THE RADIANCE OF DAILINESS: DON DELILLO AND THE

EVERYDAY

BOOK PROPOSAL FOR PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

PROFESSOR MARK L. SAMPLE

GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY

BRIEF DESCRIPTION

The Radiance of Dailiness: Don DeLillo and the Everyday is about Don
DeLillo and things—real world, physical, everyday things. My project
approaches DeLillo as a cultural archeologist who uses ordinary objects
in his novels to understand life in contemporary America. Examining
the way common, household things—a Coca-Cola bottle, a pair of
shoes, kitchen trash—circulate through DeLillo’s fourteen novels, I
argue that DeLillo imagines that everyday life is populated by things as
much as by people. Moreover, DeLillo reveals that the objects we
might otherwise take to be mundane and apolitical are in fact deeply
connected to larger social and historical forces.

FULL DESCRIPTION

The Radiance of Dailiness: Don DeLillo and the Everyday addresses a

significant gap in DeLillo scholarship, which is that critics have
consistently overlooked DeLillo’s preoccupation with everyday things.
Throughout his thirty-five year career, DeLillo has returned time and
time again in his novels to the theme of the ordinary, the everyday,
what DeLillo once called in an interview the “radiance of dailiness.”
DeLillo scholars in particular and American Literature scholars more
generally have glossed over this fixation of DeLillo’s, most commonly
ascribing the recurring thematic presence of things in his novels to
DeLillo’s broader critique of American consumer culture.

However, what the current scholarship has not recognized is that

DeLillo exhibits an engineer’s interest in the pure physicality of the
trinkets and objects of our daily lives. I distinguish between things and
commodities in this project, which in its crudest form is the difference
between how things are used and how they are made, marketed,
bought, and sold. Much of my focus in The Radiance of Dailiness
centers on the way DeLillo imagines things are actually used—or
misused as the case may be. DeLillo explores how physical objects are
endowed with unique affordances, a term from the recent work of
Sellen and Harper that refers to the activities and habits that the

1
physical properties of an object allow. These affordances shape
DeLillo’s characters, and in some cases, entire plot trajectories, which
suggests that for DeLillo the bric-a-brac in our houses, apartments,
offices, and stores is not merely background clutter—white noise, so to
speak—but is in fact ecological, a formative and transformative aspect
of our physical environment.

Even as I demonstrate DeLillo’s interest in the thing-in-itself, I explore

how he gives life to the inanimate by reading into and through the
history of things. I argue in The Radiance of Dailiness that DeLillo is
disinterested in a typical Marxist critique of the commodity and is
invested in actually reversing the terms of commodity fetishism.
Instead of veiling social relations, hiding the material reality of their
production, things in DeLillo’s novels invite speculation about their
origin and design. DeLillo is deeply concerned with what the
anthropologist Igor Kopytoff calls “the cultural biography of things,”
the very real, material conditions of an object, how it is given meaning
and situated and resituated within culture. For DeLillo, delving into the
cultural biography of an object is a means to illuminate the past and
perhaps more importantly, reveal what remains hidden in the present.

Examining DeLillo’s treatment of objects as material forms and the

cultural work these objects perform as they are used, mishandled, lost,
or forgotten, I am necessarily guided by several theoretical
approaches. Bill Brown’s “Thing Theory” and his recent effort in A
Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago,
2003) to think through physical objects represented in 19th century
American literature is an important predecessor to my study, dealing
with many of the same issues but in an earlier milieu. The
anthropologist Daniel Miller’s ethnographic work on material culture
studies (Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter, Chicago, 1998)
likewise provides an important framework for considering the social life
of objects, and Miller’s work is especially relevant when we consider
that DeLillo himself is an ethnographer of sorts.

