titles might indicate, is his

refinement of the practice of advanced-art as essayed by earlier practitioners. In his

work the dialogue between art and the common culture, according to Crow, is brought

in some way full circle, not only because at times the very culture that Williams

engages with is art itself, but also in the manner in which his work fulfils many of the

ideals that Crow posits for art-criticism. The inherent synthesis of practice and critical

or historical thought in William's work also represents a model by which the contact

149 Description of the installation of this work at the Galerie Max Hetzler, Kola, February to Match 1991.

110 Catdneri 'Christopher Williams and the Loss of History', p70.

80

between art and fiction considered elsewhere in this thesis might be understood, and as

such it is his advanced-art that represents the sharpest critical instrument amongst those

provided by Crow's writing.

In the Natural History section of Modern Art in The Common Culture Crow addresses Williams' use of vernacular information and cultural dialects in the making of his work. The works discussed include Source: The Photographic Archive (a work which makes

use of the archives of the Kennedy Presidential Library), in which Williams uniformly

rephotographs and displays together four photographs taken of John F. Kennedy on a

certain day in 1963, and selected on the condition that the subject has his back turned in

each of them; and the Angola to Vietnam project, in which he again uses photography

to reclassify the visual manifestation of an archive. In this case he selects from a group

of glass botanical models those that represent the flowers of countries who appear in an

Amnesty international list of states who practice the political disappearance of their

citizens. "'

These works function on several visual and institutional levels, but the rationale of

advanced-art is most clearly seen in their combination of the creative - their use of the

visual, and attention to the material aspect of photography - and the critical - the

application of historical thought onto their medium, and to the politics of exhibition and

the collection of visual artefacts. In the Source piece, Williams uses pre-existing

photography, but poetically recontextualises the imagery. With the subject's back turned

to the camera, the work becomes a record of a kind of previewed absence: his

application of potentially arbitrary criteria onto a vernacular archive produces a historical or biographical text, in which the viewer is promted to gaze through the

frame of another work. The Source project will be considered in its 'local' as well as

formal meanings in the following chapter, in which Don DeLillo's own reflection on a

'literary' archive of Kennedy's disappearance will be considered, the FBI's Warren

Report, in the novel Libra. Crow uses the term 'local' to differentiate between the

'pastoral detour' of Williams' excursion into a political or botanical archive, as opposed

`s' See Craw, p259-260 for the full, and again ph-length ticks of these works.

81

to the formal, more traditionally art-historical aims of his works that engage with his

own discipline's vernacular (see the following section). Whilst the latter are perhaps

more truly 'local' to Williams, Crow's use of the term is coloured by the political

component of his study, that of art's accessibility to a'lay audience'. 152

Angola to Vietnam similarly authors a monument to an absence: in this work Williams

photographs examples of the Harvard University Museum of Natural History collection

of glass botanical models; a seemingly fixed and secure form of institutional

representation. Yet by selecting items of the collection that record the flowers of

countries who engage in the disappearance of its citizens, the apparent political

neutrality of the objects themselves is called into question. Once again, the source

material of the work is not a representation as such, but the frame of a larger work, a

critique whose thesis is historical and political, but consolidated into the visual. The

layers of remove that this system require are emphasised in the method by which the

work was produced. Williams engaged the services of the archive's own photographer,

but specified that the images should be made in black and white (what Crow calls a

form of'chilling abstraction', again indicating the combination of the emotive and the

formal) rather than the colour imagery conventionally used by the museum. 153 The

dispassionate photographic voice, as it were, of the institutional photographer is

ventriloquised, but channelled into critical thought through the conceptual criteria

imposed by Williams. He articulates with this method a series of works-within-works:

the images themselves appear through the filter of a political purview imposed from

without, through a vernacular photographic form, through the craftsmanship of the

glass flowers, and in turn through the practice of museum collecting.

In addressing these works Crow reiterates the plurality of practices that comprise that

of advanced-art, that 'every artist who finds a pressing need for the already handled,

already transformed expressions of vernacular culture admits to his or her project a

132 See Crow, p216. 153 See Crow, p201.

82

multitude of anonymous collaborators. 154 These'anonymous collaborators' emerge as

voices in the work, as participants in a democratized critique in which the institutions

that comprise both the works' subject matter and place of display play equal part. A key

thread that runs through Williams' work is what Crow calls the'recognition of meaning

on the level of historical folk memory': that his works and the historical or critical

thought within them are immanent in the culture from which they issue, and that they

are circumscribed by the frame of the artwork. 155 Likewise, to cite an author whom I

will use to discuss the literary application of such methods in Chapter 4, David Foster

Wallace is alerted to a literary form of this'historical folk memory' present in DeLillo's

Libra, what he calls the'mediated myths' with which DeLillo works. 156

Williams' work, in addition to its political layers, is also doubly mediated, in the sense

that it forms a subjective or sometimes arbitrary selection of materials derived from an institution that has itself in turn collected the arbitrary or the subjective. Whilst in the

examples of Source and Angola to Vietnam the myths or narratives that the works

mediate are political and historical, the relationship that Williams' work has to critical

thought becomes even closer when he takes on the myths of his own discipline, and

conducts art-history in the midst of art practice. The work described in the following

section operates in such a locality, and forms the resolution of Crow's notion of

advanced-art, showing Williams' practice to be the producer of comparable archival

porosity even when the fit between the subject and object of the critique is closer than

that between high art and 'common cultures' somewhat distant from the fine arts.

154 Cmw, p211. 'n Crow, p198. "6 Burn, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest A Reader's Guide, p14.

83

4. Written and Unwritten Histories of Art

In the works by Christopher Williams discussed above, his manipulation of myths and histories is achieved through means that, according to Crow, already formally refer to

the period of art that his more art-historical works will explore: the conceptual art of

the 1960s, with which Williams shares the'mimicry of bureaucratic information and

classification'. 157 Applied to historical and political material, the vernacular culture that

Crow terms'local meanings', this method is decontextualised, and used as an

alternative historical method distinct from, say, biography (in terms of Kennedy), or journalism (in terms of reporting on the practice of governments). 158 In his works that

use conceptual art itself as their subject matter, however, Williams recontextualises the

process, applies it to itself. The Bouquet project, which I have already introduced,

makes'floating signifiers' out of not only conceptual art, but its physical and historical

settings. Timothy Martin, in the 1997'draff of an ongoing essay on Williams, traces the ideas that circulate between his works. 159 He describes the assembly of elements that

make up the Bouquet piece as follows: 'The sculpture edition consists of a nondescript, freestanding, white wall supporting a single, framed, photographic still life of cut flowers arranged prone on a tablecloth, the whole (wall-photograph-title) constituting

the "bouquet" of Williams' title. i160

Both physical elements of this expanded 'bouquet' of conceptual elements make direct

reference to works by the titular artists: the bouquet of flowers to Adei's video work of

1974, Primary Time, in which he is shown arranging a group of flowers, and the wall to

D'Arcangelo's site-specific projects in which a record of the labour and materials used

to build supports in the gallery space was presented as the work. 161 In addition to this, 157 Crow, p216. us Ibid.

Martin's essay 'Undressing the Institutional Wound' has appeared, like the exhibition it describes, in a series of versions. The term'draft' is used by Williams to title the iterations of this exhibition, which is described in the following section 'For Example: Die Welt ist Schön (Final Draft)'.

160 Martin, Undressing the Institutional Wouid, p15. 161 Whilst in Ader's video the flowers he arranges are primary coloured, the flowers in the Bouquet

photograph derive their colours from a previous Williams work, Brasil, which in tam derived from the Angola to Vietnam project; indicative of the restless connectedness that Williams' work has to

84

Williams' Bouquet exists as a kind of memorial to Ader and D'Arcangelo, both of

whom died at a young age (Ader, famously, was lost at sea whilst engaged in part of a long performance work, In Search of the Miraculous, whilst D'Arcangelo committed

suicide). In light of this the ceremonial use of flowers as the installation's visual

centrepiece combines and re-contextualises references to both artists in order to signify

a double disappearance; of two individuals, but also of a generation of conceptual art (Ader and D'Arcangelo were both practising in the mid-1970's). As Martin's essay goes

on to say, Williams' work therefore takes on a historical function, that it'recapitulates

the dual nature of archives, which are both monuments of history and closed tombs'. He

goes on to say that such work produces a'phantom archive, collecting the absences as

well as the presences. 162 The advanced-artwork, as seen here, uses its own discipline as

a common culture with which to engage, and so connects with other work in self-

critical, historicizing and, in this case, elegantly memorial, ways. '63

The complex structure of presences and absences in this work is demonstrative of what

the title of chapter in Modern Art In The Common Culture that addresses these works

describe Williams as practising: Unwritten Histories Of Conceptual Art'. It is perhaps

appropriate to the subject matter of this history, conceptual art, that its narrative is in

some way unfixed, unwritten. The hermetic systems of a conceptual artwork would

seem resistant to the loaded artefacts and weight of sentiment often present in Williams'

work, yet the careful reading it makes of its own cultural archive makes this history not

only viable, according to Crow, but achieved through practical means that reflect and

extend its methods. As Crow writes, 'his enterprise (is) on an equal footing with the

written histories of the phenomenon', but achieves this through systems of framing

rather than description. ' In many respects, according to Crow, Williams' practice is the

polar opposite to the model of a conceptual work, in that it seeks almost to connect

itself as well as to 'other' works. 162 Martin, p16. 163 In yet another example of of such connectedness, Williams has more recently shown alongside the

Dutch artist Willem De Roog, who in his collaborative practice with Jeroem De Rijke also used the motif of a bouquet of flowers. De Rijke too died at a young age, and Williams and De Rooij's collaborative works combine their the use of bouquets, and of systems of gallery walls. See their interview ('As We Speak', Frieze, online).

161 Crow, p216.

85

itself to the culture it is produced in by concentric circles of reference, and doesn't seek

to reduce itself to conceptual structures alone. It is the very use of subject matter and

narrative however, that which is lacking in the stereotypical aims of conceptual art; 165

that Williams revitalises through an engagement with vernacular material - finding that

'even if conceptual art rarely found its subject matter, it possessed the keys to new

modes of figuration, to a truth telling warrant pressed in opposition (to abstraction and 'high' modernism)'. ' It is this expansiveness, a willingness to place in dialogue the

apparently resistant systems of conceptualism and unsystematic narratives, that allows Williams' work to meet the challenge of historicizing somewhat insular conceptual

works even as it remakes them, a process Crow describes as 'recovering the living

potential of Conceptualism'. 167 In its use of conceptual art's disappeared practitioners Bouquet engages with and recovers their work in terms of both the negation and

accommodation that form the poles of advanced-art practice: he records the

disappearance of a certain practice even as it re-emerges in his own.

The kind of discursive practice that Williams engages in, then, is one where many kinds

of texts - both the vernacular of institutional visual culture as well as those of his own discipline - can be used in the formation of a new one, and in which a critical stance

can be taken even when a seemingly ill-fitting sentimental veneer is applied to the

material it critiques. As Crow states, 'Bouquet is an example of a work of art that

demands further work not only from the professional historian of art but also from the

historian inside every serious viewer' - the viewer is implicated in the work's

circumscription of other work. 168 In reaching this conclusion Crow's critical narrative

draws to its conclusion: by making a critique of work that is to a highly refined degree

self-critical, and which prompts critical thought on the part of the viewer. In another

sense, though, it is also returned to its very beginning, to the thought of the

Enlightenment academie that sets the critical context to his work on the art of 18'

165

166

167 l6B

What Crow typifies by Jeff Wall's notion that 'conceptual art could undertake no subject matter in good faith' (Crow, p217). lbid, p217. lbid, p226. lbid, p227.

86

century France, which according to Crow, 'for better or worse, established fine arts as a learned, self-conscious activity in Western culture'. 1 This application of the learnedness that would lead to formal modernism, when combined with a capacity for

incorporating vernacular dialects, is, for Crow, is the critical faculty that marks out the

advanced-artist.

Williams' practice is resolutely contemporary, yet answers these earlier demands of art- history. This is ultimately what is meant by Crow's reminder of Greenberg's demand

that an art that: 'comes closest to non-fiction, has least to do with illusions, and at the

same time maintains and asserts itself exclusively as art'. 10 Williams' work, standing for the model of advanced-art, answers both demands: it asserts itself as critical

practice, 'learned and self-conscious', yet does so through practical means,

rehabilitating visual vernacular into art-historical theses. The porous, partial critique

that such work produces reflects a continuation of a strand of modernity that Diderot

perhaps chances upon in his writings on art: that works which record the engagement between creative practices create a circumscriptive text that synthesises its varied

elements into a critical voice. In this guise, the advanced-artwork demonstrates a way

of reading artworks as well as making them, and, for Crow, the productive nature of

this relationship is its elegantly refined in the work of Williams.

169 Crow, p214. 110 See Crow, p. 210.

87

5. For Example: Die Welt ist Schön (final draft)

Following the work that concludes Modern Art in the Common Culture Williams'

practice has expanded upon these themes. In his For Example series of exhibitions (proposed, as it were, as a changing series of attempts at the same thesis in various

galleries between 1993 and 1997) Williams refines the concerns that emerge through

the art-historical works described above. "' This work (the exhibition concept serves as

the work in this case; as a single piece of historical art made up of a changing group of Williams photographs) can be seen as both a footnote and the logical conclusion to the

extrapolation of Williams' ideas, and their fulfilment of the advanced-art project that

Thomas Crow describes. Timothy Martin, in his essay Undressing the Institutional

Wound for the 1997 catalogue of the For Example project succinctly describes the

practical implication of the broadening concerns of Williams' more recent work:

'There has been a gradual but distinct shift in Christopher Williams' practice over the

past decade. He has moved from the appropriation and/or rephotography of images

culled from institutional collections, to, most recently, original photographs with no

objective trace to an institutional source. This shift in orientation, rather than belying

Williams's long-standing fascination and discourse with archiving institutions - i. e.,

their histories and ideologies, their formal conceits and exuberances - has expanded

and complicated it. ""

The practical shift that Martin describes takes the form of almost bafflingly broad

group of images, which reflect both the art-historical and more popular vernacular

strands of Williams' previous subject matter. For Example takes the form of a critical

remake, or more precisely critical revision of the work that gives it its full title, Albert

Renger-Patzsch's 1928 book of photographs Die Welt ist Schön -'The World Is

171 For Example: Die Welt Ist Schön appeared as a Thst draft) in Munich in 1993, as 'revisions' 1$ in various spaces through to 1996, and as a 'final draft' in 1997 in Rotterdam and at the Kunsthalle Basel. This later iteration of the project, and its catalogue, serve as the primary text for this section. The series of revisions has continued with the title For Example: Dix Huits Legons Sur La Societe Industrielle.

172 Martin, p15.

88

Beautiful'. This book was a kind of catalogue of'things', a quasi-encyclopaedic set of

photographs depicting plants, animals, man-made objects, landscapes, architecture, and images of industry, presented in a uniform manner as if to illustrate a global continuity

of form throughout its subject matter. This presentation has an evident visual similarity

to Williams' practice, although its radical, modern appearance in the 1920s stands in

contrast to the discretion that marks out Williams' work in the contemporary moment. As Martin points out, Die Welt ist Schön's apparent attempt at objectivity was

controversial for various reasons at its publication, yet Williams' prefix 'for example,

and the nature of the'world-view' in his semi-ironic reprisal of Renger-Patzsch's work,

contests these concerns on a number of new levels. In the light of the broader themes of

my thesis, this contest can be read as being enacted on the ground of modernism, in the

assessment that the work makes of the medium of photography, but also as a critique of

postmodernity, of the remnants of such an encyclopaedic attempt at art-making and the

subject matter it gathers. Williams' broad circumscription of this older work (and its

historical problems) is also a precursor to the historicising creative practice I will

address DeLillo's engagement with in the production of his novel Libra, in the

following two chapters, and in the methodology of the visual work that follows them.

The Renger-Patzch original was an attempt at a de-personalised, de-classifying

photographic study: a list of disparate 'things', as the title he intended to use indicates

(Die Dinge). His editor, however, intervened on this attempted photographic

modernism by giving it the title Die Welt Ist Schön, implying a somewhat romantic,

classical value judgement in the criteria by which the photographs were assembled. However true it may be that the aesthetic reason for this assembly is reflected in the

new title (the photographs were indeed produced using subjective criteria), the title's

imposition brought its aesthetic into political controversy, making it, as Martin

describes, a'lighting rod for harsh criticism from the left' and an example of

conservative naivety and idealism. ' It is in the midst of such critical confusion and

ambiguity that Christopher Williams resuscitates the problematics the work has

acquired, and imports them into a cultural climate that rejects even more than

173 Mattin, p33

89

modernising 1920s Germany the statement'the world is beautiful'. Not only is the

world of Williams' For Example photographs not 'beautiful', but the complex

superimpositions of the built environment that the new set of photographs record make

an attempt to'list' this subject matter even more futile.

In response to Renger-Patzch Williams assembles his own collection of images of 'things'; commercial products, industrial activities, and even elements of the natural

world (although in these pictures nature has been subject to modernisation, in the forms

of building sites, dams, and like in Angola to Vietnam the scientific collection and

representation of the natural). The world that is presented here is no longer

systematized, even by the superficial formal unity employed by Renger-Patzch. Instead,

the images both individually and in their totality form a post-modern worldview, where

everything is plural, depersonalised and built upon. This post-modernity would seem to

indicate what Frederic Jameson calls the 'moment of late, consumer or multinational

capitalism', which, like the already-interpretive advanced-artwork, prompts work

whose 'formal features in many ways express the deeper logic of that particular social

system 1.174 However, a kind of re-phrased photographic modernism is applied by

Williams to this world, with the apparent intention of exposing the lack of'fif between

Renger-Patzch's methods and the subject matter he uses. The colonial and industrial

remnants that frame this critical disjunction also share the muted, mediated tragedy of Williams' earlier work. As in Bouquet, or in the poetic drama of an assassinated

president's turning away from the camera, the subjects of Die Welt ist Schön reflect the

importance of the gaps and spaces between the elements of Williams' practice.

The pair of photographs that provide the cover for the catalogue demonstrate these

disjunctions. In both images, shot in stark black and white, the scene (a printing press in Dakar, Senegal) is the same, although the first would appear to be a group portrait of four of the printers, casually posed against a press, looking just to the right of the

174 Jameson, Toshnodermsm and Consumer Society', inModernisn Posbnodenusm, p179.

90

camera. 15 In the second the group are absent revealing a plaque on side of the press indicating its German manufacture, another globalised layer to the colonial line of

thought that runs through For Example, and which is made plain by the image of a 'western' place of work (if described by its machinery) with and without its local

employees.

The irony present in Williams iteration of Die Welt Ist Schön is double-edged. In

challenging the attempt at classification made by Renger-Patzsch it makes clear the fact

that the world can no longer be separated into 'things' if each such thing has also become a cultural context, a representative of cultural and political forces. And yet, for

this very reason a single object is perhaps more able than in the 1920s to speak of'the

world' as much as of itself. The printing press photographed in Dakar, in its guise a

piece of German machinery, might in fact have been a viable subject matter for Renger-

Patzch or for the New Objectivity movement in German photography in general.

Williams' work recognizes that a physical object such as this can no longer be simply

the object of photography, but that it inevitably becomes the frame of wider discourse.

As Martin states, 'Williams is citing Renger-Patzsch's book not as a source but as an

example of a photographic milieu', and in so doing makes an art-historical critique

through a visual one: that a historical moment in art can, rather than being simply cited, be mechanised to produce a contemporary correspondent. 16 In turn, this process

produces a space between the two, where the ventriloquised gaze of modernist

photography no longer meets its object.

The critical gap between these elements of the work strengthen the case for describing

Williams' work as an act of porous modernism: the work is energised by the

discrepancies it identifies, both between itself and the original it circumscribes, but also

between the dissonant contexts of its visual content. In this 'beautiful' world the

"S This off-target gaze is a recurring trope in Williams' photographs, and often a disjunction resulting from his photograph being taken alongside that of another photographer's. Martin alerts the reader to the high art/vernacular disjunction that this in tam creates, quoting Crow: 'join(ing) the the most sophisticated theoretical positions to the %vrong' kinds of looking'. See Martin, p62.

176 Martin, p37.

91

advanced-artist finds culture at large as the'other' work with which to engage, allowing

the globalised world and the advanced-artwork to express each other's 'deeper logic', as Jameson suggests that the artistic products of the postmodern world will.

As Martin illustrates, Williams enters this discourse not only through an updating of the

photographic constituent of Die Welt Ist Schön, but through a re-telling of the critical

problems imposed on the book by its title. Citing the famous opposition Walter

Benjamin had for what he saw as the blundering naivety of New Objectivity

photography, and how this critique has 'stuck' to Renger-Patzch's work, Martin

identifies the discrepancy that Die Welt ist Schön and its critical legacy have left, and

the way in which Williams exposes this gap: 'Williams neither appropriates Renger-

Patzch's ouevre nor overtly addresses Benjamin's explicit critique of it. Rather, he

opens a new territory, independent from yet bordering the two'. "'

The For Example project, then, serves as a fitting final example of Williams' exposition

of the advanced-art project, in part because of its lack of finality, for its being an 'example' of the unresolved relationship between the visual frame of the work and both

the culture from which it issues and the culture in which it is received. The advanced-

artwork here becomes a discursive practice in which the visual becomes a means of identifying gaps and fissures in itself, an image of uncertainty that Martin calls the

'coveted break in the archival order', a break that Williams finds in both a photographic

ancestor, and in the archive of a body of subject matter that cannot help but point out its

own uncertainties. ' The following chapter will consider this nuanced notion of the

archive more closely, and the way in which DeLillo's Libra achieves a comparable break in the 'archival order' using literary means.

