#13 Leveraging the Void, part 3
The penultimate part of a series inspired by Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis.
..I heard, in my soul I suppose, where the acoustics are so bad..
Samuel Beckett, Molloy1
The way up and the way down are one and the same.
Heraclitus2
ix
..It was slathered in red-and-black spray paint. There were dozens of bruises and punctures, long burrowing scrape marks, swaths of impact and discolor..
After its daytime encounter with the mob, those rat- and aerosol-wielding anticapitalists who brought explosive chaos to downtown Manhattan, Eric Packer’s white stretch rolls into the second, after-dark part of Cosmopolis in a still-roadworthy but disheveled state. The defacement of the limo heightens the sense of crossing a threshold. DeLillo is fond of his signs and portents. The first hint of trouble to come was the eccentric shape of Eric’s prostate, the second the ‘credible threat’; now we have the third—a spray-painted omen of the billionaire’s coming descent, from Randian hero as rich as Croesus3 to pauperised American Psycho.
Eric is worried about his prostate. His worries are heightened by his awareness of the circumstances of his father’s death4. That anxiety, maybe, goes some way toward explaining his behaviour in Part One—by which I mean his hubris, his recklessness. That lack of caution which leads him to make ruinous mistakes in the currency markets, errors whose consequences will extend to ‘shit’ poet Elise Shifrin (his wife, in case you need a reminder) and the unfortunate Torval (his chief of security). As Eric will later confess to his incompetent assassin:
“The yen eluded me. This had never happened. I became halfhearted.“
An asymmetrical prostate, an exercise bike missing a pedal, the driver Ibrahim’s collapsed eye, half a haircut, half a heart—it’s curious how asymmetry is a motif throughout the book. It seems to me this leitmotif is linked in a not-entirely-clear way5 to dissolution, fate and death, the foremost themes of the pair of chapters (three and four) that make up Part Two.
At this point it’s worth recalling Eric was already deceased in Part One. Let’s rewind to the relevant point: news of Packer’s death came in a text sandwiched between chapters one and two (of course, going back in time here also means going forward):
He is dead, word for word. I turned him over and looked at him. His eyes were mercifully closed. But what does mercy have to do with it? There was a brief sound in his throat that I could spend weeks trying to describe. But how can you make words out of sounds? These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link.
So begins the Night section of ‘The Confessions of Benno Levin’. It soon becomes clear there is something not quite right with this ‘confessor’, and that ‘he’ refers—to the reader’s natural surprise—to Eric Packer:
I made a phone threat that I didn't believe. They took the threat to be credible, which I knew they had to do, considering my knowledge of the firm and the personnel.
A bitter ex-employee of Packer Capital and an utter failure, at this early point in the book Levin comes across as something like Eric’s opposite. A Beckettian man: a wretch, a near-derelict. Yet by the time of the final confrontation in a ruined Hell’s Kitchen apartment, Packer’s assassin is someone the billionaire (in fact ex-billionaire) will in a way resemble, spiritually and materially. Benno Levin’s role in Cosmopolis is more than that of a side character. He’s almost a second—though secondary—protagonist6.
With his 1988 novel Libra, the central character of which is Lee Harvey Oswald, DeLillo had explored in depth the psychology of the kind of ‘man in a room’ Levin is a further example of. In a 2012 interview, the author explained how his preoccupation with this particular theme (one we might call Pascalian7) had its origins in his living circumstances in the 1960s and 70s:
Toward the end of Americana, I began to get the idea for the next novel, End Zone, but nothing beyond that. End Zone went quickly, and Great Jones Street, in a sense, was determined by my own circumstances, not that I was a famous person in hiding, but that I lived in one room for a long time and felt that there was something important about a man in a room and what it meant. Every so often, I end up with a man in a room. In the case of Great Jones Street, it had a particular context. In the case of Libra, it had a very different context. In Point Omega, there's a man in a screening room, watching a crime being committed.
In an interview from 2005, DeLillo dissected that ‘lonely assassin’ psychology that fascinates him (I recommend checking out his complete answer):
..there's something of Oswald's personality in Benno Levin, the killer in Cosmopolis. All of that comes from a motif which had always struck me: a man, in a small room, fomenting something. That motif is already there in my early books but I couldn't find a good way of formulating it until I was working on Libra, and constructing the Oswald character. I think Oswald spent his life trying to become someone, trying to give himself a place within the larger History.
