DeLillo’s The Silence, Same but More

Perhaps at this point of an almost 50-plus year career in writing we cannot really expect Don DeLillo to change too much. His latest work, The Silence, is a short 117-page novel(la) that centres on the abrupt cutting off the power at the beginning of the 2022 Superbowl.

Similar to previous works, characters are shown to be paralysed by the ever-growing terms we use today to outline the apocalyptic feel of today’s world. There is the anxiety of being anonymous among crowds, virtual or otherwise, and the connections we build with each other further hollowed out.

The Silence focuses on married couple Max and Diane, and Martin, a professor today but a former student of Diane’s. All sit in wait for Jim and Tessa to arrive at the Superbowl party they are hosting. The guests are aboard a plane that has to make an emergency landing amid the power outage.

With the television suddenly switching off, the conversation turns to a number of theories imagined by Martin, an Einstein enthusiast who loves to talk, ventures that the Chinese had involvement with the outage, while a neighbour suggests a sunspot or a strong magnetic field.

None of which are based in reality, but we see the steady enticement of a conspiracy theory work its effect on the characters.

Following Max’s dismissal of the neighbour’s explanation, it is Diane who steps into the vacuum in the group to ask: “Is this the casual embrace that marks the fall of civilisation?”. The apocalypse is seductive.

And that is later literally played out in the sex Diane has with Martin later, where just before he says “Greenland is disappearing” and during the act translates Marx’s definition of capitalism. Marx himself a harbinger of the end of capitalism.

Between Martin and Diane a silence emerges. “You know what we want, don’t you?” she declares to Martin. Neither say anything because their desire is impossible to articulate, instead they can only connect through the language of destruction.

Where the connections lies is in tying together seemingly very different ideas together, a process that ends with the self-annihilation of the idea.

Internet arms, wireless signals, countersurveillance.
“Data breaches,” he says, “Cryptocurrenices.”
He speaks this last term looking directly at Diane.
Cryptocurrencies.
She builds the world in her mind, unhyphenated.
They are looking at each other.
She says, “Cryptocurrencies.”
She doesn’t have to ask him what this means.
He says, “Money running wild. Not a new development. No government standard. Financial mayhem.”
“And it is happening when?”
“Now,” he says. “Has been happening. Will continue to happen.”
“Crypto,” she says, pausing, keeping her eyes on Martin. “Currencies”.
Somewhere within all those syllables, something secret, covert, intimate.

Distilled here is the process of creation in today’s language. It is not describing a new idea, but a new brand of chaos. In that process of creating the cryptocurrency neologism, assimilating the two terms and removing the hyphen to elevate it into a noun. The final re-separation reveals “something secret, covert, intimate”.

What that is remains unclear, but is akin to the unsayable desire shared between Diane and Martin, a relationship that began as teacher and student that has reversed.

CROWDS

Another key theme throughout DeLillo’s work is the anxiety of crowds, the mass media’s ability to hypnotise a population (most acutely in Mao II).

In the Superbowl we have the virtual crowd through the screen. The millions watching at home knowing that millions of other are watching the same thing. But the sudden ending of that virtual bond creates the type of mayhem echoed in Martin’s dialogue on modern finance.

Max worries about the cash he might lose on his bet on the game. It is a hard number that drives his material interest in the game. Outside he reaches out to neighbours, to no avail, and then returns to narrate the game with the words and cliches that have penetrated his psyche over the many years of watching football. By scrutinising the blank screen he makes the game himself.

His use of language was confident, she thought, emerging from a broadcast level deep in his unconscious mind, all these decades of indigenous discourse muddled up by the nature of the game, men hitting each other, men slamming each other into the turf.

Later Max joins the crowds outside, those without working phones are unsure where to go. He imagines how people in other continents would react, before imagining his daughters, one travelling and the other in Boston. It is one of the few times we get access to Max’s inner thought process.

At the moment he finds himself feeling “claustrophobic” he forgets the names of his daughters, forcing himself to detach from the crowd and observe the people around him to rebuild his memory.

At the point of realising he has to make his way through the huddled masses, he reminds himself to “count the steps as he climbs to the apartment”. Again relying on the numbers to be his guide amid the chaos.

It is in the certain pattern of numbers that Max builds the foundation of his relationship with the world. The cash he bets on games, winning and losing, is how he involves himself in the crowded spectacle of sport. And the cash figure he bets on, incidentally, is unknown to Diane, a secret for her to unlock.

It’s a relationship echoed in Jim at the opening of the novel, where he regurgitates the altitude displayed on the screen of the plane, as well as the temperature, both in Celsius and Fahrenheit. But this obsessiveness with numbers denies him a healthy attachment with the world, even if it is what binds him.

Sleep was the point. He needed to sleep. But the words and numbers kept coming.

In just a few hours that it takes to finish The Silence a new reader to DeLillo can get a good summary of the themes in all his works. He’s one of the few writers that can document sports well (End Zone and Underworld) and narrate humanity’s instinct to its own destruction, whether its through mass media or nuclear armageddon.

Yet the beauty of DeLillo’s books are the depiction of tight spaces where the action takes place and the confusing patterns of speech in familial drama also make for great humour. The Silence is a fun work, even if its impact is likely to have a numbing affect on the reader left hopeless by the chaos that governs them.