Skip to main content

Don DeLillo’s Reinvention of ‘Beckett World’

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Samuel Beckett’s Legacies in American Fiction
  • 134 Accesses

Abstract

Don DeLillo stages a consistent dialogue with Beckett as the last vestige of literature’s potential for erecting spacious literary worlds. Building on scholarship around the residual worldliness of Beckett’s writing by Peter Boxall (2009) and Steven Connor (2006, http://www.stevenconnor.com/beckettworld/), this chapter will situate Beckett’s legacy against enduring DeLillian themes of consumption, nuclearity and the cultural exhaustion of American postmodernity. As ‘the last writer to shape the way we think and see’ (Mao II, 1991), it will be argued that Beckett’s influence remains a contested site in DeLillo’s fiction, an ambivalent symbol of both termination and renewed possibility. This chapter will also consider DeLillo’s late style and the thematization of ‘landscapes of estrangement’ (The Body Artist, 2001) as a focal point for residual modernist influences.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

eBook
USD 16.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 119.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 119.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    David Cowart forcefully argues that DeLillo’s novels require readers to engage with ‘the whole landscape of postmodernism,’ turning a critical eye to structures of economy, space, epistemology and belief in American postmodernity. David Cowart, Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language, p. 1. Suggestively, Cowart defines DeLillo’s engagements with postmodernity against the ‘ontological pretensions’ of McHale’s autonomous postmodern worlds (p. 3).

  2. 2.

    See S.E. Gontarski, The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts, (John Wiley & Sons: Hoboken, 1985).

  3. 3.

    This would be exemplified in the increased abstraction of the performance text for Waiting for Godot in the 1980s (‘Only tree and stone! As simple as possible!’); Quoted in Walter Asmus, ‘In Memoriam,’ Journal of Beckett Studies, (Vol. 19, No. 1: April, 2010), p. 103.

  4. 4.

    Adam Begley, ‘Don DeLillo: The Art of Fiction, No. 135,’ Paris Review, (No. 128: Fall 1993), https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1887/don-delillo-the-art-of-fiction-no-135-don-delillo

  5. 5.

    Boxall, Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism, p. 147.

  6. 6.

    Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, p. 5.

  7. 7.

    Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability, (Verso: London, 2014), p. 71.

  8. 8.

    Ibid. p. 74.

  9. 9.

    ‘Nobel Prize: Kyrie Eleison Without God,’ in The Critical Response to Samuel Beckett, ed. by Cathleen Culotta Andonian, (Greenwood Press: Westport, 1988), p. 230.

  10. 10.

    Samuel Beckett and George Duthuit, ‘Three Dialogues,’ p. 143.

  11. 11.

    Steven Connor, ‘Beckett and the World,’ a lecture given at the Global Beckett conference, Odense, October 26, 2006, http://www.stevenconnor.com/beckettworld/ republished in Beckett and Ethics, ed. Russell Smith, (Continuum: New York, 2008), pp. 134–147.

  12. 12.

    Theodor Adorno, ‘Trying to Understand Endgame,’ in The Adorno Reader, (Blackwell: Oxford, 2000), p. 329.

  13. 13.

    Ibid.

  14. 14.

    Boxall, Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism, p. 140.

  15. 15.

    Ibid.

  16. 16.

    See the monographs Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction, (Routledge: New York, 2002), Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism, (Continuum: New York, 2009), and the essays ‘Stirring From the Field of the Possible,’ in Beckett’s Literary Legacies, ed. Matthew Feldman, Mark Nixon, (Cambridge Scholars: Newcastle, 2007), and ‘“There’s No Lack of Void”: Waste and Abundance in Beckett and DeLillo,’ in SubStance, Vol. 37, No. 2, (2008).

  17. 17.

    Boxall, Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction, p. 4.

  18. 18.

    Ibid. p. 3.

  19. 19.

    By negotiating the presence of ‘critical fiction’ in Beckett and DeLillo, Boxall’s comparative readings draw from the philosophy of Adorno, Maurice Blanchot, and Ernst Bloch.

  20. 20.

    Boxall, ‘Stirring From the Field of the Possible,’ p. 216.

  21. 21.

    Anthony DeCurtis, ‘Q&A: Don DeLillo’, Rolling Stone, (November 17, 1988), http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/matters-of-fact-and-fiction-19881117.