The ‘Morning’ section of Benno Levin’s Confessions, which actually appear later in the book, reveal how, like Oswald, their author sees the assassination he has planned as an act that’ll redeem him and his failed existence:
But to take another person’s life? This is the vision of the new day. I am determined finally to act. It is the violent act that changes history and changes everything that came before.
And then later, in the part of chapter four that recounts the confrontation with Packer:
“I still need to shoot you. I’m willing to discuss it. But there’s no life for me unless I do this.”
Thus Packer winds up dead, or so it seems. Let’s remember DeLillo is considered—by most critics, though not all—a postmodernist8. Therefore nothing’s truly certain. It could be this ‘confessor’ is lying (“I used to try to tell the truth. But it’s hard not to lie. I lie to people because this is my language, how I talk.”), in the Night section at least, merely fantasising about having put to death the object of his morbid obsession. Yet if that’s the case, given how chapter four’s culiminating meeting between Eric and his ex-employee will play out, how is Levin at liberty to write his confessions? Where’s Packer? Wouldn’t a still-living Eric be intent on eliminating this threat to his life? DeLillo does not seem to go in for really extravagent postmodern tricks, so the idea that either Eric Packer or Benno Levin (aka Michael Sheets) exists only in the imagination of the other can probably be discarded.
Thus for me the possibility most likely and also most interesting is this: appearances on this occasion do not deceive; Packer has indeed met / will meet his end at the hands of Levin. That’s his likely fate—and I return to the themes of predestination and death further on in this piece and in part 4.
x
In my first piece inspired by Cosmopolis I explored the novel’s poetic of space (a Gaston Bachelard concept). I found in the limosine and its east-to-west plod along that single Manhattan street the key elements of that poetic. It seems to me this book does something very interesting with the automobile, by which I mean the motorcar in the abstract: the car as invention and the car as symbol of modernity, perhaps the symbol. It robs the automobile of its quintessential attribute, speed. Only at rare moments in the book do any cars in the Manhattan of Cosmopolis reach even walking pace, let alone anything faster. For the most part “traffic speaks in quarter-inches”, as Torval succintly puts it.
Now I don’t know if this was DeLillo’s conscious intention, but the book’s transformation of the motorcar from a highly mobile and dynamic vehicle to a sort of room on wheels, a thing almost static, could be taken as wry and ironic commentary on the trajectory of modernity.
We experience driving quite differently to how the first motorists did. Back in 1907, Octave Mirbeau celebrated the delirious dynamism of the motorcar:
..the traveller’s head bursts under the pressure of a mass of truncated images vainly striving to join up with each other.9
At the century’s beginnings this new and astonishing thing, the automobile, is as mind-expanding as any narcotic. I’m reminded of a pre-First World War exchange between Italian futurist leader Filippo Marinetti and English artist and writer Wyndham Lewis, as recounted by the latter in his memoir Blasting and Bombardiering (I recommend the full exchange, reproduced in the footnotes):
‘Futurism is good. It is all right.'
'Not too bad,' said I. 'It has its points. But you Wops insist too much on the Machine. You're always on about these driving-belts, you are always exploding about internal combustion. We've had machines here in England for a donkey's years. They're no novelty to us.’
'You have never understood your machines! You have never known the ivresse of travelling at a kilometre a minute. Have you ever travelled at a kilometre a minute?’
‘Never.' I shook my head energetically. 'Never. I loathe anything that goes too quickly.’10
In his War and Cinema11, Paul Virilio quotes La révolution figurée (1979) by Michèle Lagny, Marie-Claire Ropars and Pierre Sorlin to compare the novel delirium of an early-20th-century automobile journey to the experience of watching Eisenstein’s and Alexandrov’s October (1927):
“The inner Tension of the film, the inner current of the montage, set up such strong disturbances that no logical determination seems tenable anymore.. with no anchorage in space and time, the readability of the shapes is called into question by such a large number of shots that it is impossible to hold them in memory.”