177 Martin, p37. 178 Martin, p39.

92

6. A Definition of the Advanced-Artwork

The advanced-artworks described here make use of this break in an archival order as both subject matter and practical method. But before applying terms such as these to

the writings of DeLillo, it is worth concluding this review of advanced-art by

reiterating my conception of its formal aspects in slightly broader critical terms. The

aesthetic means of making 'breaks' in visual image in the contemporary moment, despite the critical and historical sophistication that Williams' work demonstrates, is an

echo of the 18' century modernism that begins the history of advanced-art. What

Michael Fried calls the establishment of the'ontological basis of modern are, the way

that the modernist painting'faces' its viewer and becomes an autonomous work and an interpretive frame that refers to the medium, is refined by Williams into a conception of

the artwork in which it becomes the frame of a wider cultural discourse. " This space,

though, is one that has to a large extent been opened by the intervention that Diderofs

writing makes on the visual image.

Fried, in regard to the formalist development of modern art, refers to its'anti-

theatricality', its ability to treat the beholder'as if he were not there. 180 In the book that

this comment introduces, he goes on to extrapolate the changing relationship of the

viewer to the artwork in the process of art becoming modem. However what sets the

advanced-artwork, and the composite form of work I have termed'porous modernism',

apart from this narrative is the emphasis it places on its own internal connections and

gaps: its'modemism', in terms of formal self-consciousness, is present in the

accommodating, critical way the fibres of the work suspend its constituent parts in

discourse. As Crow describes in Modem Art in the Common Culture, Fried's critique describes work that is, predominantly, 'seen' by the viewer: 'a denial of contingency and

temporality in the viewer's experience!. "' As he goes on to say, the conceptual work

that becomes 'high are in the post-Duchamp era replaces this experience with a more

Fried, p61. ieu Fried, p5. 'g' Crow, p183.

93

critical one, that it has produced 'another kind of academy'. 182 The critical model that

this implies is, for Crow, extended by Williams' application of such discourse to

material that is vernacular in its popular sense: he produces formal work that engages in

discourse with the informal. In addressing Greenberg's idea of 'art that comes closest to

non-fiction', Crow states: 'That Williams has fulfilled the terms of that demanding

dictum (in ways that Greenberg himself would never have imagined) comes in no small

part from his detour through the pastoral'. 183

This idea of the detour' is key to the formal arrangement of the advanced-artwork. In

terms of 'absorption and theatricality', in the way the work addresses or'faces' its

viewer, it can be said that in its very porousness the advanced-artwork 'faces' both

towards the viewer and back into a cultural source, the'other work' with which it is in

dialogue. The disparate scenes, visual or critical, that the viewer of the work engages

with are not what has been made, per se, by the advanced-artist, but the passage

between them has. The frame that the work wields is precisely that: a frame delineates

a mid-point between spaces, a border or boundary. Be this 'other work' a seemingly

straightforward, accomplished landscape painting, or, in the case of For Example, a

cultural archive as broad as to be described as'photography and the modern world', the

formal construction of the advanced-artwork remains fairly consistent. As Crow writes

in his introductory essay to the Salon writings, Diderot's art writings show that 'the

disappearance of the physical presence of the work of art was the defining condition of

its modernity, long before photographic reproducibility became an issue'. '" This

disappearance has become more rarified in the work of Christopher Williams (the

disappearance of a strand of conceptual art, or of critical certainties regarding the

medium of photography) but it is still used as a means of reflecting critically on art and

visual culture, and of using their own methods as a way of working the space for these

reflections back into them.

182 Crow, p183. '8 Crow, p201. 184 Tild6wt, p xvn.

94

Vernet's painting The Abundant Spring, becomes in the hands of Diderot a new work, First Site, that is comprised of the painting itself, the text, but also the product of this

dialectic: the text's approach to the painting. The advanced-artwork circumscribes other

work, and produces a structure in which the critical thought that this entails is

discernible in the spaces that a conversation between its less than perfectly fitting

elements produces. In formal terms, the advanced-artwork's engagement with other

work echoes the cultural objective of Bourriaud's'altermodem': work that seeks to

address a contemporary world that resembles that of For Example, and to 'reach the

stage of translation', even when identifying cultural differences. 185 This'translation'

takes the form of artworks that form a system of frames and references, articulated by

critical thought.

The viewer of the advanced-artwork is present at the testimony of this circumscription,

and so in a sense is its reader, becoming subject to the work's interpretation of its

subject matter as well as its presentation (or re-presentation) of it. The 'text' that is read in this process is perhaps what Crow identifies in Diderot as writing that'cannot be

supplemented by illustration'; a critique that has as a part of itself the object of its

writing. ' It is perhaps this outcome of Diderofs writing that permits Crow to assert

that the withdrawal of the physical presence of the artwork is the'defining condition of

modernity', at least of the particular kind of modernity which he sees as being brought

to full fruition in the work of Christopher Williams. '87 This is the modernity that I have

termed porous both as an observation of its production of gaps and spaces, and due to

the necessity of finding a new term to register the disjunction it prompts between the

modern and the postmodern. The extended definition Crow supplies of this condition of

modernity is the means by which I will both analyse and produce new work from the

archival discourse that circulates in and around the writing of DeLillo's Libra, a novel

that like Diderot and Williams combines the creative and the critical; and which

encompasses both writing and reading.

'0 Boutriaud, The Radicant, p28. 196 D1denOt, p xvi. ls7 Diderot, p xvi.

95

The physical artefact, whilst essential as a fulcrum to the advanced-artwork, is indeed

withdrawn in terms of its singular role - instead it becomes the frame for the larger

system. The architecture of this system becomes the medium, and, to take the example

of Vernet, the paint itself no longer has this status, although it remains crucial, as the

emollient that enables the system to function. This is an important material paradox in

the advanced-artwork, and to the porous form of modernism that my thesis uses it as an

example of. the physical medium of the work remains essential whilst as the same time

losing its primacy, and the overall form of the work becomes a negotiation between its

use of content and context, between subject matter and the role this subject matter plays in the work's discourse. The gaps in this negotiation are where its critique is given

space; implied silences in the conversation of the work that are filled by critical

reflection.

96

Chapter 3- Libra as a Work of Porous Modernism

In Chapter 1I argued that the engagement with art in DeLillo's fiction guides his

readers and critics towards a space beyond or between ideas of modernist and post-

modernist writing. I would like to refine this claim by applying the idea of porous

modernism, developed in Chapter 2, to DeLillo's 1988 novel Libra, and showing how it

is a work whose critical voice sits, like the character of the writer and historian Nicolas

Branch in the novel, somewhere between its own text and the historical text it

circumscribes. In Chapter 2I describe porous-modernist works as those which record

an engagement between creative practices, creating a circumscriptive text that begins

its own criticism. The artwork itself, the physical work, is withdrawn in terms of its

singular role, and becomes in such work the frame of a larger system of references and

representations. The disjunction between these elements is what I have explained using

the term porous: that such work relies on creating gaps within itself.

I will argue that Libra can be defined as such a work using these same criteria. Firstly,

that an engagement between practices is recorded in both the contest between historical

and fictional writing in the book, as well as between the disparate motivations of the

various 'author' characters within it. Secondly, that in regards to DeLillo's use of the

CIA's Warren Report (amongst other intertexts) in his research for the novel, Libra is

both circumscriptive and self-critical. It is written in and around the context set by the

Report's prose, and through the figure of Branch offers a literary-critical view of this

text, and a reassessment of the text's genre that exposes DeLillo's strategy for making a historical reading of it. Thirdly, in view of what DeLillo describes as the'complete

book' formed by Librd s drafts and research materials, and the novel's use of quotation

and paraphrase from the Warren Report, Libra (if taken as the 'physical artwork', the

production that DeLillo'exhibits' by means of publication) takes on the role of framing

device, and is indeed withdrawn in its central role. The published novel becomes the

lens by which one reads this expansive 'complete book', comprised of both a multi-

volume draft and the multi-volume body of vernacular language (the Warren Report)

97

that the prose is to a large extent drawn from. This chapter analyses the literary

elements of the novel that prompt my reading of it, and set the ground for the visual

work with which I will respond to the 'complete book' I see it at the centre of. I will begin by setting out in more detail the role the the Warren Report plays in Libra as an intertext that both enters into the text of the novel, and informs DeLillo's critical

perspective on his writing process.

An immediate point of convergence between Libra and the advanced-art described in

the previous chapter can be used to introduce the themes and deployment of this text,

namely the shared subject matter and comparable use of vernacular source material in

the novel and Christopher Williams' Source: The Photographic Archive. '88 Both works

reflect on the absence of Kennedy, and do so using archival sources produced in the

medium native to the artists: just as in Source Williams uses documentary photography, DeLillo uses the Warren Report as'documentary literature' as it were; a mass of

vernacular prose, 'with its twenty-six accompanying volumes of testimony and exhibits, its millions of words' (L 181). In addition to the challenge presented by its size, the

Report exists for DeLillo as writing that not only resembles fiction, but is already

somewhat fictional; a body of immanent fiction that records an event that is too

fractured to be conclusively reassembled by traditional historical writing. As well as finding this reading 'invigorating', and depending on it to 'propel the story' 189 of Libra,

DeLillo has also pointed to the importance of the novelistic tone and language that the

scope of the Warren Report generates alongside its attempted historical theses: 'an

extraordinary window on life in the fifties and sixties and, beyond that... a sense of

people's speech patterns'. 190 Nicolas Branch, the fictional writer whose research frames

the plot of Libra, presents a view of the Warren Report that extends this observation

specifically into DeLillo's literary heritage, describing it as'the megaton novel James

1! B On page 182-183 of Libra Branch, like Williams, studies photographs pertaining to the case, 'suspended outside the particularized gist of this or that era, arguing nothing, clarifying nothing'. In the first draft of this section of the novel be describes the subject of one such photo who, like Kennedy in Christopher WilliauW Source, has their back, oddly, to the camera' (Ransom Center, 30.5).

189 Conversations, p44. 19° lbid, p62.

98

Joyce would have written if he'd moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred'. 191

This thought, which occurs to Branch in the novel's central and defining section,

corroborates several elements of DeLillo's conception of Joyce's fiction, that centre

around his conviction that 'Joyce turned the book into a world'. 192The Warren Report,

which DeLillo also calls a'masterwork of triviai193 and an'encyclopaedia of daily life"

served as his research for both the plot of the novel, its structure, and the voice and

vernacular of its protagonists. Indeed certain voices, DeLillo notes, come'right out of

the Warren Report195, and that in the case of the central protagonist's mother, 'the

Marguerite Oswald in the novel is, in most important respects, the Marguerite Oswald

of the Warren Commission report'. " In fact, as David Cowart points out, Douglas

Keesey's research tells us that much of the voice of Marguerite Oswald is at times very

subtly adjusted from the Warren Report transcripts. However, her voice in the novel is a 'dramatic re-enactment' that retains her 'broken eloquence'. 197 It is her voice, more than

any other, that indicates that the novel is a work of vernacular ventriloquism, a multi-

phonic document, even reminding the reader in the final chapter (in which her voice

and DeLillo's intermingle most completely), 'Listen to me. I have to tell a story' (L

453). Its resemblance for DeLillo to Joycean writing reflects what in Chapter 1I have

called the polyphonic pole of his inheritance of modernism, that which stands against

the imperative towards silence represented by the Beckettian elements in his fiction,

which, as will be discussed, contest each other just as they do in examples given in that

chapter. In Libra, however, their relationship is refined by the implications of Libra's

concurrent contest between fictional and historical writing.

In this respect the Warren Report, present in the text of Libra and given an honorary

place by DeLillo in his inheritance of 20te century modernist writing, becomes both an

aesthetic and literary-critical echo in the novel. However in addition to the aesthetic 191

192

193

194

I"

196

197

Conversations, p62. Conversations, p101. lbid, p62. lbid, p25. lbid, p33. lbid, p26. See Keesey, Don DeLillo, p196-197.

99

inheritance that it offers, the Warren Report is also the major means of historical

research for the novel, despite the flawed and partial record that it gives. Like the

photographic archive that Williams repurposes in Source, the Warren Report is for

Libra both a primary and secondary text: a source of historical data about the event it is

centred around, but also a source of the poetic information inherent in the voices that

describe it, and which the artist/author sees as immanent work: the artwork to be

plucked from an arbitrary collection of press photography, the prose to be drawn from

the Warren Report. The character of Collings, a CIA agent, reminds the reader of how

this method is close to those that create the secret narratives of spy-work: 'A fact is

innocent until someone wants it. Then it becomes intelligence (L 247). This

selectiveness, also crucial to the historian's interpretive task, is beyond the abilities of

Branch, but enriches DeLillo's attempt to use the means of fiction to produce a literary

advanced-artwork that is built around the ambiguities and ahistorical gaps in its source

material. Boxall describes the dual role of the Warren Report as fonming'the most

powerful intertext in Libra, however, it is also a conduit for the other voices and texts

that press upon the novel from the outside'. '" It is in its guise as a conduit, rich in

poetic vernacular but unreliable as'history' per se, that it can also come to stand as an

intertext that changes the consideration of DeLillo's engagement with 'other work' in

his writing: a historical document that thanks in part to its flaws is formally similar to

that which represents, for DeLillo, the canon; and whose resultant dual role frames the

novel's critical debate.

The contrast between Branch's inability to process this history on the one hand, and the

novel in which this inability occurs on the other, provides a running dichotomy, a

disjunction that remains open. Describing the regular delivery of documents to Branch

by a distant FBI 'curator', DeLillo writes:

He sends new books all the time, each with a gleaming theory, supportable, assured.

This is the room of theories, the room of growing old. Branch wonders if he ought to

despair of ever getting to the end. ' (L 59)

19S Boxall, p14.

100

If DeLillo's production of a novel drawn from the Warren Report represents an

advanced-artwork in written form -a new artwork produced out of both historical

thought and the selective circumscription of another vernacular work - then the Branch

character's fictional practice stands in counterpoint to this. His inertia illustrates a failure to produce such a work, and in doing so presents a critical view of DeLillo's

own enterprise. Even as the novel progresses, the work-within-the-work that is never

seen, Branch's history, fails to cohere: Branch has'extensive and overlapping notes - notes in three-foot drifts, all these years of notes. But of actual finished prose, there is

precious little' (L 59). Yet, as DeLillo states in a later interview regarding his own

writing practice, 'discarded pages mark the physical dimensions of a writer's labor'.

Separated by these points, by opposing masses of papers describing both failure and

accomplishment in writing, lies an archive of which Libra is both the central text and

commentary. DeLillo goes on to say that the draft of Libra, the typescript, is'the

complete book, the full experience containable on paper'. ' If the novel circumscribes

the Warren Report, then this'complete book' circumscribes Libra in turn, whose prose is contained within it. The archive that the Branch character accumulates in lieu of

conclusions, that is gradually and overwhelmingly transferred from the curator to him,

is yet another part of this complete book, an'unwritten history' at the heart of one that

has been written using fictional means.

The way in which DeLillo describes his use of the Warren Report illustrate the layers of

displacement that allow this process to produce a'complete book' that can be claimed

as a work of advanced-art and porous modernism, in which both vernacular and critical

voices engage in conversation. He states that'I wasn't translating spoken speech as

much as the printed speech of people... I simply had to read it and then remake it,

rehear it' 20' Central to this is the distinction that DeLillo makes between reading,

remaking and re-hearing: this implies not only the use of other work, its re-

employment, but also the application of critical discourse, in its being're-heard' rather

t99 Conversations, p90.

2' lbid, p90. 101 lbid, p70.

101

than simply re-presented in the novel. In the course of this process the voices of the

Report are reanimated and join the novel's critical conversation open to inspection,

undecided. Whilst the novel 'decides' that both Oswald and an anti-Castro group of

agitators attempted to shoot at Kennedy, there is a deliberate ambiguity as to which

shot or shots are the fatal ones. And yet for DeLillo even this ambiguous conclusion is

somewhat arbitrary, a means to provide a structure to keep the novel's plots and voices in suspended conversation. He describes Libra's historical conclusion as'a clear historical center on which I could work my fictional variations'. 202

It is, in contrast, the character of Branch who is unable to'simply' read, remake and re- hear, to re-establish the event of the assassination in a way that retains the ambiguities his research presents him with. He remains trapped in the first of these acts, buried

beneath the task of reading. The implication of this, in light of his realization that the

prose he is reading belongs in some way to a highly multi-phonic form of fiction, and

that he will not be able to're-make it as history, is that a history of this subject can only be conducted through aesthetic means. The end result, Libra, is fill of gaps but, like

the Kennedy with his back to camera of Williams' Source, makes a virtue of the

information missing from certain moments in the institutional record: porous moments

that once 're-heard' in another context (fiction, art) suddenly become displaced theses

that animate the work. What prevents the novel from being neither'merely' fiction, an

aesthetic work, but also merely historical, an attempt at a conclusive narrative, is the

emphasis placed on these gaps, which the failure of Branch as well as the novel's other

authors make apparent. Instead, Libra uses its aesthetic faculties to historicise, and the

fictional writers it contains to reflect on its aesthetics, just as Branch does with his

description of the Warren Report as 'the novel in which nothing is left out'. In accepting

the flaws in the historical record, and by using the character of a fictional writer to

dramatize this acceptance, DeLillo in turn 'leaves nothing out', including even the

disjunction between these two forms of writing.

20x Conversations, p58.

102

Boxall suggests that between the disjunctions in Libra, between the'point at which history becomes a finished text' and the imperative to remain in a state of becoming,

belonging to fiction, lie'dark, shrouded spaces'. 203 It is these gaps, the'broken

eloquence' of Marguerite Oswald's vernacular speech, or the 'word-blind' language of Lee Harvey Oswald, around which Libra structures its dialectic of history and fiction,

and which only what DeLillo describes as the 'free weave' of fiction is able to record. My assertion that Libra can be thought of as a work of porous-modernism is in

response to its concerted use of these gaps, which produce what Timothy Martin has

described in Williams' work as a 'phantom' archive, 'an archive in which erasure and disclosure are constantly being transposed'. 204 The suggestion I take from the novel as a

proposition to work with it in terms of advanced-art is that the archivist of such a body

of work must regard its gaps and flaws as a crucial part of its contents, rather than as

representing a lack.

DeLillo's use of a fictional form close to that of an espionage thriller that permits

mystery and a poetic porosity that history does not in order to access such an archive is

made clear in one of the novel's early Branch sections. Branch reasons that 'there is

endless suggestiveness' in the early deaths of those connected to the case, but that'there

is enough mystery in the facts as we know them'; that he cannot write a'plot that

reaches flawlessly in a dozen directions' (L 58). Yet DeLillo takes on the narrative task

that Branch's historical duties will not allow, will not be able to make sense of. As

DeLillo later says, 'the novel which is within history can also operate outside of it,

'finding rhythms and symmetries' that other writing cannot. 205 He likewise states that if

'journalism is the first draft of history', then fiction is its'final draft'. 206 A line from an

early draft of Libra itself, removed from the final typescript, reads in this context like a

reminder from DeLillo to himself of what means of proceeding are proper to him and

not to his fictional counterpart: 'Why does Nicolas Branch feel, after years of mastering

the data, that there is an eerie poetry in all of this? That the assassination has liberated a

203 Boxall, p144. 204 Martin, p16. 205 Conversations, p64. 206 DeLillo, BBC interview with John Humphreys (online).

103

spirit of mystery? '. 207 As I will go on to show, Libra offers answers to these questions

through the contests I have described already; between the writing of fiction and

history, and their enactment in the novel through the guise of a fictional, inert writer

who is only capable of reading. In doing so the structure of a work of literary art built

around gaps, flaws, and inconsistencies that defy straightforward historical telling is

revealed, a work of porous modernism that uses the materials of language to frame its

aesthetic and historical debates.

207 Ransom Center, 29.4.

104

1. The Archive of Libra

A recurring contrast in Libra is of Branch's archive formed of 'drifts' of notes, which is

assembled within a novel that succeeds in coalescing a parallel body of research into

fiction. As I have already suggested, this represents the critical disjunction that marks Libra out as an advanced-artwork, and furthermore a work of porous modernism. But

before describing the novel in greater detail on these terms, I would like to unpick the

structure of the archive of which the 'complete book' of Libra is the central point. My

conception of this archive stems from DeLillo's description of'the complete book', a body of work I have studied during a period of research conducted with DeLillo's

working papers, research materials and typescripts at the Ransom Center library. The

visual work that is introduced and critiqued in the following chapter records this aspect

of my research. Given the theme of accumulations of paper, and the pressing demands

of the reading that overwhelms Branch, Libra more than any other of DeLillo's novels

calls to be looked at in this expanded form; for the reader to keep in mind the'extended

performance of a kind of critical exhaustion' that Boxall sees in DeLillo's writing, and

which DeLillo personifies in the character of Branch more literally and more materially

than with any of his other fictional practitioners. 208

The complete book of Libra exists in multiple layers of paper-artefacts. Firstly, in the

news material that DeLillo collects, beginning with immediate responses to the

assassination, echoes of the event that are as yet unweighted by further 'drafts' of history. Secondly, in his extensive reading of the Warren Report, which splinters the

event into a wide cast of characters and their reflections on both the event and, in a broader sense, their lives and backgrounds. These reflections draw the narrative back

into Lee Harvey Oswald's early life, the motivations for his disaffection and

'radicalisation', as well as a great amount of textural detail, historical background that is

not always criminal or legal evidence per se, but inconclusive and highly personal

zoe BORaU, pg.

