SOURCE: “For Whom Bell Tolls: Don DeLillo's Americana,” in Contemporary Literature, Vol. XXXVII, No. 4, Winter, 1996, pp. 602–19.

Don DeLillo’s 1971 novel Americana, his first, represents a rethinking of the identity or alienation theme that had figured with particular prominence in the quarter century after the close of World War II. The theme persists in DeLillo, but the self becomes even more provisional. The changing social conditions and imploding belief systems that alienate a Meursault, a Holden Caulfield, or a Binx Bolling do not constitute so absolute an epistemic rupture as the gathering recognition—backed up by post-Freudian psychology—that the old stable ego has become permanently unmoored. Whether or not he would embrace Lacanian formulations of psychological reality, DeLillo seems fully to recognize the tenuousness of all “subject positions.” He knows that postmodern identity is not something temporarily eclipsed, something ultimately recoverable. DeLillo characters cannot, like Hemingway’s Nick Adams, fish the Big Two-Hearted to put themselves back together. Thus David Bell, the narrator of Americana remains for the reader a slippery, insubstantial personality—even though he claims to be able to engage with his self whenever he looks in a mirror (13/11).¹ Bell in fact stumbles through life, waiting for some change, some new dispensation, to complete the displacement of the old order, in which the fiction of a knowable, stable identity enjoyed general credence.

In psychoanalytic theory, one’s sense of self originates, at least in part, in the early relationship with the mother. DeLillo, like Freud or Lacan, extends this idea beyond individual psychology. He knows that Americans collectively define themselves with reference to a land their artists frequently represent, in metaphor, at least, as female. In Americana DeLillo represents this female land as maternal—a trope common enough in Europe (where nationalists often salute “the Motherland”) but seldom encountered on this side of the Atlantic. The author thereby makes doubly compelling the theme of the land violated, for he presents not the familiar drama of rapacious Europeans despoiling a landscape represented as Pocahontas, but the more appalling tragedy of the American Oedipus and his unwitting violation of a landscape that the reader gradually recognizes as Jocasta.²

By means of these and other allegorizing identifications, DeLillo participates in and wields a certain amount of control over the profusion of images by which America represents itself. More than any other contemporary writer, DeLillo understands the extent to which images—from television, from film, from magazine journalism and photography, from advertising, sometimes even from books—determine what passes for reality in the American mind. Unanchored, uncentered, and radically two-dimensional, these images constitute the discourse by which Americans strive to know themselves. DeLillo’s protagonist, a filmmaker and successful television executive, interacts with the world around him by converting it to images, straining it through the lens of his sixteen-millimeter camera. He attempts to recapture his own past by making it into a movie, and much of the book concerns this curious, Godardesque film in which, he eventually discloses, he has invested years. Thus one encounters—two years before the conceit structured Gravity’s Rainbow—a fiction that insists on blurring the distinctions between reality and its representation on film. Film vies, moreover, with print, for readers must negotiate a curiously twinned narrative that seems to exist as both manuscript and “footage”—and refuses to stabilize as either. Americana, the novel one actually holds and reads, seems to be this same narrative at yet a third diagetic remove.

In his scrutiny of the mechanics of identity and representation in the written and filmed narratives of David Bell, especially as they record an oedipal search for the mother, DeLillo explores the America behind the Americana. What the author presents is a set of simulacra: manuscript and film and book mirroring a life and each other, words and images that pretend to mask a person named David Bell. But of course David Bell is himself a fictional character—and six years too young to be a stand-in for DeLillo (though one can recast the conundrum here as the attempt of this other subject—the author—to trick the simulacra into yielding up a modicum of insight into the mysteries of the ego’s position within the Symbolic Order). DeLillo makes of his shadow play a postmodernist exemplar, a dazzling demonstration of the subject’s inability to know a definitive version of itself. Thus Bell’s film begins and ends with a shot of Austin Wakely, his surrogate, standing in front of a mirror that reflects the recording camera and its operator, the autobiographical subject of the film. A perfect piece of hermeticism, this shot announces an infinite circularity; it suggests that nothing in the rest of the film will manage to violate the endless circuit of the signifying chain. It suggests, too, the complexity—indeed, the impossibility—of determining the truly authentic subject among its own proliferating masks.