Speed and its effects were a career-long obsession for Virilio; he coined the term dromology to give a name to their study (from the Greek word dromos for ‘race’ or ‘racetrack’).
One of the central preoccupations of Cosmopolis is speed, albeit speed in a different context to that of the kinetic one of vehicles and movie projectors—the speed of data and capital flows, of markets, of the making and losing of fortunes. Thus I like to think of the book as a dromological novel. John David Ebert’s gloss on Virilio’s dromology is relevant here:
Furthermore, according to Virilio, it matters little whether what is sped up is information or physical objects, since in both cases it is the message of movement itself that is at issue. Acceleration, moreover, tends to produce accidents, since the faster a technology moves, the greater the likelihood that a crash of some sort will result. Dromological speed-up has affected both the realms of transport and of human data communications equally… news functions as what Virilio calls The Information Bomb (2000d [1998]).12
We speak of economic crashes, credit crunches and so on, and for Virilio an economic disaster can be thought of as a kind of accident analogous to a car, train or plane crash. The extraordinary speed at which the financial system now operates he regards as a key factor in all such market meltdowns.
Cinema-going and driving, which in the early 20th century were ways of not only experiencing but also celebrating speed and other exhilarations, have in the 21st become banal activites. They’ve long since lost the power to startle, except in bad ways. Flying, politics, war and celebrity have similarly lost their transcendent dimension. A certain phase of the modern era, a romantic and optimistic phase, has unquestionably ended. But modernity as transformative process continues apace and retains its essential features. Old myths give way to new ones, less poetic but holding no less appeal for the masses. The confusion, anxiety and intoxication of pell-mell modernity remain our lot, as they were Mirbeau’s, Marinetti’s and Lewis’s a century ago.
While old-fashioned corporeal mobility continues to preoccupy us, the motorist and the globetrotting millionaire are no longer its salient symbols. They’ve given way to the migrant, that figure whose unchecked mobility lacks all romance, is merely threatening, depressing.
Only incorporeal mobility excites the 21st-century imagination—that hectic movement enabled by a light year of fibre-optic cables; a sky thick with comms satellites; innumerable vast anonymous sheds housing server farms. Data flows and data dreams. The scenario of Cosmopolis serves as a neat metaphor for the fall of the old ‘kinetic’ mythology and the rise of the new computational one, one regime of speed giving way to another. The car’s slowness contrasted with the celerity of cyber-capital, that tempo Eric Packer believes he can master. Benno Levin writes of the billionaire:
He is always ahead, thinking past what is new, and I’m tempted to admire this, always arguing with things that you and I consider great and trusty additions to our lives. Things wear out impatiently in his hands. I know him in my mind. He wants to be one civilization ahead of this one.
In Virilian terms Packer is a dromomaniac. An extract from Mark Featherstone’s gloss on dromomania and dromomaniacs in The Virilio Dictionary:
..whereas in Marx’s account of the development of capitalism the idea of constant upheaval as conflict is rendered as economic competition, in Virilio’s version of modernity as a period of turbulence conflict is rethought as a dromocratic contest characterised by the obsession to win the race into the future. Thus Virilio understands modernity, which is defined by notions of change but also, importantly, progress and development, as a form of society organised around the rule of the race. If this is the literal meaning of dromocracy, from dromos, ‘race’ and kratos, ‘rule’, then dromomania is the condition of being addicted to the race, and the dromomaniac is the person who is possessed or obsessed by the idea of the race.
Certainly Packer is obsessed with the future, as is the novel in which he stars. For Cosmopolis the future means the reign of cyber-capital:
The bank towers loomed just beyond the avenue. They were covert structures for all their size, hard to see, so common and monotonic, tall, sheer, abstract, with standard setbacks, and block-long, and interchangeable, and he had to concentrate to see them.
They looked empty from here. He liked that idea. They were made to be the last tall things, made empty, designed to hasten the future. They were the end of the outside world. They weren’t here, exactly. They were in the future, a time beyond geography and touchable money and the people who stack and count it.
..
”Because time is a corporate asset now. It belongs to the free market system. The present is harder to find. It is being sucked out of the world to make way for the future of uncontrolled markets and huge investment potential. The future becomes insistent. This is why something will happen soon, maybe today,” she said, looking slyly into her hands. “To correct the acceleration of time. Bring nature back to normal, more or less.”
