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Cruel but hilarious
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Americana
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At twenty-eight, David Bell is the American Dream come true. He has fought his way to the top, surviving office purges and scandals to become a high-powered television executive. David's world is made up of the images that flicker across America's screens, the fantasies that enthrall America's imagination.
And then the dream—and the dream-making—become a nightmare. At the height of his success, David sets out to rediscover reality. Camera in hand, he journeys across the country in a mad and moving attempt to capture a sense of his own and his country's past, present, and future.
NB: "In preparing this edition for publication, the author has made some cuts in the original text; there is no new material." [on copyright page]
And then the dream—and the dream-making—become a nightmare. At the height of his success, David sets out to rediscover reality. Camera in hand, he journeys across the country in a mad and moving attempt to capture a sense of his own and his country's past, present, and future.
NB: "In preparing this edition for publication, the author has made some cuts in the original text; there is no new material." [on copyright page]
377 pages, Paperback
First published January 1,1971
This edition
- Format
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377 pages, Paperback
- Published
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July 6, 1989 by Penguin Publishing Group
- ISBN
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9780140119480
- ASIN
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0140119485
- Language
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English
About the author
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Donald Richard DeLillo is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, the complexities of language, art, the advent of the Digital Age, mathematics, politics, economics, and sports.
DeLillo was already a well-regarded cult writer in 1985, when the publication of White Noise brought him widespread recognition and the National Book Award for fiction. He followed this in 1988 with Libra, a novel about the Kennedy assassination. DeLillo won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II, about terrorism and the media's scrutiny of writers' private lives, and the William Dean Howells Medal for Underworld, a historical novel that ranges in time from the dawn of the Cold War to the birth of the Internet. He was awarded the 1999 Jerusalem Prize, the 2010 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2010, and the 2013 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
DeLillo has described his themes as "living in dangerous times" and "the inner life of the culture." In a 2005 interview, he said that writers "must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments... I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us."
DeLillo was already a well-regarded cult writer in 1985, when the publication of White Noise brought him widespread recognition and the National Book Award for fiction. He followed this in 1988 with Libra, a novel about the Kennedy assassination. DeLillo won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II, about terrorism and the media's scrutiny of writers' private lives, and the William Dean Howells Medal for Underworld, a historical novel that ranges in time from the dawn of the Cold War to the birth of the Internet. He was awarded the 1999 Jerusalem Prize, the 2010 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2010, and the 2013 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
DeLillo has described his themes as "living in dangerous times" and "the inner life of the culture." In a 2005 interview, he said that writers "must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments... I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us."
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The novel is constructed under the amazed and fascinated gaze of the reader, who sees the narrator gradually deconstructing his life and his own identity: from New York to the Navajo desert, his desert of origins, from his daily life punctuated by downtime, multiple liaisons, and "ego-moments" to an existence increasingly outside of normalized, conventional, collective time; from the quest for success, power, and seduction to the inner narrative of one's own story and to the creative act.
On the road to self-knowledge (the road movie he is filming is part of it), David Bell thus metamorphoses in America, merges with the most primitive fantasies of American society, and becomes himself the continent there unexplored.
Americana never ceases to remind us of the eternal struggle of man against the passage of time, the fear and fascination that the idea of death and destruction exert on individuals, and the hypocrisy of a society that promises happiness in 20-second commercials and at the same time, drops napalm on Vietnamese civilians (the action takes place in the early 1970s, amid the Vietnam War).
The poetic power that emanates from each sentence of this book, its incessant digressions, but which nevertheless always remain at the border of realism as cerebral and controlled as sometimes "dreamlike" and almost unreal, inscribe, in my opinion, Americana in the lineage of the great novels of Julio Cortazar or Roberto Bolaño (the latter moreover having one of his characters in "The Savage Detectives" say that Don Delillo was "the greatest living writer of our time").
On the road to self-knowledge (the road movie he is filming is part of it), David Bell thus metamorphoses in America, merges with the most primitive fantasies of American society, and becomes himself the continent there unexplored.