One can resolve some of the difficulties of DeLillo’s first novel by searching for coherent elements amid the larger obscurity of its action and structure. The central events of the narrative evidently take place some time after the Kennedy assassination (the American century’s climacteric) and before the Vietnam War had begun to wind down. Recollecting the second year of his brief marriage, terminated five years previously, Bell remarks that the conflict in Southeast Asia “was really just beginning” (38/35), and subsequently the war is a pervasive, malign presence in the narrative. Inasmuch as the hero is twenty-eight years old and apparently born in 1942 (his father in the film mentions that the birth occurred while he was overseas, shortly after his participation in the Bataan Death March), the story’s present would seem to be 1970. Yet occasionally Bell intimates a much later vantage from which he addresses the reader. He seems, in fact, to be spinning this narrative at a considerable remove in time, for he refers at one point to “the magnet-grip of an impending century” (174/166). He is also remote in space: like another great egotist who embodied the best and worst of his nation, Bell seems to have ended up on an “island” (16/14, 137/129) off “the coast of Africa” (357/347).

DeLillo structures the novel as a first-person narrative divided into four parts. In the first of these Bell introduces himself as a jaded television executive in New York. Presently he collects three companions and sets out on a cross-country trip—ostensibly to meet a television film crew in the Southwest, but really to look in the nation’s heartland for clues to himself and to the American reality he embodies. In part 2, through flashbacks, the reader learns about Bell’s relations with his family (mother, father, two sisters) and about his past (childhood, prep school, college). In part 3, Bell stops over in Fort Curtis, a midwestern town, and begins shooting his autobiographical film with a cast composed of his traveling companions and various townspeople recruited more or less at random. This part of the story climaxes with a long-postponed sexual encounter with Sullivan, the woman sculptor he finds curiously compelling. Subsequently, in part 4, he abandons his friends and sets off alone on the second part of his journey: into the West.

Bell’s “post-Kerouac pilgrimage,” as Charles Champlin calls it (7), takes him from New York to Massachusetts to Maine, then westward to the sleepy town of Fort Curtis, in a state Bell vaguely surmises to be east (or perhaps south) of Iowa. After his stay in Fort Curtis he undertakes a “second journey, the great seeking leap into the depths of America,” heading “westward to match the shadows of my image and my self” (352/341). A hitchhiker now, picked up “somewhere in Missouri” (358/348), he travels with the generous but sinister Clevenger, himself a remarkable piece of Americana, through Kansas, through “a corner-piece of southeastern Colorado,” across New Mexico, and on into Arizona. Significantly, he never gets to Phoenix. Instead, he visits a commune in the Arizona desert before rejoining Clevenger and heading “east, south and east” (372/362), back across New Mexico to the west Texas town of Rooster (where DeLillo will locate Logos College in his next novel, End Zone). Parting with Clevenger for good, Bell hitchhikes to Midland, where he rents a car and drives northeast, overnight, to Dallas, honking as he traverses the ground of Kennedy’s martyrdom. In Dallas he boards a flight back to New York.

In his end is his beginning. Seeking the foundational in self and culture, Bell travels in a great circle that is its own comment on essentialist expectations. His circular journey seems, in other words, to embody the signifying round, impervious to a reality beyond itself. In this circle, too, readers may recognize elements of a more attenuated symbolism. As an emblem of spiritual perfection, the circle suggests the New World promise that Fitzgerald and Faulkner meditate on. As an emblem of final nullity, it suggests America’s bondage to historical process—the inexorable corsi and ricorsi described by Vico (whom Bell briefly mentions). DeLillo teases the reader, then, with the circle’s multiple meanings: vacuity, spiritual completeness, inviolable link in the chain of signification, historical inevitability.

That history may be cyclical affords little comfort to those caught in a civilization’s decline. Like his friend Warren Beasley, the Jeremiah of all-night radio, Bell knows intimately the collapse of America’s ideal conception of itself. He speaks of “many visions in the land, all fragments of the exploded dream” (137/129). The once unitary American Dream, that is, has fallen into a kind of Blakean division; and DeLillo—through Bell—differentiates the fragments embraced by “generals and industrialists” from what remains for the individual citizen: a seemingly simple “dream of the good life.” But this dream, or dream fragment,

had its complexities, its edges of illusion and self-deception, an implication of serio-comic death. To achieve an existence almost totally symbolic is less simple than mining the buried metals of other countries or sending the pilots of your squadron to hang their bombs over some illiterate village. And so purity of intention, simplicity and all its harvests, these were with the mightiest of the visionaries, those strong enough to confront the larger madness. For the rest of us, the true sons of the dream, there was only complexity. The dream made no allowance for the truth beneath the symbols, for the interlinear notes, the presence of something black (and somehow very funny) at the mirror rim of one’s awareness. This was difficult at times. But as a boy, and even later, quite a bit later, I believed all of it, the institutional messages, the psalms and placards, the pictures, the words. Better living through chemistry. The Sears, Roebuck catalog. Aunt Jemima. All the impulses of all the media were fed into the circuitry of my dreams. One thinks of echoes. One thinks of an image made in the image and likeness of images. It was that complex.

