Don DeLillo Should Win the Nobel Prize

So who killed JFK? We still don’t know, but we’re concluding our series on DeLillo’s conspiratorial history with Episode 27: Libra (3). This episode begins by focusing on the unexpected injection of humor and depth that comes with Jack Ruby, another reluctant shooter, in the novel’s second part. We draw into this episode some comparisons of Libra to other artists’ paranoid visions of conspiracy, including Oliver Stone, Norman Mailer, and Thomas Pynchon. We spend ample time on the newspaper-clipping and TV-watching of CIA wife Beryl Parmenter, one of several figures here who make Libra a canny narrative of media and information history. And we close with detailed debate and speculation about why DeLillo’s concluding “Author’s Note” – with its powerful notion that “readers may find refuge here” – has changed over the years. Like Nicholas Branch, we're overwhelmed by all that still could be said about Libra (and we may still say it in a future episode!), but we conclude our three-part analysis here.   References and corrections for this episode:   “Don DeLillo: The Word, the Image, and the Gun.” BBC Documentary, September 27, 1991. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DTePKA1wgc [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DTePKA1wgc]   Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia.” chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Freud_MourningAndMelancholia.pdf   JFK (dir. Oliver Stone, 1991).   Frank Lentricchia, “Libra as Postmodern Critique.” In Frank Lentricchia, ed., Introducing Don DeLillo (Durham, NC: Duke U. Press, 1991), 193-215.   George F. Will, “Shallow Look at the Mind of an Assassin.” Washington Post, September 22, 1988.   Correction and references on Carmine Latta and Sam Giancana: DeLillo’s character Carmine Latta is indeed based on Carlos Marcello (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Marcello [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Marcello]), but we misstate the name of mobster Sam Giancana (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Giancana [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Giancana]).   Interlude clips include the voices of Jack Ruby and Marguerite Oswald.

In Episode 26: Libra (2), DDSWTNP continue our deep dive into DeLillo’s story of Oswald and CIA plotters, taking on the distinctions between lone-gunman and systems theories, the unique role of Bobby Dupard in Oswald’s arc, and all this novel has to teach us about “diminishing existence” and the taste for mediated violence as it’s grown since the watershed moment of 1963. Major segments here focus on the remarkable, Mephistophelean voice of David Ferrie, the work done by secret CIA historian Nicholas Branch, and DeLillo’s prefatory essay “Assassination Aura,” which brings Libra’s enduring mystery into the twenty-first century through the promises and failures of technology embodied by “Dictabelt No. 10.”    An episode best listened to, of course, after Episode 25: Libra (1)! Stay tuned next week for the release of our concluding episode on Libra.   References and corrections for this episode:   Don DeLillo, “American Blood: A Journey Through the Labyrinth of Dallas and JFK.” Rolling Stone, December 8, 1983. Rpt. in Osteen, Mark, ed., Novels of the 1980s: The Names, White Noise, Libra. Library of America, 2022. 1045-1061.    Don DeLillo, “Assassination Aura” (May 2005). Included as preface in 2006 edition of Libra (Penguin).   “I was able to acquire a copy of the [Zapruder] film before it became legally available, which made me feel slightly conspiratorial”: Don DeLillo, “Preface, 2022.” In Osteen, ed., Novels of the 1980s: The Names, White Noise, Libra. Library of America, 2022. 633-634.   Linda Hutcheon, “Historiographic Metafiction: The Pastime of Past Time.” In A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988. (The first instance of a concept much discussed by Hutcheon and many others.)   Tom LeClair, In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. U. of Illinois P., 1988.   Dante correction: We say “circling the square” in Paradiso 33, but it’s of course the problem of “squaring the circle.”   Interlude clips include the voices of General Edwin Walker and Lee Harvey Oswald.

