Delillo's Underworld -- a Review/Response

A note after the fat: After writing this I immediately read The Body Artist straight through. As regards Underworld itself my thoughts are mostly unchanged. However, my estimation of Delillo is greatly raised. More detail offered in a footnote on The Body Artist, below.

 

Delillo has been subject of or made appearances in a handful of discussions recently, enough so to prompt me to return to Underworld after having put it down unfinished a few years ago. I read then the opening foray, the (apparently) well known prologue on the pennant clinching, 1951 Dodgers-Giants game, which I enjoyed greatly but which left me with questions as to whether I wanted to continue, questions which were answered to the negative by the pages that followed.

I tend to be a slow reader, I tend to read books that demand (and merit) being read slowly, and as such I don't like wasting my time on books that I don't find profitable or highly enjoyable, and don't generally read books just for the sake of having read them.

Yes, as regards its technical character, that opening chapter is worth the reading. It is a well crafted narrative. But so also is the opening salvo of Saving Private Ryan technically a marvel, and worth the viewing and reviewing for grasping what it does so well. However, the rest of Saving Private Ryan is a shallow narrative woven mostly of conventions, contrivances, and cheap manipulations. But that one word there applies also to the opening: shallow. While it may be a bravura technical performance, the extended sequence is wholly and only narrative; there is no ideational depth to it, no ideational development. It is visual prose, if very well crafted prose, at its most prosaic.

Which is the same take-a-way that I had with the opening of Underworld: technically interesting, but for the most part a shallow – and occasionally conventional or contrived – narrative; and, it seemed that it was during its attempts to move beyond empty, prosaic narrative into intelligent prose that it most turned to contrivance (as with the closing sequences concerning the struggle for and possession of the baseball).

As such, even as the praise of being a "technical marvel" becomes qualified. For example, consider the side story of the foursome in the audience of Gleason, Sinatra, Shor, and Hoover. Do they add ideational depth and energies to the text, or are they merely a part of the brute narrative. If the latter, even if they exist to serve the technical function of giving a different point of view to the game, something off which the narrative line of the announcer can bounce, the demands on technical ability will be less than if the foursome because of an outward generating, ideational core, wherein the writer had to deal not only with the surface narrative but also unifying the whole into an ideational field that was not centered upon the narrative. For example, in The Thin Red Line, the cinematic polar opposite to Saving Private Ryan, the major characters are all in dialogue with each other by way of their own being in the film, all addressing the nature of conflict and war as though beings on an Olympus, all simultaneously part of a unity but individual within that unity. In Underworld, I never sensed such unity: it stayed, like the prologue to Saving Private Ryan, in surface narrative, in realist depiction, never generating a field of ideational resonance. Thus why at the end I had little true inertia carrying me forward into the rest of the book, however exciting the narrative of the game, and why after reading a little farther into the book I lost all desire to continue.

Visual Labyrinths in Body Double

This is something newly posted to the Cabinet (here).

 

It is the epitome of obviousness to say Body Double is Brian de Palma's full out homage to Alfred Hitchcock (a relationship resumed, though less emphatically, in his 1992 Raising Cain). The film follows heavily in theme and visualization both Rear Window, in the voyeurism, and Vertigo, which is transformed into claustrophobia. Though is it solely homage? To me de Palma is delving far too deeply into the stylistic aspects of Hitchcock for it to be merely homage: it is all out exploration and play; stealing, in the manner of the phrase, to the ends of his own creation, but stealing in plain sight, and playfully calling attention to the theft to boot.

What I would like to look at here, however, is a third theme that lies (mostly) outside the Hitchcock connection and speaks to how Body Double is an very successful film of its own identity and unity: the theme of the labyrinth. It is a theme in Body Double presented almost entirely visually, which is what makes it so fascinating to me, and, I would argue, what makes it so successful. Granted, the visuals work in the film also at the simpler, technical levels of creating mood, pace, tension, etc. However, the work also, and to greater effect, on their own within a complex of ideational play. In what follows, keep that relationship in mind. My interest here is not in how the visual aspect of the labyrinthian work subserviently to some base structure; rather, my interest is how the visuals on their own, without the support of exposition or dialogue in any way, generate their own ideational depth to the film. I will here mostly only present the visual elements and offer a reading of some of the ideational energies created. I will not go too deeply into any theoretical discussion; and will leave exploration beyond presentation mostly to you.