(137–38/130)

This passage is an especially good example of the DeLillo style and the DeLillo message. DeLillo’s writing, like Thomas Pynchon’s, is keyed to the postmodern moment. Inasmuch as this is prose that strives to become as uncentered and as shadow-driven as the peculiarly American psychological and social reality under scrutiny, one glosses it only at the risk of violating the author’s studied indirection. But one can—again, without pretending to exhaust its ambiguity and indeterminacy—hazard a modest commentary.

“Almost totally symbolic,” the dream of the good life is subject to “complexities” from which powerful ideologues are free. Focused, single-minded, exempt from doubt, the military and industrial powerful confront the “larger madness” of political life in the world (and especially in the twentieth century) with a singleness of purpose that, however misguided, at least enjoys the distinction, the “harvests,” of “purity” and “simplicity.” The reader who would convert these abstractions into concrete terms need only recall how for decades a Darwinian economic vision and a passionate hatred of Communism made for an American foreign policy that was nothing if not “simple.” The irony, of course, is that simplicity is the last thing one should expect of dealings between nations, especially when those dealings take the form of war. But DeLillo evinces little interest in attacking the monomania of Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara or Richard Nixon and Melvin Laird. By 1971, their obtuseness had been exposed too often to afford latitude for anything fresh in a literary sense—and DeLillo has the good sense to know the fate of satiric ephemera like MacBird! (1966) and the contemporaneous Our Gang (1971). In Americana, by contrast, DeLillo explores the far-from-simple mechanics of life in a culture wholly given over to the image. The citizen of this culture, however seemingly innocent and uncomplicated, exists as the cortical nexus of a profoundly complex play of advertisements, media bombardments, and shadow realities that manage, somehow, always to avoid or postpone representation of the actual, the “something black … at the mirror rim of one’s awareness.” DeLillo, then, chronicling this “existence almost totally symbolic,” sees the American mass brain as “an image made in the image and likeness of images.”

But the real lies in wait, says the author, whose thesis seems to complement Lacanian formulations of the subject position and its problematic continuity. The subject cannot know itself, and language, the Symbolic Order, discovers only its own play, its own energies, never the bedrock reality it supposedly names, glosses, gives expression to. Hence DeLillo actually echoes Lacan—not to mention Heidegger, Derrida, and others—in speaking of “interlinear notes” to the text of appearances, a presence at the edges of mirrors, a “truth beneath the symbols.” Americana is the record of an attempt to break out of the endlessly circular signifying chain of images replicating and playing off each other to infinity. As such it is also the record of a growing awareness of the complexity with which a consumer culture imagines itself. For the author, this awareness extends to knowledge of the social reality beneath what Pynchon, in The Crying of Lot 49, characterizes as “the cheered land” (180).

Part of the agenda in the Pynchon novel, one recalls, is to bring to the surface of consciousness the disinherited or marginalized elements of the American polity. The Crying of Lot 49 functions in part to remind readers that enormous numbers of Americans have been omitted from the version of the country sanctioned by the media and other public institutions, and that is one way to understand what DeLillo is doing when a reference to Aunt Jemima follows a cryptic remark about “the presence of something black (and somehow very funny) at the mirror rim of one’s awareness.” For years, one encountered no black faces in that cornucopia of middle-class consumerism, the Sears, Roebuck catalog, but the semiotics of breakfast-food merchandising could accommodate a black domestic like Aunt Jemima. The reference to a familiar and venerable commercial image affords a ready example of a reality that the sixties, in one of the decade’s more positive achievements, had brought to consciousness—the reality of an American underclass that for years could be represented only as comic stereotype. Thus the reader who needs a concrete referent for what DeLillo is talking about here need go no further than a social reality that was, in 1970, just beginning to achieve visibility.

Aunt Jemima metonymically represents the world of advertising, a world dominated by that especially resourceful purveyor of the image, Bell’s father (the familial relationship reifies the idea that television is the child of advertising). The father’s pronouncements on his calling complement the book’s themes of representational form and substance. He explains that advertising flourishes by catering to a desire on the part of consumers to think of themselves in the third person—to surrender, as it were, their already embattled positions as subjects. But the person who laments “living in the third person” (64/58) is his own son, this novel’s narrating subject. “A successful television commercial,” the father remarks, encourages in the viewer a desire “to change the way he lives” (281/270). This observation mocks and distorts the powerful idea Rilke expresses in his poem “Archäischer Torso Apollos”: “Du musst dein Leben ändern (313).³ The poet perceives this message—“You must change your life”—as he contemplates the ancient sculpture. He suggests that the work of art, in its power, its perfection, and (before the age of mechanical reproduction) its uniqueness, goads viewers out of their complacency. The artist—Rilke or DeLillo—confronts torpid, passionless humanity with the need to seek a more authentic life; the advertiser, by contrast, confronts this same humanity with a spurious, even meretricious need for change. The impulse behind this narrative, interestingly enough, is precisely that need to change a life one has come to see as empty—the need to return from the limbo of third-person exile, the need to recover, insofar as possible, a meaningful subjectivity.

