The voice contracts to a congregation in a baseball ground, a scene that recurs from Mao II to the masterpiece, Underworld, of which those are the opening lines. Places where the game is played, stadium’s, baseball parks, hold the voice to sounding not for that kind of everything, ‘history’, as it is made and shaped and controlled by those who want its ambiguous glories, but to ‘local’ concerns, to an event taking place within that changes nothing but itself, making another kind of history, apparently temporary in the formation of its occurrence, but capable of crossing vast swathes of time and place, making of everything a liminal relationship of the things easily forgotten, erased, feared, outside the law of the discursive formation. Call that sport, maybe; call it Underworld, because that is how it speaks, from spaces cut off from the largesse of the world’s story, not post-modern in Lyotard’s specific and so quickly clichéd sense, but saturated places that the World goes through but will not linger in.

‘He speaks in your voice, American’, and he speaks so in a voice of evanescence. Underworld’s prologue describes the 1951 baseball match between the Giants and the Dodgers. The game will decide who goes to the World Series. The tension’s too high to calculate. With the last pitch, Bobby Thomson strikes a home run that, as it disappears into a crowd moving too fast with joy to be people any longer, freezes the world, just for as long as it takes for the cheers to die down, the winning ball to be scrambled for and the crowds to disperse into the streets of Queens, and onto Brooklyn, Manhattan, Harlem, beyond.

A frozen world is the heights of the type of game DeLillo has taken to describing- its winning move against ‘what makes history’, its escape route, the trump card. Paul Virilio talks of a world saturated by time, so sped up and grounded in simultaneity that it can no longer be a categorical factor of our experience of things. DeLillo’s great fictions provide an expanded model of that dromology. Freezing time, he shows how ‘speeds and intensities’, the material measurements of time described by Deleuze and Guattari drawn from Virilio 3 , include territories of resistance within them, when everything stops and evanescent miracles happen, like the home run, or like the face of a missing girl falsely appearing in the overlap of billboard posters in a train’s light with which Underworld closes. This is who speaks- a voice that halts itself.

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