105

anecdotes. This is especially true of the accounts of Marguerite Oswald, which form an

alternative narrative voice, counter to official conclusions, deluded and partial, and from the outside of the plot. 209 This in turn reflects Oswald's ongoing attempt not to be

a part of his mother's story, but to be a part of'history's', to engage in a literary/historical world that he idolises but finds hard to grasp. Both Oswald and the

conspirators who will go on to employ him are depicted by DeLillo as yet more

contesting authors; and Oswald is, as he says himself of his family, 'trapped in their

minds' (L 244). All of these accounts stress the inseparable nature of historical events

and their telling, the language that they both produce and then remain in. As Cowart

says, describing Libra's Oswald, 'seeking to write history, he discovers that this subject

matter cannot exist apart from its embodiment on the page or on the tongue'. 210

DeLillo's 'complete book' of Libra takes both the written and spoken accounts of the history of Oswald's historic actions and words and applies yet another, artistic, historicising process to them. This process culminates in a novel that places an

emphasis on the multitude of tellings that surround a historical event, what Crow calls

the 'multitude of collaborators' whose vernacular culture becomes part of an advanced-

artwork that circumscribes their discourse. Libra's proximity to this process is indicated

by its use of the Warren Report as an intertext that is already a highly porous historical

document, already a'common culture' with which to engage. As DeLillo describes the

crowd who witness Kennedy's assassination, the event is surrounded by a 'mystery of

common impulse, hundreds of thousands come from so many histories and systems of being' (L 393-4); a collective whose multitude is recorded by the Warren Report.

The drafts and final typescript of the novel itself record the assassination's fragmentation into a set of fictional decisions on DeLillo's part, structured around a

temporal plan set by his initial research. Much of this early research is to establish

where the protagonists were on certain days and at certain times; there are several

notebooks that plot this structure alongside records of his reading of historical sources.

109 As DeLillo notes, 'her conspiracy theories Lave been born out, if not in fact, then in that so many serious commentators on the case ended up coming to the same conclusions she came to instinctively and maternally'. (Conversations, p26).

210 Cowart, p94.

106

In the novel this research forms the dual plotlines, those of Oswald (whose chapters are

titles after places) and the conspirators (by dates). As Boxall has said, these plotlines

eventually enact the novel's themes of convergence and coincidence by intersecting. "'

This structural theme reflects the way in which in Libra the term 'plot' is applicable in

both senses of the word; as within the novel the plot to shoot at Kennedy is authored by

a cast of conspirators, and this sub-plot is itself fragmented, due to disparate

motivations of those involved. Coincidences also represent those moments at which a

historical account does not, for Branch, fit. However for DeLillo this lack of fit

provides the cracks into which fiction will seep and where his aesthetic means

undertake the task of history, given the imperative to do so by their encounter with the

ahistorical gaps in the official record.

Fourthly, and most importantly for my thesis, the novel's investigation into the

possibility of reversing this fragmentation, in writing a history, produces a critical

contest between DeLillo's conception of historical and fictional work. Like the visual

works of advanced-art described in the previous chapter Libra historicises through a

critical and aesthetic engagement with other work, offering a resolution to this contest. The crux of this is the presence of the fictional writer in the novel, who takes the role

that DeLillo more commonly gives to an artist: the character who is engaged in

producing a work-within-the-work. "' In the case of Libra this character is a historian

presented with a seemingly impossible task, who begins to drown in evidence.

However, the production of fiction also occurs within the novel, in the hands of the

plotters, who find the character they invent embodied in the form of Lee Harvey

Oswald. DeLillo describes these characters in explicitly authorial terms ('Mackey

would find a model for the character Everett was in the process of creating [L 50], etc. )

Indeed, the character of Everett has been described by DeLillo in terms that apply both

to himself and the creation of the Branch character, stating that he 'begins to examine himself as a subject, as someone in the third person'. The practical and domestic aspect

to this self-examination will be considered in Chapter 4, in addition to its resonances

211 See Boxall, p148. 212 Who in Libra, DeLillo says, 'had a tougher time than I did' (Conversations, p27).

107

within the novel described here. Z'3

Lastly, my own work proposes an addition to this archive: the visual works that are at

the centre of Chapter 4 are conceived of as yet another layer, and as an image of a

single moment in this process of fragmentation: the formation of the novel's language,

the settling of the event onto the page. The'archive of Libra', then, is multi-layered,

and constructed around multiple narratives and authors that compete and coincide, despite their culmination in the event of, or events surrounding, a single death.

However, these many lines are plotted around a single work, coalescing in the form of a

novel that offers, through its writer-character, a critical glance at this structure, and in

turn of the possibilities of fictional and historical writing. The fractured nature of the

assassination and its re-establishment in the Warren Report, DeLillo's introduction to

Libra asserts, calls for a re-contextualization where'lost history becomes the free

weave of fiction' (L vii), where the event and intertext that the novel circumscribes are

addressed on their own splintered terms rather than by a method that attempts to correct

them. A closer textual analysis of the novel, especially its central chapters, will reveal how the novel can be seen as the central text in this archive, the framing device at the

centre of a literary advanced-artwork.

213 Conversations, p30.

108

2. Libra's Plots

DeLillo's conception of the 'free weave of fictional writing is of a medium that

corresponds better to a multifarious body of history than a historian's attempt to repair

or fix its chaotic structure: that'the novelist can try to leap across the barrier of fact'. 214

The sense that the novel and its fractured historical source seem to fall in on each

other's language and structure is reflected deep within the novel's construction. As

DeLillo has stated several times, coincidences, at the expense of logical or rational

procedure, are a primary force driving the book. 21' These convergences, images of one

plot seeming to trace another and then intersect, form a central theme of the novel, and

cause its writing to be organized around the double meaning of the word 'plot', as Lee

Harvey Oswald's plot-line comes to intersect with that of a group of conspirators,

connected by a series of coincidences. DeLillo goes on to say that'the tremendous

bruising force of history, sometimes random, often without logic or resolution, may

produce a work of fiction that leans for its effectiveness on structure and pattern, on a detailed unravelling of some old perplexity or anxiety' (L viii). The historical perplexity

that Libra ultimately unravels is that of its most fictitious character, Nicolas Branch,

invented by DeLillo as an intermediary between himself and this 'bruising force.

Within the sympathetic tension that DeLillo finds between history and fiction, Libra

intervenes as an advanced-artwork using the sympathy between both the structure of

and the language produced by the event it addresses. Both of these occur as artistic

dialects that, channelled into DeLillo's finely worked prose, shape the novel.

As I have said in the previous chapter, an advanced-artwork, and especially a work of

porous modernism, is distinctive for the gaps between the critical attribution of terms to

describe it (modern, postmodern, etc), and between the elements that make up the

work. These dialects within Libra, which would seem to present its historical axis (a re-

establishment of the events surrounding the assassination) and its literary counterpart 214

215 Conversations, p64. See Conversations, p27 and p31 for example.

109

(the vernacular, 'Joycean' language of the Warren Report), as producing just such gaps. Indeed, the novel produces its own set of disjunctions by identifying the contesting

practices that it records. These historical and literary axes are self-reflexive, each

responding to the other's failure. The Warren Report aims for conclusiveness, for an

encyclopaedic mastery of the facts that will allow conclusions to be drawn from it, yet

the overall effect, for DeLillo, is of a work that resembles literature, that like Joyce

'turns the book into a world'. Rather than tapering towards a certain conclusion the text

expands for DeLillo into a common culture, a'multitude of collaborators, to cite the

words of Thomas Crow, whose voices form a collective work of modernism. However,

Libra's post-modern devices (the widespread quotation from the Report, the self-

referencing fictional writer who is confounded by it) employ the Warren Report to

produce a work of fiction that presents the very inconclusiveness of this source text as a historical thesis. It is by working itself into these disjunctions that Libra comes to form

a work of porous modernism. With this proposal for the structure of Libra's plots, I

would like now to look more closely at the 'detailed unravelling' that DeLillo makes of

the plots that feed into his own; that dictate the conceptual structure of this work.

a. There is a world inside the world"'

As I have said, there is the quality of immanence in DeLillo's conception of the Warren

Report as a form of quasi-modernist fiction: Libra assembles its plots almost as if they

were a work of fiction waiting to be written, the'lost history' they record finding its

place in the 'free weave, the excess offered by DeLillo's writing. The tension between

the writing of history and fiction is, as has been discussed, a constant theme in Libra, in

both the novel's attempt at history using the means of the fiction, and in the critique implicit in the oppositional nature of the character of Branch. Yet additionally, the

novel enacts this tension within its own structure, in the primary, novelistic plot that its

others are contained within. The central part of the book, beginning with the chapter'In

2'6 This phrase, which describes Oswalds conception of history as a kind of secret knowledge, repeats itself in the early part of the novel (p13 and p47, and then again at p277). It also relates to a comparable exposition of the formal structure of Ratter's Star. "There is a life inside this life. A filling of gaps. There is something between the spaces' (Ratner's Star, p370).

110

Moscow', seems to record the tipping of the scales that the novel's title alludes to, and

make a precis of its critical and creative thought.

These central chapters also represent the point at which the volume of plots within the

plot reach a kind of critical mass and begin to, if not write themselves, then proceed

along the parameters set by DeLillo's historical reading, a juncture about which he says: 'all I really had to do was follow these lives onto the pages in my typewriter'. 217 In light

of this, the moment at which the novel gathers pace records Libra's historical project being subsumed by its fictional counterpart; and, paradoxically, that the'redemption'

that DeLillo describes fiction offering to history allows it to perform its historical

theses. The role that this part of the novel plays in my conception of Libra as an

advanced-artwork relates to Timothy Martin's reading of Christopher Williams' For

Example work, and in particular his notion of the'coveted break in the archival order'

that reveals the critique implicit in Williams' work. Martin is referring here to an early

work of Williams, also described in Chapter 2, Angola to Vietnam, and to the breaks

and repairs' in the glass models of plants that appear in otherwise 'sublime

photographs. 218 In the central part of Libra, around which I will frame a close analysis

of the text, a comparable exposition of the novel's archival structure appears, in the

course of three chapters that both sum up the relationship Libra has to its historical

sources, and show most clearly the reconcilement that this history must, because of its

own breaks and repairs', be recorded in a work of fiction whose'stories hang in time,

spare, perfect in their own way, unfinished' (L 182), as Branch describes the Warren

Report in this part of the book.

The mid-point to the novel begins with Lee Harvey Oswald's defection to Russia, the

highly dramatic result of his romantic and intuited historical reading of Marx and

Engels, and an attempt to 'become historical' like his hero Trotsky. It ends with his

return to America, and eventually his fatal incorporation into the maelstrom of plots

that produce the assassination. The three chapters ('In Moscow, '2 July', and'In Minsk') 217 Conversations, p26. 218 Martin, p39.

111

lead up to the end of Part One' of the book. 'Part Two', in which the novel's plots begin

to coalesce with Oswald entering the plots of the conspirators, begins with the inscription (from Jack Ruby, who will go on to murder Oswald, the event that together

with the assassination of Kennedy form what DeLillo calls 'flashes of a single incandescent homicide (L 444)) that states: 'Somebody will have to piece me

together... ' (L 215). In these three chapters DeLillo pieces together the elements of his

own enterprise that mark Libra out as a literary work of advanced-art. Due to the

distance from America that Oswald finds himself in they present a decontextualisation

that reprises two structural ideas from earlier novels that are described in Chapter 1:

both the idea of the novel in miniature (as in the 'Movie' prologue to Players), and the

arcing plotline (as in Rainer's Star), as Oswald is conditioned by the time he spends in

a distant expanse, before his return to America and to both Libra's, and the

conspirator's, plots. As I look at these chapters in closer detail, I will address the wider issue of the tipping point of the book - its titular Libran scales - and the shift that occurs

as Branch's historical enterprise is overwhelmed by fiction. It is within this shift, I will

argue, that the novel reveals itself as a literary advanced-artwork.

b. 'In Moscow'

The first of these chapters, 'In Moscow', begins by adding to Libra's archive another intertext, Lee Harvey Oswald's diary (entitled, appropriately, 'The Historic Diary'),

whose central place in the novel in some way matches its relationship to the Warren

Report, depicting the inner thoughts and confusions of the subject that both Libra and

the Warren Report attempt to circumscribe. Its presence at the novel's central point also indicates, perhaps, the point at which DeLillo finds the'voice' of Oswald; at which he

begins to write his own story. This in turn is indicated in the sentence that precedes DeLillo's quotation from the Diary: He was a man in history now' (L 149), and by the

long description of this document, an image that echoes Branch's confusion of paper

and language, and which stands in stark contrast to DeLillo's finely wrought drafts that

are addressed in Chapter 4:

112

'The page is crowded with words, top to bottom, out to either edge, crossed-out words,

smudged words, words that run together, attempted corrections and additions, lapses

into script, a sense of breathlessness, with odd calm fragments. ' (L 149)

This chapter contains several references to fiction, and to Oswald's attempt to relate himself to his conception of the historical writing. He is given a copy of a Dostoevsky

novel by his tour guide, with the inscription'Let all your dreams come true, yet he is

told by another state official that the'USSR is only great in literature' (L 150). DeLillo

quotes the broken language of Oswald's dyslexic script here: 'Myfondes dreams are

shattered' (L 151). Indeed, Oswald's time as a 'frustrated writer' is largely limited to the

period he spends in self-imposed exile, and so the 'Historic Diary' he writes is doubly

marked out, by its quotation in the central part of Libra, as a work within the work, a

ventriloquised piece of inarticulate writing that stands in contrast to the Joycean Warren

Report. 219 The dialectic that Boxall observes in the Joycean and Beckettian poles in

DeLillo's writing becomes complicated here, as a second intertext finds its way into the

centre of the novel, and if the Warren Report is a biography of Oswald written

externally by a'multitude of collaborators', then the Historic Diary is that document's

internal counterpart; a record of the linguistic inarticulacy of a man whose actions

become dangerously and almost accidentally articulate. ' If Beckett, for Boxall,

represents DeLillo's means of addressing a state of critical exhaustion within novels

that would seem to describe the opposite in their very expansiveness, then the

introduction of the Historic Diary as an intertext places this disjunction at the heart of

Libra, at either side of its titular scales. DeLillo's reading of Oswald's diary will be

further addressed in Chapter 4.

This is followed by the first of a series of interviews conducted by an agent of the

'Committee for State Security', Alek Kirilenko, which surmise another reference to

Oswald's connection to fiction, his statement that'I want to write short stories on

American life' (L 160), and also contain references to Hemingway. The role of

219 Conversations, p44. 120 Oswald writes, for example, the almost Beckettian line: 'I think to myself, "How easy to Je` (Libra,

p152)

113

Kirilenko will be discussed further in reference to the third of these central chapters, 'In

Minsk' . 221 Kirilenko is presented in this chapter as a bureaucrat who, like Branch, is

charged with the problematic interpretive task of assessing where the figure of Oswald

fits into a wider story, the dimensions of which, as for Branch, whose task is mapped

out by volumes of paper whose size and scope change, can only be speculated on. Yet

unlike Branch Kirilenko is able to theorise this difficulty, to understand the warped information that he must make sense of, and that he is'paid to drive himself crazy' (L

167). He realizes that'the lesson of Lee H. Oswald was that easy cases are never easy',

that 'self-evident truths, necessary truths, faltered so badly when subject to rigorous

examination. No plane surfaces here. We are living in curved space (L 164). This

'curved space' is also that of Libra's page, which begins at this point, even as it accepts

another historical intertext almost verbatim into itself, starts to become more fictional,

to use the form of fiction to resolve the historical questions it prompts. Oswald has, in

travelling so far to get to'Russia, the other world, the secret' (L 33) that he reads about

as a teenager, entered a curved space that will not only reject him and be rejected by

him, but will return him to where he came from, to his final oblivion. At the very beginning of the book, as a child in the Bronx, Oswald rides the subway system for fun,

with 'so much iron in the sound of those curves he could almost taste it, like a toy you

put in your mouth' (L 3), an image which is horribly reprised in the book's penultimate

chapter, in which he has been shot: 'they'd introduced metal into his body. This is what

caused the pain' (L 440). His defection is the extreme bend in this curve, in the shape of

the book, which, for a moment in the chapter'In Minsk', suspends him at its apex. The

contrast between this time in Oswald's life and to the America he returns to is expressed later by the thoughts of Marina, the Russian women whom he marries and returns with. After his arrest, days before his own murder, she notices his changed appearance from

in Russia, dirtier, a'specter with gray skin', 'a man who appears in a dream, in some darkness outside ordinary night (L 424-5). In fact, it is in brief happiness in Russia that

Oswald had appeared in a kind of dream, when he'had a place, an obligation' (L 206)

221 In the novel Oswald tells Kirilenko of this desire to write, and it is Kirilenko who raises the topic of Hemingway. In his historical research DeLillo found the line in an application form for a Swiss college just prior to his entry into Russia, and Oswald's likening of his time in Russia to Hemingway's in Paris in a letter towards the end of his period of defection. (see Conversations, p44).

114

that had not been plotted by either himself or an outside manipulator.

c. '2 July'

This chapter contains several elements that explicitly describe the problematic nature of

history, and the apparent suitability of the fiction of Libra to perform its task. It begins

with the character of David Ferrie, who acts as a conduit between the various plotters in

the book: anti-Castro, pro-Batista organized criminals, and secret service agents including Win Everett. Ferrie also has two key meetings with Oswald, at either end of

the book, selling him a gun as a teenager, and then drugging and manipulating him later

in the novel, Oswald's final encouragement to participate in the plot in some way. Ferrie's role in the book, other than as a conduit between these characters and plot-

lines, is as the voice of DeLillo's conviction that the novel is driven by what he calls

'nonhistorical forces like dreams, coincidences, intuitions, the alignment of heavenly

bodies' - that which prompts the 'perplexities' that the novel seeks to address. " In this

chapter Ferri e says 'we don't know know what to call it, so we say coincidence' (L 172),

a statement that is echoed in both of the meetings with Oswald described above. In the

first of these, to the teenage Oswald he says 'coincidence is a science waiting to be

discovered' (L 44). In the long chapter'In New Orleans', towards the end of the book,

Ferrie makes this discovery in the form of Oswald, as the plots finally coalesce, and

Ferrie manipulates him, finally drugging him in a scene that has a final, linguistic

hypnotism. He says to him 'You're a coincidence. They devise a plan, you fit it

perfectly' (L 330), before giving Oswald hashish to smoke, which becomes a kind of

ritual to lock him into these coincidences - telling him that the plot 'has no history we

can recognize or understand. But it forces a connection. It puts a man on the path of his

destiny' (L 339). The connection is forced the following morning, again with hashish

but also language, Ferne explaining to Oswald the inner meaning in the name of what

he has been smoking, that the word hashish is'the source of the word assassin' (L 342).

In this moment Ferrie again comes to voice another of DeLillo's convictions about the

222 Conversations, p43.

115

book, that its meaning comes from language, from the 'nonhistorical', that'prose itself

began to suggest not the path the novel would take but the deepest motivation of the

characters who originated this prose. "' Likewise, Oswald later complains of being

authored by the expectations of his family, describing than in terms that call to mind DeLillo's derivation of meaning from language, from the typewritten words that

Chapter 4 will focus on: 'they shape and hammer you' (L 244).

At the midpoint in the book Ferrie's statement that'we don't know what to call it, so we

say coincidence' seems to respond to the ambiguous tension between historical

recollection and fiction writing that begins to resolve itself as the novel progresses. When the plot reaches its final stage, with Oswald working in the Book Depository

outside of which Kennedy's motorcade will pass, Ferrie repeats the line yet again,

adding that it is a 'pattern outside experience', and 'something that jerks you out of the

spin of history' (L 384). Ferne appears here as the manic counterpart to Branch, voicing

the opposing critique, the alternate form for a narrative to take, outside experience,

outside history. By alerting the reader to the lack of reason at the centre of the plot,

telling Oswald that he is a'coincidence', Ferrie exposes the porous nature of the book

that will acknowledge this history: he argues the case for Libra as a work of history that

permits the'nonhistoncal'.

This chapter goes on to describe the crucial intersection of characters in terms of both

the plot, and of the fictional processes immanent within it. The character of Win

Everett, the originator of the assassination plot, is shown the extent to which Oswald

has, in a sense, pre-empted his strategies to place him in the role of the shooter. He

realises that due to the volume of secret identities that Oswald has been acquiring for

his own reasons that'it was no longer possible to hide the fact that Lee Oswald existed independently of the plot' (L 178). It is not so much that his invention of the plot has

been usurped, but that Oswald's archive of false papers present to Everett'a glimpse of

the fiction he'd been devising, a fiction living prematurely in the world' (L 179). This

act of authorship is described earlier in the novel as Everett'devising a general shape, a

221 Conversations, p63.

116

life', a'bodily frame they (the plotters) might use to extend their fiction into the world' (L 50). Upon finding that Oswald has, almost entirely by coincidence, pre-empted his

own invention, Everett is'displaced' (L 179). As Glenn Thomas has noted, Everett had

not been attempting to create a historical actor as such, but a'structure out of a

collection of texts and traces that will be intelligible to putative investigators'- a meta-

text that is yet to be read, that is designed to be read after the fact by investigators led

toward a patsy. 224 Libra, at this point, subsumes yet another form of writing into itself,

in an almost concentric pattern; first Oswald's failed attempt at'Historic' writing, and

then his personal displacement of Everett's fiction. The elaborate plot that this fiction is

to run into is, as is shown in the following section, folded in turn into the final failure of Nicolas Branch to construct a historical narrative from these plots, a failure that Libra

goes on to redeem as a metafictional artwork.

Branch is confronted with the weight of documents that surround him, the'photo

enhancements, floor plans, home movies, biographies, letters, rumors, mirages dreams'.

