On Silence and Judgement

 

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I don't propose to enter into a detailed response, in this blogpost, to DeLillo's latest. Or to be more precise, I'm interested in my broader reaction to DeLillo's latest rather than the more detailed specifics of such reaction. 

The Silence is brief. It's padded-out in my edition with large font (in, irksomely enough, typewriter case throughout, like a typescript from 1960) to 116 pages, but the whole is well under 20,000 words. It opens inside a plane on its way from Paris to New York. One passenger, Jim, is coping with his anxiety by reading the numbers off the in-flight screen: ‘arrival time sixteen thirty-two. Speed four seventy-one m.p.h. Time to destination three thirty-four’ and so on. His wife Tessa, a poet, is jotting things in her notebook. DeLillo describes her with an awkwardly egregious emphasis on pigmenation: ‘dark-skinned, Tessa Berens’; ‘Caribbean-European-Asian origins’ and the like. Then, later in the novel, when Jim and Tessa have made their way to Diane Lucas' Manhattan appartment, we get: ‘Diana thought she was beautiful, mixed-parentage’ [71]. Diane is a retired university professor and is hosting a Super Bowl party with her husband Max and a younger friend Martin (this latter one Diane's former students; he seems to be on the autism spectrum). The skin-colour of these other characters is not vouchsafed to us, but we can intuit the blanke default, alas (at one point, inside the appartment, DeLillo peers into Tessa's mind and shares what, we assume, he assumes a woman like her would be thinking: ‘she sees herself. She is different from these people. She imagines taking off her clothes nonerotically to show them who she is’ [91]. And then again, later: ‘Tessa Berens studies the backs of her hands as if confirming the color, her color’ [112]. Hmm.)

Anyway: Jim and Tessa's plane suffers engine failure and lands bumpily, leaving Jim with a wound where his head knocked against the window. In Manhattan, Diane, Max and Martin talk sport, types of bourbon, telescopes, life, the universe and Einstein’s 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity which Martin quotes at length from memory, in English and German, sometimes affecting an Albert Einstein voice. 

The big event of the novel happens: electricity dies, the grid has failed, all the screens go black. It's a temporary inconvenience, or it's a permanent collapse, the novel doesn't tell us. Jim and Tessa make their way to a NY hospital where Jim's head is bandaged. The two of them have sex in a toilet cubicle before walking across town to Diane's appartment. There they join the others in disposing of the time with chatty chatting chat. Max performs an imaginary commentary of what might be happening at the Super Bowl. More Einstein is quoted. Ponderings on the nature of reality alternate with banalities. The book ends by giving each of the main characters a two-page-long monologue: Diane talks about ‘staring into space’ and ‘time's arrow’; Jim recounts their emergency landing (‘I was tossed sideways into the window, someone was shouting fire, was a wing on fire’); Max recalls walking around the now darkened city; Tessa speculates on apocalypse (‘is our normal experience being stilled? Are we witnessing a deviation in nature itself?’) and finally Martin quotes some more Einsein. Bish bash and, dare I say it, bosh: the novel is done.

This is a slight piece of work, or it isn't; a five-finger exercise or a brilliant distillation. There are, I think, interesting, or potentially interesting, things going on. It's a novel about end zones, end times (like lots of DeLillo) and about words. It's about words in the sense that there's very little descriptive prose; it's almost entirely dialogue—it reads, indeed, as if DeLillo had originally conceived it as a play, and only latterly decided to novelise his material—and therefore about that John Ashbery thang of threading profundity and beauty through the quotidian murmurs and gabble of ordinary speech. But it's also about words in a more quasi-religious, lapsed-Catholic logos sense: ‘“Cryptocurrencies ... Crypto” [Diane] says, pausing, keeping her eyes on Martin. “Currencies.” Somewhere within all those syllables, something secret, covert, intimate’ [86]. Lest we miss this, DeLillo repeatedly presses the relevant pedal:

“The painted ceilings. Rome,” she said. “The tourists looking up.”

“Standing absoluely still.”

“Saints and angels. Jesus of Nazareth.”