Like the questers of old, then, Bell undertakes “a mysterious and sacramental journey” (214/204): he crosses a threshold with a supposedly faithful band of companions (Sullivan, Brand, Pike), travels many leagues, and descends into a Dantean underworld with the Texan, Clevenger, as cicerone. Indeed, the nine-mile circumference of Clevenger’s speedway seems palpably to glance at the nine-fold circles of Dante’s Hell (especially as Bell imagines, back in New York, a “file cabinet marked pending return of soul from limbo” [345/334]). When, from here, Bell puts in a call to Warren Beasley, who has “foresuffered almost all” (243/232), he modulates from Dante to Odysseus, who learns from Tiresias in the underworld that he must “lose all companions,” as Pound says, before the completion of his quest. Alone and empty-handed, without the boon that traditionally crowns such efforts, Bell is a postmodern Odysseus, returning not to triumph but to the spiritual emptiness of New York before ending up in solitude on a nameless island that would seem to have nothing but its remoteness in common with Ithaca. Indeed, announcing toward the end of his story that he will walk on his insular beach, “wearing white flannel trousers” (358/348), he dwindles finally to Prufrock, the ultimate hollow man.

In attempting to understand the reasons for Bell’s failure, the reader engages with DeLillo’s real subject: the insidious pathology of America itself, a nation unable, notwithstanding prodigies of self-representation, to achieve self-knowledge. The novelist must represent the self-representation of this vast image culture in such a way as to reveal whatever truth lies beneath its gleaming, shifting surfaces. But the rhetoric of surface and depth will not serve: America is a monument to the ontological authority of images. DeLillo seeks at once to represent American images and to sort them out, to discover the historical, social, and spiritual aberrations they embody or disguise.

DeLillo focuses his analysis on the character of David Bell, a confused seeker after the truth of his own tormented soul and its relation to the larger American reality. One makes an essential distinction between DeLillo’s engagement with America and that of his character, who becomes the vehicle of insights he cannot share. Marooned among replicating images, Bell loses himself in the signifying chain, as doomed to “scattering” as Pynchon’s Tyrone Slothrop. In his attempts to recover some cryptic truth about his family and in his manipulation of filmic and linguistic simulacra, Bell fails to see the extent to which he embodies an America guilty of the most abhorrent of violations—what the Tiresias-like Beasley calls the “national incest.” David Bell’s existential distress seems to have an important oedipal dimension, seen in his troubled memories of his mother and in his relations with other women in his life. I propose to look more closely, therefore, at just how the relationship between David Bell and his mother ramifies symbolically into the life of a nation.

The emphasis, in what follows, on the Freudian view of the Oedipus complex is not intended to imply an argument for its superiority to those post-Freudian (and especially Lacanian) views invoked elsewhere in this essay. When the subject is postmodern identity, one naturally opts for Lacan’s refinements of Freudian thought, but insofar as Lacan took little interest in pathology per se, and insofar as DeLillo’s emphasis is on a nation’s sickness, the critic may legitimately gravitate to the older psychoanalytic economy and its lexicon. It is a mistake to think that entry into the Symbolic Order precludes all further encounters with the Imaginary, and by the same token we err to view Freud’s system as wholly displaced by that of his successor. Indeed, Lacan resembles somewhat the messiah who comes not to destroy the law but to fulfill it, and just as the theologian illustrates certain points more effectively out of the Old Testament than out of the New, so does the critic need at times to summon up the ideas of the Mosaic founder of psychoanalysis.

Throughout his narrative, Bell strives to come to terms with some fearsome thing having to do with his mother—something more insidious, even, than the cancer that takes her life. She grapples with a nameless anomie that becomes localized and explicable only momentarily, as in her account of being violated on the examining table by her physician, Dr. Weber (one recalls the similarly loathsome gynecologist in The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s meditation on another rape of America). Neurasthenic and depressed, Bell’s mother evidently lived with a spiritual desperation that her husband, her children, and her priest could not alleviate. Bell’s recollections of his mother and his boyhood culminate as he thinks back to a party given by his parents, an occasion of comprehensive sterility that owes something to the gathering in Mike Nichols’s 1968 film The Graduate, not to mention the moribund revels of “The Dead.” The party ends with the mother spitting into the ice cubes; subsequently, the son encounters her in the pantry and has some kind of epiphany that he will later attempt to re-create on film. This epiphany concerns not only the mother’s unhappiness but also the son’s oedipal guilt, for Bell conflates the disturbing moments at the end of the party with his voyeuristic contemplation, moments earlier, of a slip-clad woman at her ironing board—a figure he promptly transforms, in “the hopelessness of lust” (117/109), into an icon of domestic sexuality: “She was of that age which incites fantasy to burn like a hook into young men on quiet streets on a summer night” (203).