Who killed JFK? What forces made the mind and actions of Lee Oswald? And what does it mean to be an agent of history or something called fate? DDSWTNP probe these and other big questions in multiple new episodes on Libra released over the coming month. June may be the time of Gemini, another sign of doubles in the Zodiac, but for us it’s a month for the balance scale, tipping one way or the other, with some Librans like Lee not balanced at all but (as David Ferrie puts it) “somewhat unsteady and impulsive . . . Poised to make the dangerous leap.”   In Episode 25: Libra (1), we discuss where DeLillo began in the 1970s in his build-up to Libra, as far back as Americana and other early novels’ mentions of JFK, Oswald, the CIA, and the overwhelming Warren Report. We examine what makes DeLillo’s Oswald a great but frustrating character and a portal for new dimensions in the author’s examination of language, naming, and self-making. We ask what’s behind the clear shifts in style, tone, and humor DeLillo makes for this historical novel, as well as the power of his place/date chapter structure, the influence of existentialist fiction, and some alternate titles he considered. And we begin working our way through all the figures and ideas surrounding Oswald, from Marxist beliefs and CIA practices of “unknowing” to Cold War obsessions with the Bay of Pigs, life in the U.S.S.R., and a losing war in Vietnam that DeLillo and readers know is coming but his characters importantly don’t.    Stay tuned in our Libra episodes to come for investigation of the Murray-like wit of David Ferrie, how DeLillo regards the lone gunman theory, the mysterious edits made to his “Author’s Note,” the theological musings of Nicholas Branch, and much more.   Texts and historical figures mentioned in Episode 25:   Ann Arensberg, “Seven Seconds” (1988), in Thomas DePietro, ed., Conversations with Don DeLillo, University of Mississippi Press, 2005, 40-46.   Don DeLillo, “American Blood: A Journey Through the Labyrinth of Dallas and JFK.” Rolling Stone, December 8, 1983. Rpt. in Osteen, Mark, ed., Novels of the 1980s: The Names, White Noise, Libra. Library of America, 2022. 1045-1061.    ---. “Preface, 2022.” In Osteen, ed., Novels of the 1980s: The Names, White Noise, Libra. Library of America, 2022. 633-634.   Don DeLillo Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.   “Don DeLillo: The Word, the Image, and the Gun.” BBC Documentary, September 27, 1991. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DTePKA1wgc [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DTePKA1wgc]   DeLillo: “I was hoping it was Scorpio, because I liked that word. But his birth sign turned out to be Libra, the scales. I settled for that.” David Marchese, “We All Live in Don DeLillo’s World. He’s Confused By It Too” (2020) https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/12/magazine/don-delillo-interview.html [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/12/magazine/don-delillo-interview.html]   Everette Howard Hunt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Howard_Hunt [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Howard_Hunt]   Correction: the character Aleksei Kirilenko, Oswald’s Soviet handler in the novel (and source for one of many Lee aliases, Alek?), is DeLillo’s creation, not historical! Branch later reveals Kirilenko’s real name is Sergei Broda (301). No claim about DeLillo’s basis for Kirilenko/Broda, but here is information on yet another shadowy figure, defecting KGB agent Yuri Nosenko, who claimed to have been in charge of Oswald’s case file in the Soviet Union: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Nosenko [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Nosenko]

What does the déjà vu allegedly caused by the Airborne Toxic Event have to do with a disease called Jumping Frenchman? How is Jack Gladney’s “day of the station wagons” connected to the first female NHL player’s longing for quaint hometown holidays? In Episode 24, DDSWTNP continue our White Noise residency by showing listeners all the hidden connections between DeLillo’s most famous novel and his most obscure: Cleo Birdwell’s Amazons, his pseudonymous 1980 collaboration with Sue Buck, written as a kind of lark but we think absolutely integral to the satiric vision of White Noise five years later. Our discussion suggests all the ways in which DeLillo seems to have used Amazons as a “laboratory” of sorts, developing Cleo’s thoughts on ad shoots, celebrity athletes, Americana, and an ex-player in a deathlike suspension into the richer, more in-depth meditations on similar topics in White Noise. Naturally we give major attention to Murray Jay Siskind, a sportswriter in Amazons who’s become an Elvis scholar in White Noise, expressing above all our gratitude that DeLillo came back to him and transformed him, reshaping an already very funny snowmobile obsessive into a Mephistophelean wit and one of the darkest, most memorable characters in the corpus. Those who haven’t gotten to read Amazons but know other DeLillo will get a ton out of this episode, for we end up drawing surprising connections not just to White Noise but Americana, End Zone, Great Jones Street, Underworld, Zero K, and others. Turns out this prank of a novel in 1980 paid many dividends for DeLillo. Tune in to hear some fun thoughts as well about a prank of our own: an April Fool’s post about a brand-new DeLillo novel we put on social media a few weeks ago.   Texts and quotations referred to in this episode:   “Pynchon Now,” including short essay on Pynchon’s example by Don DeLillo, Bookforum (Summer 2005). https://web.archive.org/web/20050729023737/www.bookforum.com/pynchon.html [https://web.archive.org/web/20050729023737/www.bookforum.com/pynchon.html]   Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (Free Press, 1973).    John N. Duvall, “The (Super)Marketplace of Images: Television as Unmediated Mediation in DeLillo’s White Noise.” In Mark Osteen, ed., White Noise: Text and Criticism (New York: Penguin, 1998), pp. 432-55.   Adolf Hitler, “Long Live Fanatical Nationalism” (text of speech). In James A. Gould and Willis H. Truitt, Political Ideologies (New York: Macmillan, 1973), p. 119.   Gerald Howard and Mark Osteen, “Why Don DeLillo Deserves the Nobel: A Conversation with Gerald Howard and Mark Osteen,” Library of America, January 17, 2024 (source for Howard’s remark that DeLillo’s manuscripts need no editing). https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/why-don-delillo-deserves-the-nobel/ [https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/why-don-delillo-deserves-the-nobel/]