  22. 22.

    DeLillo’s ‘Narratives of Retreat’ are investigated in Joseph Dewey’s Beyond Grief and Nothing: A Reading of Don DeLillo, (University of South Carolina Press: Columbia, 2006), pp. 17–49.

  23. 23.

    Peter Boxall, ‘Stirring From the Field of the Possible,’ in Beckett’s Literary Legacies, ed. Matthew Feldman, Mark Nixon, (Cambridge Scholars: Newcastle, 2007), p. 210.

  24. 24.

    Adam Begley, ‘Don DeLillo: The Art of Fiction, No. 135,’ Paris Review, (No. 128: Fall 1993).

  25. 25.

    Gary Adelman, ‘Beckett’s Readers: A Commentary and Symposium,’ Michigan Quarterly Review, (Vol. 53, No. 1: Winter, 2004), https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mqr;c=mqr;c=mqrarchive;idno=act2080.0043.108;rgn=main;view=text;xc=1;g=mqrg.

  26. 26.

    In a letter to critic Frank Lentricchia, DeLillo praises Gravity’s Rainbow for its ‘unapologetic global range.’ Quoted in James Gourley, Terrorism and Temporality in the Works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, (Bloomsbury: London, 2013), p. 5.

  27. 27.

    David Cowart, Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language, p. 2.

  28. 28.

    Boxall, ‘Stirring From the Field of the Possible,’ in Beckett’s Literary Legacies, p. 223.

  29. 29.

    Hugh Kenner, ‘Beckett Translating Beckett: Comment C’est’ in Delos: A Journal of Translation, 5, (1970), p. 195.

  30. 30.

    Ruby Cohn, Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut, p. 4.

  31. 31.

    The performance would go ahead with the programme featuring a special insert of the first page of Beckett’s text with authorised stage directions, alongside commentary by Rosset and Brustein.

  32. 32.

    Mel Gussow, ‘Stage: Disputed Endgame in Stage Debut,’ in The New York Times, (December 20, 1984), https://www.nytimes.com/1984/12/20/arts/stage-disputed-endgame-in-debut.html

  33. 33.

    Samuel Beckett, ‘Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce,’ p. 16.

  34. 34.

    Steven Barfield, Philip Tew, ‘Critical Foreword,’ in Beckett and Death, (Bloomsbury: London, 2009), p. 1.

  35. 35.

    Quoted in Steven Connor, ‘Beckett and the World,’ (October 26, 2006).

  36. 36.

    Vivian Mercier, Beckett/Beckett, (Souvenir Press: London, 1977), p. 174.

  37. 37.

    Theodor Adorno, ‘Trying to Understand Endgame,’ p. 322.

  38. 38.

    Ibid.

  39. 39.

    Mária Minich Brewer, ‘Samuel Beckett: Postmodern Narrative and Nuclear Telos,’ in boundary 2, Vol. 15, No. 1–2, (Autumn, 1986 – Winter, 1987), p. 157.

  40. 40.

    Ibid.

  41. 41.

    Jacques Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives),’ in Diacritics, Vol. 14, No. 2, (Summer, 1984), p. 27.

  42. 42.

    Quoted in Lawrence Graver, Beckett: Waiting for Godot, A Student Guide, (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1989), p. 24.

  43. 43.

    Daniel Grausam, On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War, (University of Virginia Press: Charlottesville, 2011), p. 6.

  44. 44.

    Boxall suggests that both DeLillo’s and Pynchon’s oeuvres ‘can be read as a history of military technology’; Peter Boxall, Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction, p. 6.

  45. 45.

    Michiko Kakutani, ‘A Prescient Novel Retains its Power,’ in The New York Times, (July 14, 2011), http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/15/books/don-delillos-underworld-still-holds-power.html?mcubz=0

  46. 46.

    See Phillip E. Wegner, ‘October 3, 1951 to September 11, 2001: Periodizing the Cold War in Don DeLillo’s Underworld,’ American Studies, Vol. 49, No. 1, (2004), pp. 51–64 and Johanna Isaacson, ‘Postmodern Wastelands: Underworld and the Productive Failures of Periodization,’ Criticism, Vol. 54, No. 1, (Winter 2012), pp. 29–58.