That word, ‘cyber-capital’: clearly intended to suggest money is undergoing certain transformations in the era of digital tech and online; it’s not behaving in quite the same way as before. Cyber-capital had a futuristic ring in 2003—with that exotic prefix capital sounded posthuman, as if it were several steps ahead of us all.
Yet in 2023 all ‘cyber-’ words (punk, space, sex, bullying) have a distinctly quaint ring. That sense of what the future will be is old hat. Likewise Eric Packer’s high-tech limosine: twenty years on, a man with a smartphone and an ordinary car could do everything Packer does (certain bodily functions excepted). Words wear out, and fast. The rapidity of these obsolescences is a measure of the pace at which things move there, at the culture’s bleeding edge.
xi
A man’s character is his fate.
Heraclitus13
With the foretelling of Eric’s death in the Confessions DeLillo introduces the notion of a universe of predetermined events, a theme he’ll work away at as the novel progresses. For instance, on Part One’s final page he has Packer contemplate, in the evening aftermath of the firey (and certainly not peaceful) protest, the ‘credible threat’ to his life:
But it was the threat of death at the brink of night that spoke to him most surely about some principle of fate he’d always known would come clear in time.
And later, at the close of Brutha Fez’s funeral14:
The voice fell into silence finally. People thought the event was over now. They were shaking and drained. Eric’s delight at going broke seemed blessed and authenticated here. He’d been emptied of everything but a sense of surpassing stillness, a fatedness that felt disinterested and free.
And later still, just after DeLillo’s had Packer arbitrarily murder Torval with the security chief’s voice-activated handgun:
He paused imperceptibly, thinking he ought to go back for the weapon.
He’d tossed the weapon in the bushes because he wanted whatever would happen to happen. Guns were small practical things. He wanted to trust the power of predetermined events. The act was done, the gun should go.
He climbed the chain-link fence, tearing his pants at the pocket.
He’d tossed the weapon rashly but how fantastic it had felt. Lose the man, shed the gun. Too late now to reconsider.
I’m far from a DeLillo expert15, but I have noted the man appears to have a penchant for ancient Greek mythology and religion. For instance, this from an archived 1997 Publishers Weekly article:
"While I worked on the book, I gradually compiled a number of titles. I first hit upon Underworld when I started thinking about plutonium waste buried deep in the earth. Then about Pluto, the god of the dead and ruler of the world. New connections and meanings began to suggest themselves, and I recall drawing a circle around the title Underworld on a page filled with prospective titles."
“Can it have escaped the novelist that Pluto is also the god of money?” the article’s author Jonathan Bing goes on to ask, drawing to a close a piece largely focused on examining DeLillo as a critic of consumerism.
I’ll touch upon the question of DeLillo as a political writer in the fourth and final part of Leveraging the Void. For now let’s stick with this pagan theme of fate. Given the structure of the novel and the various references to predetermination, are we to take DeLillo for a fatalist, a hard determinist? Of course an author isn’t his characters; the latter’s outlook and opinions aren’t necessarily to be imputed to their creator. All we can say for sure is Eric Packer believes in fate, or at least comes to believe in it. It could be DeLillo views Packer’s fatalism not as a lucid philosophy but rather as an aspect of his fall—the ideal outlook for a man intent on nihilistically refusing all guilt, all responsibility.
If DeLillo is himself a fatalist with pagan characteristics, then it’s probably fair to say he has travelled far from his roots. An extract from the 2005 interview mentioned earlier is relevant here:
Q: You wrote that JFK's assassination was the event that created you ....
DD: November 22nd 1963 marked the real beginning of the 1960s. It was the beginning of a series of catastrophes: political assassinations, the war in Vietnam, the denial of Civil Rights and the revolts that occasioned, youth revolt in American cities, right up to Watergate.When I was starting out as a writer it seemed to me that a large part of the material you could find in my novels – this sense of fatality, of widespread suspicion, of mistrust – came from the assassination of JFK.
Just how much DeLillo remains the Catholic he was presumably raised as (he is the son of Italian immigrants; the family lived for most of DeLillo’s childhood in the Bronx) is an interesting question that’s exercised some critics, but one that I’ll leave for another essay.