Roll film! In Episode 23, DDSWTNP continue our White Noise residency by heading to the movies (or the TV screen) and examining Noah Baumbach’s 2022 film adaptation of the novel. We discuss the drive over the years to adapt the supposedly “unadaptable” DeLillo for the screen, the 2020s context of this film, and our varied reactions to successive viewings of it over the two-plus years since its release. Other topics include the central performances (especially Adam Driver as an unexpectedly good Jack Gladney and Don Cheadle as a refashioned Murray Siskind); Baumbach’s successes and failures at re-ordering DeLillo’s dialogue and visually distilling certain themes; and his shaping of the narrative as a “meta-cinematic” journey through his personal film history and a mixture of genres. Reviews by Tom LeClair, Marco Roth, and Jesse Kavadlo figure in our analysis, and we close by considering whether we do in fact “need a new body” in the film’s concluding supermarket song and dance number, which in our view captures some of the novel’s themes and distorts others. We’d love to hear on Instagram or email what you think of the film and our reactions, too!   We also take a little time to correct a historical error in our Episode 19 on Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake.   Texts and sources for this episode:   White Noise (dir. Noah Baumbach, 2022) (Netflix).   Film adaptation pages at “Don DeLillo’s America”: http://www.perival.com/delillo/whitenoise_film_2022.html [http://www.perival.com/delillo/whitenoise_film_2022.html] http://perival.com/delillo/ddoddsends.html [http://perival.com/delillo/ddoddsends.html]   Patrick Brzeski, Alex Ritman, “Noah Baumbach on Getting LCD Soundsystem to Create New Track for ‘White Noise,’” The Hollywood Reporter, August 31, 2022. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/venice-noah-baumbach-white-noise-lcd-soundsystem-1235209318/ [https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/venice-noah-baumbach-white-noise-lcd-soundsystem-1235209318/]   Jesse Kavadlo, “Don DeLillo’s ‘White Noise’ Remains Unfilmable,” Pop Matters, January 11, 2023. https://www.popmatters.com/white-noise-noah-baumbach-unfilmable [https://www.popmatters.com/white-noise-noah-baumbach-unfilmable]   Tom LeClair, “The Maladaptation of White Noise,” Full Stop, December 29, 2022. https://www.full-stop.net/2022/12/29/features/tomleclair/the-maladaptation-of-white-noise/ [https://www.full-stop.net/2022/12/29/features/tomleclair/the-maladaptation-of-white-noise/]   Jon Mooallem, “How Noah Baumbach Made ‘White Noise’ a Disaster Movie for Our Moment,” New York Times Magazine, November 23, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/23/magazine/white-noise-noah-baumbach.html [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/23/magazine/white-noise-noah-baumbach.html]   Marco Roth, “Don DeLillo on Xanax,” Tablet, November 3, 2022. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/don-delillo-xanax-white-noise-noah-baumbach [https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/don-delillo-xanax-white-noise-noah-baumbach]