Americana never ceases to remind us of the eternal struggle of man against the passage of time, the fear and fascination that the idea of death and destruction exert on individuals, and the hypocrisy of a society that promises happiness in 20-second commercials and at the same time, drops napalm on Vietnamese civilians (the action takes place in the early 1970s, amid the Vietnam War).
The poetic power that emanates from each sentence of this book, its incessant digressions, but which nevertheless always remain at the border of realism as cerebral and controlled as sometimes "dreamlike" and almost unreal, inscribe, in my opinion, Americana in the lineage of the great novels of Julio Cortazar or Roberto Bolaño (the latter moreover having one of his characters in "The Savage Detectives" say that Don Delillo was "the greatest living writer of our time").
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I expected a little bit more but the writing is impeccable as always.
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A Polished Set of Pieties
My first experience of the DeLillo-Rama was n "The Names"n and until now I had only read one of the earlier novels - "Great Jones Street" - though I was trying to keep up with the later novels.
Little did I realise what a gem was waiting for me in "Americana", DeLillo's first novel.
It's 377 pages long, divided into four parts and 12 chapters, but it reads as fluently as a novel two-thirds its size.
Its relative brevity doesn't detract from its ability to explore or dramatise profound concerns. As the narrator, David Bell says of his own writing in a film script:
"Large issues will begin to manifest themselves out of the dull set of pieties I've been constructing here. This is not easy work for me."
It took DeLillo four years to write this novel. I'd say his reservations must have been more formal than stylistic, because the quality of the sentences is never less than exemplary.
Four Parts
While DeLillo is regarded as a Post-Modernist author, in this case it's more overtly because of his subject matter than his structural approach.
The four parts of the novel do however let in some scope for metafictional play:
Part One paints a self-portrait of David Bell as a vain (“I was an extremely handsome young man”) 28 year old producer for a New York based television network. There's plenty of corporate rivalry, sexual flirtation, prurient gossip and mutual suspicion. DeLillo totally nails the speech patterns of this subculture.
Part Two returns to Bell's childhood, and his relationship with his legendary advertising exec father, his socialite mother, and his two sisters, Mary and Jane.
In Part Three David absconds from work to make a semi-documentary, semi-autobiographical film in the Mid-West, which causes him to miss his engagement on a documentary project about the Navaho people in Arizona for his network.
Part Four sees David continue his road trip westward to California, after which much later (possibly 1999) he is living in isolation on an island (rather than the continent of North America) where he finishes an autobiographical novel (possibly this novel?).
Part Dream, Part Fiction, Part Movies
The film script gives David an opportunity to write about himself in dialogue form. So DeLillo creates the narrator David Bell, who then uses fictional friends, colleagues and actors to dramatise his own life and elaborate on the issues that preoccupy both himself and DeLillo. It's a nice touch of metafiction that doesn't distract or detract from the psychological realism of the novel as a whole:
“I'm thinking of making a long messy autobiographical-type film, part of which I'd like to do out here in the Midwest, if that's where we are - a long unmanageable movie full of fragments of everything that's part of my life, maybe ultimately taking two or three or more full days to screen and only a minutely small part of which I'd like to do out here. Pick out some sleepy town and shoot some film.”
After a while, the novel takes the form of the film, the movie’s style influences the structure and style of the novel. Maybe the book is the real motion picture:
“The illusion of motion was barely relevant. Perhaps it wasn't a movie I was making so much as a scroll, a delicate bit of papyrus that feared discovery...It takes centuries to invent the primitive.”
Bell describes the film in terms that apply equally to the novel:
“What I'm doing is kind of hard to talk about. It's a sort of first-person thing but without me in it in any physical sense, except fleetingly. It'll be part dream, part fiction, part movies. An attempt to explore parts of my consciousness.”
