English Studies Forum

Specters and Props:  Protest as Fantasy in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis

Todd Rohman

“There is no outside.”

 

            Much of the criticism leveled at Don DeLillo’s most recent work, Cosmopolis, chiefly focuses on the work’s central character, Eric Packer.  Those critics who long for an updated version of one of DeLillo’s best known creations, Jack Gladney, the fumbling, ineffectual, paranoid professor of Hitler studies at college-on-the-hill (which could be any small, liberal arts Midwestern university) find plenty of opportunity for disappointment.  Gladney’s humorous pursuits exposes ironies and dilemmas of university, family, consumer and media culture through memorable absurdist dialogs and pointed investigation into the twin American poles of television and supermarket.  White Noise further concerns itself with the “toxic” nature of contemporary culture and explores the possibility of a death-drive lurking beneath the gloss of technological production.  Gladney’s experiences are “haunted” by the unintended effects of advanced technology, and much of his growing sense of anxiety and dread throughout the novel results from unexpected intrusions of consumer culture into his private life.   Despite the promise of safety, comfort and convenience offered to the modern consumer, as one character puts it, an inverse relationship has developed between technology and its perceived usefulness: “The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear” (161).  Another episode reports:

They had to evacuate the grade school . . . Kids were getting headaches and eye irritations, tasting metal in their mouths.  A teacher rolled on the floor and spoke in foreign languages.  No one knew what was wrong.  Investigators said it could be the ventilating system, the paint or varnish, the foam insulation, the electrical insulation, the cafeteria food, the rays emitted by microcomputers, the asbestos fireproofing, the adhesive on shipping containers the fumes from the chlorinated pool, or perhaps something deeper, finer grained, more closely woven into the basic state of things.” (35) 

In this charged context, Gladney attempts to find significance in his family and career but remains paralyzed within a world he regards as an indecipherable accumulation of layered codes and texts.  As technology surprises, baffles, and terrifies Gladney, he evokes our empathy, appearing to us a romantic figure trapped in a postmodern universe. 

But this, alas, was twenty years ago.[1] It may be DeLillo’s fourteenth novel, Cosmopolis, which attempts to answer the question of what this culturally woven, “something deeper” may be.  While the influence of endless television viewing and shopping formed the thematic pulse of White Noise, one could argue that this novel rests on a site overlooking the digital revolution.  Were the novel released even three or four years later, the narrative would have had to shift its focus to the world-altering influence of digital technologies to achieve similar relevance.

Cosmopolis is similarly poised at the edge of a major cultural shift.  Set in Manhattan in April of 2000, the attacks of 9/11 haunt the novel in ways perhaps more provocative than by a direct contemplation of their circumstances and consequences.  Such choice of setting has important implications for our reading of 28-year-old billionaire Eric Packer and his role as a transnational power broker, as well as for many of the other characters who form the backdrop of the work.  Packer begins his book-length pursuit of a haircut in his massive 48-room apartment and takes a moment to appreciate his building from the street: “The tower gave him strength and depth . . .  [he] stood a while longer in the soaring noise of the street and studied the mass and scale of the tower.  The one virtue of its surface was to skim and bend the river light and mime the tides of the open sky. . . he scanned its length and felt connected to it, sharing the surface and the environment that came into contact with the surface . . . [a] surface separates inside from out and belongs no less to one than the other” (9).  Unlike Gladney, who meets rapid progress into the future with equal parts fascination and disorientation, Packer feels “contiguous” with his piece of high-tech real estate.

Further, Packer’s reflection evokes an historical moment when skyscrapers had the power to exuded permanence, preeminence, and perhaps even mastery over the future.  Surfaces, not only of buildings, pervade the narrative, in the Manhattan skyline but extend to the inhabitants themselves, who seem to lack interior space.  We might consider the characters of Cosmopolis place holders in a contemporary morality play, and DeLillo’s new Everyman isn’t imbued with the haphazard neo-Luddite charm of Gladney.