Perhaps the remark of Bell’s sister Mary, who becomes the family pariah when she takes up with a gangland hit man, offers a clue to this woman’s misery: “there are different kinds of death,” she says. “I prefer that kind, his kind, to the death I’ve been fighting all my life” (171/163). Another sister, Jane, embraces this death-in-life when she opts for Big Bob Davidson and suburbia. Bell’s father completes the pattern: like the man he was forced to inter in the Philippines, he is “buried alive” (296/285). The death that his mother and sisters and father know in their different ways is also what David Bell, like Jack Gladney in White Noise, must come to terms with. The pervasive references to mortality reflect the characterization of death in the line from Saint Augustine that Warburton, the “Mad Memo-Writer,” distributes: “And never can a man be more disastrously in death than when death itself shall be deathless” (23/21). Later, when Warburton glosses these words, he does not emphasize the spiritual imperative represented by death so much as the simple fact itself: “man shall remain forever in the state of death” because “death never dies” (108/101).

Bell’s charm against death and social paresis may be his recurrent recollection of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film Ikiru, especially the famous scene in which its protagonist, an old man dying of cancer, sits swinging in a nocturnal park amid drifting snowflakes.⁴ Though he does not mention it, Bell must know that ikiru is Japanese for “living.” Certainly he understands in the image something redemptive, something related to the fate of that other victim of cancer, his mother. In his own film he includes a sequence in which Sullivan, playing her, sits swinging like old Watanabe. In another, the amateur actor representing his father recalls that during his captivity in the Philippines the prisoners had filed by an old Japanese officer who sat in a swing and, moving to and fro, seemed to bless them with a circular motion of his hand. This detail may reflect only Bell’s desire to graft certain intensely personal emblems onto the imagined recollections of his father, but he seems in any event curiously intent on weaving Kurosawa’s parable into his own story of familial travail.

The submerged content of DeLillo’s Kurosawa allusions suggests the larger meanings here. Kurosawa’s character struggles within an enormous, implacable bureaucracy to drain a swamp (symbol of Japanese corruption and of his own part in it) and build a children’s park. David Bell speaks of “the swamp of our own beings” (122), and, indeed, DeLillo’s swamp and Kurosawa’s represent the same discovery: that personal and national corruption prove coextensive. Like Kurosawa, too (or for that matter Saint Augustine), DeLillo understands that ikiru, living, can never be pursued outside the process of dying. The power of Kurosawa’s conclusion, in which, dying, the protagonist sits in the swing, has to do with just how much his modest achievement has come to signify: it is what one can do with the life that gives the film its title. But this insight remains inchoate for Bell, who seems half-fatalistically to relish the knowledge that his own culture clears swamps only to achieve greater regularity—more straight lines, more utilitarian buildings—in a landscape progressively purged of graceful features that might please children. As an American, he knows that the clearing of “what was once a swamp” merely facilitates erection of some monument to transience and sterility: the “motel in the heart of every man” (268/257).

The reification of this place, a motel near the Chicago airport, provides the setting in which Bell and his ex-wife’s cousin, Edwina, commit what she refers to as “some medieval form of incest” (273/261). This jocular reference contributes to a more substantial fantasy of incest at the heart of the book, a fantasy or obsession that figures in other fictions of the period, notably Louis Malle’s witty and daring treatment of incestuous desire, Un souffle au coeur (1971), and the starker meditations on the subject in Norman Mailer’s An American Dream (1965) and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974). If Americana had been written a generation later, at the height of controversy over repressed memory retrieval, it might, like Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, involve the revelation of literal incest. Bell, however, seems guilty of transgressing the most powerful of taboos only in spirit.

