In Episode 38, DDSWTNP talk to John Duvall, a major scholar of DeLillo, author of a 2002 reader’s guide to Underworld, and expert especially on how DeLillo’s 1992 novella “Pafko at the Wall” became, five years later, the Prologue, “The Triumph of Death.” In examining the 1951 Giants/Dodgers game and the Soviets’ bomb test, we discuss with Duvall in great detail the issues of race and racism in the portrayal of fourteen-year-old Cotter Martin, winner of the struggle for Bobby Thomson’s home run ball, as well as the major difference made by DeLillo’s change of the very last word of “Pafko” in Underworld: “It is all falling indelibly into the now”? Or “into the past”? Throughout this episode, Duvall gives us a rare critical glimpse at DeLillo as editor of his sentences and scenes. He speaks also to the mythologizing effects of baseball, what it means to aestheticize politics in DeLillo’s representations, DeLillo’s relationship to E. L. Doctorow’s work, and the competing visions of ideology and history embodied in FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and metafictional radio man Russ Hodges. Not only that, but Duvall has several intriguing, “paranoid” stories to tell about his correspondence with the author and how it’s possible his interpretations of “Pafko” in a 1995 journal article might have directly influenced some of DeLillo’s revisions as he shaped it into Underworld’s opening. Other topics in this probing discussion include how DeLillo fits in with conceptions of Fredric Jameson’s postmodernism and Linda Hutcheon’s historiographic metafiction, his claims about his art in “The Power of History,” and the motifs of “The Triumph of Death” that set up the 700+ pages to come.

For a profile of John Duvall’s scholarship and teaching, see https://www.cla.purdue.edu/directory/profiles/john-duvall.html

Stay tuned for a series of guest episodes on Underworld to come in the next few months!

Texts mentioned and discussed in this episode:

Don DeLillo, “Pafko at the Wall.” Harper’s (October 1992): 35-70.

—. Pafko at the Wall: A Novella. Scribner, 1997.

—. “The Power of History,” New York Times Magazine, September 7, 1997. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/books/090797article3.html

John N. Duvall, “Baseball as Aesthetic Ideology: Cold War History, Race, and Delillo's ‘Pafko at the Wall.’” Modern Fiction Studies 41.2 (Summer 1995): 285-313.

—. Don DeLillo’s UNDERWORLD. Continuum Contemporaries Reader’s Guide. 2002.

Mark Osteen, ed. “Notes.” Don DeLillo, Mao II and Underworld. Library of America, 2023. p. 1038.

David Remnick, “Exile on Main Street [interview with Don DeLillo].” New Yorker, September 7, 1997. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/09/15/exile-on-main-street-don-delillo-profile-remnick

In Episode 37, DDSWTNP kick off the Summer of Underworld with an overview that, like Episode 20: Discovering White Noise, offers newcomers to the novel a set of things to look out for as well as readings bound to appeal to those already familiar with DeLillo’s big book and headed back to it. How is this mega-novel structured in its six main Parts bookended by Prologue and Epilogue? How and why does it portray time’s variability and crisscross four decades of history? What to make of all the depictions of art and artists, from Klara Sax to Moonman 157, that populate these pages? What does a reader have to look forward to when they make it to the remarkable Lenny Bruce stand-up DeLillo creates? How do we keep track of all the meanings of waste and “under” in this book, and how does the quest for a single baseball help move the reader along? How to describe all the uncanny connections between paired characters and images, and is an aesthetic of filmic montage the way to understand Underworld’s method? Has DeLillo somehow made this giant book into both a vast, scattered history of the Cold War and a page-turning, character-driven account of personal transgression, confession, and regret? With these and other questions DDSWTNP begin a series of episodes, featuring many a guest appearance and working through the sections of Underworld one by one.

Enjoy the new variations in intro and outro music, and stay tuned for more episodes in the Summer of Underworld. Coming up next, an episode devoted to the Prologue and “Pafko at the Wall” with DeLillo scholar John Duvall.

Texts mentioned in this episode:

Mark Osteen, American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture. Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania P., 2000.

Transmission incoming from the insane world of Ratner’s Star, DeLillo’s fourth novel, a major change in his fiction and his most difficult text, underappreciated as precedent for his later turns on encyclopedic form in Libra and Underworld. Ratner’s also has, though, tons of connections to earlier works like Americana and End Zone. In this episode DDSWTNP celebrate Ratner’s fiftieth anniversary with a wholly new re-reading of a book that remains for us hilarious, pleasurable, and a huge reading challenge. We consider how Ratner’s Star, like any masterpiece, teaches us how to read its fabulations from its first page on. We examine its relentless juxtaposition of minds and bodies, as well as its dissection of the impulses toward pattern, order, and other “convenient fictions.” We ask what kinds of narrative experimentation with time and perspective DeLillo carries out, especially in the quest for an ultra-logical metalanguage in Part 2. We wonder about how science and math as fields of knowledge and uncertainty relate to DeLillo’s later turns to examining history. We do our best to try to understand the relationships of DeLillo’s “mohole” physics to Einstein’s relativity, and we offer a reading of a Jesuit’s interrogation of “red ant metaphysics” and “premature genuflection” that marks a new turn in DeLillo’s satires of his Catholic education. We close by disagreeing with a 1976 panning review of the novel as a pale imitation of Pynchon.

As we say in the episode, Ratner’s fiftieth makes for a great transition into our Summer of Underworld – look for a string of episodes on that big novel from us in the next few months! Enjoy the Ratnerama rendition of our intro music, too. And the rats and the bats and the stars. And in a nod to all ARS Extants out there, this episode is being sent into the podcast universe at exactly 14:28:57 (China Standard Time).

Texts mentioned and discussed in this episode:

David Cowart, Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. Athens: U. of Georgia P., 2002.

Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 1967.

Tom LeClair. In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. U. of Illinois P., 1987.

Mark Osteen, American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture. Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania P., 2000.

Peter S. Prescott, “Mandarin’s Apprentice” [review of Ratner’s Star]. Newsweek, June 7, 1976, p. 88.