15 - Joycean DeLillo

Summary

Midway through Don DeLillo's Libra (1988), Nicholas Branch, a retired CIA analyst who has been contracted to write ‘the secret history of the assassination of President Kennedy’, thinks to himself that the Warren Commission report, ‘with its twenty-six accompanying volumes of testimony and exhibits, its millions of words … is the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he’d moved to Iowa City and lived to a hundred’ (15, 181). In an interview for Rolling Stone on Libra's publication, DeLillo elaborated on this funny and suggestive line:

I asked myself what Joyce could possibly do after Finnegans Wake, and this was the answer. It's an amazing document. The first fifteen volumes are devoted to testimony and the last eleven volumes to exhibits, and together we have a masterwork of trivia ranging from Jack Ruby's mother's dental records to photographs of knotted string. (DeCurtis 62)

There is much to say about DeLillo's invocation of Joyce's post-Wake trajectory in Libra, not least as a reflection on his own career trajectory. But taken as a face value comment on the genesis of Libra, this remark is a little unusual. In an interview on how he wrote Libra, DeLillo does not say, as one might expect, that his experience with the Warren Report reminded him of Joyce: he says that thinking about what Joyce could do after Finnegans Wake put him in mind of the Warren Report. The implication is that DeLillo's concern with Joyce predates, or perhaps even led to, his interest in the Warren Report. Without getting lost in unprovable claims about authorial intention, I contend that the primacy DeLillo attributes to Joyce in this moment speaks of his own deep and career-spanning engagement with Joyce: Joyce is, throughout DeLillo's work, one of the smithies in which he forges his art.

He has not been especially coy about this: in his very first interview as a writer, with Tom LeClair in Contemporary Literature, DeLillo famously attributed his apparent reclusiveness to ‘Silence, exile, cunning, and so on’ (LeClair, ‘An Interview’ 4) – a knowing reference to Stephen Dedalus's famous lines at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.