“The luminous figure. The Nazarene. Einstein,” he said. [53]

There's also lots in the novel to do with screens. Airborne Jim reading his screen for comfort. Everyone on their phones all the time, as everyone is nowadays. Folk gathered to watch not the Super Bowl (as DeLillo's characters gather to watch the baseball at the beginning of Underworld) but to watch a screen-mediated version of the Super Bowl. Screens, DeLillo knows, grant us only a kind of simulacrum of access to things and people, but screens also screen us from things and people, protect us. That, combined with the gestured-towards (lazily gestured-towards would be an overly judgmental way of putting it, but still) consilience of Einstein's weird physics and religious faith, is the main thrust of this book.

Alright. But, as I said at the beginning, I'm not here to delve into all that. Rather I'm intrigued by the fact that, upon finishing the novel I could not decide whether it was any good or not. This is what I tweeted at that time:

Consider: I am a professional critic. Determining and assessing literary and aesthetic judgment is literally what I do for a living. You'd think I'd be able to thumbs-up or thumbs-down a 20,000 word novella. And yet here we are.

I don't mean to protest too much, of course. I could certainly gussy-up a reaction, if pressed (or, as it might be, paid: for instance paid to write a review of the title). That's not my point. Rather I'm intrigued by the Schrödinger's felinity of this particular novel. Aren't our aesthetic responses more intuitive and immediate than this? If I drink a slug of milk I know immediately whether it's gone off or not. If I hear a song for the first time I can, by and large, tell whether I like it, or at the very least whether I'm going to like it, as (if) I become more famliar with it. DeLillo, increasingly (which is to say with a lot of his later, post 9/11 fiction), leaves me baffled on this front. I don't mean baffled with respect to what the novel's about, what he's doing and so on. Baffled on this fundamental level of not knowing whether his novel is good or is shit. Honestly, The Silence could be either.

My milk analogy isn't entirely apropos, I know. Kant's Critique of Judgement distinguishes between four modes of aesthetic response: agreeable / disagreeable; good / bad; beautiful / ugly; sublime / contemptible. The agreeable is a simple sensory judgment (it gives immediate sensory pleasure; ‘this doughnut tastes nice’, ‘this bed is soft’ and so on). The good is a moral judgment, and so connected to Kant's idea of a fixed and absolute notion of ethical reason. The beautiful is a ‘subjective universal’ judgment, one that relies on what Kant calls the ‘free play’ of the cognitive powers of imagination and understanding, and which he argues must broadly conform with the sorts of judgements (‘this is beautiful’, ‘this is ugly’) of other reasonable and cultured people, a sensus communis as to the criteria of taste by which such judgments can be made. The sublime is also a ‘subjective universal’, with the difference that it speaks not to proportion, harmony etc, but to a going-beyond the immediately comprehensible, an awe-inspiring affect of terror and wonder.

We're going beyond agreeability into quesions of taste, and taste, obviously, is taught rather than innate (judging a Haydn string quartet or a Rothko canvas is hardly an instinctual ability possessed by every newborn, after all). As a little kid I liked the bright, accessible music of Beatles but hated Bob Dylan's tuneless droning and wheezy soundworld. I later learned to love Dylan, and to see the aesthetic merit and resonance where before I heard only ugliness. Sometimes I engage with art and, as the phrase goes, bounce off it. Often I will give the art another go: for maybe the problem is me. Maybe I can learn to love it. And sometimes I do so! Often I don't. Of course I don't expect my aesthetic response to be always and everywhere instant and infallible. But ... I've been kicking around, aesthetic-judgment-wise, long enough (as per Malcolm Gladwell's Blink) for it often to be instant, and rarely wrong. In this case, though, my gut is caught, like a donkey between two equidistant and equally tempting bales of straw, who then starves to death, between good and bad as DeLillo judgments. Odd, no?

