DeLillo’s work has always been prescient. An author who has been fascinated by the “curious knot” that binds terrorists and novelists. His subject has been variations on the paranoiac nostalgia for disaster, technology’s appetite for immortality and extinction and the threat of the artist being supplanted by the terrorist. In Cosmopolis, he turns his attention, ten years before the global financial meltdown, to the sinister effects of extreme greed and wealth.
Cosmopolis is a day in the life novel with events coming off simultaneously speeded up (there are numerous sexual exploits, a raft of fast-talking meetings, lunches, a riot, a funeral and, ultimately, assassination plots and gunplay) yet the prose is glacially slow, attending to the nanoseconds of moments.
The style is a kind of literary brutalism. Denatured, scientific, sparse, liminally cool. Like the looming geometries of brutalist architecture, it seems the purpose ofCosmopolis is to be uncompromising, stark, post-human. The conversations Packer has with his consultant, theoretician, wife and mistress read like cut-ups of Baudrillard. He has no motive beyond wanting a haircut. Packer is a cypher and a scapegoat for the horrors of what has increasingly come to be known as “Capitalist Realism”. He barely has a human impulse.
DeLillo’s fiction post-Underworld and post-9/11 has become noticeably smaller and slower. His aura of prescience has been uprooted and as Andrew O”Hagan has noted, his out and out ‘terrorist’ novel lacks everything good we have come to know about DeLillo beyond a couple of set pieces and strong sentences. Aside from Falling Man, there is The Body Artist and Point Omega, which opens with the gambit that, “The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we’re alone thinking feeling, lost in memory, dreamily selfeaware, the submicroscopic moments.”
Progress and catastrophe are horrifyingly interlinked, even on a personal level and Packer’s actions, abstractions, speculations and prophesies have the power to shake the world.
“In fact data itself was soulful and flowing, a dynamic aspect of the life process. This was the eloquence of alphabets and numeric systems, now fully realised in electronic form, in the zero-oneness of the world, the digital imperative that defined very breath of the planet’s living billions.”
Packer, like a Pharaoh, lives for death. He has amassed a huge fortune, has 6% body fat and a beautiful wife yet he longs for the sort of bodylessness that can truly set him free. Packer is without motive and is going through a crisis of protagonisity. There’s nothing wrong with having ideas in novels. They’d be insubstantial without them. But DeLillo doesn’t allow them to develop beyond cuttings of theory and take on deeper, more abstruser meanings through dramatic action. The question of intent is whether DeLillo intends for Packer to be real at all. Whether he want to use the artifice of fiction as a visible exterior like Richard Rogers’ le centre Pompidou exposing the many fictions that invent reality.
Fukuyama was right. This is the End of History. There are no serious alternatives to the “global social totality” of the market. The acceptance of this ‘ideology’ has been called Capitalist Realism. Intended to mean that this isn’t the only alternative, but the ideology presents itself as a non-ideology, not as a positive programme of improvement or values, but as a necessity and ruthlessly pragmatic. The other Capitalist Realism is a pun on ‘Socialist’ or Social Realism. This is a neo-noir worldview implicit within works by Frank Miller and James Ellroy (and even my own beer-stained, working class spaghetti Western, Shark), that present rugged individuals merely surviving within the ‘realism’ of capitalism. Critics like Mike Davis have written that such works endorse ‘homo reaganus‘ and desensitise outrage.
There is also the extent to which capitalism is able to redefine reality and the boundaries of the human through technology. This seems to be the real starting point forCosmopolis. So a traditional novel form that plays to bourgeois class prejudices might not be desirable. Another way of expressing this concern might be found in the paradox of a film like Avatar, that, while being ostensibly leftist, anti-imperialist and green is a multi-million pound popcorn movie that functions as a vicarious thrill of radicalism while maintaining the structures it seeks to disinherit.
Yet the antimony within DeLillo has always been between postmodern abstraction and secular mysticism. For all the predilection toward fashionable theory, anti-globalisation and post-human themes, there is a moral centre to Cosmopolis. There actually is a motive beneath the surface of wanting to get a haircut and for all the futurist prose Packer goes through something of a change of fortune. He understands that he’s missing the predatory impulse to be human. The dynamic essence of human nature. DeLillo is most rooted in his connection within the American transcendental tradition. Like Whitman, Emerson and Melville, DeLillo is a mystic. Eric Packer wants to transcend his physical limitations with digital technology. This is the true life. Great art is not simply relevant. The latest update on social theory or reductive allegories for power structures and political viewpoints. The purpose isn’t to just to broadcast, stock information or present arguments (though it can do all of these things). It is to tell us how it feels, how ideas feel lived in characters, what it means to live in a mass, in transition, transformed by science. As all fiction becomes the stuff of science fiction, Cosmopolis is an attempt at a kind of realism that is barely real at all.
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