 

Before continuing, let me posit a fourth idea, one mostly structural in nature, which I bring in primarily in an organizational function. I want to recognize that Body Double follows the classic, Shakespearean, there-and-back-again, five step structure. This is in itself not that terribly important an idea as regards the design of the film: the five step organization is something readily found in narratives, and something really created by accident; its presence within a text does not mean that the text was intentionally built upon that framework, as here, where there is no insistence within the film itself that we as the audience should see five steps.

Something I Read #16 -- David Perkins

This comes from David Perkins's A History of Modern Poetry: From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode (1976; pgs 128-130; it is the first of a two volume history), closing off his discussion of Edward Arlington Robinson. The ideas he raises are both historical and theoretical in nature.

These long narratives go on mostly for between eighty and a hundred pages and make up abut two-thirds of Robinson's total output. They appear to have been admired mainly on principle and to have been more praised than read. Neither can one challenge this consensus of inattention. It is impossible to read them with more than languid interest. To ask why this is so, however, is to raise fundamental. questions about the limitations and the evolution of poetry in the modern world. Robinson, to be sure, was not a storyteller of Chaucerian genius. But since the Romantic period no poet has scored a major success in narrative poems of this length, though a good many have tried. One thinks of Browning's The Ring and the Book, Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum, the tales of Morris, and Yeats's Wanderings of Oisin. The short short story of a few hundred lines, such as Frost's "The Witch of Coos," or a series of linked lyrics making up a story, such as Meredith's Modern Love, seem to exhaust the possibilities open to poetry on this line. Why? Answers can only be speculative, and while we are speculating, we should keep in mind that the question of the long narrative poem overlaps the question of the long poem generally. Here again there have been few successes that cannot be reduced to the general form of a long poem made up out of linked short ones: for example, In Memoriam, The House of Life, The Waste Land, Four Quartets, The Bridge, Paterson. The few exceptions that spring to mind – the longer epistles of Auden or Ginsberg's Kaddish – are especially revealing: they succeed precisely because they avoid the more condensed uses of language that have been the norm of poetry for the last fifty years.

Agresto — "The Suicide of the Liberal Arts"

– minor editing, Apr. 7, 2016

 

This is a response – what became an long response – to comments in a Facebook discussion on John Agresto's Wall Street Journal essay "The Suicide of the Liberal Arts" (located here). In its simplest, and greatly simplifying, this response is to the two ideas that (1) Agresto seems off base, and (2) that the problem lies in the business style administration that has taken over higher education.

I won't quote here the comments as I believe the only resulting negative might be a sense of absence as to what was leading in to this response (as though turning on a interview on a news show a few seconds late and missing the first exchanges of the conversation). The ideas below will not suffer for being taken out of that flow.

 

It is an undeniable that the turn to a profit-oriented system has done great damage to the university system. Though, I do question whether it is the the idea of 'profit' or if it is more the particular methods of profit-making (methods criticized not only in education but across the business world) that are to blame: an institution that is not in some way income-oriented is a not-long-to-live institution. But to blame all the ills of US education upon that alone is facile, perhaps equivalent to blaming a driver for the performance of their car's engine. There is one quite obvious question dodged right from the start by the over-tight focusing upon profit orientation: is the turn to a poor business model itself the effect of a deeper systemic issue? After all, it is difficult to use university business models to explain the miserable quality of K-12 education in the US.

I, from conversations with others, was apparently fairly lucky in my many years of collegiate education in that I escaped, pretty much entirely, ideologically dogmatic professors like that described by Agresto:

Instead of guiding young men and women by encouraging them to read history, biography, philosophy and literature, [those who would] rather debunk the past, deconstruct the authors and dethrone our finest minds and statesmen.

Now, normally here, I would briefly digress onto – if not sidestep entirely – how the word "deconstruct" here is being used wholly against the post-structuralist ideas from out of which the word comes. Agresto uses it in the commonly seen, derogative manner, of theory over-riding the practical aspects of reading a text (or being used to justify political readings of texts). In truth, though, the very core of post-structuralist thought is turned to opposite aims: the core point of learning to deconstruct a text lies in that it is learning, at a fundamental level, how to read. Normally, I would go there only as corrective digression. But this time I go there and stay, as the use of the word here is demonstration to the point(s) I want to make.