DeLillo, Bruegel, Hoover, Plutonium
Oct 15, 2008 — 54 comments
I recently finished Underworld, by Don DeLillo. It’s 830 pages, dense, filled with numerous interrelated characters, and was a Finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; it’s not exactly an leisurely read I can push on people (I try anyway). But above all, I think it is a work of genius.
The Prologue, called The Triumph of Death, it’s a fictionalized account of the 1951 game between the Dodgers and the Giants, which ended on Bobby Thomson’s so-called Shot Heard Around the World (capitalizing that phrase annoys me to no end, but I guess it’s necessary. Baseball is stupid). Anyway, this opening section is technically about baseball, and considering my complete distaste for the game you would think would bore me to death, but it doesn’t, and it’s not really about baseball. In extremely general terms, it’s about the human species’ inherent tendency toward chaos and conflict.
The 60-or-so page section is a brilliant juxtaposition of images. As the game builds toward its dramatic finish, J Edgar Hoover, who is in the stands with Frank Sinatra, is informed that the Russians have tested a nuclear bomb. Thomson hits the famous home run, the crowd goes insane, running frenzied and tangled onto the field. Torn magazine fragments fall from the stands, with an image of the painting The Triumph of Death, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (shown above) lands on J Edgar Hoover, who almost immediately becomes obsessed with it.
There’s way too much going on in this book to adequately describe here; one character, a waste management official, believes that the central factor defining and driving human evolution is our relationship with and struggle against the waste that we create. Another, with whom the aforementioned waste manager had an affair at the age of 18, is working to repaint huge warplanes with bright colorful designs, hundreds of planes left in a field in the middle of nowhere. This character’s husband was the waste manager’s brother’s chess teacher at the time that his wife was having the affair. The Zapruder film, Lenny Bruce, the Rolling Stones, chess, buried nuclear waste, adultery, nuns, the mafia, graffiti artists, murdered orphans, Lucky Strike cigarettes, everything and everyone relates to everyone else in some way. Nuclear war and all related paranoia sort of Saran Wraps the whole book. It’s all very concise and clearly described, but becomes a sort of jumbled mass of metaphors and symbolic language, writhing like the figures in the Bruegel painting.
Anyway, I either just pushed you beyond boredom, or, much more likely, I have you hooked, have ignited in you a desperate lust for the devouring of this book. Read it and email me so we can talk about it.
I made the above flash videos using still frames from this film, which is terrifying and amazing (the sequence I took the images from is at around 20 seconds). The more I watch these repeat, the less I can tell if one has a different effect than the other running forwards then backwards (above), instead of just repeating from the beginning (top of the page). Ooooohh, see, it’s all cyclical, you know? Like everything repeats and goes back, like history, human nature and existentialsomething and all? Finnegan’s Wake!! Yeaahh that’s deep man.
I had a giant poster of this image hanging in my room throughout college. It made people a little uncomfortable.
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May 16
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