He goes on to ask if he has become, like Oswald, one of the'men in small rooms' (L

181) that his research is tracing. He then makes his Joycean reading of the Warren

Report, that'everything is here... thousands of pages of testimony, of voices droning in

hearing rooms in old courthouse buildings, an incredible haul of human utterance, before describing the literary disorder that these thousands of pages present: 'It lies so flat on the page, hangs so still in the lazy air, lost to syntax and other arrangement, that

it resembles a kind of mind-spatter, a poetry of lives muddied and dripping in language'

(L 181). These last images recall, chillingly, the assassination itself, the physical death

that the Warren Report is written around, of Jackie Kennedy's realization that 'I have

his brains in my hand"' (L 399), as if the Report has come to embody in its dripping and

spattered language the event it records. The contrasting completeness and disorder of

this record is presented by Branch as a paradox, that 'everything is the Report is

elsewhere, and yet 'everything belongs, everything adheres' - and as such becomes the

'Joycean book of America' (L 181-2). It is the weight of all this language that finally

defies Branch, that prevents him from drawing a conclusion, from writing, condemning

224 Thomas, History, Biography, and Narrative in Don DeLillo's Librd, p119.

117

him instead just to read, to exist in the midst of language that adheres, yet is elsewhere. Precisely because everything adheres in the material before him, he is unable to select from it, to make his own writing adhere. His stasis means that he'eats most of his

meals in the room, clearing a space on the desk, reading as he eats. He falls asleep in

the chair, wakes up startled, afraid for a moment to move. Paper is everywhere' (L 184).

Later in the novel the colonisation of Branch's space by paper worsens, forming'paper

hills around him', with paper that is'beginning to slide out of the room and across the doorway', that'the floor is covered with books and papers' (L 378).

The conclusion, in the form of Libra (a novel that, as DeLillo says, is about history),

that all this paper is conditioned for fiction, and not what Boxall calls the'tyranny of

the narrow way' of history, is confirmed by Branch in his final appearance in the

novel. "' This section begins with a disjunction that clarifies his realization, that Branch

'thinks he knows better' than the blank narrative voice that tells the reader, 'If we are on

the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme' (L 440-1). He

concludes that the conspiracy was'a rambling affair', that only succeeded due to chance

and coincidence. But his enforced project of reading, not writing, remains perpetual - 'the stuff keeps coming' (L 441) - even to the extent that Branch is now reading

accounts from some way outside the historical record, 'descriptions of the dreams of

eyewitnesses' and, finally, 'fiction, twenty-five years of novels and plays about the

assassination' (L 441-2). In this moment it is as if the novel has rounded on its writer

character, that he is left reading what his work could not become, and which the book

in which he appears has: a work of fiction'about history'. The 'tyranny' of historical

thought that Boxall refers to is at one side of this disjunction, which for Boxall relates

to the tension between historical and literary writing in Deleuze's'Literature and Life'.

Its counterpart is the perpetual 'becoming' of literature, in which a text remains in some

way unfinished and stands in contrast to that which 'becomes historical'. ' Whilst

Boxall observes that in order to'effect the convergence in which history and and fiction

might come into mutual being that Librd s multiple authors'have to enter into the

225 Boxall, p131. 126 lbid, p131.

118

frame of the other', in Branch's final appearance the convergence goes further. " Once

dissolved into a reader of fiction he comes to represent a moment in DeLillo's writing

where the fictional artist is no longer oppositional, and the book becomes a single

artwork that uses that character as a means of depicting the resolution of the creative

and the critical impulses it combines. Like the works of porous modernism described in

Chapter 2, Libra becomes the framing device for a critical meeting between these

disciplines, and does so through the circumscription of vernacular material. Branch's

final concession to literature is his recognition that this vernacular material will only

'become historical' by its re-contextualisation in art; in Libra, the artwork that

dramatises this critique.

d. 'In Minsk'

The authors within Libra that enter the 'frame' of each other include Lee Harvey

Oswald the diarist, as well as his de facto biographers, Branch and DeLillo himself.

Like Branch in the previous chapter, Oswald's writing also comes to a halt at the

novel's turning point. The chapter'In Mins' describes Oswald's time spent working in

a factory in that city, where he has been sent on Kirilenko's recommendation, to keep

him out of the way of foreign journalists. Oswald is also given'incentives to remain' in

Russia, an apartment, and an extra source of income from a Red Cross payment each

month. Kirilenko's feeling is that Oswald is an'innocenf whose knowledge of

potentially sensitive military information (Oswald stakes his claim for Russian

citizenship on providing Kirilenko with information on Atsugi airbase in Japan, where

he was stationed as a Marine, and the U-2 spy planes that flew from there), is, like his

polygraph test, 'inconclusive owing to various factors' (L 166). In the relative comfort

of his life in Minsk, Oswald is presented in stark contrast to in the rest of the book. He

is, for a moment, redefined, a process which he begins himself in writing:

, on his first day he presented a handwritten autobiography to the plant director. "My

parents are dead, " he wrote. "I have no brothers or Sisters. "' (L 189)

117 lbid, p147.

119

This, like the information he provides on the military, is only half-true, a wishful

attempt to define himself. His mother, who is alive, and whose voice comes almost to

monopolise the massive Warren Report (for DeLillo at least, who allows her Warren

Report testimonies to form the bulk of the novel's final chapter), challenges this

redefinition in two ways, both by writing; firstly, towards the end of his time in Russia

by managing to find his location and address, and writing to him; secondly, once Oswald has returned to America and is planning to publish the writings he has

produced whilst in Russia, Marguerite tells her son that she too is planning to write a book, about his defection. Oswald is appalled by this, telling her not to, but she tells him: 'I can write what's mine, Lee. ' (L 288), threatening to overwhelm him in the very form that eludes him. Marguerite Oswald, as both a figure who threatens to write, and

whose voice in any case comes to write itself into the text of the novel, adds yet more to the 'structure of layered authorship' that Boxall describes Libra as forming. 228 As she herself says, in part of the Warren Report transcript that finds itself written into the

novel's final chapter, 'there are stories inside stories, judge' (L 450). It is this concentric

structure that Libra acts as the framing device for, the lens that draws its historical

thesis from the structure's lack of fit.

One such story inside another is that of Francis Gary Powers, the American pilot of a

U-2 spy plane shot down over Russia, and who for a time comes becomes not only an

counterpart of Oswald in exile, but more deeply bound into his story. ff the central

chapters of Libra form a kind of work-within-the-work, a Russian novella within an

otherwise American novel, then the story of Powers is a yet another story within this.

Both he and Oswald are like badly fitting members of a set of Russian dolls here, out of

context and prising the structure apart. The parallels between Powers and Oswald are

indicated by their reception in Russia, with an interview by Kirilenko, and recorded by

the same stenographer wearing a rosette, both of them answering questions on the spy

plane with varying degrees of truth. ' Oswald is brought back from Minsk to Moscow

229 Boxall, P135. I" See Libra, p161 and 191.

120

to observe and evaluate Powers' questioning, which is being misdirected by the

exaggerations made by Oswald on the subject of the U-2 plane during his own

questioning. As yet another author to conceive of Oswald as a character in a fiction

being played out around him, Kirilenko thinks of Oswald here as'some kind of Chaplinesque figure, skating along the edges of vast and dangerous events' (L 194).

The unwitting crash into history is the parallel between Powers and Oswald that is most

strongly indicative of the novel's theme of a historical destiny that fits comfortably into

the patterns of fictional writing. This metaphor is fully played out much later in the

book - Powers' descent through the air after ejecting from his plane is not described in

the novel until almost its end, when it is replayed as the hallucinatory thoughts of the

dying Oswald after he has been shot. This returns Oswald to the centre of the book, to

Powers and to 'the white nightmare of noon, high in the sky over Russia. Me-too and

you-too. He is a stranger, in a mask, falling' (L 440).

The crashed plane itself is exhibited as a piece of propaganda-as-found-sculpture in

Moscow (which Oswald goes to visit) forming another of this section's works-within-

works, more specifically a political artwork within another, if one is to read Libra as

one. In the context of DeLillo's oeuvre, this represents one of two visual artefacts that

are suggested or recapitulated later in Underworld, in the form of the fictional artist

Klara Sax's aeroplane installations (their'shaped weave of painted steeli230 almost a

remake in massive scale of Libra's'display of the plane's battered fuselage and tail

section' [L 195]). "' The second, more prominent, of these artefacts is the famous

Zapruder footage of the assassination itself, which the novel leads up to, and which history attempts and fails to unravel: in Underworld its screening (by an artist, as a

piece of found footage) is described as a work of'floating fear, a mercury reading out

of the sixties. " This film has come to be a kind of substitute for the event, a'mercury

reading that measures a historical temperature, but which also acts as a container for it

that adds its own layer of mystery and inscrutability. For DeLillo it serves, to use

230 Underworld, p124. 231 Sax also encounters a vernacular aeroplane sculpture almost 20 years earlier in Underworld, an

ambiguous work of either advertising or outsider art (Underworld, p379). 232 Underworld p488.

121

Derri da's words, 'to shelter itself and, sheltered, to conceal itself, to consolidate an

unknown number of gunshots into a single visual document, a single camera-shot. 233

Such a consolidation into a single 'artwork', which for DeLillo the Zapruder footage

and the Warren Report have both become forms of, describe the structure of an

advanced-artwork: an aesthetic body made up of layers of reference whose critical

potential thrives on the tension created by its historical flaws. DeLillo notes in his

introduction to Libra that it is the film footage, even more than the event it depicts, that

is the frame for representations of the assassination, giving the example of the'Ant

Farm' collective's performative re-enactment The Eternal Frame, 'recreating a media

event, not a shooting (L viii). The assassination's afterlife begins with the film, and it is

the gravitational pull of an image that prompts his narrative, rather than the event itself

- an archive within the archive, which keeps the event itself'poised at the edge of

revelation' (L vi). Like William's selection of images of Kennedy in Source, it is the

drama of this poise that enacts the work's thesis, the creation of what Martin describes

as an 'archive in which erasure and disclosure' are played against each other, and history in its'state of becoming' is crystallized. 734

Whilst the novel as a whole is, then, in part an attempt to unpack the constitution of

these few seconds of film, the footage is addressed explicitly in its climactic chapter,

where the assassination is played out as if through the lens of a written camera: 'A

misty light around the President's head. Two pink-white jets of tissue rising from the

mist. The movie camera running' (L 400). This same moment is seen by Lee Harvey

Oswald, through the sighting lens of his gun, itself like a camera, and appears, in more

romantic cinematic teens, in light that is 'so clear it was heartbreaking. ' The fatal shot is

then seen as if in black-and-white film: 'There was a white burst in the middle of the

frame' (L 400). The appearance of Oswald in the centre of the book, at a point of

equilibrium before the scales turn, is itself like a burst of light, heartbreaking and

poignant given his unravelling upon returning to America. Later in the chapter'In

Minsk' his own colours and tones are compared, Oswald writing in the Historic Diary 233 Archive Fever, p2. 234 Martin, p16.

122

that 'I am a healthy brown colour and stuffed with fresh fruit', an image that is quickly

countered by Marina's description of him as a'gray specter' (L 198).

This central part of the book makes a precis of the novel's most important themes, and, I would argue, dictate the historical thesis present in the failure of Branch to form his

own. As I have already suggested, these chapters function as the book's tipping point, the moment at which a historical re-establishment overbalances into fiction. This is

confirmed in the following chapter, the first of the book's second part. In it two of the

plotters, T -Jay and Everett consider the nature of the plot now that it has begun, now

that it has momentum. Way, reflecting on how Everett's original plan to stage a

provocative failed attempt on Kennedy had been adapted to become an actual

assassination, states that the plot which was once'scattered in technique' and impotent

now had the 'full heat of feeling!; had become'loose in the world' (L 219-20). Everett

too senses the momentum that the plot has now acquired, stating, famously, that 'there

is a tendency of plots to move towards death', that'a plot in fiction... is the way we localize the force of death outside the book' (L 221). He is concerned here that

cauterization is no longer possible, that the plot has started to exceed his fiction, and its

deathward intent can no longer be contained. Whilst his intuition is correct, within Libra and therefore within the plot that contains Everett's, this realization also runs

parallel to the wider significance of Branch's failure to write a history that coheres. His

attempt to write a history that begins with the assassination and seeks to move back

from it, to form a plot in reverse, loses itself in the tangle of narratives. The chapter'In

Minsk' goes on to describe Oswald's final attempt to write a history of his actions, history being a form that should bring'a persuasion and form to events' (L 211). Yet

like Branch, he is unable to write, his'pages were crowded, smudged, urgent, a true

picture of the state of his mind' (L 211). Like Branch's own failure, this confirms the

transference of authority from attempted history to fiction. It records the processes of

Branch's un-named, unwritten history and those of Oswald's Historic Diary being given

over to Libra, to a work of fiction that is about history, that circumscribes it. The

transference is made clear by the sharp contrast between Oswald's writing and

DeLillo's, a contrast that echoes the difference between Branch's'years of notes' and

123

DeLillo's'complete book'. Where Oswald feels'the pain, the chaos of composition' (L

211), we know that for DeLillo'the white space on the page helped me concentrate

more deeply', that the act of writing and the instrument of the typewriter is what allow

the language to be'finished, printed, beautifully formed'. 5 This comparison, in light of

a novel that humanises Oswald with great compassion for his subjugation by historical

forces, should not be read simply as a critique of his inability to write, but as a

validation of aesthetic writing to give'persuasion and form' to a work of history whose

very thesis is elusive, partial and porous.

235 Conversations, p92.

124

3. Libra and DeLillo's Oeuvre

The assembly of interconnected works that the the novel collects, what I have called

the'archive of Libra', differs from the bulk of DeLillo's fiction in two important

respects. It responds both to a body of history that is multifarious and complex, and

also maintains a close intertextual relationship with the document in which much of

this history is gathered in. The extent to which the Warren Report's presence as an intertext conditions the novel can be seen when the production of Libra, as opposed to

his other writings, is compared to DeLillo's own description of his method. In one interview he states that'the basic work is built around the sentence', rather than a

preconceived outline or structure; that plot and even characters issue from language

itself 11 Yet in Libra not only the structure of the novel, its historical element, but also

to a large extent its language (in the case of Marguerite Oswald, sentences and

paragraphs themselves) are to a significant extent predetermined by another body of

text. As I have described in Chapter 1, the intertextual relationship to the writings of

Lewis Carroll in Ratner's Star, for example, is brought to bear on the novel's structure

and form. Its parallel linguistic circumscription, the mathematical 'common culture'

with which it engages, present what might be termed an inter-voice rather than an inter-

text; as in the work of Christopher Williams employs the institutional workings of

another discipline. The two intertextualities, form and language, work together, and in

combination describe the role of the writer, playfully lost in the'rabbit hole' of

mathematical and scientific vernacular. The description that Libra makes of the role of

the historical writer, again lost in the 'warren' of another discipline, is achieved in the

course of a much closer intertextual relationship.

In Libra the Warren Report, and to a lesser extent the Historic Diary of Oswald,

perform multiple roles, as structural research, vernacular language, and as a work of

'excessive' history that allows DeLillo to demonstrate the critical role that fiction might

play as a device to draw meaning from its flawed and porous record. The shift this

236 COHYiCPSQb'OßS, p91.

125

represents in DeLillo's practice is caused by its innate literary suitability to become a

work with which DeLillo's writing will engage and circumscribe; by the voices in it

that DeLillo recognizes as already belonging to his writing, and by the multi-phonic

scope that Branch describes as Joycean. If, as Boxall states, Joyce is a 'guiding spirit'

and 'modernist father' in DeLillo's writing, then the Joycean Warren Report )like the

Beckettian Historic Diary) stands as a doubly key text when considering that writing as

advanced-art; its formal significance having been ascertained by DeLillo through the

employment of vernacular material. "

To return to the role of Branch, there is a running disjunction between Libra's

successful employment of an overarching intertext and its writer character's being

overwhelmed by the research he undertakes himself. This marks out a central point in

DeLillo's oeuvre, at which a key critical theme in his writing, the depiction of another

writer, is on the one hand most contrasted with the novel in which he is a protagonist,

and on the other most deeply embedded in the novel's central conceit and historical

thesis. To compare Libra with the novel that follows it, Mao II, whose fictional writer I

have discussed in Chapter 1, the stasis of its writer character is absolute - Branch is

mired in the preparation to write, whereas Mao Ifs Bill Gray manages to make an

escape of sorts, even if it is to the alternative narrative possibilities of 'political

violence'. 235 This outcome is something that DeLillo has connected to writing on

several occasions, stating that the contemporary terrorist has in some way taken on the

role of the writer, where the'gains that terrorists were realizing through violence had a

way of reducing the ground traditionally possible for writers'. 239 Whilst the character of

Branch, as DeLillo says, 'despairs' at his task, 'the fiction writer tries to redeem this

despair'. 240 Although the terroristic Oswald makes a leap between these forms, Branch

does not.

237

238

239

240

Boxall, p33. Conversations, p99. 1bid, p114. lbid, p64.

126

The potential for this redemption, as played out in Libra, is due to the dual nature of the

Warren Report as an intertext, as a historical and literary source that allows the novel to

circumscribe it even as its fictional writer fails to do so. Rather than appear as a piece

of critical punctuation like many of the artworks described in Chapter 1, as a competing

aesthetic, its place as a work-within-the-work runs deeper, becoming part of'the basic

work built around the sentence'. It comes to script the act of writing as well as that

which the writing will engage with. Whilst the fictional writer in Libra is usurped by

the novel in which he appears, and which the very existence of records a success at the

task at which he fails, the Warren Report - in what DeLillo characterises as its role as a

work of quasi-fictional writing - finds a more harmonious, or rather more nuanced

oppositional place in Libra, as it becomes part of its text. The space of the page here

assimilates another work, even as it also presents an alternative, impotent response to

the body of work that is assimilated.

Boxall's chapter'Becoming Historical' considers the centrality of the Warren Report to

Libra, and in turn the centrality of Libra to DeLillo's oeuvre. He maps out this

concentric structure through a sequence of ideas that seem to echo Derrida's Archive

Fever, and suggest that the convergence of DeLillo's writing and the text of the Warren

Report is due to a primal, even oedipal scene that both Libra and his first novel Americana centre around. " Whilst my own reading of the deep connections between

the two texts is primarily to do with the adjustment to DeLillo's relationship to

vernacular material that the Warren Report makes, and to the effect this has on the

possibility of reading his fiction in terms of advanced-art, Boxall's analysis provide a

means to open this part of Librds'archive; the collection of texts and unwritten histories that permeate it.

241 Boxall has confirmed in private correspondence that Archive Fever was abase noteto his writing the chapter on Libra, despite being absent in name from its bibliography. (email corresponderroe, 27/6/10). Cowart too, in his chapter on Libra ('Convergence of the Twain) also makes repeated references that allude to the subject matter of Archive Fever; that (from Freud) in the beginning was the deed', and yet The deed, historians fad, remains swaddled in the word' (Cowart, p94, and p107- 108).

127

Without referring explicitly to Archive Fever, Boxall's chapter on Libra considers what

might be called'DeLillo's archive', its originary moment, and uses the recurring phrase 'DeLillian signature', an idea whose inscriptive character recalls the'Freudian impression' at the heart of Archive Fever. For Boxall, the'primal moment' or'primal

scene' in DeLillo's fiction is the point of deepest convergence between his writing and

the Warren Report, the strange incidence of a witness to the murder of a policeman by

Lee Harvey Oswald, who places her shoes upon the bonnet of a car. ' This event takes

place within the chaotic moments after the shooting of Kennedy, within the long

climactic chapter entitled'22 November'. Boxall relates this moment in the historical

record, in the Warren Report, to the image of another empty shoe belonging to the

mother of the central character in DeLillo's first novel, Americana. For Boxall this

'youthful, Proustian, oedipal' moment is reprised in the climax of Libra, not in terms of its erotic suggestion as such but as something more central to DeLillo's oeuvre as a

whole, that serves to'carry the freight' of oedipal moments for several of DeLillo's

main characters. 243

Boxall uses this connecting line through DeLillo's writings as a means of resolving DeLillo's famous quote that the assassination of Kennedy'maybe invented me'. '''a It is

the overarching intertext of the Warren Report however, rather than this image alone,

that allows Boxall to join Libra to the originary moment, the'primal' scene in DeLillo's

work. Boxall sees this scene as such a crucial point, almost the true destiny of the novel beyond the assassination, and that it forms a point where the combination or

convergence of the'DeLillian voice' and the 'encyclopaedic comprehensiveness' of the

Warren Report's move toward a'point at which history becomes a finished text, and

resolve the state of becoming historical. ' The historical archive that Libra addresses is, Boxall suggests, just as much the archive of DeLillo, and in Libra the two are

opened at once. Seen as a novel that circumscribes an archival text that addresses an

event that'maybe invented' its author, in Boxall's near Derridian terms the novel

242 Boxall, p143. 243 lbid, p143. 21 Conversations, p36. 241 Boxall, p144.

128

becomes central to DeLillo's oeuvre. David Cowart also makes the comparison between

this originary moment to the writings of Dante and the implicit critique it makes of fall

of Julius Caesar and the decline of his civilization, stating that both writers seek'to

understand his age and his own identity as artist by returning to and contemplating the

act that brought both into being'. He also links this to the importance of vernacular language to these disparate writers, of Tuscan Italian and DeLillo's'postmodern lingua

franca'. The comparison between the two is in the employment of vernacular language as a dialect that is far-reaching due to its very locality.

As I have discussed in Chapter 1, key to the postmodern dialect of DeLillo is its

engagement with other work, with other artforms, and I would argue that equal to the

personal convergence of the Warren Report and DeLillo the writer is the convergence

that the Report has with this art-historical or critical element of DeLillo's writing. As I

have further detailed in Chapter 1, the artworks in DeLillo's novels offer a form of art- historical critique through their opposition, or aesthetic contrast, to the text in which

they are written. Yet in Libra DeLillo both engages with an intertext that he claims a

quasi-Joycean literary importance for, and frames the novel around a writer who fails to

write due to the volume of research he accrues. In this case, the expansive text of Libra,

that according to Cowart reaches 'extraordinary performative heights', 'constructed, not

transcribed' from the Warren Report, would seem to represent the Joycean pole of DeLillo's literary inheritance, and the failure of Branch its Beckettian counterpart. '

The question of the convergence between the task that DeLillo the writer and Branch

the fictional writer perform, though, begins to dissolve this opposition. Whilst the

Warren Report is an archive that both the structure and language of Libra are drawn

from, it is also an archive that is shown in the novel to be inaccessible to writing. It is

this that points towards the possibility to view Libra as an advanced-artwork: it

performs a historical task, even as it presents historical practice as a failed, questioned

mirror-image of itself. Cowart goes on to say that in the close attention paid to the

voices that emerge in his research, DeLillo's achievement here begins with his effort to

synthesize the language of an assassin', but in doing so he also begins to synthesize the

Cowart, p92. lid, p92.

