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Zero K
Like a stethoscope, Don DeLillo’s work can make the heartbeat of your life roar in your ears. In 1997, he published Underworld, a consciousness-stirring book that seemed intent on reflecting as many dimensions of post−Second World War American culture as possible. His sentences roamed through the baseball crowds, the counterculture, and the defense industry to a starscape of other points, yielding a vision of a nation’s collective imagination. The book was the defining moment of a literary career whose signal accomplishment has been to give Americans and other citizens of the world a rejuvenated sense of the psychosocial texture of American society.
DeLillo’s post-Underworld novels are compact — each of the five comes in at less than 300 pages. With the questionable exception of his 9/11 novel, Falling Man (2007), they lean more on the power of language than the spectacle of events. In The Body Artist (2000), a woman considers the mysterious utterances of a stranger she discovers in her house who evokes her relationship with her late husband. “She knew it was foolish to examine so closely. She was making things up. But this was the effect he had, shadow-inching through a sentence, showing a word in its facets and aspects, words like moons in particular phases.” In her words and “his” effects, DeLillo maps out his aesthetic agenda — one that has escaped a number of critics.
In the New York Times Book Review, Michiko Kakutani called Cosmopolis (2003) — DeLillo’s story about a billionaire’s trek across Manhattan in a limo, in search of a haircut — “a dud,” judging its antihero as unable to “engage our attention.” As for the male protagonist of Falling Man, who, after surviving the collapse of one of the Twin Towers, drifts into becoming a professional poker player, she writes, “Mr. DeLillo leaves us with . . . a self-absorbed man, who came through the fire and ash of that day and decided to spend his foreseeable future playing stupid card games in the Nevada desert.”
In the midst of the current political season, DeLillo’s portrait of a megalomaniac billionaire of gross appetites is about as topical as can be, while the critic’s contempt for games of chance seems downright passé in light of poker’s increasing popularity – and its implicit relationship to the speculative nature of global finance. Still, the essence of these ahead-of-the-curve books is not to be found in their broad movements as much as in the units of their sentences and the accuracy of their judgments. Consider this appraisal of an ATM in Cosmopolis:
He was thinking about automated teller machines. The term was aged and burdened by its own historical memory. It worked at cross-purposes, unable to escape the inference of fuddled human personnel and jerking moving parts. The term was part of the process that the device was meant to replace.
Or this reflection on race from Falling Man:
She became her face and features, her skin color, a white person, white her fundamental meaning, her state of being. This is who she was, not really but at the same time yes, exactly, why not. She was privileged, detached, self-involved, white. It was there in her face, educated, unknowing, scared. She felt all the bitter truth that stereotypes contain.
DeLillo probes words to unveil the power relations inherent in them — the ATM as a symbol of the devaluation of human capital, whiteness as a mark of security and optional obliviousness. If anything, such observations are more relevant to the prevailing discourses of today than they were at the time of their publication. Furthermore, as DeLillo reminds us in Point Omega (2010), one of the best ways to understand the assertion of American power in the twenty-first century is to look at how language has been used to marshal and control popular opinion. In the novel, a former government contractor — a theorist — who helped sell the public on the Iraq War speaks of his professional mandate:
Human perception is a saga of created reality. But we were devising entities beyond the agreed-upon limits of recognition or interpretation. Lying is necessary. The state has to lie. There is no lie in war or in preparation for war that can’t be defended. We went beyond this. We tried to create new realities overnight, careful sets of words that resemble advertising slogans in memorability and repeatability. These were words that would yield pictures eventually and then become three dimensional. The reality stands, it walks, it squats. Except when it doesn’t.
In DeLillo’s philosophical universe, words are deterministic paths that facilitate our steps and missteps.
