Late Postmodernism and the Utopian Imagination

Abstract

In a British television documentary on his work, Don DeLillo quoted an excerpt from John Cheever’s journal that describes an evening spent watching baseball at Shea Stadium in the summer of 1963. Cheever wrote and DeLillo read:

I think that the task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain, but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony. The umpires in clericals, sifting out the souls of the players; the faint thunder as ten thousand people, at the bottom of the eighth, head for the exits. The sense of moral judgments embodied in a migratory vastness.¹

Cheever’s remarks are surprising, given his usual sharp-eyed interest in middle-class suburban lives, the private anguish of the woman rather than the Whitmanesque word en masse, but they evoke nonetheless a sense of purpose and cultural authority for the writer. He calls for the American author to engage with the symbolic acts—spectatorial participation in a panoply of election—by which a national identity is enacted and affirmed. As the 400 spectators reach for the foul ball as one, they play out a ritual that culminates, according to Cheever, in the “sense of moral judgments embodied in a migratory vastness.” This migratory vastness is not simply the clamorous expanse of the baseball stadium; it is America itself, and the writer participates in the “ceremony” of national identity.