129

historical language of an assassination. '" This language forms a history that is both

written and unwritten, and that somehow finds a strategy to depict a subject that has

evaded it. The materials and tools that this strategy employ are what I in turn will

circumscribe in the textual artwork described in the following chapter.

Seen in this light Libra would seem to enact another, inner synthesis within DeLillo's

writing, where history's despair is redeemed by a shift in its criteria, from facts to

voices, and through measuring the extent to which a body of history, (re)constructed if

not transcribed, has within it lines of thought that might already be proper to fiction.

The Warren Report, standing as both DeLillo's primary body of historical research and

as a text that also feeds into Libra's literary character, acts as a voice in a novel that, in

his own words, is'about history in a way. Ifs also about fiction, about plot-making, and

the relationships between plots and deaths'. 'A9 This is a history, then, that whilst not

literally 'unwritten', like Christopher Williams', is unwritten in traditional form, with

any attempt at objectivity per se, but rewritten via the innate relationship it has to

fictional writing. From the art-historical perspective of Crow's Modern Art in the

Common Culture, DeLillo makes use of his literary artform to circumnavigate the task

of history, but he historicises nonetheless - and like Williams uses the innate artistic

rhythms of the material to which he applies historical critique. Libra becomes central to

DeLillo's oeuvre at precisely the point at which the proximity of his writing to

advanced-art is most visible; where one work circumscribes another whilst alerting the

viewer, or reader, to the cracks and fissures made evident despite the close meeting of

the two. In the case of Libra these gaps and flaws are at the very source of the writing;

in the subject matter of the book as well as the body of history that feeds into it, and

they are preserved in the text even as it writes over and around them. The narrative

punctuation of the character of Branch and his gradual failure remind the reader that the

'free weave' of DeLillo's fiction is a means of historicising through an aesthetic

engagement that takes place as an acknowledgement of its flaws.

14 Cowart, p92. 20 Conversations, p32.

130

The'phantom archive' that, for Martin, is produced by Williams' work finds a literary

contemporary here, not least in the sense that Libra is to an extent haunted by its

intertexts and the voices within them. Like a telephone, or a musical instrument

plugged into a mixing desk the novel draws on the phantom power of the texts it is

attached to even as it feeds back into them. DeLillo states that in his research he was 'looking for ghosts, not living people, and that he would feel 'an eerie excitement'; that

the territory was'crawling with secrets'. 250 Branch, in turn, is 'haunted' (L 82) by the Warren Report, unable to shake off the multiple narratives that make it resistant to his

task. Again, as in the Libra chapters in the studies of Boxall and Cowart, these ideas are

suggestive of the literary archive described in Archive Fever, that every text is haunted

by another, that'every archive is spectral'. 25' In terms of the shared form of Libra and

the advanced-artwork, these archival relationships are more precisely suggested by

Herman Rapaport in his work on Derrida. In the'Archive Trauma' chapter of his Later

Derrida Rapaport applies the thought of Archive Fever onto itself, on its own archival

structure. He describes the texts that 'haunt' Archive Fever (Derrida's earlier Post Card,

and Feu la cendre) as being present like a 'phantom limb', that is to say present in their

absence, as a voice from both within and without. 252 As Martin says of Williams, in

work that produces a phantom archive'erasure and disclosure are being constantly

transposed'. Without wishing to dwell for too long in Derridian thought, these

observations note that as the Libran scales shift for DeLillo, the transposition of historical, critical thought and fiction is dramatised by a fictional writer haunted by an intertext, whose failures both punctuate and puncture the text, maintaining its porosity. But outside of theory, and granted a structural model by advanced-art, it is the practical

relationship between these texts, and the possibility of re-performing their

circumscription in the textual artwork I have produced, that energise my critique.

130 Conversations, p97-8. 23' Archive Fever, p68. 252 Rapaport, p91.

131

4. The Depository

I would like to conclude this chapter, and set the ground for the chapter that follows it,

with a discussion of the idea of the'depository', a word whose multiple meanings

express many of the facets that make up the 'archive of Libra'. My conception of this

archive as an institution that has Libra as its central artefact will, in the following

chapter, be expanded by the addition to it of my own work, drawn from Libra's drafts,

but before doing so I will trace some of the resonances of the depository as a location

in which texts, either written or unwritten, come to settle.

It is initially the location of the Texas Book Depository that suggests the implication of

the term 'depository', the place in which Oswald stood and, Libra tells us, took the shot

that may or may not have been the one that killed Kennedy. 'Texas School Book', in

reference to this location, was one of the titles considered by DeLillo for the novel that

would become Libra, and the obvious contrast between the metaphorical implications

of the two titles, one suggesting the permanence of both storage and learning, the other

a balanced scale that is to tip over, can be brought to bear on my attempt to make a

reading of Libra as the central artefact of an advanced-artwork, a'complete book'. "

The implications of repurposing this room of books as a sniper's vantage point stretch

both to Oswald personally, and to the book as a whole. For Oswald to make his fateful

act here is a terrible irony, the articulacy he lacks in language and literature but finds, or

attempts to find, in violence, is like a final victory for his 'word-blindness, or like a

skewed completion of the essay 'The Murder of H'story', the notes to which he

smuggles out of Russia and back to America. ' And in terms of the novel itself, the

notion of it existing as a depository for other books is no less appropriate, and just as ironic. Libra stores, in the circumscriptive manner of the advanced-artwork, the Warren

u' Upon choosing Libra, DeLillo's working notes indicate that he considered the word both for its meaning of the 'arm of a balance' and its similarity to the Italian'hbro', meaning book (DeLillo's research notebooks for Libra, Ransom Center 27.2).

251 See Libra, p210-12.

132

Report, but also a matrix of unfinished works, of what truly are'unwritten histories'-

the potential writings of Branch, of Lee Harvey and Marguerite Oswald, but also the

thwarted plot of Everett. The book depository, where books are stored but not read - it

is not a library - is where the contention of Mao II, that political violence will replace

political writing, is played out in a narrative that itself contests the two.

These unwritten works are deposited within the text of Libra, just as the collective

voices of a multitude are in the deposition given to the Warren Commission. As

DeLillo, via Branch, assures the reader, the Report itself forms a literary deposition,

despite its attempt at assembling historical fact, which as Boxall states, can only 'testify,

despite itself to the'multiple nature of lived experience'. " The deployment of the

Report's prose in Libra reflects this double de-position, where both its language and the

categorization of its genre as a piece of writing are shifted. The novel itself finally

deposits a testimony on the nature of these negotiations, on the possibility of historical

writing (writing about history) that acknowledges 'multiple natures' and multiple

voices.

It is given this imperative not only by the competing multiplicity of its plotters, but also by the unfixed nature of individual characters, who like the gunman figure that Everett

is seeking to create, 'emerge and vanish in a maze of false names' (L 145). The idea that

history is deposited in a name is a recurring concern of Oswald's, who as a teenager

reading that Trotsky lived for a time near his home in the Bronx (a coincidental

relationship parallel to that of DeLillo and Oswald), reflects that neither Trotsky, nor Lenin, nor Stalin were real names, that they were'historic names, pen names, names of

war, party names, revolutionary names' (L 34) - names in which the meaning of a life

and its historical gesture is invested. After meeting Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot, in

Moscow Oswald realizes that his full name, Francis Gary Powers had'officially

marked' him, that the permanent addition of the middle name now'sounded historic' (L

198); as the permanent addition of 'Harvey' to his own name would come to. Nicholas

Branch then comes to feel that what is finally deposited in the multiple names of the

255 Boxall, p144-5.

133

book's characters is that which makes his task truly impossible: the'merging of written

and living characters, of words and politics' (L 301), the'free weave' accessible to

fiction and not to history. He comes to this conclusion whilst unpacking the multiple identities contained within a pseudonym used by Oswald, D. F. Drictal', which, in a

ghostly act of fraud, Oswald used so as to be his own 'witness' whilst filling in the

forms necessary to buy a gun. Branch is described as having'toiled over the inner

structure (L 301) of the name, finding fragments in it from Castro, from Oswald, and from Dupard (a character who is Oswald's accomplice in an earlier crime). The

perplexity that this name causes for Branch is once again in contrast to the figure of his

contemporary DeLillo, whose fiction will allow this history not to be'losf, and whose

writing method foregrounds such textual deposits; is about words, about their inner

structure and composition. A page in the first draft of Libra reads almost as an illustration of Branch's toil over this name; the fragments of'D. F. Drictal' deconstructed

and expressed visually like a piece of mathematiCS. 256 It is in ambiguities such as this

name, whose syllables and sounds contain splinters of meaning, that DeLillo's writing

process also finds its expression, a process about which he says that he is 'willing to let

language press meaning' upon himsel£zs'

It is, ultimately, Libra's expression of this artistic method, using historical means and

achieving, within its aesthetic, historical thought, that marks the novel out as an

advanced-artwork. Whilst characters, a plot, but above all else language drive the

writing, they are also held at one remove, by the space of the page, the'complete book'

in which the 'words typed on the white page have a sculptural quality'; in which the

words become artefacts within a space that frames them. Another unwritten history

deposited within Libra is this writing method, of the slow accretion of the complete book that is refracted into the published novel. The 'state of becoming that DeLillo's

carefully preserved archive records is both present and absent in the novel; whilst all of Libra is somewhere within the pages of drafts, only certain voices and lines of thought

Ransom Center 31.6. Further'calculations' such as this using the names'oswW, 'hidell', 'lee' and other names associated with Oswald are made in pen on the back of the typescript for a previous chapter (Ransom Center 30.1).

217 Conversations, p91.

134

from the draft become part of the novel. DeLillo's use of the typewriter means that, like

the Warren Report, this complete book is a novel in which'nothing is left out', which

records the coming into being of a novel that contests that very possibility. My own

artistic reading of the archival layers formed by the novel's drafts follows this draft

back into the moment at which'language presses meaning onto the page.

Like the advanced-art of Christopher Williams, DeLillo's novels make a critical

exploration of the inner workings of their own medium, even whilst using this

somewhat modernist gesture as one element in a larger work that is also postmodern in

character, that incorporates references, other voices and other works into itself. As

Martin says of Williams' For Example, 'reference becomes unstuck in historical time

and expands': in Libra this occurs when an intertext so profoundly central to the writer

as the Warren Report comes to prompt a critique of writing itself, of the possibility of fiction to depict a fractured narrative through its very flaws. 258 As LeClair says of

DeLillo the'system novelist', it is forms such as this that offer a'model for writers who

would attempt to continue the modernist tradition of synthetic masterpieces [referring

to what he calls modernism's 'monumental', rather than naturalistic impulses], now

synthesising ranging abstractions'. 259 Libra, with its central tension of a failing writer,

and its competing historical narratives, allows these porous elements to be synthesised. The puncture-hole that indicates this porosity is worked into DeLillo's writing by the

works-within-the-works that permeate them, by the 'investment in the possibilities of

aesthetic silence that Boxall sees as DeLillo's inheritance from Beckett - an investment

made in the currency of the competing, excessive aesthetic of expansive writing. 260 In

Libra Branch, both as DeLillo's contemporary and opposite, comes to bear the weight

of this silence. But it is, in my view, DeLillo's more personal modernism that drives the

inherited modernisms, the de-facto postmodernity, or the re-modernity that have been

gathered into the critical discourse surrounding his writing. His deep attachment to the

medium itself, to both language and typewriter keys striking the page, is what allows

this plurality to be polished and worked to the point that'nothing is left out, and yet the

2" Martin, p82. 259 LeClair, pll. 21 Boxall, DeLillo and Media Cultore', p46.

135

space of critique can still puncture the text.

DeLillo's 'complete book', the archive of Libra with its many forms of writing and language, gives a critical narrative to this porous whole, where a fictional writer

confronts the essence of the writing itself, as in Oswald's pseudonym Drictal', the

'alphabet blocks' (L 301) of its language; in intimate contact with the medium. The

figure of Branch dramatises this critique, asking, finally, for'a thing to be what it is',

and not an unreadable signifier, and asking himself as a historian for what the 'free

weave' of fiction might deliver: a death (the assassination)'without the ensuing ritual of

a search for patterns and links' (L 379), for an inconclusive narrative to take a form that

accepts this very quality. The final deposition made by Libra, in light of this, is to an

expanded, porous space of the page in which a history is subsumed into a fiction, but

where this fiction is itself subject to a form of historical critique, and is reflected back

upon itself through the gaps built into the whole. The 'alphabet blocks' at the heart of

DeLillo's writing that work these gaps into the prose will, in the work introduced by the

following chapter, be reassembled using the tools with which they were made.

136

Chapter 4- The Draft

This chapter introduces, annotates and expands upon the visual work that forms the

conclusion to the thesis. The thirty pages of typewritten text that follow this chapter, The Draft, are reproductions of DeLillo's typewritten drafts of passages from Libra. As

well as corresponding to the parts of the book subject to analysis in the previous

chapter, these excerpts refer to the act of writing in several formal and descriptive

ways, and also refer to the conceptual links between the novel, its fictional writers, and

my own practice. They are drawn chronologically from the novel, and chronologically

within the drafting process of each paragraph. The text shifts and changes before it

reaches the point at which it will be published. The Draft presents this flux as a way of

engaging with DeLillo's writing practice as a work in progress or 'in situ!; in the space in which it is made. The intention of this, to use a distinction made in Chapter 1, is to

'ventriloquise' rather than represent this writing practice, to employ its workings within

a circumscriptive work of advanced-art.

The objective of this artwork, in its guise as the conclusion to the thesis, is to apply the

processes of advanced-art to DeLillo's language, to take the writing itself as a common

culture or artistic vernacular with which to engage. Following the conclusion to the

previous chapter, this work uses the drafts of the novel to form an advanced-artwork

much as the novel itself forms one out of the intertexts and historical thought that it

circumscribes. During that conclusion I have said that DeLillo's writing makes a critical

exploration of its own medium that relates to modernist writing practice, and does so

using methods that also display a post modern plurality. In response to his writing's

problematising of these terms, as outlined in the previous chapters, I have used the term

porous modernism. My notion of this qualified modernism lies in the exploitation of

the apparent disjunction between these'isms', the gaps and spaces in the structure of highly plural work. In the case of Libra, this plurality incorporates historical thought

(about the practice of history, as much as the practice of writing) into an aesthetic

practice, dramatising, as I have shown in the previous chapter, the gradual shift of

137

fiction's 'free weave' as it overrules the constraints of history. In my account of the

making of The Draft I would like not only to look much more closely at the means by

which DeLillo's writing forms a practice analogous to advanced-art, but to expand upon

my re-application of its methods onto the novel's drafts. This is to allow, as in the work

of Christopher Williams, patterns of reference and representation to open out even further than they do within Libra itself, and to make one advanced-artwork out of

another. The intention is also to show how DeLillo's writing functions by writing it

myself, as it were, as well as writing about it as I have done up until this point in the

thesis. By putting theory into practice, I will use this as another strategy for thinking

about a fictional oeuvre that I have argued does the same.

These reproductions are images of a text between the states of being decided and

undecided. The slight inconsistencies between them and the originals - the exact weight

of the ink, the precise position on the page - are the marks of the re-performance of

DeLillo's writing that has taken place. I have tried as much as possible to re-stage the

action of their writing, just as Christopher Williams re-built the walls of Christopher

D'Arcangelo's installation, or indeed as DeLillo revivifies the drifting narratives of Marguerite Oswald and the Warren Report in which her narratives sit. The methods of

advanced-art, as I have described them, unite actions such as these in the way they re-

contextualise creative dialects, allowing them to draw breath in new spaces. In my

work presented here, it is as if DeLillo's writing has formed a script in both senses of

the word, as writing, but also - as the references to the act of writing present in these

paragraphs suggest - instructions for its performance. In this sense DeLillo's

typewritten pages form a score as well as script, for an alphabetic rather than musical

keyboard, which when played'scores' in turn its letters onto the page. Yet the terms

'script' and 'score are complicated by the looping nature of an archive of texts that are

both intertextual and extratextual. The writing that these documents inscribe, score, into

their pages is also ex-scribed: it is written out existing vernacular prose, and out of the

white space of DeLillo's page into that of my own.

138

Central to this looping structure is the presence of Libra as the fulcrum of the archive

that my advanced-artwork addresses. The Draft, the title of this chapter and of the body

of reproductions as a whole, is an image of all the currents of ideas that run through the

thesis they conclude. The Draft uses the advanced-art methodology of employing other

work within itself, but does so using the gaps and flaws in that material - in this case

the language as it is settling into its final form. These gaps, the porous elements in the

material, reveal the negotiation between the modern and the post-modem that permeate

my claim that the space of the page in DeLillo's writing forms an advanced-artwork. It

these gaps that also prompt my own work. To reiterate a critical concern of Chapter 1,

although the process of employing another work within my own is postmodern in

character, what is quoted here is the modernity at the heart of DeLillo's writing, the

medium-specificity that runs through the finely-tuned attention he pays to his language,

script and page.

This remains the case even as DeLillo's writing forms a self-referential exposure of his

application of critical thought through aesthetic means, as the figure of Nicholas

Branch, described in the previous chapter, indicates. DeLillo's engagement with his

medium is linguistic, spatial, and conceptual, shaped not only by the meaning of the

text, but by the visual relationships within the isolated paragraphs that his page-by-page

method circumscribes. The Draft, composed of quotations of this porous modernism

ultimately seeks to use DeLillo's critique-in-practice as a voice within a new work, and

seeks to trace the 'draft of these lines of thought throughout the inter and extra textual

structure they form. The work that follows, therefore, uses artistic practice to

summarise the theoretical questions my thesis has established, but it is also a step

beyond them, a new work made from another. Responding to the ideas that form the

thesis' title, the space of the page in DeLillo's writings is one in which 'the writer as

advanced-artist' finds depths in which to produce work, and in which critical thought

circulates within practice. It is also a space in which this critical thought can be

extracted and reapplied onto itself, allowed to continue into the space of another page.

139

1. The Drafting Process

The practical artistic process of making The Draft began with a visual and textual

interpretation of DeLillo's pages of typing: reproductions on paper by pencil that record both the layout of the typewritten text and the notes and corrections that surround it,

conducted in the reading room of the Ransom Center at the University of Texas, where

the archive of DeLillo's working papers, notebooks, research materials, typed drafts and final typescripts are housed. This was only allowed to take place using the Ransom

Center's own yellow sheets of paper, a security requirement of its reading room. These

initial records use a neater form of handwriting to record type, and a more scribbled hand to record DeLillo's pencil marking. They also note the box and folder number

with which the Center catalogues them, the chapter the page is taken from, and their

place within the sequence of drafts of a given paragraph.

140

PAGINATED BLANK PAGES

ARE SCANNED AS FOUND IN ORIGINAL

THESIS

NO INFORMATION

MISSING

In the almost microscopic reading of Libra that this archive allows, I read and recorded

the many layers of work that DeLillo conducted in writing the novel: notebooks that

assemble information about the dates and locations of events and characters that appear

in the book, magazine articles and press cuttings relating to the Kennedy assassination,

notes on DeLillo's reading of the Warren Report, and then finally the layers of

typewritten text that come to form the novel. It is these layers of type that I have chosen

to apply yet another process to in order to make the work that is discussed in this

chapter, re-typing them using a manual typewriter so as to both reproduce and represent

them, intervening critically and practically on DeLillo's archive in a manner that

follows the methods of advanced-art production described throughout this thesis. I use

the term 'reproduction' throughout this chapter, rather than, say, 'copy' or'transcription'

in order to make clear that it is the act of writing as much as the end result that I am

replicating; the application of the same words using the same tools. The critical implications of this, as well as testing in practice the methods of advanced-art, are to

use these practical methods to expand the field of DeLillo studies. As I have stated in

Chapter 1, the subject of the physical process of DeLillo's writing and the space of his

page remains an under-researched area. This visual work ventures to redress this

imbalance using the tools made available by art-theory.

The stage of drafting in his writing practice reveals the moment at which DeLillo's

writing encounters the'space of the page' that my thesis has so far considered as a

theoretical concern. The space that this theoretical work has mapped out has been used

as the site for a new production, a practical demonstration of the ideas that form the

title of this thesis: 'The Space of the Page in the writings of Don DeLillo', and The

Writer as Advanced-Artist'. After showing, in Chapter 3, that the expanded space of

DeLillo's page allows for a writing that can be read as an advanced-art practice, I will

now add another such practice to it.

142

Examining the very particular method of drafting in DeLillo's writing process makes

evident the importance of visual space to his writing. His novels emerge paragraph by

paragraph, each one given a page of their own, and are only assembled together at the

very end of the process. Each attempt at a given paragraph was kept by DeLillo,

archived as part of the'complete book' that I have discussed in the previous chapter, before this archive was acquired by the Ransom Center. The Center's archive retains

this structure, storing multiple attempts at writing the same paragraph together in

sequence. Whereas in Chapter 1I have considered the relationship of fictional works

and practices to the space of DeLillo's page, here it is the physical page whose space is

under scrutiny - in terms of art, I see this difference as being close to the difference

between the studio and the work that emerges from it. When the writing is drafted to

the point of completion, but has yet to be typeset, printed and published, it is as if an

artwork has been completed but has yet to leave the context of the studio, and can still

be seen amongst the tools and materials that have formed it. It is an inner moment of

the writing process in which the author perhaps less present that in the realized work, in

which the unformed and forming writing is - like much of the language and burdens of

authorship throughout Libra - overwhelming. As Blanchot puts it, 'Every writer, every

artist is is acquainted with the moment at which he is cast out and apparently excluded by the work in progress!. "" My re-assembly of these texts is an attempt to form a new

narrative out of this excluding moment, by reading DeLillo's writing in its 'studio'

context. This new narrative encounters key elements of that of the novel that the texts

contribute to, but it equally describes the practical method that is so key to their

formation.

