Destination Valparaiso

The author of eleven novels, Don DeLillo began his literary career in a non-traditional way. He did not consider himself a writer until relatively late in life. In a 1997 interview with Diane Osen, DeLillo remembers that books–let alone writing–did not interest him as a child. “The minute I got out of school I started playing street games, card games, alley games, rooftop games, fire escape games, punch ball, stick ball, handball, stoop ball, and a hundred other games. I read comic books and I listened to the radio. No one read to anyone else at home. That’s why we had the radio; the radio read to us all.” As he grew older, DeLillo began reading American authors such as Hemingway, Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and the poet Hart Crane. The idea that he could be an author did not occur to him until he was “looking down a street filled with elms and maples and old homes. And there was something in the moment. Some mystery that made me feel I had to write about it.”

Although his career began with an ephemeral moment, its impact on twentieth-century literature is indelible. His name often appears in the company of authors like Norman Mailer and Thomas Pynchon. In his book Introducing Don DeLillo, Frank Lentricchia notes that DeLillo refuses to allow us to believe in the existence of a “‘human nature,’ here, now, forever, as ever.” He also points out that DeLillo prevents his readers “from gliding off into the comfortable sentiment that the real problems of the human race have always been about what they are today.” DeLillo’s significance rises from his ability to capture the unique crisis of our particular historical moment through the stories of charismatic and confused characters.

DeLillo employs different literary genres to tell his stories. His first performed play, The Day Room, premiered at the American Repertory Theater in 1986. In the laudatory reviews, critics praised his ability to capture pathos and humor. The Boston Globe called it “an unselfconscious, fizzing, inventive black comedy” and National Public Radio hailed it as a “metaphysical tour de force.” Robert Brustein, Artistic Director of the A.R.T., anticipated their enthusiasm. In recent conversation, he remembers feeling that he had stumbled on a dramatic genius similar to Pirandello. When Brustein first read Valparaiso, he had that same feeling but also recognized a writer who had “deep insights into where our country is heading.” Brustein found that DeLillo’s ability to capture the “paradox[es] of American life” and his sophisticated dramaturgy were alive and well in his second dramatic outing.

DeLillo’s ability to capture paradox on many levels may be what makes his playwriting so captivating. DeLillo’s stage worlds blur the line between realism and surrealism. In The Day Room, the first-act hospital set gives no physical indications of being anything outside the realm of a normal, double-occupancy hospital room. Doctors and nurses come in and out, but we slowly learn that they are escapees from the psychiatric ward’s day room. Each uniform-clad medical worker seems more authoritative than the last and assures us that he or she is the real doctor. But as they are one by one exposed, we realize that they are simply stark raving mad. By the end of the second act we know them as characters played by a group of itinerant actors. The play leaves us with an uneasy sense that the insane manipulate reality better than the sane.

Another reason for DeLillo’s success as a playwright lies in his ability to structure urgent, postmodern themes into compelling action and conflict. In Valparaiso, he focuses on how we define, construct, and maintain personal identity in a media-saturated culture. DeLillo’s stories demonstrate the insidious power that the media have to infiltrate our personal lives while also revealing our complicity. A character in DeLillo’s novel White Noise visits “THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA.” He remarks to his companion, “Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn. . . . We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura . . . We’ve agreed to be party of a collective perception. . . . ” The identity of the barn undergoes a transformation when presented as a media image.

In his book of literary criticism entitled Don DeLillo, Douglas Keesey remarks that those seeing the image no longer travel “beyond their conventional, mass-mediated forms of perception to view what little is left of the natural world . . . the tourists see only what the media have prepared them to see. . . . ” Even worse, “It may be that the tourists themselves have conspired in their media-induced blindness, because a longing for direct contact with foreign things is often countered by a fear of experience outside the normal range.” The media not only manipulate our images but slowly undermine our ability to accept these images on any other terms. As a result, the reality behind the images destabilizes. DeLillo’s stories take the problem one step further and question how we can possibly define individual identity in a world losing its grasp on reality.

In Valparaiso, we meet a man who enters the world of media interviews, a universe where the definitions of identity become complex. In their book Media Interview: Confession, Contest, Conversation, Philip Bell and Theo van Leeuwen explore how celebrity interviews create an environment where identity is mutable. The interviewee enters a quasi-theatrical experience; like a play, the interview has a structure, a set, a script, and a live audience. Even off-camera interviews use theatrical techniques. Experienced interviewers design the body position of the two people involved in the dialogue, the tone of voice, the props, and physical locale to influence the psychological state of the interviewee. The interviewer uses these techniques to achieve a specific objective. In the case of non-celebrity-turned-celebrity-by-some-kind-of-unique-experience – as with the main character in Valparaiso – the goal of the interview is to transform the new celebrities into “meaningful exemplars. . . . They have transcended the mundane and the material, or at least appear to do so as the interview unfolds.” However, unlike an actor in a traditional theatrical experience, the interviewee has little control over the performance. By obscuring the lines between real conversation and theatrical revelation, DeLillo forces us to renegotiate the terms of the world we are watching. In the pockets of contrast between reality and media reality, DeLillo gives us a glimpse of how dangerously close the two might be.

Michael’s story becomes a parable for the modern American. What happens to personal identity in the face of a media-saturated culture? Our images of what makes a person interesting, believable, watchable, and likable now must meet industry standards. Are we now to take our turmoil on to a talk show and let the audience decide for us who is the emotional victor? No one wants their identities to be controlled in this way, but the alternatives shrink as rapidly as our culture of media consumption grows. DeLillo pushes us to look beyond the emotional outlets offered to us by the media and seek–on our own terms–the definition of identity.

Megan Uebelacker is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University