3 - The Art of War

Summary

No better gloss on Walter's Benjamin's characterisation of fascism as ‘the logical result of the entrance of aesthetics into politics’ (241) exists than the scene in Don DeLillo's White Noise where Jack Gladney and Murray Siskind riff on the uncanny affinities between Hitler and Elvis (71). As the Nazi dictator and the hillbilly rock star become twin ‘mama's boys’ obsessed with death, we enter a nightmare where public figures are all celebrities, their aura glinting before an audience ignorant of history and sociology. In 1994 John Duvall noted DeLillo's view that ‘giving oneself over to formal contemplation of the image matrix of either television or the supermarket denies one's assertion into the political economy … is learning how to be a fascist’. DeLillo shows that Jack and Murray consistently fall ‘into [this] suspect formal method when they interpret events in their world’ as if they were happening on television (Duvall 129).

Yet in recent years, many readers, including Duvall, have complained that DeLillo has excised concrete history from politics, reducing 9/11 to an event in the emotional lives of middle-class Americans or glossing over the differences between cities that look like Beirut. Tracing the evolution of DeLillo's stance on politics and history requires following the link between art and violence through his novels. DeLillo's artists often conflate their instruments with weapons, as Bucky Wunderlick does when he muses, ‘I might actually kill someone with my music’ (Great Jones Street 105). Almost antiphonally, Richard Elster, thirty-seven years later in Point Omega, interprets Jim Finley's request for an interview filmed against a wall as an assault: ‘Up against the wall, mother fucker!’ (45). The Names, ‘Baader–Meinhof’ and Point Omega all raise questions about art's relation to political violence. In The Names, James Axton, a freelance writer, becomes an unwitting CIA source and a collaborator with America's neo-colonial presence in the Middle East. Both ‘Baader–Meinhof’ and Point Omega revolve around exhibitions that DeLillo visited at New York's MoMA. DeLillo's persistent conviction that the aesthetic impulse is itself violent or is easily made to serve the goals of terrorists and militarised regimes runs through all three works.