But he transgresses it over and over, nonetheless, for almost every woman he sleeps with turns out to be a version of his mother. In his relations with women he enacts an unconscious search for the one woman forbidden him, at once recapitulating and reversing the tragically imperfect oedipal model: as he was rejected, so will he reject successive candidates in what occasionally amounts to a literal orgy of philandering and promiscuity. Meanwhile he suffers the ancient oedipal betrayal at the hands of one surrogate mother after another. Thus when Carter Hemmings steals his date at a party, Bell spits in the ice cubes—a gesture that will make sense only later, when Bell describes his mother’s similar (and perhaps similarly motivated) expression of disgust. Bell thinks Wendy, his college girlfriend, has slept with Simmons St. Jean, his teacher. Weede Denney, his boss, exercises a kind of seigneurial droit with Binky, Bell’s secretary. And even Sullivan turns out to have been sleeping with Brand all along.

In Sullivan, at once mother and “mothercountry,” Bell recognizes the most significant—and psychologically dangerous—of these surrogates. When she gives Brand a doll, she replicates a gesture made by Bell’s mother on another occasion. To Bell himself she twice tells “a bedtime story” (332/320, 334/322). He characterizes three of her sculptures as “carefully handcrafted afterbirth” (114/106). Her studio, to which Bell retreats on the eve of his journey westward, was called the Cocoon by its former tenant; swathed in a “membranous chemical material” (116/108) that resembles sandwich wrap, it is the womb to which he craves a return. Here he curls up, goes to sleep, and awakens to the returning Sullivan: “A shape in the shape of my mother … forming in the doorway” (118/110), “my mother’s ghost in the room” (242/230). Bell’s attraction to this central and definitive mother figure is so interdicted that it can only be described in negative terms; indeed, the climactic sexual encounter with Sullivan, a “black wish fulfilled” (345/334), is remarkable for its sustained negative affect: “mothercountry. Optional spelling of third syllable” (345).—“Abomination” (331/319, 344/333), he keeps repeating, for symbolically he is committing incest.

Sullivan’s narratives, the bedtime stories she tells the filial Bell, represent the twin centers of this novel’s public meanings—the heart of a book otherwise wedded to superficies and resistant to formulations of psychological, sociological, or semiotic depth (here the play of simulacra retreats to an attenuated reflexivity: one story is told in Maine, the other about Maine). Sullivan’s first story concerns an encounter with Black Knife, aboriginal American and veteran of the campaign against Custer; the other concerns the discovery of her patrilineage. The subject of these stories, encountering the Father, complements the larger narrative’s account of coming to terms with the Mother.

Black Knife, one-hundred-year-old master ironist, describes the strange asceticism that drives Americans to clear their world of annoying, wasteful clutter: “We have been redesigning our landscape all these years to cut out unneeded objects such as trees, mountains, and all those buildings which do not make practical use of every inch of space.” The idea behind this asceticism, he says, is to get away from useless beauty, to reduce everything to “[s]traight lines and right angles” (126/118), to go over wholly to the “Megamerica” of “Neon, fiber glass, plexiglass, polyurethane, Mylar, Acrylite” (127/119). Black Knife hopes that we will “come to terms with the false anger we so often display at the increasing signs of sterility and violence in our culture” (127/119)—that instead we will “set forth on the world’s longest march of vulgarity, evil and decadence” (128/120). These imagined excesses would reify a vision like that of the Histriones in Jorge Luis Borges’s story “The Theologians” or the Dolcinians of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose—heretics who seek to hasten the Apocalypse by committing as many sins as possible. Black Knife looks to the day when, “having set one foot into the mud, one foot and three toes,” we will—just maybe—decide against surrendering to the swamp and pull back from our dreadful course, “shedding the ascetic curse, letting the buffalo run free, knowing everything a nation can know about itself and proceeding with the benefit of this knowledge and the awareness that we have chosen not to die. It’s worth the risk … for … we would become, finally, the America that fulfills all of its possibilities. The America that belongs to the world. The America we thought we lived in when we were children. Small children. Very small children indeed” (128–29/120–21). We would, that is, repudiate the swamp in favor of an environment friendly to children—a park like the one created by that Japanese Black Knife, the Watanabe of Kurosawa’s Ikiru.

The second bedtime story, which parallels the interview with Black Knife, concerns Sullivan’s misguided attempt to recover her patrimony. In a sailing vessel off the coast of Maine, Sullivan and her Uncle Malcolm contemplate “God’s world” (336/324), the land the Puritans found when they crossed the sea: America in its primal, unspoiled beauty. The voyage, however, becomes Sullivan’s own night-sea journey into profound self-knowledge—knowledge, that is, of the intersection of self and nation. The vessel is the Marston Moor, named for the battle in which the Puritans added a triumph in the Old World to complement the success of their brethren in the New. The vessel’s master is himself an avatar of American Puritanism, with roots in Ulster and Scotland. What Sullivan learns from her Uncle Malcolm immerses her—like Oedipus or Stephen Dedalus or Jay Gatsby or Jesus Christ—in what Freud calls the family romance. The child of a mystery parent, she must be about her father’s business. She dramatizes the revelation that Uncle Malcolm is her real father in language that evokes by turns Epiphany and Pentecost and Apocalypse—the full spectrum of divine mystery and revelation.