As important as these contemporary scholars are, their work is

unvaryingly indebted to one of the first theorists of modern everyday
life, the German critic Walter Benjamin, whose wide-ranging essays
from the 1920s and 1930s serve as the initial impulse for my study of
DeLillo. Benjamin’s insistence on delving into the mystery of everyday
things, whether it’s a telephone in his childhood home in the early
1900s or the meaning of a wooden toy to a child, motivates the spirit
of my work. Benjamin cultivates a mindfulness of the ordinary, seeing
anew what has gone unnoticed simply because of its familiarity. Surely
Benjamin would agree with Father Paulus’s counsel to Nick Shay in

2
DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) that “everyday things represent the most
overlooked forms of knowledge.” Benjamin taps into these forms of
overlooked knowledge, often by examining what he calls a “dialectical
image,” a startling juxtaposition of two opposing elements, bound
together in a way that disrupts a typical understanding of either of the
elements. DeLillo too, I argue, exposes everyday life through dialectical
images—say, a Molotov cocktail in a Coca-Cola bottle—and indeed, this
is DeLillo’s primary strategy for exploring, to quote from Father Paulus
again, “the depth and reach of the commonplace.”

The Radiance of Dailiness: DeLillo and the Everyday makes a

substantial contribution to the field of contemporary American literary
studies. Most significantly, I reframe Don DeLillo, often considered
alongside Thomas Pynchon as one of the principal postmodernist
novelists of our age, as a realist writer, firmly grounded in the modern
material world. I insist that DeLillo, even at his most surreal or stylized,
is a writer of realist fiction. This reformulation of DeLillo counters the
trend in DeLillo studies, which has been dominated in recent years by
poststructuralist readings that focus on the philosophical or
metaphysical side of DeLillo. While these influential studies—such as
David Cowart’s Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language (University of
Georgia, 2002) or Joseph Dewey’s Grief and Nothing: A Reading of Don
DeLillo (University of South Carolina, 2006)—have expanded our
understanding of DeLillo in important ways, they concentrate on the
institutional or cosmological indeterminacies which haunt DeLillo’s
fiction, leaving DeLillo’s emphasis on materiality unaccounted for.

CHAPTER OUTLINE

I do not present my study of DeLillo as an exhaustive chronological

reading of his oeuvre, the format of most books in the field. Rather, I
have structured The Radiance of Dailiness thematically, with each
chapter devoted to a specific category of everyday objects. This design
allows for a fluid discussion of key objects across DeLillo’s fourteen
novels, allowing me to make my own startling—and revealing—
juxtapositions of DeLillo’s work.

Introduction – “In the Commonplace I Find Unexpected

Themes and Intensities”

I open with a discussion of the recent trend in popular culture to

take us “behind the scenes” of everyday life. Whether it is the
so-called “CSI shot,” now common in many television shows and
movies, that tunnels a camera through the human body, or the
popularity of what the critic Bruce Robbins calls commodity

3
 histories—those books that document the history of goods like
coffee or chocolate—Americans are entranced by the possibility
of seeing what is normally kept hidden from us. I am skeptical
about the pedagogical mission of such texts, and I argue that
DeLillo offers an alternative way to locate the unexpected in the
commonplace. I frame my overarching argument with a striking
but neglected passage from White Noise (1985), in which Jack
Gladney and the neurochemist Winnie Richards discuss the
engineering behind a mysterious pill Jack has found. This scene,
which couples Gladney’s awe of advanced technology with
Richard’s understanding of basic bodily functions, is an
archetypal moment for DeLillo, in which he imposes—critically
and sardonically—a forensic vision upon an ordinary object,
exposing its secret life.

Chapter 1 – “Molotovs in the Coke Sixpack”: The Violence of

Everyday Things

This chapter examines the intersection of consumer products

and violence in several of DeLillo’s stories and novels. The
centerpiece is a reading of DeLillo’s critically overlooked short
story “The Uniforms” (1970), a surreal account of pseudo-Marxist
terrorists rampaging through the French countryside. It is the
seemingly inexplicable presence in the story of a banana factory
and the weapons used to attack it—Molotov cocktails in a Coca-
Cola six-pack—that motivates my historically-informed reading. I
show how this nearly unknown early work foreshadows DeLillo’s
later engagement with terrorism in Players (1977), Mao II (1987),
and Falling Man (2007), and how, in all of these texts, DeLillo
breaks the spell of the ordinary surrounding everyday things.
This ultimately reveals DeLillo’s satire to be a complex
meditation not only upon the extraordinary violence of terrorism
but also upon the more subtle violence latent in everyday things.