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Language is a protective stimulus for Jeffrey, the thirty-four year-old man at the center of DeLillo’s new novel, Zero K. Jeffrey Lockhart, like the aforementioned characters, has a sharp feeling for the talismanic quality of words. When his plane gets caught in a sandstorm en route to the cryogenic facility where much of the story takes place, he calls upon words to calm his nerves:
The sandstorm was out there, more visibly now, dust rising in great dark swelling waves, only upright, rollers breaking vertically, a mile high, two miles, I had no idea, trying to work miles into kilometers, then trying to think of the word, in Arabic, that refers to such phenomena. This is what I do to defend myself against some spectacle of nature. Think of a word.
Jeffrey is the son of a wealthy man who, in his youth, ditched his unfulfilling name — Nicholas Satterswaite — to become Ross Lockhart. Nicholas shed his name to remake himself into the man of consequence symbolized for him in the words “Ross Lockhart.” When Jeffrey was thirteen, Ross left the boy’s mother, Madeline, for reasons unbeknownst to his son. (DeLillo exploits the Proustian undertones of her name by having Jeffrey admonish his father to remember the woman he’s tried to forget.) Since the divorce, Jeffery and his dad have had a fraught relationship.
At the beginning of the novel, Jeffrey is escorted by various people to the Convergence — a cryogenic facility located at an undisclosed location somewhere in the relative vicinity of Kyrgyzstan. He is there to say goodbye to his terminally ill stepmother, Artis, whose body will be placed in storage pod to be preserved until technology has evolved to a degree where resurrection is possible. Jeffrey is skeptical that such an eventuality will ever coming to pass, but he tries to be a supportive presence while he’s with Artis.
When Jeffrey questions his father about his financial stake in the project, Ross bids him to think of its interdisciplinary grandeur. The Convergence relies not just on medical personnel to fulfill its mission but also philologists who are, as Ross says, “designing an advanced language unique to the Convergence. Word roots, inflections, even gesture. People will learn it and speak it. A language that will enable us to express things we can’t express now, see things we can’t see now . . . ” For Artis, the Convergence offers the chance of being “reborn into a deeper and truer reality.”
There is a certain heavy-handed irony to the fact that a woman whose name so closely resembles the word artist should think that a technology that subsumes other intellectual disciplines, like philology, will lead to a greater understanding of reality. Zero K is the special wing of the Convergence dedicated to the processing of those true believers whose faith in technology-midwifed rebirth brings them to the conclusion that they ought to trade their current life for a better tomorrow.
Representatives of the Convergence raise ethical questions like “Aren’t we easing the way toward uncontrollable levels of population, environmental stress?” before waving them away with classic “Hey, let’s be disruptive” talk. “We want to do whatever we are capable of doing in order to alter human thought and bend the energies of civilization.” Yet, as cavalier as some of the staff are, others look out upon the world and see a techno-state from which — paradoxically — only their technology can save the privileged few:
Those of you who will return to the surface. Haven’t you felt it? The loss of autonomy. The sense of being virtualized. The devices you use, the ones you carry everywhere, room to room, minute to minute, inescapably. Do you ever feel unfleshed? All the coded impulses you depend on to guide you. All the sensors in the room that are watching you, listening to you, tracking your habits, measuring your capabilities. All the linked data designed to incorporate you into the megadata. Is there something that makes you uneasy? Do you think about the technovirus, all systems down, global implosion? Or is it more personal? Do you feel steeped in some digital panic that’s everywhere and nowhere?
Wandering the halls of the institution, Jeffery periodically encounters large screens that descend from the ceiling and show him all manner of ecological and humanitarian disasters. Eventually, he sees the death of someone he knows — such patented artificiality speaks to the artificiality of our age, where virtual experiences often supersede actual ones.
In Zero K, DeLillo doesn’t give the reader much room to suspend disbelief. With very deliberate words the novel wants to turn our eyes back to the artificial realities that we’ve allowed to colonize our lives. Our only chance, his fiction implies, is to define them, to master them with language — lest we continuously be defined by our technology.