The imagery here hints further at Sullivan’s identification with the American land, for the heritage she discovers coincides with that of the nation. Described originally as some exotic ethnic blend and called, on one occasion, a “[d]aughter of Black Knife” (347/336), Sullivan proves also to be solidly Scotch-Irish, like so many of the immigrants who would compose the dominant American ethnic group. In that her spiritual father is a native American, her real father a north country Protestant, she discovers in herself the same mixture of innate innocence and passionately eschatological Puritanism that figures so powerfully in the historical identity of her country.

The perfervid descriptions of the wild Maine coast and the travail of the seafarers recall nothing so much as the evocations of spiritualized landscape in Eliot’s Four Quartets (Sullivan is not so many leagues distant from the Dry Salvages, off Cape Ann). In the present scene, as in Eliot, the reader encounters a meditation on the way eternity subsumes the specific history of a place, a meditation in which deeply felt religious imagery intimates meanings that strain the very seams of language. Yet the mystery proves ultimately secular, and the only direct allusion to Eliot is from “Gerontion,” one of his poems of spiritual aridity. Sullivan’s shipmate, appalled at the absence of “Christ the tiger” (342/330) in the apocalyptic scene into which he has steered, also sees into the heart of things, and an unquoted line from the same poem may encapsulate both their thoughts: “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”

The allusion to “Gerontion,” like the other Eliot allusions in Americana, recalls the reader to an awareness of the spiritual problem of contemporary America that the book addresses. The climax of the sailing expedition occurs when a boy with a lantern appears on the shore: he is a sign, a vision at once numinous and secular. He disappoints Uncle Malcolm, who seems to have expected a vision more palpably divine. As Sullivan explains him, his shining countenance reveals certain truths of the human bondage to entropy—yet he also embodies an idea of innocence and the generative principle: “the force of all in all, or light lighting light” (342/330). He is, in short, the child that America has long since betrayed, the principle of innocence that sibylline Sullivan, glossing Black Knife’s parable, suggests America may yet rediscover—and with it salvation.

DeLillo conceived Americana on a visit to Mount Desert Island, a place that moved him unexpectedly with its air of American innocence preserved.⁵ Sullivan and her companion are off the island when the boy with the lantern appears. Though the moment bulks very small in the overall narrative, it will prove seminal as DeLillo recurs in subsequent novels to an idea of the redemptive innocence that survives, a vestige of Eden, in children. The boy with the lantern, an almost inchoate symbol here, will turn up again as the linguistically atavistic Tap in The Names and as Wilder on his tricycle in White Noise.

When Sullivan, in her valedictory, calls Bell “innocent” and “sick” (348/336), she describes the American paradox that he represents, but DeLillo defines the canker that rots the larger American innocence in terms considerably stronger. Bell’s sister Mary, as played by Carol Deming in the film, remarks that “there are good wombs and bad wombs” (324/312), and the phrase recurs to Bell as he contemplates the southwestern landscape from Clevenger’s speeding Cadillac (363/353). In other words, the mother he repeatedly violates is more than flesh and blood. DeLillo conflates and subverts a familiar icon of American nationalism: mother and country. In doing so he augments and transforms the traditional symbolism of the American land as the female victim of an ancient European violation. Fitzgerald, in The Great Gatsby, reflects on Dutch sailors and “the fresh green breast of the New World.” Hart Crane, in The Bridge, and John Barth, in The Sot-Weed Factor, imagine the land specifically as Pocahontas. But DeLillo suggests that the real violation occurs in an oedipal drama of almost cosmic proportions: not in the encounter of European man with the tender breast of the American land but in the violation of that mother by their oedipal progeny. “We want to wallow,” says Black Knife, “in the terrible gleaming mudcunt of Mother America” (127/119). Like Oedipus, then, Bell discovers in himself the source of the pestilence that has ravaged what Beasley calls “mamaland” (243/231). The American Oedipus, seeking to understand the malaise from which his country suffers, discovers its cause in his own manifold and hideous violations of the mother, the land that nurtures and sustains. Physical and spiritual, these violations take their place among the other Americana catalogued in DeLillo’s extraordinary first novel.

