APF

language cult merely exaggerates (to a deadly degree) our habitual orientation to the language we
use, which we assume is transparent in its meaning and direct in its authority. DeLillo’s fiction
consistently questions these assumptions, never more directly than in The Names, and many of
the oblique, discontinuous stylistic features of his novels can be explained as a prolonged
response to the critique of language it also works to disclose, offering an alternative practice that
acknowledges the instability and uncertainties of human language. The need to cultivate a
different, less transcendental relationship with words and their use is explicitly depicted in The
Names, whose protagonist comes to appreciate the “cadences” of language, and can accept “the
rise and fall of the ironic voice.”
This acquiescence to the inconclusive nature of language is echoed in the formal and
narrative structures of the novels as well. Most of them feature characters engaged in a search for
meaning or enlightenment, only to have the search frustrated, become hopelessly convoluted.
Such a narrative scheme is most visible in Libra (1988), in which the invented character of
Nicholas Branch seeks to assemble a CIA secret history of the Kennedy assassination, but can
only conclude that the “real” story will never be known, so thoroughly confused, contradictory,
and circuitous is all the “evidence” he encounters (a judgment that doesn’t so much gainsay the
parallel narratives relating the story of Lee Harvey Oswald and the plot to assassinate the
President as it makes all three narrative strands essentially indeterminate, impossible to
reconcile). A novel like Libra explodes the human propensity to seek order and pattern by
invoking a patterning that is out of control, susceptible to an endless loop of explication and
interpretation. It also works to reveal the kind of order and pattern fiction itself offers, which also
prompts indefinite explication and interpretation rather than providing fixed meaning. What is
most meaningful in a work of fiction is found in the process of reading, not in the resolution of
conflicts or mysteries.
The gravest threat to our presumption of meaning and coherence is surely the prospect of
our own death. If death is final, oblivion looms, annihilating any meaning we try to force on
existence and making belief in immanent order or beauty pointless. Fear of death pervades
DeLillo’s fiction, but—at least before Zero K—probably most directly in White Noise, whose
main characters are preoccupied with death (including Murray Siskind, who is no doubt the
preeminent philosopher of death in DeLillo’s fiction, especially in his notorious lecture on the
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