The Rumble of Public Opinion
The network places Bell at the heart of mass culture as at 1971. He regards television as "an electronic form of packaging" for the products that the network’s sponsors are advertising. He and his colleagues depend on sponsorship and advertising sales for the continuity of their programs and their status within the organisation. They have "orchestrated their lives to the rumble of public opinion," the emotional response of the crowd.
David's independent film is both an escape from the corporate crowd and a rebellion against mass culture, “the larger madness”. In contrast to television:
"The film is a sort of sub-species of the underground."
Modernist Literary and Filmic Precursors
The novel is shot through with references to modernists like James Joyce, Antonioni, Samuel Beckett and Godard, especially “Ulysses”:
“Mollycuddling my bloomless bride”; and
“I've got the Stephen Dedalus Blues and it's a long way to Leopoldville.”
A Leap Too Far
In Part Four, David encounters a community of hippies who are sharing accommodation with some self-exiled Apache Indians who have refused to embrace the life of ranchers.
Their leader believes in aliens and flying saucers, which proves to be a leap too far for David, and he moves on. He’s not yet ready to surrender to all aspects of the American counter-culture. His is a more individual and personal journey. It’s religious, almost sacred to him.
Westward to the Wilderness Dream
It’s hinted at the end of the novel that David returns to New York City to resume his participation in mainstream culture, even though his absence during the film project means that he has lost his job.
Only later does he end up on the island, where he wrote his book.
It’s hard to tell just how ingrained the mainstream is in his consciousness. The individual is overwhelmed by the multifarious images and dreams of commercial culture and advertising:
“...the mightiest of the visionaries [were] those strong enough to confront the larger madness. For the rest of us, the true sons of the dream, there was only complexity. The dream made no allowance for the truth beneath the symbols, for the interlinear notes, the presence of something black (and somehow very funny) at the mirror rim of one's awareness...but as a boy, and even later, all the impulses of all the media were fed into the circuitry of my dreams. One thinks of echoes. One thinks of an image made in the image and likeness of images. It was that complex.”
It was so complex that David had to escape from his reality by heading into the west, ironically a source of new and different dreams (“westward to the wilderness dream... to match the shadows of my image and my self”):
“I'm trying to outrun myself.”
“I've spent twenty-eight years in the movies...”
“It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams.”
DeLillo seems to be arguing that the dreams of the crowd cause the death of individuals, their reality and their possibilities. Society had become a "death machine" and television had become its “festival of death”, a “death circus”.
The world might remain a mystery, but DeLillo’s fiction has become a guidebook of sorts that directs us to pockets of life and individuality, and just perhaps a mirror that reflects our own.
May 29, 2016
My first experience of the DeLillo-Rama was n "The Names"n and until now I had only read one of the earlier novels - "Great Jones Street" - though I was trying to keep up with the later novels.
Little did I realise what a gem was waiting for me in "Americana", DeLillo's first novel.
It's 377 pages long, divided into four parts and 12 chapters, but it reads as fluently as a novel two-thirds its size.
Its relative brevity doesn't detract from its ability to explore or dramatise profound concerns. As the narrator, David Bell says of his own writing in a film script:
"Large issues will begin to manifest themselves out of the dull set of pieties I've been constructing here. This is not easy work for me."
It took DeLillo four years to write this novel. I'd say his reservations must have been more formal than stylistic, because the quality of the sentences is never less than exemplary.
Four Parts
While DeLillo is regarded as a Post-Modernist author, in this case it's more overtly because of his subject matter than his structural approach.
The four parts of the novel do however let in some scope for metafictional play:
Part One paints a self-portrait of David Bell as a vain (“I was an extremely handsome young man”) 28 year old producer for a New York based television network. There's plenty of corporate rivalry, sexual flirtation, prurient gossip and mutual suspicion. DeLillo totally nails the speech patterns of this subculture.
Part Two returns to Bell's childhood, and his relationship with his legendary advertising exec father, his socialite mother, and his two sisters, Mary and Jane.
