It is the voice that freezes in the glare of this new atomic evanescence. This is who speaks, and it has implications for our own relationship to literature. From the beginning of Underworld it is made clear: He speaks in your voice, America, and that voice, speaking to the world in a register that merges command into report comes back as The Triumph of Death starts to flutter down onto J Edgar Hoover’s head:

‘Look at the man in the upper deck. He is tearing pages out of his copy of Life and dropping them uncrumpled over the rail, letting them fall in a seesaw drift on the bawling fans below. He is moved to do this by the paper falling elsewhere, the contagion of paper – it is giddy and unformulated fun.’ 15

Amongst the wreckage of his Passagenwerken, Walter Benjamin formulated the notion of bringing the dialectics of history to a standstill. It is a process that can move in a number of directions, one of which is towards natural beauty, a natural beauty that begins to speak in Underworld. Adorno describes this movement in his Aesthetic Theory, stating that ‘natural beauty is suspended history, a moment of becoming at a standstill’ 16. When Underworld ‘speaks in your voice’ it assumes the position of a new form of nature apparent to an age of instant global extermination. That nature, formed of the basic particles of which the universe exists, has come not to be significant of growth but of its own potency as destroyer, the dialectical balance of forces that give and take away swept away to be replaced by a single model in which everything is potential termination.

The reinstitution of a dialectical scenario back into a nature defined only by its limit-capacity of annihilation takes place when he speaks, when that turn to a report commanded takes place. Such a turn offers a new kind of resistance to the disaster that has remained unheard until now. Where Celan, Beckett, and those other darkest voices of the last half-century’s terrors gave themselves to the horrors man perpetrates, in the American Novel of the last twenty years, DeLillo most explicitly, Underworld most of all, there has been the voicing of a stilled replication of the atomic.

In Breughel’s painting there was the sense of the worst, when all that can be said, as in King Lear, was ‘this is the worst’ or wait to say it again when things deteriorate. In the age of instant global annihilation, there can be no prospective speaking of those words, no expectation that if they were said they ever could be said again. After the catastrophes of Auschwitz, Hiroshima, the genocides and civil wars of Africa, East Timor, the ravaging of Afghanistan, we have seen and heard the worst over and over, but the total enunciation of its meaning remains a consequence beyond thought. And so everything that’s said in Underworld, under the long shadow of nuclear war is frozen before that final catastrophe which cannot be spoken because it has nothing to tell.

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