The way in which DeLillo uses his medium in this visual space is partly what gives the

writing the refinement and self-critical depth to engage with the other practices for

which I have shown it to find space. It is an example of what I have called porous

modernism: that by working with such acute medium-specificity as regards his

language, DeLillo produces work that places gaps within itself, critical doubts and

potential resolutions to these doubts. For DeLillo the sight of typed text and the site of

211 Blanchot, The Space of Literature, p53.

143

the page interface in such a way as to adjust the text's meaning at times. This is of

particular conceptual importance in Libra, a novel which makes a circuitous pursuit of, if not historical fact, then the trajectories this history follow in the mind of the authors

whose fictional narratives form voices within DeLillo's own. The drafts reproduced in

my work give an image of the conceptual workings of the project of Libra, through a

study of its practical and material origins. The stage in DeLillo's writing practice at

which the visual has the greatest importance is this moment where the language forms,

but this is also where meaning is in some way prised open by the way the language sits

in the white space of the page; where words 'match up not just through meaning but

through sound and look'. " Such adjusted meanings are, as I have said, another indicator of the porous modernism in his writing, where gaps and ambiguities at one level of the writing become aesthetic gestures on another level. What my work sifts from the drafts is a visual reading of the prose in the moment at which these forces

converge, using a process somewhere between writing, reading, and looking at the

structure of the text as a whole. This multi-layered reading is in turn is reassembled in

my reproductions as a kind of immanent artwork, the materials of which are already

present in the Ransom Center's DeLillo archive. This artwork is intended to exist within

and without Libra - an advanced artwork that uses DeLillo's texts, and the critical field

set by his personal literary theory and aesthetic ideas as the vernaculars with which it

engages.

Each stage of the drafting process of Libra held in the collections of the Ransom Center

is recorded here, up to the final typescript (in which the paragraphs appear, albeit one

per page, as they do in the published novel). These reproductions have then been re-

typewritten, preserving the layout and textual details of the originals, including notes in

pencil. The following paragraph, for example, describes Oswald's teenage reading

about Russia and Marx, DeLillo's pencil notes recording his own reading, his'serious

time in the library' and engagement with the Warren Report. I have chosen examples

such as these for the way in which they offer a meta-description of the processes I have

engaged with in order to produce The Draft.

262 Conversations, p91.

144

He spent serious time in the library. He edged through the stacks, scanning titles for hours. Old men crossed the aisles, men with breadcrumbs in their pockets, foreigners, hobbling.

He wanted books more advanced than the school texts, books that put him at a distance from his classmates, closed the world around him. They had their civics and home economics. He wanted subjects and ideas of historic soaps scope, ideas that touched his life, his real life, the

whirl of time inside him. Held seen pamphlets, photographs in Life. Men in caps and worn jackets.

with scarfs on their heads. A Penetrating Look at the people of Russia.

These pencil markings, so distinct from the precision of even early typewritten attempts

at the prose, record another practical voice at work, DeLillo as reader or editor,

conducting work that requires a different tool. The privileged role given to the

typewriter indicate that the pages form facsimiles of the most purely linguistic stratum

of Libra's writing, of the critical adjustments made by DeLillo as his writing appears on

the page. As I have said, the paragraphs that I have recorded in this way were chosen for their conceptual links to both the novel's historical and literary thesis, and

relationship to its own medium - they refer to the act of writing, to the biblio-philia and

-phobia that the novel's fictional writers (and myself as its subsequent scholar) are

subjected to, and to the role of language and writing in the historical destiny of the

individual characters. In respect to my visual work, and to the forms of advanced-art

considered throughout this thesis, the self-referentiality of these examples are part of

what allow my reproductions to form an advanced-artwork of their own, employing the

'voice' of DeLillo's practice within a new work. By taking examples that address in

various ways the the act of writing, the intention is both to expose anew the critique of

writing in DeLillo's work (as I have detailed in previous chapters), and also to

repurpose that critique - to place it in a new mode of visual/writing practice.

From the eight detailed reproductions of paragraphs that I have remade in this way, I

have selected several to re-appear in this chapter for closer analysis. They are the drafts

of passages that are key to the textual analyses of the previous chapter, and which

crystallize many of my critical and aesthetic conclusions. They also refer more or less

directly to the practises I discuss throughout the thesis: the act of writing, the use of intertextual material, and the impact of writing on the space of the page. However,

aside from these quite rational criteria of selection, The Draft, the full thirty pages of

work that follow this chapter, represents parts of the book that also had a particular

resonance or intensity for me during the weeks I spent reading the novel's drafts. They

are, perhaps, quieter moments within the novel, not dramatic incidents or virtuosic

writing necessarily, but reflective of the undercurrents in DeLillo's writing process that

first alerted me to its breadth, and the critical address it makes to its medium. The

present chapter, as well as continuing the literary and art-historical theory of the

146

previous chapters, is an artist's explanation of work prompted by that theory. I have

therefore taken on a slightly different role in regards to this work; of an artist whose work is primed by the more traditional criticism that precedes it, and who applies that

critique using practical means. It might then, correctly, be said that by concluding this

predominantly theoretical and historical thesis with an artwork I am responding to its

more 'rational' concerns irrationally, and vice-versa; that I am testing practice with theory and theory with practice. This is the intention of the work, informed by the

models of DeLillo's writing and advanced visual art.

147

2. The Notion of Drafting

In the previous chapter I used the terms 'phantom power' and 'phantom limb' as

metaphors to describe the relationship that Libra has to its intertexts. The ghostly trace

of the appearance of one text in another provides a means of thinking about the place of

a text's draft in the published, finished work towards which it is written. In electrical

terms, phantom power is drawn from the circuit it feeds back into, and the sensation of

a phantom limb is drawn from the memory of it's presence. The feedback loop between

concepts and matter engendered by these relationships informs the poetic idea of the

drafting of a text that the work in this chapter explores: just as Libra is substantially drawn from intertextual sources, the published novel can be looked at as an intertext

that works its way back into the white pages of typescript from which it itself is drawn.

In this sense DeLillo's draft, the'complete book' of which my work is an image, can be

seen as interface between the Warren Report, the 'Historic Diary' of Lee Harvey

Oswald, and more generally Libra.

In producing this work such metaphors have occupied my artistic thought processes,

amongst the many other metaphors presented by the meanings of the word 1draft'.

Along with it's older spelling of 'draught', the word accounts for multiple meanings that

imply the relationship of one text to another, and to an intertext. As well as the draft of

a text, or the plans of a draughtsman, there is the notion of imbibing a substance, of

taking a draft of liquid or drawing on a cigarette. This connection to smoking also

relates to pulling, to draw from a source. The draft of soldiers, or of athletes in

American team sports, also implies a kind of accession, the allocation and organization

of a source material: just as historical research and texts are drafted into use by a work

such as Libra. Yet the text of Libra is to an extent already drafted by its intertexts; they

contain elements of its language. I see this loop of ideas as working like a kind of

circular breathing, a draft passing from one work to another and back again. A final

meaning of the word also gives a metaphor for the competing practices in the book, of

historical and fictional writing, and of multiple authors whose plots converge - the idea

of drafting in bicycle race, where riders who are in competition will cooperate to draw

148

each other along in their slipstream, in order to avoid yet another meaning associated

with the word, the 'drag' of the air. In this form of drafting the contest is sustained until

a break is made, until the draft is broken and each competitor then acts on their own initiative. As I have discussed in the previous chapter, this principle is played out by

DeLillo and his fictional counterpart Branch throughout the narrative of Libra. All of

these meanings have coloured my understanding of the intertextual and practical

relations that have led me to use Libra's drafts as a way of showing that DeLillo's use

of the space of the page marks his work out as advanced-art - and that this work can in

turn be reworked using the same methods and tools.

I also see the novel as an 'extratext' in the way it relates to its intertexts - to be written

out of them, employing their literary or anti-literary voices. In Chapter 1I use the term

'extratext' to describe the way in which DeLillo's writing, like the work of other

advanced-artists, uses a technique that is closer to ventriloquism than quotation, bringing other disciplines and institutions, rather than other works as such, into his

own. As such, it is the excessive Warren Report, the non-writing of Nicholas Branch, or

the flawed writing of Lee Harvey Oswald that form major intertexts in Libra, and I see

the novel becoming a critical extratext in relation to them. As Deleuze states, 'a text is

merely a small cog in an extra-textual practise', and the critic's role is to examine the

'use a given text has in the'extra-textual practice that prolongs' it. 1b3 It is within such a

structure (what I have called throughout Chapter 3 the'archive of Libra') of interrelated

texts, that my typewritten reproductions of DeLillo's drafts intervene, as a means of not

only identifying but performing the novel's critique of the practice and possibility of

writing. If, as I have described in Chapter 3, Libra is a work whose textual porosity and

partial nature is its subject matter and theme, then the present chapter seeks to identify

these qualities in its physical materials, the typewritten characters that 'shape and hammer' (L 244) the novel that I see as the centre of an advanced-artwork in prose.

The passages I have chosen to examine more closely here contain essential moments in

the novel as regards my critique of it. They describe, via the character of Branch,

ý' From the introduction to Delenze, Essays Critical and Clinical, pXVI.

149

DeLillo's own writing process; the failed writing process of Oswald; the'drugging by

language' of Oswald by David Ferrie; and finally Branch resigned to failure, inhabiting

an archive of text but no longer writing. In reading these examples, refracted into the

attempts that DeLillo made at writing them, a new book is produced: fragments of

prose that record the gradual refinement of the language as it reaches the point of

precision at which it is published, and which also record the space of the page in which

that language comes into being.

By tracing the development of passages from the novel that I have analysed in the

previous chapter, this new book is my reading, or, to use a term I have applied to the

processes of advanced-art, my circumscription of Libra. The sense in which I have used

the term circumscription is especially apt here; to literally 'write around' rather than

draw around or enclose.

The 'complete book' that these reproductions are an image of share its presentation in

the white space of the typewritten page, and share the 'physical dimensions' of

DeLillo's writing, but remade by another hand. The published novel becomes in this

context the framing device for the larger advanced-artwork of Libra, the'physical

artwork' at the centre of the conceptual frames that underpin a porous whole. My

typewritten reproductions offer another physical artwork that draws both textual and

visual breath from this same archive. Like the advanced-artworks I have described up

to and including Libra, this work is circumscriptive of another, and offers a critique of

that work. It places the possibilities of DeLillo's fiction into critical dialogue at the

level of their physical manifestation and production, in the state of their becoming

texts, using possible fragments of prose that for DeLillo are visual and spatial as well as

narrative. It is the apparent disjunction between the conceptual and the visual that also indicates the porous modernism in my work - the gaps between disciplines create texts

whose precise meaning changes in response to the word's appearance in the space of

the white paper. It is moments such as these that allow the reader of the 'complete book'

of Libra to slip between the extratextual 'cogs' that make up its whole, to see its internal

workings.

150

I will now look more closely at some examples from the The Draft, describing the

significance of their formation to both the novel and its role as an advanced-artwork,

and to the wider critical themes of this thesis. These descriptions will contain elements

of literary criticism, but also more personal reflections on the act of reproducing text

that often refers back to the very process of writing. Examples of my reproductions

appear as pages within these analyses, so as to illustrate as well as simply quote the

text, and to circumscribe the space of page as well as its contents.

151

3. The book-filled room

Like Branch, and like DeLillo, in reproducing this writing one is returned'again and

again to the page, the line' that this paragraph describes. This passage, where the

character of Branch first appears, records both the similarities and the differences

between Branch and DeLillo, focussing on the acts of reading and writing. In doing so it also shows the gradual refinement of DeLillo's language, the precision that occurs

when'language presses meaning' onto his prose, just as the typewriter presses meaning

upon the white page.

There are several points of comparison between this image of Branch early in Libra

and the habitual situation in which DeLillo has described himself writing in. The first

of these is related to what DeLillo has called his interest in the significance of'people in rooms, objects in rooms' - in the way that characters reveal something about

themselves in circumscribed spaces. "' In describing Branch's'book-filled room' DeLillo seems also to be describing some kind of inversion of his own writing space, at

the point where he and Branch converge, before the disjunction between them,

described in the previous chapter, is fully opened. As DeLillo has described, he writes in 'book time, which is transparent', that the'space is clear, the house is quiet' .

265 In

Mao II, which is structured around another of DeLillo's fictional writers, Bill Gray, he

returns to the setting of a writer's room and tools, again presenting a disjunction. He

writes'Bill was not a list-making novelist', and then a long sentence that is both

contradictory in its length and its description of linguistic method:

He thought sentences lost their heft and edge when they were stretched too far and he didn't seem to find the slightest primal joy in world-naming or enumerating, in

penetrating the relatedness of things or words, those breathy sentences that beat with

new exuberance. ''

264 Conversations, p14. w Conversations, p89. M DeLillo, Mao 11, p140.

152

Within the clear, transparent 'book time (during which, as in these examples further

examples, DeLillo does indeed address the 'relatedness' of words, things and meanings) the writer may become either DeLillo or Branch, may either become productive or list

and drift through endless reading. This paragraph sets the scene in which the disjunction between DeLillo and the fictional writer will be played out.

153

Nicholas Branch sits in the book-filled room, the room of theories and dreams. He is in the fifteenth year of his labor and sometimes wonders if he is becomming bodiless. He knows he is getting old. There are times when he can't concentrate on the facts at hand and has to come back again and again to the page, the line, the fine grained detail of a particular afternoon. He wanders in and out of these afternoons, the bright hot skies that give tone and1 depth to narrow date. He falls asleep sometimes, slumped in the chair, a hand curled on the broadloom rug. This istthe room of growing old, the beige or egg-shelled room, the faded leaf.

The 'fine grained detail' that Branch returns to again and again is ambiguous, seeming

to refer both to his present situation, his reading of'pages and lines' of the historical

record, and to the narrative contained within them. It is the weight and detail of this

narrative that will overwhelm him. As DeLillo describes, the writer finds solitude and

then 'finds endless ways to squander it. Looking out of the window, reading random

entries in the dictionary'. But unlike Branch he is able to 'break the spell' of this

situation's 'lethargy and drift', by looking at a photograph of Borges, by focussing on

the seriousness and concentration the photograph represents. '' As the novel progresses it becomes clear that Branch has no such means of gathering his thoughts and moving

from the act of reading on to writing - when his reading of the Warren Report is

punctuated by a study of photography it worsens his torpor, the pictures having the

'power to disturb him', 'arguing nothing, clarifying nothing' (L 183).

The drafts of this paragraph gradually refine the isolation and abstraction of the

fictional writer. Whereas in the first draft his 'book-filled room' is one of'theories and

dreams', the second draft adds the 'room of documents' between these two descriptions,

as if to undermine from the start any notion that what he is reading will document

anything other than an incoherent narrative.

267 Conversations, p89.

155

Nicholas Branch sits in the book-filled room, the room of ducuments, the room of theories and dreams. He is in the fourteenth year of his task and sometimes wonders if he is becoming bodiless. He knows he is getting old. He has the damndest time with

9-1: = 1313013130r= r= names andnt dates. His mind

wanders into

He has the damndest time getiing out of the c hair. He is always cold, it seems, and there are times when his mind

Nicholas Branch sits in the book-filled room, the room of room of documents, the room of theories and dreams. He is in the fourteenth year of his task and sometimes wonders if he is becomming bodiless. He knows he is getting old, xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx There are times when he can't concentrate on the facts at hand and has to come back

again and again to the page, the live, the fine-grained detail of a particular afternoon. He wanders in and out of these afternoons, the bright hot sirs skies that surround the

assassination data. He falls asleep sometimes, slumped xxxx in his chair, a hand curled on the broadloom rug. This is the room of growing old, the

The description of the afternoons that occupy and are occupied by his reading also

changes from 'narrow date' to 'narrow data', via 'assassination data'. This seems to be an

example of the meaning of the text shifting according to alliterative echoes more than

anything else; the word'data' inverting the syllable sounds of'tone and depth'- "Tone

and Depth to narrow DaTa". An effect of this is to occupy the reader with the aesthetic layers to the language, and to mesmerise him almost as Branch is by the patterns and

structures his own reading presents him with. 'The bright hot skies that give tone and depth to narrow data' becomes a poetic phrase that articulates for the reader the

mysterious narrative energies that surround the historical core of the data in question. The data itself tells Branch nothing, but such narrative descriptive details as'bright hot

skies' offer a means of addressing that data. There is also, briefly in the second draft,

the use of the word 'damndest', the easy humour of which breaks this abstract spell. It is

removed in the final draft.

157

Nicholas Branch sits in the book-filled room, the room of documents, the room of theories and dreams. He is in the fourteenth year of his task and sometimes wonders if he is becoming bodiless. He knows he is getting old. There are times when he can't concentrate on the facts at hand and has to come back ita again and again to the page, the line, the fine-grained detail of a particular afternoon. He wanders in and out of these-afternoons, the bright hot skies that give tone and depth to narrow data. He falls ziftu asleep sometimes, suimped in the chair, a hand curled on the broadloom rug. This is the room of growing old, the beige or eggshell room, autumn leaf. old, the beige or egg-shell rooms the folded leaf.

The final line of the paragraph is subjected to several changes, although its beginning

('This is the room of growing old') survives from the first draft. In each case the

sentence is a poetic list of the room's qualities, initially 'beige' or'egg-shelled', followed

by the abstract'the faded leaf or the 'ever-shining' room, or the nonsensical 'autumn

leaf. The seasonal metaphor of the double meaning of'leaf is eventually sacrificed,

perhaps to distinguish the ageing of Branch from that of the archive he sits in. 'Faded',

then 'folded' leaf is removed, until the reference to paper in the final sentence is that the

room is'fireproof, with 'paper everywhere (L 14). The papers themselves, it is implied,

are permanent and safeguarded, and yet isolate Branch from their meaning - the'bright

hot skies' they describe are part of what the room 'fireproofs': their meaning as well as

the material on which that meaning is inscribed. The depiction of this space also relates

to the differentiation I made in Chapter 3 between the metaphorical meanings of the

'depository' and the'library', between a place where text is stored and one where it is

accessed and read. 2f'

This paragraph, then, relates the acts of reading and writing to space, both that of the

page itself as well as to the'people in rooms, objects in rooms' that coordinate DeLillo's

spatial sense of narrative. The appearance of text in the space of the page in this

instance draws these concerns together, and, as an artist, begins for me to illustrate the

possibility of DeLillo's page to resemble the space of the gallery: a white space in

which artworks are contained by and work in conjunction with. It begins The Draft by

locating the work within the context of a room whose space is defined by paper, by

ways of reading and writing -a space occupied by a succession of those engaged in a form of research through those processes. The first of these is DeLillo, reading the

Warren Report, and beginning to form the narrative that will contain Branch, a fictional

double whose project ebbs away even as it is dramatised in DeLillo's. In addressing the

'fine grained detail' of DeLillo's drafts I have attempted to reopen this space, pitching

myself somewhere between the two by exploiting the gaps between the incomplete

language of the drafts and the finished novel it will become.

168 The folded leaf, one the phrases that does not survive drafting is also the title of the 1945 novel by William Maxwell, whose descriptions of lonely and disaffected adolescence and the cemrality of the maternal relationship seem to be echoed in the DeLillo's compassionate account of Oswald.

159

4. The page is crowded with words

In making a visual record of DeLillo's language, gaps such as this between reading and

writing are perpetually breached. Because it is unfinished, drafted language that 'presses meaning' upon the page of these reproductions, the sense of performing (or

perhaps re-performing) DeLillo's writing process becomes increasingly important. It is

as if the act of writing has become a form of deep reading, of unpacking structures in

the text that are hidden from the reader of the finished book. In reproducing the

paragraph addressed here, which describes an analogous act of reading and writing on DeLillo's part, the re-performance of DeLillo's practice is even more marked than in

tracing the poetic adjustments in the text of the previous example. Whilst that

paragraph records a fictional cleft in the writing process, between Branch and DeLillo's

somewhat parallel wandering afternoons, this example prompts a re-performance of DeLillo's own merging of reading and writing. The paragraph is a description of Lee

Harvey Oswald's'Historic Diary', whose typographical and linguistic chaos, that 'wanders and slants' across the page, stands in stark contrast to the page upon which the description appears. Whereas for DeLillo the act of writing produces words that have a 'sculptural quality' on the page, for Libra's dyslexic Oswald the written word is both a

point of personal difficulty and a metaphor for the vulnerability that will see him

manipulated by a series of outside plotters and authors. 269

269 Conversations, p91.

160

Later he would print in his Historic Diary a summary of these days and the days to follow. The lines, mainly in block letters, wander and slant across the page. The page is crowded with words, top to bottom, out to either edge, orosse&-out worda, butchered. words, words that run together, attempted'ovvreotions and additions, lapses into script, breathlessness, odd calm moment w..

The narrative voice here records DeLillo's combined act of reading and writing, his

processing of one of the novel's intertextual components. He is reading as he writes,

and writing as he reads, an action that my work reproducing his drafts repeats in turn.

Yet in reproducing this description one is also prompted to perform the very contrast between DeLillo's clean and measured writing and Oswald's'lapses into script', and to

breach again the novel's overriding disjunction - between fictional and historical forms

of writing and their competing articulation. The page of DeLillo's I have reproduced is

not'crowded with words', 'top to bottom' or to 'either edge'. DeLillo's description of Oswald's text is precise, and the lack of subsequent drafts indicates that this paragraph is close to a direct report of DeLillo's own research, to the textual access of the'archive

of Libra' that the novel records. It is one of the few paragraphs in Libra to have been

satisfactorily drafted at the first attempt. Yet isolated from the novel this paragraph becomes about the page as a space, containing multiple frames of reference to the

graphic and typographical roles of language, as well as the novel's overriding concern

of the writing of history, the problem which energises Libra as a whole.