In Part Three David absconds from work to make a semi-documentary, semi-autobiographical film in the Mid-West, which causes him to miss his engagement on a documentary project about the Navaho people in Arizona for his network.
Part Four sees David continue his road trip westward to California, after which much later (possibly 1999) he is living in isolation on an island (rather than the continent of North America) where he finishes an autobiographical novel (possibly this novel?).
Part Dream, Part Fiction, Part Movies
The film script gives David an opportunity to write about himself in dialogue form. So DeLillo creates the narrator David Bell, who then uses fictional friends, colleagues and actors to dramatise his own life and elaborate on the issues that preoccupy both himself and DeLillo. It's a nice touch of metafiction that doesn't distract or detract from the psychological realism of the novel as a whole:
“I'm thinking of making a long messy autobiographical-type film, part of which I'd like to do out here in the Midwest, if that's where we are - a long unmanageable movie full of fragments of everything that's part of my life, maybe ultimately taking two or three or more full days to screen and only a minutely small part of which I'd like to do out here. Pick out some sleepy town and shoot some film.”
After a while, the novel takes the form of the film, the movie’s style influences the structure and style of the novel. Maybe the book is the real motion picture:
“The illusion of motion was barely relevant. Perhaps it wasn't a movie I was making so much as a scroll, a delicate bit of papyrus that feared discovery...It takes centuries to invent the primitive.”
Bell describes the film in terms that apply equally to the novel:
“What I'm doing is kind of hard to talk about. It's a sort of first-person thing but without me in it in any physical sense, except fleetingly. It'll be part dream, part fiction, part movies. An attempt to explore parts of my consciousness.”
The Rumble of Public Opinion
The network places Bell at the heart of mass culture as at 1971. He regards television as "an electronic form of packaging" for the products that the network’s sponsors are advertising. He and his colleagues depend on sponsorship and advertising sales for the continuity of their programs and their status within the organisation. They have "orchestrated their lives to the rumble of public opinion," the emotional response of the crowd.
David's independent film is both an escape from the corporate crowd and a rebellion against mass culture, “the larger madness”. In contrast to television:
"The film is a sort of sub-species of the underground."
Modernist Literary and Filmic Precursors
The novel is shot through with references to modernists like James Joyce, Antonioni, Samuel Beckett and Godard, especially “Ulysses”:
“Mollycuddling my bloomless bride”; and
“I've got the Stephen Dedalus Blues and it's a long way to Leopoldville.”
A Leap Too Far
In Part Four, David encounters a community of hippies who are sharing accommodation with some self-exiled Apache Indians who have refused to embrace the life of ranchers.
Their leader believes in aliens and flying saucers, which proves to be a leap too far for David, and he moves on. He’s not yet ready to surrender to all aspects of the American counter-culture. His is a more individual and personal journey. It’s religious, almost sacred to him.
Westward to the Wilderness Dream
It’s hinted at the end of the novel that David returns to New York City to resume his participation in mainstream culture, even though his absence during the film project means that he has lost his job.
Only later does he end up on the island, where he wrote his book.
It’s hard to tell just how ingrained the mainstream is in his consciousness. The individual is overwhelmed by the multifarious images and dreams of commercial culture and advertising:
“...the mightiest of the visionaries [were] those strong enough to confront the larger madness. For the rest of us, the true sons of the dream, there was only complexity. The dream made no allowance for the truth beneath the symbols, for the interlinear notes, the presence of something black (and somehow very funny) at the mirror rim of one's awareness...but as a boy, and even later, all the impulses of all the media were fed into the circuitry of my dreams. One thinks of echoes. One thinks of an image made in the image and likeness of images. It was that complex.”
It was so complex that David had to escape from his reality by heading into the west, ironically a source of new and different dreams (“westward to the wilderness dream... to match the shadows of my image and my self”):
“I'm trying to outrun myself.”
“I've spent twenty-eight years in the movies...”
“It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams.”