To be concluded in part 4.
Molloy (original French 1951, English translation 1955) is the first of the landmark existentialist / absurdist novels that constitute the renowned Beckett Trilogy, the other two being Malone Dies and The Unnameable. By this point Beckett was writing everything in French initially. The Molloy translation he did himself, as usual. On the novel’s Wiki page, Paul Auster:
Beckett’s renderings of his own work are never literal, word-by-word transcriptions. They are free, highly-inventive adaptations of the original text—or, perhaps more accurately, ‘repatriations’ from one language to the other, from one culture to the other. In effect, he wrote every book twice, and each version bears its own indelible mark.
Fragment CIII. Note that the numbering for these fragments is taken from Charles H. Kahn’s excellent The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, Cambridge University Press, 1979.
It’s toward the end of the long conversation with Vija Kinski that Packer’s at his most (satirically?) Randian, a super-rich Howard Roark frustrated in his elite desires by bugman bureaucracy:
“And you bought an airplane. I'd nearly forgotten this. Soviet or ex-Soviet. A strategic bomber. Capable of knocking out a small city. Is this right?"
“It's an old Tu-160. NATO calls it Blackjack A. It was deployed around 1988. Carries nuclear bombs and cruise missiles," he said. "These were not included in the deal." She clapped her hands, happy and charmed. "But they wouldn't let you fly it. Could you fly it?"
“Could and did. They wouldn't let me fly it armed."
“Who wouldn't?"
"The State Department. The Pentagon. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.”
“The Russians?"
"What Russians? I bought it black-market and dirt cheap from a Belgian arms dealer in Kazakhstan. That's where I took the controls, for half an hour, over the desert. U.S. dollars, thirty-one million."
"Where is it now?"
"Parked in a storage facility in Arizona. Waiting for replacement parts that nobody can find. Sitting in the wind. I go out there now and then."
"To do what?"
"To look at it. It's mine," he said.”
DeLillo will divulge this key nugget of information in chapter four, after Eric’s finally arrived at the ostensible goal of his crosstown journey, Anthony’s barbershop. The old man recalls:
“He went fast once they found it. He was diagnosed and then he went. It was like he was talking to me one day and gone the next. In my mind that’s how it feels.”
Packer’s burdened with a classic anxiety, that of exiting life the same way one’s father did.
Not entirely clear because the explanation DeLillo will put in Benno Levin’s mouth in chapter four isn’t wholly satisfactory:
“But you forgot something along the way.”
“What?”
“The importance of the lopsided, the thing that’s skewed a little. You were looking for balance, beautiful balance, equal parts, equal sides. I know this. I know you. But you should have been tracking the yen in its tics and quirks. The little quirk. The misshape.”
“The misweave.”
“That’s where the answer was, in your body, in your prostate.”
The inclusion of a second ‘questing’ character, with his own chunks of narration, and this character having the protagonist as his goal, reminded me of Beckett’s Molloy. That book is divided into two parts; in the second a private detective, Moran, sets out with his ‘idiot son’ to find the Molloy of the title, whose account of his own strange quest to reach his mother (in order to ‘settle things with her’) takes up the first part. It seems likely DeLillo is at least acquainted with the Irish writer’s works. Consider what George Haddad, the spokesman for the Lebanese Maoists in Mao II, says in chapter eleven to that book’s protagonist, the novelist Bill Gray:
“What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous.”
..
”Beckett is the last writer to shape the way we think and see. After him, the major work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings. This is the new tragic narrative.”
The text doesn’t elaborate, so precisely why Haddad (and possibly DeLillo) grants Beckett this privileged status is something about which we can only speculate. It can and has been argued that modernist literature—that of ‘the men of 1914’ (Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Lewis), of Woolf, Lawrence et al—was the last to have an impact on the mainstream comparable to that of cinema, television and pop music. Perhaps Haddad (DeLillo) takes that view, or one similar, given that Beckett’s generally viewed as one of the last modernists (see Anthony Cronin’s biography).
Pascal, Pensées:
All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.
