The Writing of Ruins: Beckett, Late Modernism, and the Inhuman in Don DeLillo’s Postmillennial Fiction

Abstract

This article explores the influence of Samuel Beckett on Don DeLillo’s postmillennial, twenty-first century fiction. Although Beckett is often self-remarked as a direct influence by DeLillo, the late works – I analyse The Body Artist (2001), Cosmopolis (2003), Falling Man(2007), and the most recent, The Silence (2020) – go further than DeLillo’s earlier writings in pursuing something approximate to what Beckett terms a ‘literature of the unword’. Much like his Irish predecessor, DeLillo is also a writer caught between modernism and postmodernism (intellectually and stylistically, if not historically). In the prophetic novel Mao II (1991), protagonist Bill Gray notes: ‘Beckett is the last writer to shape the way wethink and see. After him, the major work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings’. This vision of Beckett as an heroic author opposed to the mass mind is displaced in DeLillo’s minimalist later writings as they turn away from deploying and exploring highly textualized forms of postmodern subjectivity towards an engagement with material and bodily finitude. Drawing on Beckett’s NoHow On trilogy as a comparative case study, I claim that rethinking Beckett’s writing in terms of late modernism helps to explore his ongoing influence on DeLillo and the particular inhuman forms that populate DeLillo late career depiction of a highly mediatized, globalized and terrorized contemporary. These late works, in their ruined state of literary exhaustion, aim to – following Beckett – allow the ‘void [to] protrude like a hernia’.