Browsing in a bookstore yesterday, I picked up a paperback copy of Don DeLillo's 2020 lockdown novel, The Silence. It turned out to be a fortuitous year to find it. The book—really more a novella or long short story than a full novel, brief enough to be read in a sitting—is set two years in the future from when it was published: 2022. Thus, we are now living in the not-too-distant future DeLillo described, and can compare it against his vision of what the next two years might hold.
Despite being projected two years ahead, though, DeLillo's novella is unmistakably a product of its own moment: the first, vaccine-less year of the global pandemic. It is, as I say, a lockdown novel. It is not so relentlessly topical as to refer to COVID-19 by name. Rather, its characters are trapped in place by a mysterious blackout seemingly caused by a simultaneous worldwide failure of electronic technologies—what one character describes as "the total collapse of all systems."
But its vision of of a paralyzing global event that forces everyone indoors to confront the fragility of our civilization feels deeply resonant with what we all went through in those early months of lockdown. And in case we missed the parallels even after this point, the publishers append a short essay by DeLillo to the back of the paperback edition, written in April 2021, musing on the experience of the first year of the pandemic from the perspective of a New Yorker.
What strikes one quickly in reading the book is how much DeLillo was made for this historical moment, despite its coming so many decades into his career. His earlier and greatest fiction—such as 1985's White Noise—was already concerned with apocalyptic fears of sudden death, ecological or biological catastrophe, and the failure of collective systems designed to keep us safe. DeLillo was thinking about COVID-19 before it was so much as a twinkle in the eye of a predecessor bat coronavirus.
And just as one notices that DeLillo seems to be in his element in the 2020 moment of lockdown and justified collective paranoia, one observes too that this feeling—that of having been ready and waiting one's whole life for apocalypse to strike—is itself a sub-theme of the book.
There is a subset of us, DeLillo suggests, for whom the sense of the "normal" is reversed: people for whom the safety and predictability of everyday life in advanced civilization will always seem like the aberration, and catastrophe—when it comes—as a revelation of the more ordinary and truer state of affairs that was always there beneath the surface. They are the ones for whom A.E. Housman spoke, in one of his poems:
Were light and fleeting,
Of lovers’ meeting
Or luck or fame.
But mine were of trouble,
And mine were steady,
So I was ready
When trouble came.
This is the most eerie aspect of the pandemic lockdown experience that DeLillo captures so well, and that so few others of us were willing to talk about at the time: the unacknowledged sense many of us felt, when it came, that it was what we had expected all along. As a character muses in DeLillo's book: "But didn't this have to happen? Isn't that what some of us are thinking? We were headed in this direction."
Even as it overthrew all we knew before, in short, the pandemic was somehow inevitable. And at least now we were "getting it over with," instead of having to dread its ineluctable arrival.
I remember a dream I had at the time, and shared with a friend: I was looking out of my window at a mushroom cloud in the distance—a massive billow of black smoke full of its own self-spawned lightning—a vision straight from DeLillo's White Noise. And I had to confess to my friend that, even as my heart was pounding in terror in this nightmare, I also thought to myself, within the dream—"finally."
Perhaps it was the decades of warnings of ecological catastrophe and the potential for new pandemics; whatever the reason may be, I think many people felt—as I did in my dream—a strange kind of relief, amidst the terror. As much as COVID disrupted "normal life," and all we wanted was to get back to that, it also—in a sense—restored real life. It disclosed a truth of our existence that had already been there.
It may be that disaster speaks to some secret and forbidden desire within us—a collective death wish, a Freudian drive to dance with Thanatos. As another of DeLillo's characters ponders, "isn't it strange that certain individuals have seemed to accept the shutdown, the burnout? Is this something they've always longed for, subliminally, subatomically?" Or is the sense of release when catastrophe arrives simply due to the fact that now one no longer needs to wonder how it might be: because it's here.
When people have been watching slowly-unfolding apocalypses for so many decades, as DeLillo has, (he name-checks many of them in his novel: microplastics found in the Arctic snows, global warming, mutating viruses, over-reliance on technology), there is a psychological preparation that is taking place—a apprenticeship in catastrophe along the lines of what Housman describes. The disaster, when it arrives, can only seem right and proper on some level—just as DeLillo's characters describe—because it was for so long heralded.
Perhaps in trying to explain it, therefore—this strange and eerie sense of the propriety of the pandemic, in spite of its horror, of its right-and-fitting-ness, in spite of its aberrant quality, of the ability many of us found to "accept the shutdown, the burnout," as DeLillo puts it: we need look no further than Housman's words above. And perhaps the world needs people who have been thinking their whole lives of disaster, as DeLillo seems to have done. At least, we can say, someone was "ready/When trouble came."
No comments:
Post a Comment