Wartime for Duz and Grape-Nut Flakes: Nostalgia, Capital, and War in Don DeLillo’s “Human Moments in World War III”

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See Westmoreland for a summary of the state of the art in this regard, to which only needs to be added Rezania and Pirnajmuddin’s article on “The Angel Esmeralda.”

2. In fact, the majority of the extant criticism is dedicated to the story “Baader-Mienhof”: cf. Kaufmann, Herren, and Daanoune. Martucci provides the only comprehensive critical discussion of the collection, but as a book chapter, the discussion is necessarily limited in scope to a mere few paragraphs per story.

3. See for example Osteen, Boxall, and Dewey.

4. While the majority of the critical response to The Names focuses on some aspect of its treatment of language, see Houser and Longmuir for alternative responses.

5. As evidenced here, the approach in this article assumes a fundamental importance given to the role of place—the joint experience of space and time—in the human experience, a stance most clearly delineated by phenomenology. However, as this is more background than central tenet to my argument regarding DeLillo’s text, beyond some clarifications where necessary it should be sufficient to indicate here further reading in this regard; for the philosophical bases for this understanding of place in the human experience, see Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, Grosz, Lefebvre, and Malpas.

6. An arguable exception in his novels is the early Ratner’s Star (1976), a structurally playful and highly ironic text, which I would suggest is distinct in tone and gravitas to DeLillo’s work post The Names.

7. In a 1993 interview, DeLillo stated, “The Names is the book that marks the beginning of a new dedication. I needed the invigoration of unfamiliar languages and new landscapes, and I worked to find a clarity of prose that might serve as an equivalent to the clear light of those Aegean islands” (Begley and DeLillo 92).

8. See Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity and Virilio’s The Art of the Motor or Open Sky for theoretical developments of this. For the application of these concepts to DeLillo’s work, cf. Abel, Boxall, or Merola.

9. I owe much of the following discussion on the ontology of war to the threads tied together in the discussion in Astrid Nordin and Dan Oberg’s 2015 article, “Targeting the Ontology of War: From Clausewitz to Baudrillard.”

10. Here also there is much to be said about the contemporary arguments by the likes of Nordin and Oberg that the understanding of war needs to shift in a post 9/11 context to encompass the current, deferred state of permanent war.

11. I refer to the sense of time outlined in Benjamin’s well-known 1940 essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”

12. This is a topic that DeLillo famously explores in-depth in the novel immediately following this story’s publication, White Noise.

13. See also the full-length texts by Svetlana Boym and Helmut Illbruck for the most in-depth studies of the relevance of nostalgia to the contemporary moment.

14. The release of key texts in the first half of this decade are a testament to this: cf. Ridley Scott’s film Bladerunner, Gibson’s Neuromancer, Alan Moore’s graphic series V for Vendetta (starting 1982) and Watchmen (starting 1986), as well as the stories later anthologized in Bruce Sterling’s Mirrorshades.

15. James Gourley has confirmed DeLillo’s familiarity with Virilio’s Open Sky through archival research in DeLillo’s notes at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas (Gourley 6).

16. For Virilio’s own discussion of this, see Speed and Politics or the later Negative Horizon: An Essay in Dromoscopy.

17. Cf. Open Sky.

18. For more on the role of language in the structures of capital, see Marazzi.

Additional information

Funding

I declare no financial interest or benefit has arisen from the application of this research.

Notes on contributors

Trevor Westmoreland

Trevor Westmoreland is currently a lecturer at the Universidad Autónoma in Madrid, Spain. Beyond the interest in Don DeLillo, his research generally focuses on questions of ontology, gender, liminality, desert spaces, and utopian impulses, especially as expressed through literary places/the chronotope.