37. Don DeLillo

 

“When a missing fact emerges without digital assistance, each person announces it to the other while looking off into a remote distance, the otherworld of what was known and lost.” -Don DeLillo

1.

We know Don DeLillo doesn’t use the internet, but does he watch TV? Reading his latest slim novel The Silence, I was reminded of season 4, episode 5 of the Hulu series Casual. A perfectly serviceable diversion for three years, this dramedic look at the lives of an extended family of Angelenos took a decidedly unexpected turn in its fourth and final season. Jumping forward roughly five years into the future between seasons three and four, the show picks up its characters’ lives after the sudden hiatus, having fun updating viewers on not only what has happened to them in the interim, but also suggesting ways in which the wider world (politically, technologically) has changed as well. It’s amusing and it’s playful, but it’s also unnerving, trading in the familiar and comforting world that we’ve gotten to know over three seasons for one which looks the same but suddenly feels dramatically different.

In season 4, the comedy is sharper because the stakes are higher and the funniest and most unsettling episode is number 5. In that installment, the main characters throw a small party to watch what we are told will be the last Super Bowl. In a probably sensible move, the NFL has decided to (or been forced to) disband, presumably as a result of continued discoveries about the prevalence of CTE in former players, but it’s allowed to stage one final game and our main characters have made it an occasion for some subdued celebration. For all its humor, it’s largely an elegiac moment, a recognition that one of the central cultural markers of American life for over half a century is no longer tenable, and a country that has viewed itself in the terms dictated by its pageantry has no choice but to begin to reconsider its image. (Or, perhaps, learning nothing, not).

I thought of this episode early on in my reading of The Silence, as soon as DeLillo established the time (the near future, 2022) and place (a Super Bowl party in Manhattan) of his setting. While it’s true this contest between the Seahawks and the Titans (a plausible, if somewhat unlikely, matchup given each team’s performance this season) is not billed as the final Super Bowl, it quickly comes to seem that it might be, given the immediate onset of a doomsday event. Suddenly, just before kickoff, the power goes out worldwide and all technology, from smart phones to televisions, is rendered useless. If the teams continue to play out the game, no one outside of the stadium is there to see it. Offering a far more extreme scenario of unforeseen transformation than Casual, The Silence nonetheless uses the Super Bowl as the perfect symbolically charged setting with which to imagine a future that breaks decisively with what came before. While DeLillo almost certainly didn’t have the episode of Casual in mind when he conceived his new book, it’s not unfair to suggest that the show’s final season concocts a vaguely DeLillian world, with its creeping technological ubiquity and its suddenly dark humor, a world that then projects itself back, however unbidden, into the continued work of the novelist.

 

2.

In his recent essay for The New Yorker on Jeopardy!, Wikipedia, and knowledge in the information age, Louis Menand begins by asking a pair of questions: “Is it still cool to memorize a lot of stuff? Is there even a reason to memorize anything?” The occasion of Menand’s essay is—along with the recent death of Alex Trebek—M.I.T.’s publication of a book of essays celebrating the 20^th anniversary of Wikipedia called Wikipedia@20: Stories of an Incomplete Revolution. This largely laudatory collection of reflections gets Menand to thinking about the continued value of retaining knowledge and he jumps quickly to the central conundrum posed by the existence of the online encyclopedia. Why, he wonders, should we bother to memorize anything when we can look it up in a matter of seconds? Is there intrinsic merit—apart from the bragging rights of contestants on trivia shows—in actually knowing these little bits of trivial information?

Menand ultimately sidesteps the question, centering his critique of Wikipedia less on existential questions of knowledge than on the whole enterprise’s basis in neoliberal theory and the peculiar economy of the undertaking, which relies on the paid and funded work of scholars at universities and think tanks from which the editors then freely draw. While this is a welcome look into the larger workings of the online encyclopedia, neither Menand, the other reviewers of Wikipedia@20 I’ve read, nor presumably the contributors to the book itself, get at what strikes me as the central source of discomfort engendered by the popular website, its obliteration of what Don DeLillo calls “the otherworld of what was known and lost.”

DeLillo’s apt phrase implies that knowledge doesn’t really exist if we don’t know it, if it only exists in online form, even if we can have access to it in seconds. And because it doesn’t really exist, our dependence on instant information has the added effect of making us hopelessly uncomfortable with uncertainty. We can no longer sit with this state of unknowingness because we know that the knowledge we do not possess is not real. If our phones are temporarily unavailable, we become agitated, desperate to look up that nagging fact until that blessed moment when our access is finally restored.

This discomfort with uncertainty has wide-ranging consequences for our interaction with the larger world. It has the effect of turning us further inward, while, at the same time, creating a newfound epistemological anxiety. What we used to be fine with not knowing now drives us crazy. But something like the reverse is true, paradoxically, when it comes to considering our increasingly non-guaranteed existence on the planet, as DeLillo does to such icy effect in The Silence. It is a fact too anxiety-wracked for most people to imaginatively reckon with and so this greater uncertainty only serves to leave us in greater ignorance. When the world goes dark, when our technologies finally fail, we are left with only what we know, the rest irretrievable and hopelessly lost. And what we know will almost certainly be nowhere near enough.