Chapter 2 – “Envelopes of Soup”: Eating and Drinking in the

World of DeLillo

Building on the work in the first chapter, I look more closely here
at how DeLillo imagines one of the most basic aspects of daily
life: the food we eat and the drinks we drink. Not surprisingly,
food does not function for DeLillo as a source of nourishment or
as the focus of a communal experience. In texts such as Players
(1977), The Names (1982), White Noise (1985), The Body Artist
(2001), and Falling Man (2007), dining—even dining together—is
an isolating experience, and food itself is sterile and lifeless, a

4
 metaphor for DeLillo’s own characters. Nonetheless, DeLillo
suggests that we continue to look to food and dining as a means
toward recapturing the sacred nature of the agape.

Chapter 3 – “Forgetting Who They Are Under Their Clothes”:

The Fashion of DeLillo

This chapter explores the circulation of clothing in DeLillo’s

novels, influenced by the critic Peter Stallybrass’s work on
clothing and materiality in Renaissance literature. DeLillo’s
interest in fashion and clothing has long gone unremarked, even
though fashion has played central roles in DeLillo’s novels,
ranging from Americana (1971) to Cosmopolis (2001). I show
how fashion functions for DeLillo as a significant and
transformative act which goes well beyond performance. In
DeLillo, clothes fashion an individual in the original sense of
“fashion”—to make, to manufacture, to turn something into
something else. At the same time, the refashioned self threatens
to come undone by the betrayals of the physical body
underneath.

Chapter 4 – “Garbage Rose First”: The Secret Life of Trash

In this chapter I make sense of DeLillo’s fascination with trash,

on display most prominently in Players (1977), White Noise
(1985), and Underworld (1997). My reading hinges upon an
unsettling scene in Players, in which a self-immolated man is
discovered by one of the protagonists in a remote garbage
dump, surrounded by the debris of American consumer culture.
Linking this dump to one of the most famous trash heaps in
American letters—the Hollywood backlot in Nathanael West’s
The Day of the Locust (1939)—I show how DeLillo uses refuse
and garbage in order to deliver a devastating critique of wish
fulfillment in American culture.

Chapter 5 – “The Money Didn’t Matter”: Broken Signs in

DeLillo

The final chapter explores the materiality of signs in DeLillo, that

is, the connection between physical texts and the meanings they
signify—or fail to signify. Confronting the dominant
poststructuralist reading of DeLillo, I use Bill Gray’s unfinished
novel in Mao II (1991) and Keith Neudecker’s obsession with
poker in Falling Man (2007) to argue that DeLillo’s insistence on
the frailty of signification is not rooted in a Derridean

5
 understanding of textuality; rather, broken signification in
DeLillo’s world is a result of the affordances of textual material—
paper, books, playing cards, money—and a testament to the way
that the physical world disrupts the process of signification.

Conclusion – “I Like Knowing It’s in the House”

I rest my case that DeLillo is an archeologist of things with a

discussion of Don DeLillo’s Papers, an archive at the Harry
Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas
at Austin. This massive and still growing collection of over 120
boxes of material contains thousands of pages of DeLillo’s
personal and professional correspondence, hand-written notes,
research materials, drafts, and proofs, and it is remarkable
evidence of DeLillo’s keen interest in materiality. At the same
time, the fact that DeLillo has surrendered control of this trove of
intellectual and physical labor gestures toward DeLillo’s ultimate
take on physicality.