Notes

1. In preparing the 1989 Penguin edition of Americana, DeLillo made numerous small cuts in the text, and, generally speaking, the gains in economy improve the novel. For the most part, the author simply pares away minor instances of rhetorical overkill. For example, he deletes a gratuitously obscene remark about the spelling of “mothercountry,” and he reduces the space devoted to the relationship of Bell and his ex-wife Meredith. Occasionally (as in the former instance), the author cuts a detail one has underlined in the 1971 edition, thereby affording the reader a glimpse into a gifted writer’s maturing sense of decorum and understatement. Thus a minor motif like that of the woman ironing (it contributes to the reader’s grasp of Bell’s oedipal obsession) becomes a little less extravagant in the longer of the two passages in which it appears. Elsewhere, one applauds the excision of the syntactically tortured and the merely pretentious—for example, unsuccessful descriptions of film’s epistemological and ontological properties. At no point, however, does DeLillo add material or alter the novel’s original emphases—and I have only occasionally found it necessary or desirable to quote material that does not appear in both versions of the text. Except in these instances, I give page numbers for both editions—the 1971 Houghton Mifflin version first, the 1989 Penguin version second.

2. Though Americana remains the least discussed of DeLillo’s major novels, an oedipal dimension has been noted by both Tom LeClair and Douglas Keesey, authors of the first two single-authored books on DeLillo. Neither, however, foregrounds this element. LeClair, in his magisterial chapter on this novel (which he names, along with Ratner’s Star and The Names, as one of DeLillo’s “primary achievements” [33]), represents the oedipal theme as largely ancillary to the proliferating “personal, cultural, and aesthetic … schizophrenia” (34) that he sees as pervasive in the life of David Bell and in the culture of which he is a part. Thus LeClair explores the dynamics of what Gregory Bateson and R. D. Laing call “the double bind” in “the system of communications in Bell’s family,” which, “understood in Bateson’s terms, establishes the ground of Bell’s character and presents a microcosm of the larger cultural problems manifested in Americana”, (35–36). Keesey, by contrast, takes a feminist view of Bell’s personality and life problems. Keesey is especially interesting on the oedipal relationship between Bell and his father, and on the idea that Bell, in his film, is striving unsuccessfully to recover the mother’s “way of seeing” the world—a way lost to him when he embraced the values expressed in his father’s “ads for sex and violence” (23).

3. Rilke’s “Der Panther,” by the same token, may lie behind the desire Bell’s fellow traveler Pike expresses to encounter a mountain lion face to face.

4. The only substantial discussion of the Ikiru allusions is that of Mark Osteen, who acutely suggests that Bell sees himself in the film’s moribund main character, Watanabe, and “fears his own living death” (463). The recurrent references to the scene on the swing represent “David’s attempt to generate the kind of retrospective epiphany that Watanabe undergoes” (462–63).

5. In a Paris Review interview, DeLillo describes the genesis of this novel in a positive evocation of Americana:

   I was sailing in Maine with two friends, and we put into a small harbor on Mt. Desert Island. And I was sitting on a railroad tie waiting to take a shower, and I had a glimpse of a street maybe fifty yards away and a sense of beautiful old houses and rows of elms and maples and a stillness and wistfulness—the street seemed to carry its own built-in longing. And I felt something, a pause, something opening up before me. It would be a month or two before I started writing the book and two or three years before I came up with the title Americana, but in fact it was all implicit in that moment—a moment in which nothing happened, nothing ostensibly changed, a moment in which I didn’t see anything I hadn’t seen before. But there was a pause in time, and I knew I had to write about a man who comes to a street like this or lives on a street like this. And whatever roads the novel eventually followed, I believe I maintained the idea of that quiet street if only as counterpoint, as lost innocence.

   (279)

   This recollection dictates not only the scene off Mount Desert Island but also and more clearly the scene in picturesque Millsgate, the little town on Penobscot Bay where the travelers pick up Brand. Here, at the end of part 1, Bell conceives the idea for his film—just as DeLillo, in a similar setting, conceived the idea of Americana.

Works Cited

Champlin, Charles. “The Heart Is a Lonely Craftsman.” Los Angeles Times Calendar 29 July 1984: 7.

DeLillo, Don. Americana. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1971.

———. Americana. Rev. ed. New York: Penguin, 1989.

———. “Don DeLillo: The Art of Fiction CXXXV.” Interview. With Adam Begley. Paris Review 128 (1993): 274–306.

Keesey, Douglas. Don DeLillo. Twayne’s United States Authors Ser. 625. New York: Twayne, 1993.

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

Osteen, Mark. “Children of Godard and Coca-Cola: Cinema and Consumerism in Don DeLillo’s Early Fiction.” Contemporary Literature 37 (1996): 439–70.

Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1966.

Rilke, Rainer Maria. Gesammelte Gedichte. Frankfurt: Insel-Verlag, 1962.