Shaking the Foundations: Place, Embodiment, and Compressed Time in Don DeLillo’s “The Ivory Acrobat”

ABSTRACT

In the body of criticism around Don DeLillo’s work, his short fiction has tended to be either overlooked or relegated to the category of precursor to the longer novels. This essay parts from the premise that the work DeLillo publishes in the short form deserves more focused critical attention, as its altered narrative mode opens up new avenues of expression which permit DeLillo to map out different approaches to the same broader issues his novels explore. The 1988 short story “The Ivory Acrobat,” included in the 2011 collection The Angel Esmerelda, is a text which exemplifies this essential difference, broaching in advance even of its theorization the contemporary problem of compressed or accelerated space-time, an issue which is most often associated with DeLillo in the context of 2003’s Cosmopolis. DeLillo’s later emphasis on embodiment and the significance of place from The Body Artist to Zero K is here dealt with earlier and in a distinct way, depicting through a highly spatial representation an alternative response to the altered experience of time and space in the modern era, a response based in a reaffirmation of the body as the seat of being.

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Notes

1. See discussions in Engles (“Who Are You, Literally?”) and, most notably, Mark Osteen’s American Magic and Dread (2000).

2. See articles by Kauffmann (“The Wake of Terror”) and Daanoune (“The Rough Shape of a Cross”).

3. See Martucci‘s chapter “Place as Active Receptacle in The Angel Esmerelda” in the 2017 collection of essays, Don DeLillo after the Millennium.

4. Though see Doreen Massey’s chapter “Flexible Sexism” in Space, Place and Gender, pp. 212–248 for an important feminist critique of Harvey’s text.

5. See chapters 15–17 in; Harvey‘s The Condition of Postmodernity (1990).

6. This statement and the approach of this paper is informed by such a phenomenological understanding of place as that originary point out of which the human subject’s perceptions of time and space are born, and indeed out of which subjectivity itself is therefore possible. As Edward Casey writes, it is “place itself that is indispensably spatio-temporal, ineluctably both at once” (“2007” 509–10). For more on place and subjectivity understood in this way, see Casey’s Getting Back into Place (1993) and The Fate of Place (1998), as well as Malpas’ Place and Experience (1999).

7. For more on time-space compression/acceleration in Cosmopolis, see articles by Chandler; Merola; Varsava.

8. See Boxall, Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction p. 114 and “Late: Fictional Time in the Twenty-First Century” p. 690.

9. I refer to articles by Crystal Alberts and Nicole Merola, as well as a book-length study by James Gourley.

10. Gourley writes that, in Cosmopolis, “clarified is DeLillo’s conceptualization of time, which in this novel (derived from my research in the DeLillo Archives at the University of Texas at Austin) moves beyond [George] Steiner’s analysis of time to the work of Paul Virilio” (6).

11. Cf. Boxall, Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction, pp. 41–3.

12. For more on this, refer to Robert Kohn’s “Parody, Heteroglossia, and Chronotope in Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Street,” in which he argues for Wunderlick’s retreat and spiritual process as paralleling that of Tibetan yogi Milarepa.

13. Cf. Boxall’s discussion of End Zone and Wittgenstein in his monograph (pp. 42–44) or, more generally, Cowart‘s The Physics of Language; Pass‘s The Language of Self: Strategies of Subjectivity in the Novels of Don DeLillo.

14. Though the way in which DeLillo has tackled a wide range of themes and cultural forms in his long career supports equal relevance of the political/economical-based theoretical development of time-space compression as per David Harvey and the more technological/information-based development of Virilio’s accelerated time, as mentioned earlier both concepts are in the end an attempt to understand the forces behind a unitary contemporary experience; they are by no means dichotomous. Moreover, in this paper I refer to these two thinkers (as they were the original proponents of the effects of compressed/accelerated time) without finding it necessary to further engage the important counterpoints regarding class and especially gender as brought up by feminist thinkers such as Doreen Massey, who touches on this in her “Flexible Sexism” chapter of Space, Place and Gender; such counterpoints do not negate the concepts as such, but rather argue for an adjusted critical view in their consideration – an adjustment with which I am certainly in agreement.

15. Such an assertion is again informed by the philosophical explorations of place as seen in such texts as Getting Back into Place by Edward Casey (1993) and Place and Experience (1999) by J.E. Malpas, both of which (building on such thinkers as Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger) emphasize the inseparability of time and space in one’s experience of being in the world.

16. I refer to the Virilio texts cited in this paper, Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity (1989) as well as Massey’s essay “A Global Sense of Place” (1991), published for one in her collection Space, Place and Gender (1994).

17. Cf. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (1989) or Fisher, Capitalist Realism (2009).

18. See Bakhtin pp. 253–54 on this.

19. Cf. Harvey‘s Justice Nature and Geography of Difference (1996): “Place, in whatever guise, is like space and time, a social construct” (293).

20. See Relph, Edward. Place and Placelessness. London, Pion, 1976. See also Augé (Non-places) for a furthering of this concept into that of the “non-place.”

21. For similar arguments formulated in somewhat distinct ways, see Tuan (Space and Place), Sack (Homo Geographicus), and Casey (1993, 1998).

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Trevor Westmoreland

Trevor Westmoreland is a PhD scholar specializing in Don DeLillo and representations of space and time in contemporary American fiction, most especially as found in desert landscapes, at the Universidad Autónoma in Madrid, Spain.