MARKET AND COMPETITION

Given DeLillo’s important contributions to contemporary American

literature, The Radiance of Dailiness: Don DeLillo and the Everyday is
an especially fitting entry in the Palgrave Macmillan series “American
Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century.” Like several other
books in this series, the primary market for The Radiance of Dailiness
includes students and scholars of contemporary American literature,
and more particularly, the growing contingent of scholars in the field of
DeLillo studies. The Radiance of Dailiness will also be of interest to
those involved in the fields of material culture studies and American
studies. My book will further appeal to the increasing number of
instructors who teach DeLillo in undergraduate and graduate literature
classes, as the topic of materiality in DeLillo is eminently teachable
and provides a unique and inviting gateway to DeLillo’s work.

There is an array of secondary markets for The Radiance of Dailiness.

Given the book’s relevance to scholars of American literature, the
library market among academic institutions will be important. Some
secondary markets also offer a chance for greater exposure. A number
of scholarly journals may consider reviewing The Radiance of Dailiness,
such as Contemporary Literature, PMLA, SAQ, Modern Fiction Studies,
American Literature, and American Literary History. The Don DeLillo
Society, a scholarly association dedicated to DeLillo and of which I am
a member, would want to highlight the book in the society’s
newsletter. The project will also generate interest in several online

6
venues, including the definitive Don DeLillo site, Don DeLillo’s America
<http://perival.com/delillo/delillo.html>

The field of DeLillo studies is an active one, as demonstrated by the

number of recent scholarly books which would count as competition to
The Radiance of Dailiness. The following titles devoted to DeLillo have
been well-received by the American literary studies community:

Boxall, Peter. Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction. New York:

Routledge, 2006.

Cowart, David. Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. Athens:

University of Georgia Press, 2002.

Dewey, Joseph. Beyond Grief and Nothing: A Reading of Don

DeLillo. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006.

Duvall, John N., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Kavadlo, Jesse. Don DeLillo: Balance at the Edge of Belief. New

York: Peter Lang, 2004.

Martucci, Elise A. The Environmental Unconscious in the Fiction

of Don DeLillo. New York: Routledge, 2007.

What sets my project apart from these works is evident from the titles
alone. Consider the nouns in these titles: Fiction, Language, Grief,
Nothing, Belief, The Unconscious. As I discussed above, the current
crop of criticism largely tackles the metaphysical side of DeLillo, while
my approach is grounded in the concrete, the real, the everyday
material world.

Another distinguishing feature of my project which clearly sets it apart

from the existing scholarship is that it is the first book to incorporate
research from the Don DeLillo Papers, the collection of DeLillo’s
notebooks and manuscripts housed at the University of Texas at
Austin. Given my project’s focus on materiality, it is fitting that I have
availed myself of this archive, which has provided countless insights
into DeLillo’s use of objects in his fiction. Ultimately, it is this
attentiveness to the material world—both in the real world and in how
it is represented in DeLillo’s imagination—that makes The Radiance of
Dailiness an exciting project for me and a worthwhile contribution to
American literary studies.

7
FURTHER INFORMATION

I expect the length of the final manuscript of The Radiance of Dailiness

to be approximately 200 pages, including notes. Several chapters will
include photographs and illustrations, totaling about five non-text
items. I am already in contact with the copyright holders of these
images for the necessary permissions. There are no other special
design requirements for the manuscript.

DELIVERY DATE

The delivery date for the completed manuscript is August 2009.

PEER REVIEW

A number of rising and established contemporary American literature

scholars can offer an objective assessment of my proposed project.
Most notably John Duvall (Purdue University) and Mark Osteen (Loyola
College) are preeminent DeLillo critics who have demonstrated an
interest in new ways of reading DeLillo. Other potential peer reviewers
knowledgeable about DeLillo and the broader field of contemporary
American literature include Marni Gauthier (SUNY-Cortland), Stephen
Hock (Virginia Wesleyan College), and Mary Holland (SUNY-New Paltz).

AUTHOR INFORMATION

Please see the attached CV for contact information.