The Rupture of the Author Assumed into Cyberspace
Cosmopolis
by Don DeLillo
Scribner, 209 pages, $25 / 3 rats
Reviewed by Nick Montfort
Plenty of people have tried to write novels that don't really
have characters, but a novel without characters or ideas is
particularly unusual. And a novel of this sort that, while
flawed, actually does something interesting as the author
attempts this insane feat? One that seems, behind its explicit
characters and their clearly-stated allegorical relationships to
ideas, to actually start to constitute itself directly out of raw
culture? We might not be too surprised to learn of a first novel
of this sort, written by some fevered prodigy. It is outrageous,
beyond all reckoning, that such a novel would be the thirteenth
offering from a preeminent, established writer. Yet here we have
it, delivered to us from Don DeLillo like a spaceship that has
set down by the United Nations.
Since this isn't a novel about characters, I won't mention any of
them by name. I will note that the story involves a super-wealthy
young man descending from his superurban palace and progressing
across midtown Manhattan in his limousine to his ultimate
destiny. He is joined in the futuristic vehicle by his chief of
security, who has a voice-activated pistol. Five of his
executives visit him, as tempters visited Becket in Eliot's
telling of his martyrdom. At one point a doctor who makes car
calls visits and administers a prostate exam. Bent over and with
a finger up his ass, the protagonist begins to have a form of
purely verbal sex with the sweaty soccer mom who is his chief of
finance and who has jogged over to meet him. The limo's visual
display units show what things will be like a few seconds into
the future. For those who think that a novel about a guy going
around in his car must be realistic, this will serve to be about
as shattering as Godard's Alphaville. The events of the novel
take place on a day in April 2000; perhaps it's best to read as
if that day were April 1 -- which was at least approximately the
release date of the book.
The novel is not only a joke or a self-parody, however.
Cosmopolis is about, among other things, poetry, life, and
exchange and traffic of various sorts; it begins with an epigraph
from Zbigniew Herbert's "Report from the Besieged City": "a rat
became the unit of currency." The abstract force driving the
novel is explained early on: "The yen rose overnight against
expectations" (8). And indeed it did, in many senses. This fund
manager's desire to have a haircut leads to a day-long journey
across town. Traffic is stalled absurdly, as in Cortazar's "The
Southern Thruway," although here the setting is urban and offers
many opportunities for foraging. Our fund manager has repeated
chance encounters with his super-wealthy wife of three weeks,
whom he barely knows. Cosmopolis certainly refers to, among other
things, that famous urban journey, Ulysses. There are a few
rather clear shout outs to Joyce: the protagonist, after being
pied by an artist, reaches for his handkerchief and feels a
reminder of one of the day's earlier encounter.
As in DeLillo's masterwork, Underworld, art is on parade here in
many ways, with a Spencer-Tunick-like movie shoot of a mass of
nude bodies, a rap funeral with a procession of breakdancers, a
drug-numbed event taking place under a banner that declares it
"THE LAST TECHNO-RAVE," (125) and a Seattle-like protest in Times
Square that shades into a massive performance piece itself. Here,
unlike in Underworld, art is at times fighting with real violence
to make its voice heard. One of the most explicit themes in the
book involves the embodied nature of our existence, but even this
is but one way of focusing a wildly broad attempt to deal with
the relationship between abstract and concrete in our blurring
American culture. Here, disaster ensues when our yen refuses to
drop. Currency begins to speak, like the blackhead the doctor
discovers, which, he counsels, should be allowed to "express
itself" (45).
In concluding Underworld, DeLillo had the audacity to write about
a nun's assumption into cyberspace. But at the very end, in the
last paragraph of the epilogue, there is an even more audacious
move. The last paragraph of the book is a single word, "Peace."
Suffice it to say that the ending of Cosmopolis, arranged by
DeLillo and book designer Erich Hobbing, is even more bold, as
those who read carefully and attend to how they read will notice.
Those who are expecting this novel to read like some of DeLillo's
earlier work will find it way out past End Zone and even a bit
beyond Ratner's Star. In Cosmopolis, DeLillo attempts to push
beyond parody and beyond pastiche into a register where the
absurd, the abstract, and the non-representational can somehow
live alongside human emotions and encounters. Yes, he fails. The
book is no smooth and perfect machine. But what a failure. What
an attempt. For those who can bear to look at such a serious
literary experiment, Cosmopolis is worth reading. It tries to
develop a new register in which we will have to learn to speak
and write if we are to live in this century's global city.
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This review is (C) 2003 Nick Montfort. The author allows it to be
freely reprinted if (a) the work is attributed to the author, (b)
it is used in a non-commercial context, and (c) it is printed
unmodified. It is offered under the Creative Commons
Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial 1.0 license, explained at
and available
at .
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