Baseball, Garbage and the Bomb: Don De Lillo, Modern and Postmodern Memory

Abstract

The paper focuses on the representation of the forms and objects of both collective and individual memory in Don DeLillo's novel Underworld. The novel's main concern is, as it turns out, the decline of the first type of memory and, as an antithesis or even salvific antidote, the narrative salvaging of the second form of remembrance, the memory of the ‘idiosyncratic self'. The organic structures of communal memory have been undermined by television and other visual media, (post-)modern mobility and flexibility, consumerism and novelty, and also, positivist historicism. These phenomena have fostered the illusion of an overall availability of space, time and objects which lose, however, any indication of their origin, genesis, or memory. In post-war America the identity-forming memory of traditional communities has been replaced with the collective memory of waste and the atomic bomb. They unite middle-class Americans in an uncanny new religio. But this history of postmodern loss and mnemonic paranoia is counterbalanced by an often lyrical narrative of the memory of individual characters, of the Bronx, and a piece of memorabilia, a baseball. Yet, beautiful as the description of these recollections may be, they remain devoid of any communal or political significance and appear, after all, as mere nostalgia.