The space of another page, another's writing, is inverted here into DeLillo's, and a flawed writing practice is circumscribed by a near-flawless one. However, my

reproduction of this page, and the re-performance of DeLillo's reading of the crowded

page it describes, continue this circumscription, reopening the disjunctions and gaps between the writings that the novel combines. The text of the paragraph also continues

the conceptual theme of The Draft, alluded to in the previous example, both in the

'lines' and 'pages' of a document being read, but also in the contrast between DeLillo

and the reader/writer within his writing. The novel, seen as an advanced-artwork,

makes work out of the circumscription of other work, and my reproduction continues to

build upon this structure. In the course of this process the sense of abstraction that

Branch is subject to is reprised - the lines of Oswald's text 'wander' across the page, just as Branch 'wanders in and out of his research, only to be returned to lines of text.

This too is an element of the narrative that cannot help become part of the re-

performance that my work engages with, as the text drifts between the verbal and

visual due to the repetitious nature of the process, just as they do in the dyslexic mind

162

of Oswald. The one incongruous word in this draft, the harsh 'butchered', is replaced in

the final version by the softer 'smudged' (L 149), a clarification which seems to suggest

the importance of graphic language and of the visual to DeLillo. In reproducing these

graphic terms in ink that may itself smudge, one is reminded of the'physical

dimensions' of the archive of Libra; that the white page is not a neutral or virtual space but one that is physically breached by a writing that is also'sculptural', to use DeLillo's

term.

As David Cowart notes, for DeLillo'contrasting ideas of language live together under

the sign of Libra', both in terms of history and fiction, and more specifically in the disjunctive blending of his own written voice and Oswald's. Z'0 In a novel which filters

and 'curates' vernacular detail and language, this example of Oswald's script represents

the capacity of advanced-art to re-contextualise material that is aesthetically foreign to

it, and then to incorporate the disjunction into its thesis. To ascribe DeLillo the role of

'curator' here is not merely to link his methods with those of advanced-artists whose

practice take on elements of a gallery-curator's role, but to trace the meanings that

circulate within a word that DeLillo himself uses to describe Branch's remote source of historical material, the FBI's unseen Curator. The guiding role this absent figure has is

already suggested by the word 'curator', in its root meaning of 'curing!, or'caring for'. In

the following drafted page from the final appearance of Branch, as discussed in Chapter

3, it is this curator who finally confirms the victory of aesthetic documents as historical

material that the character of Branch comes to represent. He sends Branch fiction;

'novels and plays', 'feature films and documentaries', and Branch has 'no choice but to

study this material'.

270 Cowan, P92.

163

The curator begins to send fiction. Twenty-five years of novels and plays about the assassination. xxxxx way or another. He sends feature films and documentaries. He sends transcripts of panel discussions and radio debates. Branch has no choice but to study this material. He is in tao deep to abandon his research and begin writing. T ere are lines he must examine. It isxn essential to master the data.

Branch, in the final reckoning he makes of the 'archive of Libra', comes to realize that

this material is vital, yet must be accounted for, that it is 'essential to master the data'

that has come to master him. The absent figure of the curator comes to represent the

organizer of this realization, administering the novel's argument for an aesthetic history

via the character of the fictional writer whom he overwhelms with texts. The idea of 'curation' also links DeLillo's reading of Oswald's flawed text to my description of the

work of Christopher Williams in Chapter 2, that he 'rehabilitates' visual (or in DeLillo's

case written) vernacular into historical theses. He takes something broken, flawed, and by a process of circumscription gives these flaws the historical articulation they seek but have fallen short of - Oswald's 'Historic Diary' finally becomes historic, in the

hands of a curator of text. The curator here heals, cares for and preserves, through the

administration of these texts. The process of reproduction adds another gesture of

curation, passing this document from Oswald's hand to DeLillo's, and then to my own.

165

5. It means assassin

This third paragraph, which is really just two lines of dialogue, demonstrates more directly DeLillo's notion of the pressing of meaning by language, in this case on to

Oswald rather than by an author's typewriter. As I have described in Chapter 3, the

word 'assassin' and its origin in the word 'hashish' is what finally confers the historical

role that Oswald craves upon him. He is drugged, as it were, by language, by the name

of the drug he is given. His dyslexic 'word-blindness', DeLillo suggests, means that he

draws on this meaning in the nebulous form of smoke and suggestion. 27' The aphasia

that DeLillo's Oswald confronts, it is implied, is part of the insecurity that makes him

unacceptable to the manipulations of Ferrie, amongst other plotters. It is also another link between Oswald's skewed relationship with language and the Beckettian pole of DeLillo's writing, the point at which a language near its limits intervenes on the prose. As in the previous example, Oswald and his relationship to language are a part of what

the novel curates and finds new meaning for. Like the ordinarily aphasic Lucky in

Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Oswald is given a single moment of articulacy, in which he is prompted, forced into action. Whilst Lucky takes this as a prompt to babble (and

make, in a reversal of terms often used in DeLillo studies, a somewhat Joycean

interjection into Beckettian text), Oswald is, at this stage in Libra, relieved of the

anxiety of language, and is sent instead towards deathly, silent action. Both, however,

are prompted by ritual (Oswald by smoke, and Lucky by his'thinking' hat), and both

are controlled and manipulated by their masters. As Pozzo says as he tramples on Lucky's thinking hat, 'There's an end to his thinking! '. 1

A part of DeLillo's early research for the novel concerns the drugging of former American military personnel such as Oswald with LSD and other hallncinogeenics, and the coincidental death of a 'tripping' Aldous Huxley on the same day as the Kennedy assassination. DeLillo underlined and made extensive notes on a Rolling Stone article detailing this ('Did Lee Harvey Oswald Drop Acid, Rolling Stone, 3nd March 1983, Ransom Center, 27.1). This episode of symbolic drug use also recalls both the linguistic 'truth drug' that is pursued in Great Jones Street, and 'Dylan', the drug designed to cure the fear of death in White Noise.

272 Beckett, Waiting For Godot, p44.

166

Ferne said, "Hashish, interesting, interesting word. Arabic, naturally. It's the spurce of the word 'assassin'. '"

The poetic patterns within the word that carries the historical freight of violent action

reflect DeLillo's use of a form of assonance and alliteration that is in part derived

visually. Whilst certain elements of this paragraph change through the draft ('means' is

briefly considered in place of 'source', the latter a more accurate metaphor for the

manipulative consequences of Oswald's drugging), alliterative rhythms and double-

sounds remain a constant, forming a mesmeric sequence. 273 Firstly, the letter's', and the

's' sound repeat, through the paragraph, before climaxing with a sentence that makes a

kind of serpentine onomatopoeia out of it's sinister implications: 'It'S the Source of the

word'aSSaSSin'. As Deleuze describes in reference to the'minorizing of an author's

major language, the 'great writer' makes language 'scream, stutter, stammer or murmur'.

Especially apt to the effect here of the arabic word 'assassin' is Deleuze's description of

T. E. Lawrence, who'made English stumble in order to convey Arabic cultural

meanings within a language foreign to it. 274 The word 'assassin' stumbles and murmurs

in just such a way here, causing both a spoken and typed stammer.

2" Source, coincidentally, is also the name of the Christopher Williams work regarding Kennedy. 171 Deleuze, He Stuttered', Essays Critical and Clinical, p110.

168

Hashish "An interesting word. Arabia. It means +` '"ý assassin

The double'ass' of'assassin' is the third such repeated sound or word in this fragment,

after the 'sh' of'hashish', and the double use of'interesting', a word that almost forces a

slowing of the spoken rhythm. Additionally, the line that precedes this paragraph in the

published novel finishes with the word'hashish': 'Out came the hashish. David Ferrie

said, "Hashish... ' (L 342).

170

Ferrie said, "We're all pathetic victims of our limitations. Our brains, nervous systems, xxxxxxxx words, our paltry speech. xxxx This

Ferrie said, "Hashish, interesting, inter eating word, Arabic, of course. It's the source of the word 'assassin. 'll

The aural effect of these repetitions would seem to be paramount, given their placement in a line of dialogue rather than narration, yet in reproducing them on a typewriter one is struck by the visual intervention that they make on the page. In the double double-'s'

of the word'assassin', especially, one's fingers are slowed down by the proximity of the

'a' and the 's' keys, and by the need to allow one key's hammer to fully spring up before

pressing the other, in order to avoid their tangling. As this happens the word is formed

on the page almost too slowly to read coherently, and the word's meaning is delayed for

a moment in the mind of the typist. It is in moments such as these, where the artistic

gesture of retyping DeLillo's prose draws the acts of reading and writing into one, that

the critical implications of the practical element of the process become foregrounded.

The act of reading is made apparent as part of the act of writing, the space between the

two opened by the mechanics of the typewriter. Whilst the typewriter acts as a tool to

concentrate DeLillo's mind as he writes, in reporforming the same actions - following

his script -I experienced a contrary critical reflection, of meaning being delayed, of the

language pri sed apart even as it forms. This is close to the sensation of'literary reading described by Blanchot, in which there is a'violent rupture', a'passage... from the world

where everything has more or less meaning, where there is obscurity and clarity, into a

space where, properly speaking, nothing has meaning yef. 275 However, I relate this

rupture or disjunction to the circumscriptive possibilities of advanced-art, where the

voice of another work is ventriloquised and reinvested into a new work - where even

the uncertain meanings of the language that is read can be'written around' as well as

written onto a new page. In retyping the word, especially over and over again, it comes

to resemble a symbol that is branded or stamped onto the paper -a visual mark. The

mesmeric effect with which the word marks Oswald within Librd s narrative is

translated into the physical actions of writing, dosed out in a measured beat that allows

the typist to engage visually and physically with the act of reading.

215 Blanchot, The Space ofLiteratwre, p196.

172

David Ferrie said, "Hashish. Interesting,

. interesting word. Arabic. It's the source of the word 'assassin. '"

Such moments of internal visual rhythms in DeLillo's writing are discussed in his

correspondence with David Foster Wallace, also collected at the Ransom Center and, in

DeLillo's part of the dialogue, produced in the same typewritten script (on narrower

letter-paper, the writing forming a thinner column of typescript). 276 This

correspondence is of particular significance to the reading of DeLillo that I make on

two fronts. Firstly, by supporting the idea that DeLillo sits between the modernist

writers whose work influences his own and the postmodernists who follow him (as

detailed in the'Concluding Notes' to Chapter 1), acting as a reference point and guide.

Secondly, the correspondence shows DeLillo explaining the visual significance of how

his writing forms (contradicting Foster Wallace's notion that'DeLillo-prose should be

read 'aurally, musically') but also that the pared-down script this produces results in a form of clarified ventriloquism related to the inner conceptual layers of language.

DeLillo describes this as follows: 'If I explore the word or words in question, their

meanings, their shadings, their origins, the echoes they emit, I'll find what Fm looking

for'. 277

What Foster Wallace describes in one letter to DeLillo as being assonant, the responses between sounds in certain phrases, DeLillo clarifies as being visual, or rather as being a

visual form of alliteration, of visual 'rhyming and near rhyming'. He goes on to describe

in more detail the'visual echo' between certain letters and words, and how patterns of

words that contain the same central letters and letter combinations come to shape his

language. However, what this acute visual awareness feeds into, according to DeLillo,

is his sense that'precision can be a form of poetry', that if the language is formed with

enough precision it will come to take on the poetic simplicity and clarity of scientific or

276 At the time of my visit to the Ransom Center (May and June 2010) the Foster Wallace archive bad been recently acquired, and was not yet fully available to researchers. The correspondence with DeLillo had been added in advance of this to a section of the archive including DeLillo's correspondence with Tom LeClair and Jonathan Franzen amongst others. The complete Foster Wallace collection of papers, it is reported, contains heavily annotated copies of DeLillo's novels (see D. T. Ma)es essay 'Final Destiion', he New Yorker, 11" of June 2007)

277 This quote, and those that are not otherwise attributed in this section, are from the DeLillo/Foster Wallace correspondence, dated 19/l/97,2/5/97 and 20/5/97 (Ransom Center; 101.10).

174

mathematical language. 278 It is this precision, the development of which the sequences

of his drafts are evidence, that relate the most internal workings of DeLillo's writing to

the methods of advanced-art. The vernacular that his own writing forms in turn is the

material out of which my advanced-artwork is formed.

In the letter to Foster Wallace he goes on to describe the'unexpected lyricism' in the

precise language of science, and gives as an example the description of a character who finds something beautiful. DeLillo writes that the'beauty a character may find in a

piece of weathered brick has its corresponding depth of language, and the writer finds

the language precisely where the character finds the visual delight - in the brick itself.

This example of DeLillo's conception of writing as a pared-down instrument illustrates

one of the key qualities of the advanced-artwork - that even within the finely-wrought

materials and medium-conscious methods it employs, it retains the ability to become

transparent and porous, and so becomes the frame for another image or work. DeLillo

is suggesting, as do the art writings of Diderot, that the medium of writing, either

through extravagance or simplicity, or a combination of the two, might become in some

way a framing device or near-optical tool; a conceptual device to mobilise the inner

meanings of that which is written.

The correspondence between Foster Wallace and DeLillo also mark a difference

between the two writers that connect to my observation in the'Concluding Notes'

section of Chapter 1 that there is an element of self-conscious affect in the writers

influenced by DeLillo, but that DeLillo himself is a writer whose distinctive prose

derives from internal, private rhythms rather than his conception of an imagined reader.

Indeed, DeLillo has said that he does not imagine a reader when he writes, stating, in

fact, 'I write for the page, for the space in which the writing appears. " The exploration

of the origins of the word 'assassin', a key symbolic moment in the narrative of Libra,

has the double effect of illustrating this literary technique of DeLillo's and of giving the

reader and reproducing artist the same hypnotic sensation that is described. It reflects

278 DeLiMo's interest in mathemat cal language, and the writings of Wittgenstein corroborate this sentiment. See the Rainer's SYar section of Chapter 1 for examples of this.

279 Conversations, p13.

175

the act of writing back in on itself, not just through the pursuit of the inner meanings of the word whose implications the novel in centred around, but through the intervention

it makes on the physical act of writing through a typewriter.

It is also, like the victory for aesthetic methods in the contest of histories in Libra, an

example of DeLillo's 'scientific' application of aesthetic means, or perhaps rational use

of mysterious means. This is another element of his writing practice that my use of an

artwork to conclude the critical thought of this thesis circumscribes. In the

correspondence with Foster Wallace he goes on to refer again to the 'sculptural' quality

of words and letters on paper, and the'sensuous' mechanics of the typing process - 'finger striking key, letter striking page. Yet within these aesthetic pleasures he

describes the critical enquiry into the medium towards which these means are the end,

that in the words"meanings, their shadings, their origins, the echoes they emit, I'll find

what I'm looking for. A comparable example of the cultural freight that DeLillo sees as

carried in the vernacular poetics of language comes from his research into the street

terminology of his Bronx childhood, a period which, as I discuss in Chapter 3, informs

his attraction to the figure of Oswald. In a letter to Tom LeClair he details this research,

citing the names of street games of that era and locality: 'sweep', and'briscola', 'scopa',

'tizzun' or'tizzon', all of Italian derivation. 280 Like the extended description of'Stoop Ball' in J. D. Salinger's Raise High the Roof beam, Carpenters, such memories import

into fiction a sociolectical structure residing within the poetic. In the case of the word 'assassin', the cultural and historical 'memory' of the word has more sinister implications, but DeLillo circumscribes these meanings using the same process, of

paring down his language to use words that are self-contained bodies of reference. I see

this as analogous to the'local meanings' within vernacular photographic practices that

Christopher Williams re-contextualises in his artworks. These processes represent a

combination of the modernist and post modernist forces at work in both DeLillo's

writing and advanced art, a way of paring down their materials until that which is left it

meaningful precisely because of what it quotes and circumscribes.

280 Ransom Center, 97.8.

176

Such ventriloquised elements of vernacular language are examples of the porous

modernism running through the advanced-artworks described in this thesis, where the

word and meaning'beyond speech', as DeLillo refers to when describing Herman

Broch, forms a kind of cultural 'installation' in writing. The intention of my

reproductions of DeLillo's drafts is to enact this very strategy, by focussing the process

of their creation back onto themselves. The techniques of advanced-art encourage this

strategy precisely in the way that DeLillo's writing, in this example especially, does: by

paring down to a kind of modernism rich with post-modem possibility, where the

thought and histories that lie within the work's materials are what is subject to

quotation. Part of what is peculiar about such work, and what upsets any notion that the

postmodern is a trivial successor to rigorous modernism, is that its shallows, its surface

of words, are the modernist component, and its depths - the contents that are carried by

those words - postmodern. It is the gaps left by this contested hierarchy, amongst the

other contested articulations of thought that run through Libra, that contribute to my

sense of a porous form of modernism at play here. Observing the smuggled meanings

and effects of the word 'assassin' through the effect it has on the fingers and eyes of the

typist represent one of the ways that an artistic re-performance of DeLillo's writing

might access the subtleties of his critical thought.

177

6. The room of lonely facts

This fourth example, from close to the end of the book, describes the final result of

Branch's 'wandering afternoons', his being overwhelmed by the material around which his history must cohere. The paragraph I have reproduced comes from a section of the

book in which Branch encounters the mysterious deaths and disappearances of the

novel's plotters, and describes the material existence of this inconclusive archive, the

'physical dimensions' of the paper that mounts up around him.

178

Branch sits in the glove-leather chair looking at the paper hills around him. Paper is beginning to slide out of the room and across the doorw* to the house proper. This is the room of pathetic facts. The stuff keeps coming

The description of his chair as being made of'glove leather' (a description repeated from Branch's first appearance [L 15 and 378]) adds a sensual and textural note to the

depiction, as if the unread papers surrounding him are now the scenery of an almost

narcotic calm. As the final published form of the paragraph asserts, 'it all matters' (L

378), and so this archive of paper contains more and more meaning even as becomes

more elusive, more like the 'free weave of fiction' that finally comes to shape it.

180

The floor is covered with books and papers. The closet is stuffed with materials he must read. He has to wedge new books into the shelves, force them in, insert them sideways, squeeze everything, keep everything. Nothing is discarded as irrelevant or out-of-date. This is the room of lonely facts. The stuff keeps coming.

It is this 'free weave' that allows DeLillo to depict the paper mass of the archive of Libra as scenery, to'wedge', 'squeeze, and 'insert sideways' unread texts into the space

where Branch should be writing but to allow those same texts to drift as voices in and

out of DeLillo's own text. Just as the papers'all matter', they have also become'all

matter' - the futility of Branch's task is now embodied in paper, in unread material. Within the drafts the phrase 'materials he must read' is corrected to the more resigned 'material he is yet to read', as if it is accepted that he no longer even has the task of

reading to complete, that he is in stasis. The inertia recorded in this final paragraph is,

perhaps, the final reckoning of Branch's fear in the first example described in this

chapter, that he is 'becoming bodiless'. The prose that survives in the published novel,

unusually for DeLillo, has its final draft on a chaotic sheet of type, at the end of fragments of paragraphs listing all of this 'matter', objects as well as texts. The graphic

qualities of the draft here illustrate their contents, and in reproduction prompt yet

another re-performance of the subject matter of the writing as well as its form.

182

Branch sits in the glove leather chair in the book-filled room, the room of pathetic facts. Paper is beginning out of the room into the entranoeway to the house proper. The Curator sends thirty more volumes from the CIA's one hundred and forty-five volume file on Oswald. He sends material from the

He sends the dead

National Archives -- items of clothing, xxx ballpoint xxx pens, a cigarillo tin holdin: xyzc xxx and string.

Branch sits in the glove-leather chair looking at the paper hills around him. The room of pathetic facts. Paper is beginning to slide )ut of the room into the entranceway to the house proper The stuff keeps coming.

7. A Final Draft

Selecting and making records of the drafts of the novel necessitates a uniquely slowed

and stratified reading process, that traces four or sometimes five possible versions of the novel at once. Nothing, in this process, can be'discarded as irrelevant', as every

attempt and correction within the slowly forming prose is part of the book's archive.

In recognizing the breadth of this archive in practical as well as, like in the previous

chapter, in theoretical terms, I began to feel as if I was enacting the novel's tension

between fictional or artistic work and it's historical or critical counterpart. Mechanical

engagement in the act of typing allowed Libra's own practice and theory to be traced

through a single, repetitive process that unites the two. Reproducing an author's prose,

especially in its formative stages, becomes like an action caught between these poles of the critical and the practical. One is forced to think about the materials of the writing,

and to touch those physical elements of the material: the paper, keys, ink and pencil. One is reading, but also writing, and yet the act of writing - the highly concentrated

creative act that this work is centred around - is the one part of the process that is

reduced or sent into retreat.

This process has also shown that the transmission of thought from the mind of the

writer through typewriter keys onto the paper cannot ever be fully re-enacted, only

quoted or ventriloquised. However, just as DeLillo recovers the writing of Oswald for

history, and writes his own historical work through the non-writing of Branch, the

ventriloquial channelling of the voices of another's practice becomes the way in which

the work may continue. It is here that the practice of advanced-art offers a resolution of

the critical and creative impulses, giving the possibility to shape the voice of another

work into a form that has new critical depths and possibilities thanks to its

circumscription. 'The stuff keeps coming, and yet it can be incorporated into a new

work that allows it to continue as an 'extratextual cog' in the machinery of an advanced-

artwork. The work that follows this chapter, the full thirty pages of The Draft,

184

represents the results of the reading, writing, rereading and rewriting with which I have

engaged the archive of Libra, and the archive of DeLillo's writing practice. The

reproductions do not come from a writer, just as Libra does not come from a historian,

the art writings of Diderot from a painter, or the work of Christopher Williams from a

photographer. They are instead circumscriptions of other work, critiques-in-practice

that, like these greater examples, offer an example of the scope allowed by advanced-

art.