Perhaps the conclusion we should draw, here, is that DeLillo is unusually good at pitching his novels into an uncanny zone where good writing and bad writing are in weird superposition. I don't know though. I wonder, instead, whether there has been a shift in the sensus communis, in terms of the legitimacy of aesthetic judgment. Experimental art of the postwar period, especially through the 1960s and 1970s (more so I think than the earlier generation of High Modernism) foregrounded a range of artworks which invited the reaction ‘is this crap?’ (rather than, as it might be, ‘is this good according to a different set of aesthetic criteria to the ones with which I am familiar?’) Les Demoiselles d'Avignon set out to be shocking and deracinating of reaction, but in a different way to, let's say, Carl Andre's neatly rectangular arrangement of bricks, Equivalent VIII (‘120 firebricks arranged in a rectangular formation,’ say the Tate website: ‘an important Minimalist work [that] provoked uproar after a 15 February 1976 article appeared in The Sunday Times questioning both the work's artistic merit and the price paid by the Tate in acquiring the artwork’). I'm old enough to remember the furore over the Tate's ‘Bricks’, as the work became known. The thing that occurs to me is that most of this kerfuffle was socially performative. Some of it was reflex anti-intellectualism, a suspicion of ‘high culture’ tout court, ‘I don't know much about art but I know what I like’ and so on (‘Emperor's New Clothes!’ scornfulness and all that). Some of it was genuine confusion, perhaps from people who had assiduously acquired a quasi-Kantian canon of tastes in art, only now to feel they were being sneered at by artists telling them: that's all been superseded now. Some of it was partisan on the other side: ‘if it upsets the establishment and traditionalists then it is good’ etc. None of this, it seems to me, touches the fundamental reflex of response: is Equivalent VIII good art, because it embodies balance, harmony, poise etc but makes these things new within a challenging intellectual-conceptual framework? Or is it shit, because it's just a fucking stack of breeze blocks some shyster has managed to fob off on one of the world's great art galleries. Mutatis mutandis, is The Silence column A, here, or column B?

The point (it's an obvious point, I know) is that these are less textual than they are metatextual engagements; discussions less about the specifics of this one artwork and more about the parameters of art as such. Which, though perfectly valid and interesting as a debate, is not what this blogpost is about. I have no issue with the posmodern novel, or obliquity in novel-making, or evem DeLillo, many of whose novels—earlier novels, if I'm honest, but still—I hold in high regard. This blogpost, though, is about this one novel, and its shitness or otherwise. Alright?   

:2:

Samuel Johnson once said ‘No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures.’ This may be the most wrongheaded thing Johnson ever said. I used to think it was, perhaps, only half-wrongheaded: that a man might, as it were, find hypocritical pleasure in Wagner in public, for the benefit of those he hoped to impress, and thereby for his own benefit, though he would still go home to his solitary domicile and his Easy Listening CDs. In other words I used to think that taste is, in large part defined by the movement from ego to Other and that it therefore necessarily encompasses both. But things are, I think, more complex than that. After all, we all of us often construe ‘pleasure’ when what we're actually experiencing is that-which-we-feel-we-ought-to-enjoy, or the pleasure of others we wish in turn to please, or perhaps to become like. We are social beings and therefore, as Freud notes in his Civilisation and Its Discontents, inexorably hypocritical. Our pleasures lie along precisely the same lines of force, even when, or perhaps especially when, we tell ourselves that they are our private business. Guilty pleasure is the horizon of pleasure of such, perhaps.

In part this reflects the fact that we can only gauge what our pleasures are by apprehending other peoples’ pleasures. The pleasure of others, for the various ways we construe that term ‘pleasure’, determines and shapes our pleasure. We sexually desire those who shape our sexual desire. We admire the art that is admirable by the standards of others (‘I don’t know much about art, but I know what others like …’). There aren’t any other standards for us to apply, after all. In the sense that we all own enjoyments that are not actually ours, we are nothing but hypocrites in our pleasures.

Johnson also said ‘he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man’ Thus the drunk, the crack-addict, the lecher and the sadist are all hoping for solace in their beastly life-projects. But these passtimes are quite alien to beasts (a lecherous beast? A drunk beast? A sadistic beast?). To say this is not to assert any animal-lib moral superiority of beasts over people; quite the reverse. It’s not that beasts are incapable of selfish self-indulgence: patently, they are – there’s nothing so gluttonous as a pampered dog. Rather it is to say that to live as a beast is to inhabit their moment-to-moment immersion in mortality, and that’s precisely where the pain of being a man inheres. Beasts do not need to rid themselves of the pain of being beasts because that’s not the shape of beastly consciousness; but men who method-act beastiality can never do other than throw into horrible relief their own self-conscious humanity. If you live moment by moment then death is only ever a moment away. It's that moment-ness that narcotics and fantasy are there to obscure.