3 - DeLillo and media culture

Summary

I would like to approach Don DeLillo's relationship with media culture somewhat obliquely through Samuel Beckett's early thoughts on the aesthetic possibilities of nonexpression. On July 9, 1937, a young Beckett wrote to his friend Axel Kaun:

More and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it . . . As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it – be it something or nothing – begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today.

A certain reading of Beckett's oeuvre would suggest that these early thoughts on the goals of literature turned out to be a manifesto or a statement of intent. Beckett's works get shorter as his career progresses, in the main, working toward the extremely brief texts such as Imagination Dead Imagine (1965), Ping (1966), and Breath (1969). In these works Beckett appears to be abiding by his intention to come as close as possible to eliminating language. These bleached-out late works barely happen; they are works in which literature comes as close as it is perhaps conceivable to come to nonexpression and silence, works in which the nothingness that language struggles to disguise begins to “seep through.”