185

PAGE NUMBERING

AS ORIGINAL

Nicholas Branch sits in the book-filled room, the room of theories and dreams. He is in the fifteenth year or his labor and sometimes wonders if he is becoming bodiless. He knows he is getting old. There are times when he can't concentrate on the facts at, hand and has to come back again and again to the page, the line, the fine grained detail of a particular afternoon. He wanders in and out of these afternoons, the bright hot skies that give tone and depth to nay row date. He falls asleep sometimes, 3umped ins the: claa. ir, a hand curled on the braodloom rug. THis is the rootm of growing old, the beige or egg-shelled room, the faded loaf:

Nicholas Branch sits in t', o book-filled room, the room of doeumentsp the room of theories and dreams. He is in the fourteenth year of his task and sometimes wonders if he is becoming bodiless. He knows he is getting old. He has the damndest time with

names and dates. His mind

wanders into

He has the damnest time getting out of the chair. He is always cold, it seems, and there are times when his mind

Nicholas Branch sits in the book-filled room, the room of documents, the room of theories and dreams. He is in the fourteenth year of his task and sometimes wonders if he is becoming bodiless. He knows he is getting olde xxxxxx xxxxx xxxx There are times when he can't concentrate on the facts at hand and has to come back

again and again to te xxx page, the line, the fine-grained detail of a particular afternoon. He z &- a wanders in and out of these afternoons, the bricht hot skies that surround the assassination data. He falls aslpep smetimes, aapa slumped xxx in the ohair, a hand curled on the broadloom rug. This is the room of growing old, the

He spent serious time at the library. He edged through the stacks, sat crosslegged on the floor scanning titles for hours. First he used the branch library across the street from Warren Easton High School. It was a two-story building with a library

YYYYYYYYT

for the blind down stairs, the regular room above. He sat crosslegged on the floor scanning titltes for hours. He wanted books more advanced thatn the school texts, books that put him at a distance from his classmates, closed the world around him. They had their civics and home economics. He wanted subjects and ideas of historic scope, ideas that touched his life, his real life, the whirl of time inside him. He'd read xxxx xxxxxxxx pamphlets, he'd seen photographs in Life. Men in caps and worn jackets. Thick-bodied women with an== scarves on their heads. People of Russia, the other world.

He spent serious time in the library. He edged through the stacks, scanning titles for hours. Old men crossed the aisles, men with bread crumbs in their pockets, foreigners, hobbling.

He wanted books more advanced than the school texts, books that put him at a distance from his classmates, closed the world around him. They had their civics and home economics. He wanted subjects and ideas of historic scope, ideas that touched his life, his real life, the whirl of time inside him. He'd seen pamphlets, photographs in Life. Men in caps and worn jackets. with scarves on their heads.

A Penetrating look at the People of Russia.

I

He spent serious time in the library. He xxleä the stacks

xxxx-scxx, scanning titles for hours. Old men crossed the aisles, men with breadorumbs in their pockets, forei gnersy hobbling.

He wanted books more advanced than the school texts. These put him at a distance from his classmates, closed the world arount him. They had their oivioe and plane geometeryi xxxxxxxxx He wanted xxxxxxx subjects and ideas xxxxx of historic scope, ideas that touched his life* xxxx

He 'rd seen pamphlets, held seen photographs in Life. Men in caps and worn jackets. Women with scarfs on their 7geads.

"In most of Moscow four or five families share a bath. "

He spent serious time at he the library. The shelves stood in dusty. Old men

YXXXXxx4 orossed the aisles, men with breadorumbs in their pockets, foreigners, hobbling*

stood in tick swirling light, breathing dust and,

He spent serious time in the library. He stood in the dimness between the shelves, breathing xxx dtst and age. Old men crossed the aisles, men with breadcrwnbs in their pockets, foreigners, hobbling.

He spent serious time at the library. The shelves stretzhed back into the dusty light. Old men crossed the xxxxx aisles, men with breadcrumbs in their pockets, foreigners, nodding as they read.

He spent serious time at the library. First he used thebranoh across the street from Warren Easton High School. It was a two-story building with a library for the blind downstairs, the regular room above. He sat orosslegged on the floor scanning titles for hours. He wanted books for advanced than the school texts, books that put him at a distance from his classmates, closed the world around him. They had their civics and home economics. He wanted+subjects and ideas of true historic scope, ideas that touched his life, his true life, the whirl of time inside him. Held read pamphlets, he'd seen photographs in Life. Men in Daps and worn jackets. Thick-bodied women with scarfs on their heads. People of Russia. The other world, the secret that xx covers one-sixth of the land surface of the earth.

The Curator has sent more books, fresh theories, assured and each proposing a frssh and assured

theory. The curator sends transcripts of closed committee hearings, he sends

FBI reports, police sound tapes. There is more material on Oswald's stay in Russia, gleaned from a defector with knowledge of the case. Every month there is more on Everett and Parnell. Data still trickling

after all these years. They are spoon-feeding him. He is getting it xxx in an eye-dropper.

deepest brotherhood in the Agency was among those who kept the crypt lists, who divided the keys and diagrams, who knew the true names of operations. Camp Peary was the farm, and the Farm was ISOLATION, and ISOLATION probably had a deeper name, somewhere, in a looked safe or some computer buried in the ground.

The Farm was known officially by the xxxxx ISOLATION. Language constantly went underground, as Parnell thought of it. It sought a deeper level, a secret level.

The names of places and operations were a special language in, the agency. Parnell was interested! in the way xxx this language constantly found

a deeper level a secret level where

the unschooled; could not gain access to it.

Once a name surfaced, a new one was there to

The Farm was known officially by the cryptonym ISOLATION. Parnell was interested in the way language constantly seeks a deeper level, a secret level where the non-specialists can't gain access to it. It was possible to say that the

Lawrence Parmenter booked a seat on the daily flight to the Farm, the CIA's secret training base in Virginia. The flight was operated under military cover and uded mainly by Agency people with short-term business at the base.

The Farm was known officially by the oryptpnym ISOLATION. The names of palces and operations were a special language in the Agency. Parmenter was interested in the way this language cobstantly found a deeper level, a secret level where the ix uninitiated could not

levelL, a secret level where those outside the cadre could not gain access to it. It was possible to say that the closest brotherhood in the Agency was among those who kept the orypt lists, who devised the keys and diagraphs and knew the true names of operations. Camp Peary was the Farm, and the Farm ISOLATION, and ISOLATION probably had a, deeper name sm'--c somewhere, in a locked safe or some-computer buried in the ground.

Later he would print in his Historic Diary a summary of the days and the days to follow. The lines, mainly in block letters, wander and slant accross the page. The page is crowded with words, top to bottom, out to either edge, crossed-out words, butchered words, words that run together, attempted corrections and additions, lapses into script, breathlessness, odd calm moments.

What a sense of destiny he had, locked in the miniature room, creating a design, a network of connec*ions. It was a second existenoe, the private world emerging into threes dimensions.

Ferris said, "Hashish, interesting, interesting word. Arabic, naturally. It's the source of the word 'assassin. '"

Hashish "An interesting word. Arabic. It means

assassin

Ferrie said, "We're all pathetic victims of our limitations. Our brains, nervous systems, xxxxxxxxx words, our paltry speech. xxxxx This

Ferris said, "Hashish, interesting inter eating word, Arabic, of course. It's the source of the word 'assassin. '"

David Ferrie said, "Hashish. Inter esting, interesting word. Arabic. It's the source of the word 'assassin. "'

Branoh sits in the book-filled room, the room of mysteries and lonely facts.

Branch sits in the glove-leather chair looking at the paper hills around him. Paper is beginning to slide out of the room and across the doorway to the house proper. This is the room of pathetic facts. The stuff keeps coming

The floor is covered with hooks and papers. The closet is stuffed with materials he must read. He has to wedge new books into the shelves, force them in, insert them sideways, squeeze everything, keep everything. Nothing is discarded as irrelevant or out-of-date. This is the room of lonely facts. The stuff keeps coming.

Branch sits in the glove leather chair in the book-filled room, the room of pathetio facts. Paper is beginning out of the room of into the entranoeway to the house proper. The Curator sends thirty more volumes from the CIA's one hundred and forty-five volume file on Oswald. He sends material from the

He sends the dead

National Archives -- items of clothing, xxx ballpoint xxx pens, a cigarillo tin holding xxxxxxx and string.

Branch site in the glove-leather chair looking at the paper hills around him. The room of pathetic facts. Paper is beginning to slide put of the room proper The stuff keeps coming.

The curator begins to send fiction. Twenty-five years of novels and plays about the assassination. xxx way or another. He sends feature films and documentaries. He sends transcripts of panel discussions and radio debates. Branch has no choice but to study this material. He is in too deep to abandon his research and begin writing. There are lines he must examine. It Is essential to master the data.

I. curator begins to send fiction, twenty-five years of novels and plays, movies and documentaries. 2. Branch has no choice but to study this material. He is in too deep to abandon his research It is still too early to draw conclusions.

There are important things still to learn, lives to examine. It is essential to avoid rushing into

The Curator begins to send fiction, twenty-five years of novels and plays about the assassination.

He sends feature films and documentaries. He sends transcriptions of panel discussions and radio debates. Branch has no choice but to study this materialx. He is in too deep to abandon his research and begin his writing. There are lives he must examine. It is essential to master the data.

Conclusion

In conclusion I would like to summarise the contribution to knowledge that my thesis

makes in slightly broader terms than that of the gap it identifies in DeLillo studies. The

thesis began as a way of considering his writing as a context for visual art, but in doing

so came across a multiplicity of practices that fill his fiction, marshalled by or

responsive to writing. The reaches of DeLillo criticism, as I saw it, questioned the

relationship between these fictionalised 'other' practices in their role as voices that

presented DeLillo's critique of his own medium. However, the model of the advanced-

artwork - as a kind of inter-disciplinary practice bound up within a singular authorial

voice - presented a structure for thinking about the critical, archival and formal

questions that run through DeLillo's writing. The application of this model to DeLillo's

fiction, along with the idea of porous modernism that I derived from it, provides the

initial contribution to knowledge that the thesis makes: proposing that by using thought

originating in art-history, the questions surrounding the writing of artworks that have

eluded DeLillo's literary critics can be answered. This has, in turn, also led to a new

reading of the advanced-artwork, that concentrates on the historical or critical 'text' that

the work forms. Applying the idea of the'writing' of visual work to the advanced-art of Thomas Crow's writings also represents a contribution to knowledge in that field, by

considering his oeuvre as a artistic space inherently sympathetic to the work it

describes. However, the result of the process of writing the two parallel 'literature

reviews' that these subject areas called for also began to raise wider questions: of

establishing an inter-disciplinary practice within a highly singular one, of combining

critical and creative practice at the level of a work's materials, and of inverting the

relationship of the visual and the written that first alerted me to the possibility of

considering DeLillo's fiction as a form of visual practice. In the course of addressing

these questions as they are raised by Libra, DeLillo's most archivally and intertextually

complex novel, I have used the making of a visual work out of text as a means of

consolidating my answer. The critical and creative'dialects' of this answer, in the form

of Chapters 3 and 4, and The Draft itself, are both aspects of the wider contribution to knowledge that the thesis makes.

218

The written and visual material I address earlier in the thesis present a number of

arguments for this as a theoretical approach, and also more suggestive arguments for a

practical, artistic approach that directs its rigour less predictably than that of theory. Firstly, because there is a particular 'fit', beyond the formal, between the slightly distant

conservatism and manner of Crow and of DeLillo, between the structure of Williams'

and DeLillo's work, between the (coincidental) ways they deal with the absence of Kennedy, between the theoretical problems of advanced-art and Boxall's reading of DeLillo, and between the way words and images in their respective practices share the

role of carrying critical and conceptual freight. These observations were initially made intuitively, but have been tested throughout the thesis in ways which I believe are

mutually enriching to their areas of study.

But secondly, because the visual work my research led to pursues the model they share

of a practice that incorporates the rigorous with the subjective, and the ventriloquial

within the assertive voice of an author, I also believe that this work formalises an

artistic process that has been discovered as a way of continuing beyond the limits of the

theoretical research I have undertaken. It is this practice that problematises the idea of a 'fit' between the subject areas I have used, and mean that the apparent fit that initiated

my research - noticing a similarity between DeLillo and the art-history I was reading - became something more nuanced. The spaces between these areas as they fit together,

as much as the porous space between the elements of the works I have discussed,

became a central theme of the research. All of the work I have considered throughout

the thesis has been comprised, in varying degrees and using various methods, of a

combination of forms that at times resist each other, and at others slip into each others

voices. This is a quality that I also found as my thesis moved from a theoretical mode into a practical one. The form of my thesis - one which begins in contemporary American literature, then takes the standpoint of art-history, and then applies thought from both to a bibliophilic study of paper and type - already comprises the dialects of

several disciplines, but the inclusion of my visual work in the thesis itself questions, I

think, its form further. Given the methods I have used to reproduce DeLillo's type, the

219

stipulations of PhD submission (two paper copies, as well as an electronic one) mean

that the visual work is presented with slight differences in each of its forms. The same

pages have been typed in each copy, but will not (due to the ambiguities of the precise

position of the paper, weight of typewriter ink, position of pencil marks) be identical.

The electronic copy in turn adds the visual layer of the digitised, scanned image to this

dispersal of the ideal of a singular work. Even in its final 'draft', the visual work that

forms my thesis' concluding gesture is to an extent suspended in the state of drafting.

Following the thesis' submission and examination, three further paper copies will be

produced, along with another in electronic form. The probable reader of the thesis,

whoever they may be, will most likely (if using the collection of a legal deposit library)

read these words in this electronic form. But paper, the material fever and obsession

that has driven the work, is sublimated here into the white space of the screen; yet

another abstraction and iteration. However, given the ways in which I have shown that

an advanced-artwork can iterate its thesis across multiple forms (in the'drafts' of Christopher Williams, the Fed Ex boxes of Walead Beshty, the'promenades' of Diderot,

or the simultaneous, competing authors that give structure to DeLillo's Libra) I feel that

this adds something to the possibility of academic writing, and allows my study to

express its thesis on the levels of materials and form as well as in the more abstract

space of theory. As the fourth chapter of my thesis begins, the visual space of its page is intervened upon by that which it writes about, by examples of writing in the process

of being formed. At the end of that chapter, when The Draft itself begins, the medium

of writing continues but seizes its material means of production and enters a new visual

and critical space.

My thesis has been an attempt to work these questions into a narrative that provides the

critical tools to test the space of the written page, a space whose potential depths I first

noticed as a reader, then read around as the writer of a dissertation, and then finally

circumscribed as a visual artist. My purpose, then, has not been to'map' this space in its

entirety, but to use the tools of art-history (a discipline that might be described as both

'native' and 'stranger' in DeLillo studies) to make a single expedition into it, with the intention of describing the space of the page using a methodology that accounts for the

220

many methodologies that space comprises. These methods, rather than the subject

matter they have used, are both the theme of the thesis, and the instrument with which

this theme has been pursued.

221

Bibliography

Adelman, G., 'Beckett's Readers: A Commentary and Symposium', Michican Quarterly

Review, Winter 2004.

Beckett, S., Waiting For Godot, 1955, London: Faber and Faber.

Bedford, C., 'Depth of Field', Frieze, September 2009.

Blanchot, M., Friendship (trans. E. Rottenberg), 1997, Stanford, CA: Stanford

University Press.

Blanchot, M., Lautreamont and Sade (trans. S. Kendall and M. Kendall), 2004,

Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Blanchot, M., The Space of Literature (trans. A. Smock), 1982, Lincoln, NE:

University of Nebraska Press.

Boxall, P., Don DeLillo - The Possibility of Fiction, 2006, Abingdon: Routledge.

Boxall, P., 'Since Beckett', Textual Practice, June 2006, pp. 301-317.

Boxall, P., 'DeLillo and Media Culture in Duvall, J., The Cambridge Companion to

Don DeLillo, 2008, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Ch. 3.

Bourriaud, N., The Radicant, 2009, New York, NY: Lukas and Sternberg.

Burn, S., 2001, At the Edges of Perception: William Cnaddis and the Encyclopaedic

Novel from Joyce to David Foster Wallace, Ph. D., University of Durham.

Burn, S., 'Generational Succession and a Possible Title for David Foster Wallace's The

222

Broom of the System', Notes on Contemporary Literature, March 2003, pp. 9-11.

Burn, S., Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism, 2008, London: Continuum.

Burn, S., David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, 2003, London: Continuum.

Burn, S., 'Late Postmodernism: American Fiction at the Millenium', Modern Fiction

Studies, Spring 2006, pp. 231-234.

Cowart, D., Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language, 2002, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

Cowart, D., Thomas Pynchon: The Art ofAllusion, 1980, Carbondale, IL: Southern

Illinois University Press.

Cowart, D., 'DeLillo and the Power of Language in Duvall, J., The Cambridge

Companion to Don DeLillo, 2008, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Ch. 11.

Crow, T., Modern Art in the Common Culture, 1996, New Haven, CT: Yale University

Press.

Crow, T., The Intelligence ofArt, 1999, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina

Press.

Deleuze, G., Essays Critical and Clinical (trans. D. W. Smith and M. A. Greco), 1998,

London: Verso.

DeLillo, D., (under the pseudonym Cleo Birdwell), Amazons, 1980, London: Granada

Publishing.

DeLillo, D., Americana, 1990, London: Penguin.

223

DeLillo, D., 'Baader-Meinhofl', The New Yorker, April 1", 2002.

DeLillo, D., The Body Artist, 2002, London: Picador.

DeLillo, D., Libra, 2006, London: Penguin.

DeLillo, D., Mao Il, 1992, London: Vintage.

DeLillo, D., Players, 1992, London: Vintage.

DeLillo, D., Rainer's Star, 1992, London: Vintage.

DeLillo, D., Underworld, 1999, London: Picador.

DeLillo, D., White Noise, 1999, London: Picador.

DeLillo, D. and Humphreys, J., (BBC interview), available online at:

hjll2-llwww. youtube. com/userldonologislAp/-U/I 1 /IIZkxItyDn4

Derrida, J., Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (trans. E. Prenowitz), 1996,

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Diderot, D., Diderot on Art: The Salon of 1767 (trans. J. Goodman), 1995, New Haven,

CT: Yale University Press.

Eugenides, J., Photographic Memory', in Marcoci, N. (ed. ), Thomas Demand, 2005,

New York: MOMA.

Foucault, M., Aesthetics, Method and Epistomology (Faubion, J. [ed. ], 1998, London:

Allen Lane.

224

Foucault, M., Language, Counter Memory, practice: Selected Essays and Interviews

(Bouchard, D., [ed. ]), 1977, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Foucault, M., Manet and the Object of Painting (trans. M. Ban), 2009, London: Tate.

Fried, M., Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot,

1980, Berkley, CA: University of California, Berkely.

Fried, M., Art and Objecthood, 1998, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Fried, M., Manet's Modernism or the Face of Painting in the 1860s, 1996, Chicago:

University of Chicago Press.

Gardner, C., 'Christopher Williams and the Loss of H'story', Artspace, Fall 1991.

Gauthier, M., 'Conversations with Don DeLillo', Modernism and Modernity, April

2006, pp. 410- 412.

Hernanson, S., 'Home: A Conversation with Richard Powers and Tom LeClair',

Electronic Book Review, available at: http*//www-electronicbookreview. com/thread/ficdonspresmtk=orate

James, I., The Fragmentary Demand: an Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc

Nancy, 2006, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Jameson, F., Postmodernism and Consumer Society' in Brooker, P. (ed. ),

Modernism/Postmodernism, 1992, London: Longman. Ch. 13.

Keesey, D., Don DeLillo, 1993, New York: Twayne.

Kline, T., 'Last Year at Marienbad: High Modern and Postmodern' in Perry, T. (ed. ),

225

Masterpieces of Modern Cinema, 2006, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, Ch

10.

LeClair, T., In the Loop: DeLillo and the Systems Novel, 1987, Champaign, IL:

University of Illinois Press.

LeClair, T., The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction, 1989,

Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Lentricchia, F. (ed. ), New Essays on White Noise, 1991, Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Lyotard, J-F., 'Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism' in Brooker, P. (ed. ),

Modernism/Postmodernism, 1992, London: Longman. Ch. 11.

Martin, T., 'Undressing the Institutional Wound' in Schampers, K. (ed. ), Christopher

Williams 97: For Example: Die Welt ist Schoen (final draft), 1997, Rotterdam: Museum

of Boijmans Van Beuningen, Ch. 3.

Max, D. T., 'Final Destination', The New Yorker, June 11*, 2007.

Morley, C., 'Don DeLillo's Transatlantic Dialogue with Sergei Eisenstein', Journal of American Studies, April 2006.

Nancy, J-L., Listening (trans. C. Mandell), 2007, Bronx, NY: Fordham University

Press.

Nei, P., 'DeLillo and Modernism' in Duvall, J., The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, 2008, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Ch. 1.

Pietro, T. (ed. ), Conversations with Don DeLillo, 2005, Jackson, MS: University Press

226

of Mississippi.

Osteen, M., American Magic and Dread, 2000, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Osteen, M., 'DeLillo's Dedalian Artists' in Duvall, J., The Cambridge Companion to

Don DeLillo, 2008, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Ch. 10.

Rapaport, M., Later Derrida: Reading the Recent Work, 2002, London: Routledge.

Thomas, G., 'History, Biography and Narrative in Don DeLillo's Libra', Twentieth

Century Literature, Spring 2007.

Tunstall, K. E., 'Diderot's Promenade Verret, or the Salon as Landscape Garden',

French Studies, Vol 3,2001.

Williams, C., Haider, J., and De Rooij, J., 'As We Speak', Frieze (online), available at: httn: //w w. frieze_com/issue/a_rti_clc/as-eve-s k/

227