5 - Radiance and Repetition: DeLillo’s Icons

Summary

‘Not a thing to study but to feel’

To describe something as ‘an icon’ suggests an image that crystallises a set of ideas and feelings, often a historical moment. To describe something or someone as ‘iconic’ marks its persistence in reproductions across time and space. The iconic picture or person is marked by its initial ability to fascinate, to amplify the type of call to attention we might refer to when we speak of ‘the power of the image’. There is no image that is inherently iconic; instead, an image, or a person whose image is repeated, becomes iconic when the familiarity caused by duplication makes of them cultural symbols with a rich and recognisable range of reverberations. James Axton in The Names (1982) puts off visiting the Acropolis because he thinks he is required to respond to ‘the question of its renown’: that is, to those aspects of its status that allow us to think of it as an icon, a vessel for ideas about Western civilisation. ‘The weight and moment of those worked stones promised to make the business of seeing them a complicated one’, ‘so much converges there’, DeLillo has Axton write (The Names 3). DeLillo has said that ‘my mind works one way, toward making a simple moment complex’ (De Pietro 100). The iconic in his novels often acts, as the breathtaking sunsets in White Noise (1985) do, as a prompt for the narrative, or sometimes the character, to stop, discover, study and describe these moments of complexity.

In the pages that follow I argue that DeLillo's meditation on the iconic locates the power of many of these images or figures in their ability to hold and make available the idea of death. This feels to the attracted as though the icon holds an impenetrable secret – the secret glamour of charisma, or the secret of political power, or the power over life and death of a suicide, or a dictator, or of the atomic bomb. The icon's ability to fascinate is figured in these texts in the image of a radiant light, a visual call to attention which is often amplified further by borrowing from the sublimity of death and of the sacred. In keeping with this, Axton's eventual visit to the Acropolis is very different to his anticipated experience of the citadel as already-read.