  47. 47.

    Peter Boxall, ‘“There’s No Lack of Void”: Waste and Abundance in Beckett and DeLillo,’ p. 64.

  48. 48.

    Quoted in, Jean-Michel Rabaté, ‘Philosophizing with Beckett: Adorno and Badiou,’ in A Companion to Samuel Beckett, ed. by S.E. Gontarski, (Blackwell: Chichester, 2010), p. 103.

  49. 49.

    Peter Boxall, ‘Stirring From the Field of the Possible,’ p. 221.

  50. 50.

    Ibid. p. 207.

  51. 51.

    Ibid.

  52. 52.

    Simon Critchley, ‘Who Speaks in the Work of Samuel Beckett?’ in Yale French Studies, No. 93, (1998), p. 115.

  53. 53.

    Maurice Blanchot, ‘Where Now? Who Now?’ in Modern Critical Interpretations: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, ed. by Harold Bloom, (Chelsea House: New York, 1988), p. 23.

  54. 54.

    Ibid. p. 25.

  55. 55.

    Ibid. p. 26.

  56. 56.

    Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come, (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 2003), p. 218.

  57. 57.

    Ibid. p. 219.

  58. 58.

    Ibid. p. 220.

  59. 59.

    Adam Begley, ‘Don DeLillo: The Art of Fiction, No. 135,’ Paris Review, (No. 128: Fall, 1993).

  60. 60.

    Peter Boxall, ‘Stirring From the Field of the Possible,’ p. 209.

  61. 61.

    Christian Moraru, ‘Consuming Narratives: Don DeLillo and the “Lethal” Reading,’ p. 195.

  62. 62.

    Joe Moran, ‘Don DeLillo and the Myth of the Author: Recluse,’ Journal of American Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1, (April, 2000), pp. 137–152; James Knowlson’s Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, (Bloomsbury: London, 1996), pp. 570–571.

  63. 63.

    Stephen John Dilks focuses on the elision between modernist recalcitrance and commerce that follows Beckett’s career, including the author’s perceived embrace of ‘antimarketing marketing’ tactics; for Dilks, this is exemplified in the Saatchi advertising campaign for the nonprofit organization Index on Censorship, featuring the image of Beckett wearing a clumsily superimposed gag: in this way, the author’s participation reveals ‘the postmodern character of the fame that Beckett achieved during the course of his long professional career.’ Stephen John Dilks, Samuel Beckett in the Literary Marketplace, p. 24.

  64. 64.

    Peter Boxall, ‘Stirring From the Field of the Possible,’ p. 210.

  65. 65.

    Ibid. p. 215.

  66. 66.

    Christian Moraru, ‘Consuming Narratives: Don DeLillo and the “Lethal” Reading,’ p. 190.

  67. 67.

    Samuel Beckett and George Duthuit, ‘Three Dialogues,’ p. 145.

  68. 68.

    Vince Passaro, ‘Dangerous Don DeLillo,’ in Conversations with Don DeLillo, (University of Mississippi Press: Jackson, 2005), p. 84.

  69. 69.

    Elizabeth Barry, ‘Beckett, Bourdieu and the Resistance to Consumption,’ in Modernist Cultures, Vol. 2, No. 1, (2006), p. 33.

  70. 70.

    Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,’ in Writing and Difference, (Routledge: Abingdon, 1978), p. 370.

  71. 71.

    Samuel Beckett, ‘Homage to Jack. B. Yeats,’ Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, (Calder: London, 1983), p. 148.

  72. 72.

    Daniel Green, ‘Postmodern American Fiction,’ The Antioch Review, (Vol. 61, No. 4: Autumn, 2003), p. 730.

  73. 73.

    See DeLillo’s interview with Dale Singer first published in the St Louis Beacon (September 17, 2010): ‘If I had to classify myself it would be in the long line of modernists, from James Joyce through William Faulkner and so on. That has always been my model.’ Dale Singer, ‘Take Five: Don’t call Don DeLillo’s fiction ‘postmodern’,’ in St Louis Beacon, (September 17, 2010), https://news.stlpublicradio.org/arts-culture/2010-09-17/take-five-dont-call-don-delillos-fiction-postmodern

  74. 74.