DeLillo seems to be arguing that the dreams of the crowd cause the death of individuals, their reality and their possibilities. Society had become a "death machine" and television had become its “festival of death”, a “death circus”.
The world might remain a mystery, but DeLillo’s fiction has become a guidebook of sorts that directs us to pockets of life and individuality, and just perhaps a mirror that reflects our own.
May 29, 2016
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Στα πρώτα έργα των σπουδαίων συγγραφέων ψάχνεις να βρεις αναδρομικά τα στοιχεία που προμήνυαν την μετέπειτα πορεία, εκείνα τα ψήγματα μεγαλείου που σε κάνουν να θαυμάσεις από τα παρθενικά βήματα ήδη τη γραφή, το στυλ και τη γλώσσα που αποκρυσταλλώθηκαν και τελειοποιήθηκαν αργότερα. Στον ΝτεΛίλλο δεν χρειάζεται να ψάξεις πολύ.
Κι αν, όπως λένε, στο πρώτο βιβλίο οι συγγραφείς προσπαθούν να τα πουν όλα, στο «Αμερικάνα» όχι μόνο συναντάμε έναν φιλόδοξο και γεμάτο αυτοπεποίθηση πρωτοεμφανιζόμενο, ο οποίος ήδη βάζει τον πήχη ψηλά με ένα διεξοδικό ψυχογράφημα του (μετα)μοντέρνου Λευκού Αμερικανού Άνδρα στην αρχή της δεκαετίας της αμφισβήτησης (1971), αλλά θέλει να αποτυπώσει και όλα τα αδιέξοδα και τους φόβους του αμερικάνικου τρόπου ζωής και του περιβόητου Αμερικανικού Ονείρου με ένα ταξίδι στην ενδοχώρα, σε ένα αχανές (κυριολεκτικά και μεταφορικά) τοπίο όπου ο καθένας είναι απελπιστικά μόνος.
Ο David Bell είναι επιτυχημένο στέλεχος της τηλεόρασης στη μητρόπολη της Νέας Υόρκης, όμορφος, γυναικάς και μισογύνης. Αν κι επιπλέει με άνεση στην επιφάνεια ενός επίπλαστου κόσμου, όπου η διαφήμιση είναι το μόνο πολιτιστικό προϊόν που έχει γεννήσει η χώρα του. δυσφορεί. Έχει σπουδάσει κινηματογράφο και θέλει να ικανοποιήσει τις καλλιτεχνικές φιλοδοξίες που δεν μπορούν να βρουν διέξοδο. Ξεκινάει έτσι ένα ταξίδι στις Μεσοδυτικές Πολιτείες, με πρόσχημα μία τηλεοπτική παραγωγή και απώτερο σκοπό τη δική του πειραματική ταινία.
Όταν, όμως, ξεκινάς μια αναζήτηση, καλό είναι να ξέρεις τι ψάχνεις. Και ο David δεν ξέρει. Στα τέσσερα μέρη του βιβλίου θα μάθουμε (;) με μια υποδόρια αιχμηρή ειρωνεία για το παρελθόν του, για την ψυχρή σχέση με τον πατέρα του, για τη νεκρή μητέρα του και το οιδιπόδειο σύμπλεγμα που δεν ξεπέρασε ποτέ, για ένα καλλιτεχνικό όραμα που παραμένει άπιαστο και νεφελώδες γιατί αντικατοπτρίζει το εσωτερικό του κενό. Και ταυτόχρονα θα ανακαλύψουμε μια σχιζοφρενική χώρα που δεν μπορεί να συμφιλιώσει τις ενδογενείς της αντιφάσεις.
Κι όσο αυτό το ταξίδι στη ουσία της ψυχής του David και ολόκληρης της χώρας προχωρά, ο ΝτεΛίλλο θα δείξει από την αρχή γιατί είναι ένας από τους πρωτεργάτες της αμερικανικής μετανεωτερικότητας, με καταστάσεις που αγγίζουν το εξωφρενικό, με αλλόκοτο χιούμορ και με μια ολόκληρη πινακοθήκη οριακών χαρακτήρων που ψάχνουν να βρουν νόημα εκεί που δεν υπάρχει.
