2 - The Art of Feeling

Summary

The Swirl

Don DeLillo is the poet of entropy.’ This was the assessment of fellow novelist John Banville in his review of DeLillo's 2010 novel Point Omega for the New York Review of Books. ‘The world he sets up in his fictions’, he continued, ‘is a tightly wound machine gradually running down, and in it all action is a kind of lapsing drift.’ Even in those ‘immense works such as Libra (1988) or Underworld (1997) or Mao II (1991), with plots as intricate and murky as the New York sewer system, stories do not so much unfold as become blurred; everything grows vague, attenuated, detached’ (Banville).

Though Banville does not refer specifically to emotion here, this assessment encapsulates the affective complexity of DeLillo's novels. Sharply distinct affective modes are hard to locate, and readers are instead left in affective confusion. Emotional states are consistently denied, reduced, minimised, or undermined. This we see playing out in the opening scene of one of his earlier novels, Players (1977), where one affective judgement about a live score accompanying a silent film – ‘the simple innocence of this music’ – works to ‘undermine’ a grander, more intense state: ‘the photogenic terror, reducing it to an empty swirl’ (8). Such swirls of affect disperse the hope of clearly defined feeling to mere atmosphere, the murky haze in which, in scholar Teresa Brennan's formulation, affect is transmitted. Affect transmits between us as lightly as a fresh summer breeze or with the turbulence of a building storm, in which, in Brennan's words, ‘the environment literally gets into the individual’ (1). Socially produced and socially influenced, ‘the transmission is also responsible for bodily changes’, which, ‘if only for an instant, alters the biochemistry and neurology of the subject’ (1). We might map the affective tension and interaction of a text as we would meteorological systems, with bars of pressure shifting, reducing, or increasing. Or, indeed, to use DeLillo's imagery from Players, like the internal mechanisms of an aeroplane, whose ‘many systems of mechanical and electric components’ exert a fine ‘management of stresses, power units, consolidated thrust and energy it has taken to reduce the […] sensation of flight’ (3). In other words, forces both large and minuscule have enough impact to produce affective nuance.