Linguistic Disenchantment and Architectural Solace in DeLillo and Artaud (1997)

Contemporary literary criticism and modern philosophy are rife with architectural metaphors: just as literary critics speak of surfaces and structures, foundations, frames, and fissures, so philosophers from Kant to Heidegger to Derrida have invoked structural concepts in their theorizing. Without architectural figure, as Mark Wigley has claimed, much of Heidegger's work would be groundless: is not that [Heidegger] simply theorizes architecture as such, but that theorizing is itself understood in architectural terms (7). It is only recently, however, that critics have begun to focus specifically on matrices between architectural theory and literary fiction. An example of this concentrated attention is Jennifer Bloomer's Architecture and Text, in which she argues that Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Piranesi's etchings both approach literary in their ambiguity and invitation to a kind of narrative interpretation.... Both texts are presented as white pages upon which black marks have been made (6). Similarly, literary critics like Fredric Jameson and Linda Hutcheon have been seeking new ways to textualize architectural space, while architectural practitioners like Bernard Tschumi and Peter Eisenman have been proclaiming that there is no longer any essential difference between architecture and text (Graafland 96). Indeed, Eisenman's houses - which aim to complicate relationship between inhabitants and structures - mirror textual constructions of contemporary novelists, whose truncated plots and enigmatic characters are literary equivalents of Eisenman's slanted walls and half-missing staircases. In particular, Eisenman's architectural theory seems to correspond with linguistic philosophy that informs work of Don DeLillo. In essays and interviews Eisenman has argued that in order to remain vibrant, architecture must continually reinvent itself by dislocat[ing] [the idea of] (54). In order to rethink what it means to dwell, we must first dissociate architecture from comfortable complacency of functionalism; while a building has to stand up and function, Eisenman contends that it does not have to look like it stands up and functions (52). In his novels DeLillo similarly dislocates idea of dwelling by depicting characters who are alternately welcomed and repelled by buildings they inhabit and by texts themselves. My purpose in this essay, however, is not directly to correlate Eisenman and DeLillo; rather my objective is to show how DeLillo invokes architectural concepts and metaphors to address and combat linguistic detachment experienced by his characters. Thus, in contrast to critics like Leonard Wilcox and Scott Bukatman who have hailed DeLillo as a paradigmatic postmodernist, in tune with Baudrillardian vision of a hyperreal America, I will argue that DeLillo's cynicism about language and communication is undercut by his architectural esthetics and accordingly that his postmodernism is rooted in a modernism very similar to that of surrealist theatrical auteur Antonin Artaud. What links them, as I see it, is their mutual concern with quest for an idiom that conjoins inner speech, social utterance, and physical space, and optimism that ultimately comes from finding such a space. Although my purpose is in no way to suggest any direct connection between Artaud and DeLillo - I am quite aware of dangers of collapsing theater and fiction and different historical periods - I will begin by outlining linguistic and architectural components of Artaud's project and then go on to show how these components can be used to illumine DeLillo's theory and practice. Skeptical about value of conventional language and inclined to treat body as an architectonic presence, Artaud urged his actors to develop a rhetoric of visuality in an effort to say unsayable. In The Theater and Its Double (1938) Artaud proposed a new theater - theater of cruelty - that would surmount the boredom, stupidity, and inertia of it all (83). …