Harold Bloom is one of the dissenting critics—I’ll discuss his take in Leveraging the Void, part 4. Another dissenter is DeLillo himself, as he made clear in a 2010 interview:
Your fiction often has been described as "postmodern." What does that term mean to you? Is it something you would use?
DeLillo: It is not. I'm the last guy to ask. If I had to classify myself, it would be in the long line of modernists, from James Joyce through William Faulkner and so on. That has always been my model.
I think of postmodernism in terms of literature as part of a self-referring kind of art. People attach a label to writers or filmmakers or painters to be able some years in the future to declare that the movement is dead.
From Mirbeau’s novel La 628-E8. According to the book’s Wiki page:
To Mirbeau, the automobile represents an ideal instrument for combatting ethnocentrism and xenophobia. The novel’s most electrifying descriptions recreate in readers the speeding motorist’s dazed disorientation as the missile of his vehicle carries him past epileptic telegraph poles and blurred animals along the roadside.
In 1937 Lewis published Blasting and Bombardiering, his account of the much-mythologised years of Blast magazine, Vorticism, and Lewis’s career as a British Army artillery officer on the Western Front. Here’s the full exchange between him and Marinetti:
‘You are a futurist, Lewis!' he shouted at me one day, as we were passing into a lavabo together, where he wanted to wash after a lecture where he had drenched himself in sweat.
'No,' I said.
'Why don't you announce that you are a futurist!' he asked me squarely.
'Because I am not one,' I answered, just as pointblank and to the point.
'Yes. But what's it matter!' said he with great impatience.
'It's most important,' I replied rather coldly.
‘Futurism is good. It is all right.'
'Not too bad,' said I. 'It has its points. But you Wops insist too much on the Machine. You're always on about these driving-belts, you are always exploding about internal combustion. We've had machines here in England for a donkey's years. They're no novelty to us.’
'You have never understood your machines! You have never known the ivresse of travelling at a kilometre a minute. Have you ever travelled at a kilometre a minute?
‘Never.' I shook my head energetically. 'Never. I loathe anything that goes too quickly. If it goes too quickly, it is not there.'
'It is not there!' he thundered for this had touched him on the raw. 'It is only when it goes quickly that it is there!'
’That is nonsense,' I said. 'I cannot see a thing that is going too quickly.'
'See it—see it! Why should you want to see?' he exclaimed. 'But you do see it. You see it multiplied a thousand times. You see a thousand things instead of one thing.'
I shrugged my shoulders—this was not the first time I had had this argument.
'That's just what I don't want to see. I am not a futurist,' I said. 'I prefer one thing.'
'There is no such thing as one thing.'
'There is if I wish to have it so. And I wish to have it so.'
'You are a monist!' he said at this, with a contemptuous glance, curling his lip.
’All right. I am not a futurist anyway. Je hais le mouvement qui deplace les lignes.’
At this quotation he broke into a hundred angry pieces.
'And you "never weep"—I know, I know. Ah zut alors! What a thing to be an Englishman!’
This was the sort of thing that was going on the whole time. And at last this man attempted a Putsch against the 'great London Vortex'. He denounced me in letters to the Press, as the major obstacle to the advance of Futurism in England. And this was perfectly true. I 'stood in its path', as Sir Austen Chamberlain would have said.
Virilio, Paul, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, Verso (1984, translation 1989).
Armitage, John (editor), The Virilio Dictionary, Edinburgh University Press, 2013.
Fragment CXIV.
The funeral scene, which does nothing to advance the plot, is one of DeLillo’s frequent meditations on death. White Noise is in essence one long reflection on death, the title of Underworld refers to the realm of the dead, while the televised funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini solemnifies chapter twelve of Mao II. I don’t doubt there are other examples in the DeLillo books I’ve not read yet. The funeral scene in Cosmopolis includes no mention of anything Christian, of either heaven or hell, but a characteristic reference to Greek mythology does appear:
The hearse came next, an open car with Fez lying in state at the rear in a coffin angled upward to make the body visible, asphodels everywhere, fleshy pink, the flowers of Hades, where souls of the dead come to find meadowy rest.
An even lengthier Some Private Diagonal series will likely follow when I finally emerge from DeLillo’s Underworld (I recently started it), the reader may be (dis)pleased to hear.