    Thomas LeClair, ‘An Interview with Don DeLillo,’ in Conversations with Don DeLillo, (University of Mississippi Press: Jackson, 2005), p. 15.

  75. 75.

    Samuel Beckett, ‘Recent Irish Poetry,’ p. 71.

  76. 76.

    Samuel Beckett to George Duthuit, August 11, 1948, The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1941–1956, ed. by Dan Gunn, (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2011), p. 98.

  77. 77.

    David Addyman, ‘Rest of the Stage in Darkness: Beckett, his Directors and Place,’ Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, Vol. 22, (2010), p. 301.

  78. 78.

    Ibid. p. 302.

  79. 79.

    Quoted in Rosette C. Lamont, ‘Fast-Forward: Lucky’s Pnigos,’ in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, Samuel Beckett: Endlessness in the Year 2000, (New York: 2001), p. 137.

  80. 80.

    Steven Connor, ‘Beckett’s Atmospheres,’ http://stevenconnor.com/atmospheres-2.html, later published as part of Beckett After Beckett, ed. S.E. Gontarski and Anthony Uhlmann (University of Florida Press: Gainesville 2006), pp. 52–65.

  81. 81.

    Gontarski reveals the diminishment of landscape towards ‘an increasingly hostile environment’— where a ‘grassy expanse rising gently’ transforms into Winnie’s ‘expanse of scorched grass’; this is emblematic, Gontarski writes, of the ‘cachexia and entropy’ that run throughout Beckett’s works for theatre. S.E. Gontarski, Beckett’s Happy Days: a Manuscript Study, (Ohio State University Press: Cleveland, 1977), p. 26.

  82. 82.

    Beckett to Rosset, August 27, 1957, The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1957–1965, p. 64.

  83. 83.

    Jocelyn McClurg, ‘Spy of the First Person,’ in USA Today, (December 4, 2017), https://eu.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2017/12/04/spy-first-person-sam-shepards-poignant-goodbye-comes-page/914142001/

  84. 84.

    Thomas LeClair, ‘An Interview with Don DeLillo,’ in Conversations with Don DeLillo, (University of Mississippi Press: Jackson, 2005), p.15.

  85. 85.

    Anthony DeCurtis, ‘Q&A: Don DeLillo,’ in Rolling Stone, (November 17, 1988).

  86. 86.

    Philip Nel, ‘Don DeLillo’s Return to Form: The Modernist Poetics of The Body Artist,’ in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 42, No. 4, (Winter 2002), p. 737.

  87. 87.

    Ibid. p. 736.

  88. 88.

    Quoted in Erik Tonning, Samuel Beckett’s Abstract Drama: Works for Stage and Screen 1962–1985, (Peter Lang: Bern, 2007), p. 169.

  89. 89.

    Michiko Kakutani, ‘Make War. Make Talk. Make it all Unreal,’ The New York Times, (February 1, 2010), http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/books/02book.html?pagewanted=all&mcubz=0

  90. 90.

    Sam Anderson, ‘White Noise,’ New York, (February 1, 2010), http://nymag.com/arts/books/reviews/63210/index1.html

  91. 91.

    Philip Nel, ‘Don DeLillo’s Return to Form: The Modernist Poetics of The Body Artist,’ in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 42, No. 4, (Winter 2002), p. 736.

  92. 92.

    On the subject of DeLillo’s temporalities, James Gourley links the author’s tendency to decompress time to Beckett’s Proust (1930). James Gourley, Terrorism and Temporality in the Works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, (Bloomsbury: London, 2013).

  93. 93.

    Peter Boxall, ‘Stirring From the Field of the Possible,’ p. 224.

  94. 94.

    Jean Baudrillard, America, (Verso: London, 1988), pp. 5–6.

  95. 95.

    Peter Boxall, ‘Stirring From the Field of the Possible,’ p. 223.

  96. 96.

    Here, Boxall compares Harkness’ claim to Beckett’s Molloy—c.f. ‘You would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is blank and flat…’ (10).

  97. 97.

    Peter Boxall, ‘Stirring From the Field of the Possible,’ p. 223.

References

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Baxter, J. (2021). Don DeLillo’s Reinvention of ‘Beckett World’. In: Samuel Beckett’s Legacies in American Fiction . New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81572-1_5

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics