Don De Lillo

‘Who Speaks?’

Maurice Blanchot asked the question of Kafka and Beckett, ‘Who speaks?’, looking to find what it was that the voice became within the boundaries of that thing called Literature. To Blanchot, Literature is the space of death, the site wherein all voices are neutralised, so that speaking and writing themselves converge upon a kind of silence that has Entry and Exit as its only noise. He said:

‘Of course my language does not kill anyone. And yet, when I say, "This woman", real death has been announced and is already present in my language; my language means this person, who is here right now, can be detached from herself, removed from her existence and her presence, and suddenly plunged into a nothingness in which there is no existence or presence; my language essentially signifies the possibility of this destruction; it is a constant, bold illusion to such an event.’ 1

Let’s renew the question, because Literature does not to continue to speak solely in the univocal language of death’s space. Don DeLillo, amongst a select group of contemporary American Novelists (Burroughs above all, but also Pynchon, McCarthy), has helped to reshape the territory in which the question can be asked and answered, and it his two most recent novels, Underworld and The Body Artist that provide a forum for asking ‘Who speaks?’, and finding new ways to form an answer.

Who Speaks?

‘He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eyes that’s halfway hopeful.
It’s a school day, sure, but he’s nowhere near the classroom. He wants to be here instead, standing in the shadow of this old-rusk hulk of a structure and it’s hard to blame him – this metropolis of steel and concrete and flaky paint and cropped glass and enormous Chesterfield packs aslant on the scorecards, a couple of cigarettes jutting from each.

Longing on a large scale is what makes history. This is just a kid with a local yearning but he is part of an assembling crowd … and even if they are not a migration or a revolution, some vast shaking of the soul, they bring with them the body heat of a great city and their own small reveries and desperations, the unseen something that haunts the soul …’ 2

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