In Episode 37, DDSWTNP kick off the Summer of Underworld with an overview that, like Episode 20: Discovering White Noise, offers newcomers to the novel a set of things to look out for as well as readings bound to appeal to those already familiar with DeLillo’s big book and headed back to it. How is this mega-novel structured in its six main Parts bookended by Prologue and Epilogue? How and why does it portray time’s variability and crisscross four decades of history? What to make of all the depictions of art and artists, from Klara Sax to Moonman 157, that populate these pages? What does a reader have to look forward to when they make it to the remarkable Lenny Bruce stand-up DeLillo creates? How do we keep track of all the meanings of waste and “under” in this book, and how does the quest for a single baseball help move the reader along? How to describe all the uncanny connections between paired characters and images, and is an aesthetic of filmic montage the way to understand Underworld’s method? Has DeLillo somehow made this giant book into both a vast, scattered history of the Cold War and a page-turning, character-driven account of personal transgression, confession, and regret? With these and other questions DDSWTNP begin a series of episodes, featuring many a guest appearance and working through the sections of Underworld one by one.

Enjoy the new variations in intro and outro music, and stay tuned for more episodes in the Summer of Underworld. Coming up next, an episode devoted to the Prologue and “Pafko at the Wall” with DeLillo scholar John Duvall.

Texts mentioned in this episode:

Mark Osteen, American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture. Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania P., 2000.

Transmission incoming from the insane world of Ratner’s Star, DeLillo’s fourth novel, a major change in his fiction and his most difficult text, underappreciated as precedent for his later turns on encyclopedic form in Libra and Underworld. Ratner’s also has, though, tons of connections to earlier works like Americana and End Zone. In this episode DDSWTNP celebrate Ratner’s fiftieth anniversary with a wholly new re-reading of a book that remains for us hilarious, pleasurable, and a huge reading challenge. We consider how Ratner’s Star, like any masterpiece, teaches us how to read its fabulations from its first page on. We examine its relentless juxtaposition of minds and bodies, as well as its dissection of the impulses toward pattern, order, and other “convenient fictions.” We ask what kinds of narrative experimentation with time and perspective DeLillo carries out, especially in the quest for an ultra-logical metalanguage in Part 2. We wonder about how science and math as fields of knowledge and uncertainty relate to DeLillo’s later turns to examining history. We do our best to try to understand the relationships of DeLillo’s “mohole” physics to Einstein’s relativity, and we offer a reading of a Jesuit’s interrogation of “red ant metaphysics” and “premature genuflection” that marks a new turn in DeLillo’s satires of his Catholic education. We close by disagreeing with a 1976 panning review of the novel as a pale imitation of Pynchon.

As we say in the episode, Ratner’s fiftieth makes for a great transition into our Summer of Underworld – look for a string of episodes on that big novel from us in the next few months! Enjoy the Ratnerama rendition of our intro music, too. And the rats and the bats and the stars. And in a nod to all ARS Extants out there, this episode is being sent into the podcast universe at exactly 14:28:57 (China Standard Time).

Texts mentioned and discussed in this episode:

David Cowart, Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. Athens: U. of Georgia P., 2002.

Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 1967.

Tom LeClair. In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. U. of Illinois P., 1987.

Mark Osteen, American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture. Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania P., 2000.

Peter S. Prescott, “Mandarin’s Apprentice” [review of Ratner’s Star]. Newsweek, June 7, 1976, p. 88.

Anticipating a summer to be spent exploring Underworld, DDSWTNP in Episode 35 take a small detour to a DeLillo short story, “Creation,” which distills DeLillo’s omnipresent motifs of Romanticism and Christian mythos, transports literal and figurative, and disillusionment with the maintenance of Edenic experience — perhaps especially for the American tourist trying to escape from, rather than into, their vacation world. This 1979 story of infidelity, manipulation, and fantasy depicts repeated journeys to a small, jammed Caribbean airport that draw thoughts about godliness, meaning, and mortal fear from an unnamed narrator who has the impulse to write but perhaps not the skills and honed perception. In “Creation” we find many unexpected things: stirring parallels to the space orbits of “Human Moments in World War III”; a precursor to the voice of James Axton to emerge amid Mediterranean islands three years later; and of course new turns on the key DeLillo topos of plane travel and the contingencies of leaving the earth for the sky. Elements of journeys in Americana, Mao II, Cosmopolis, and Valparaiso come up, and we conclude that Rupert the cab driver may be the hero of this tale, or the figure who understands these affairs the best. We give listeners quite a few reasons to read or re-read this under-appreciated story that DeLillo would later choose to place first in The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories (2011).

The cover image incorporates part of Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897-98) by Paul Gauguin, who seems the likely reference point when the narrator of “Creation” says of his canceled seat on a flight out, “I’ll marry a native woman and learn how to paint.”