Unruly bodies in the fiction of Don DeLillo

Throughout Don DeLillo’s oeuvre, anxieties of American culture are expressed through unruly, excessive bodies, and in the interactions between body and world. Bodies uniquely and variously channel their cultural contexts in DeLillo’s fiction: in characters’ experiences of pain, illness, and violence, boundaries are challenged and selfhood negotiated. Bodily fluids and wastes variously invoke horror and fascination, and force a reckoning with how the body’s borders are thought and maintained. Abject and leaky bodies challenge and undo idealised notions of the embodied subject as intact and safe from contamination.

Chapter one examines how, in Falling Man (2007), DeLillo interrogates the relationship between the body and language, suggesting that the unique vitality and chaos of embodied experience escapes the limited capacities of narrative form. Chapter two looks at abjection, pain and selfhood in Mao II (1991) and The Body Artist (2001). Chapter three focuses on the relationship between bodily transgressions and cultural abjection in Americana (1971). Chapter four explores how specific anxieties of the Cold War are expressed through bodies and bodily fluids in Underworld (1997). Finally, Chapter five looks at ideas of containment and consumption in Players (1977).

DeLillo’s writing of the body both resonates with existing theory and philosophy, and represents an idiosyncratic line of enquiry all its own. The overall argument of this thesis is based on close readings, supported by relevant theory and criticism and revelatory archival research. Whilst DeLillo’s oeuvre is widely recognised as a prolific and cerebral engagement with U.S. culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, here it is shown to also represent a fecund and ongoing account of how the body in the context of American culture might be thought and written.