Για πρώτο βιβλίο όλα αυτά δεν είναι και λίγα.
Κι αν, όπως λένε, στο πρώτο βιβλίο οι συγγραφείς προσπαθούν να τα πουν όλα, στο «Αμερικάνα» όχι μόνο συναντάμε έναν φιλόδοξο και γεμάτο αυτοπεποίθηση πρωτοεμφανιζόμενο, ο οποίος ήδη βάζει τον πήχη ψηλά με ένα διεξοδικό ψυχογράφημα του (μετα)μοντέρνου Λευκού Αμερικανού Άνδρα στην αρχή της δεκαετίας της αμφισβήτησης (1971), αλλά θέλει να αποτυπώσει και όλα τα αδιέξοδα και τους φόβους του αμερικάνικου τρόπου ζωής και του περιβόητου Αμερικανικού Ονείρου με ένα ταξίδι στην ενδοχώρα, σε ένα αχανές (κυριολεκτικά και μεταφορικά) τοπίο όπου ο καθένας είναι απελπιστικά μόνος.
Ο David Bell είναι επιτυχημένο στέλεχος της τηλεόρασης στη μητρόπολη της Νέας Υόρκης, όμορφος, γυναικάς και μισογύνης. Αν κι επιπλέει με άνεση στην επιφάνεια ενός επίπλαστου κόσμου, όπου η διαφήμιση είναι το μόνο πολιτιστικό προϊόν που έχει γεννήσει η χώρα του. δυσφορεί. Έχει σπουδάσει κινηματογράφο και θέλει να ικανοποιήσει τις καλλιτεχνικές φιλοδοξίες που δεν μπορούν να βρουν διέξοδο. Ξεκινάει έτσι ένα ταξίδι στις Μεσοδυτικές Πολιτείες, με πρόσχημα μία τηλεοπτική παραγωγή και απώτερο σκοπό τη δική του πειραματική ταινία.
Όταν, όμως, ξεκινάς μια αναζήτηση, καλό είναι να ξέρεις τι ψάχνεις. Και ο David δεν ξέρει. Στα τέσσερα μέρη του βιβλίου θα μάθουμε (;) με μια υποδόρια αιχμηρή ειρωνεία για το παρελθόν του, για την ψυχρή σχέση με τον πατέρα του, για τη νεκρή μητέρα του και το οιδιπόδειο σύμπλεγμα που δεν ξεπέρασε ποτέ, για ένα καλλιτεχνικό όραμα που παραμένει άπιαστο και νεφελώδες γιατί αντικατοπτρίζει το εσωτερικό του κενό. Και ταυτόχρονα θα ανακαλύψουμε μια σχιζοφρενική χώρα που δεν μπορεί να συμφιλιώσει τις ενδογενείς της αντιφάσεις.
Κι όσο αυτό το ταξίδι στη ουσία της ψυχής του David και ολόκληρης της χώρας προχωρά, ο ΝτεΛίλλο θα δείξει από την αρχή γιατί είναι ένας από τους πρωτεργάτες της αμερικανικής μετανεωτερικότητας, με καταστάσεις που αγγίζουν το εξωφρενικό, με αλλόκοτο χιούμορ και με μια ολόκληρη πινακοθήκη οριακών χαρακτήρων που ψάχνουν να βρουν νόημα εκεί που δεν υπάρχει.
Για πρώτο βιβλίο όλα αυτά δεν είναι και λίγα.
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Americana is DeLillo's first novel, but i cant say that it seems to be the first he wrote. it's as if he never really advanced in his writing. It's as if he chose a way of writing and stuck to it until now. Americana deals with a man, David Bell, who leaves his job in order to 'live,' but he goes on an advanture from which he never recoveres...
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La mia videorecensione: https://youtu.be/NmwXPrshUxQ
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