The narrative of Cosmopolis is literally driven by Packer’s cork-lined, terrazzo-floored, fully wired white limousine, (which also appears on the novel’s cover art).  The apartment, the limo, and, indeed, the very streets DeLillo describe shimmer with trappings of hypertechnology.  Where earlier novels of DeLillo seemed to spool out in multiple fields and directions, Packer’s journey is a brief, often gridlocked, linear trek.  Multiple media conduits wallpaper the interior space of the vehicle, and therefore, the novel.  While Packer occupies his “prousted” limo, he stares at a swirl of signals from seemingly endless market indicators, and the twenty-four hour Money Channel.   Frequent interruptions do occur, however, as minor characters make brief entrances and exits, as they might from a cab.  Packer finds time to eat, have an in-car medical exam, and to grab short moments outside the vehicle for spontaneous sex with a few people over the course of the day, including his wife.  His eleven-block, episodic odyssey is further arrested by antiglobalization protesters, a bombing, and a Spencer Tunick-style photo shoot.

            As one critic points out with (disproportionate?) enthusiasm, coincidences abound in the novel, to a degree that might threaten some readers’ sense of verisimilitude.  The globalization protesters, Walter Kirn suggests, “[offer] Packer a convenient chance to opine on the novel’s major themes while watching them play out around his car.  It’s a fortunate day, in life or in literature, when crowds on the street explicitly enact . . . the very same issues a person woke up pondering  . . . all morning.  Lucky break” (8).

Not only does Kirn indict DeLillo for employing a common literary device (see foreshadowing), he fails to recognize the narrative makes no secret of its narrowed field of vision.  Though the setting is Manhattan, DeLillo carves out a small stage on which a number of improbable, happenstance meetings develop within claustrophobic parameters.  This effect, one could submit, is no accident of authorial myopia, but rather a structural convention that lends itself to the disquieting atmosphere of Cosmopolis.  Crowds pass along the Manhattan streets, faceless, like bytes on the stock ticker, “all too fleet to be absorbed” (80). 

Unlike DeLillo’s earlier (more likeable) floundering protagonist, Packer has established himself deeply in the future.  His environment bristles with one-way windows, surveillance cameras, ear buds, security details possessing voice-activated guns, plasma screens and electronic organizers.  Packer remarks, in clear contrast to the anxieties Gladney expresses in White Noise, “There’s no more danger in the new” (Cosmopolis 8).  A number of critics find this kind of austerity off-putting and regard Eric Packer as the novel’s central weakness. Kirn contends that “the barely corporeal cerebral entities that populate the pages of Cosmopolis . . . aren’t so much people as walking topic headings” (8).  Any critic of DeLillo should be aware of his deep interest in, and interrogation of the nature of narrative, and as any good student of fiction knows, text is always driven by context.  DeLillo situates these characters, spouting abstractions of market potential and yen manipulation, within the rapidly vanishing era of unbridled optimism in the digital market place, and within a shared sense of national invulnerability.  DeLillo defines this era by the ways in which market faith acts as a talisman to protect us from the unpredictable or the deadly—familiar territory for DeLillo, whose depiction of cyber-capital is as permeating as the toxic cloud that dominates the text in White Noise.  The sense of foreboding generated in Cosmopolis stems from an atmosphere of uncertainty that pervades the novel.  Nearing the end of the dot-com explosion, the world of Cosmopolis is punctuated by “credible threats” and “rogue programs.”  Rob Walker writes, “His Packer is a cartoon character, cold, calculating and controlling,” while Kirn concludes “Though Don DeLillo gives his characters names, he might as well just assign them serial numbers” (8).  Packer’s discourses on technology, language, and culture read, according to James Wood in The New Republic, “in a Baudrillard-bruised language evocative of an assistant professor of cultural studies with, alas, an MFA.”  An initial reading of the ever-discoursing Packer seems in some measure to support these jibes.  At times he seems less a fully round character and more a one-man juggernaut of capitalism, a modern archetype of power and privilege. 

We might take one such passage that met with critical disfavor, “He took out his organizer and poked a note to himself about the anachronistic word skyscraper.  No recent structure ought to bear this word.  It belonged to the olden soul of awe, to the arrowed towers that were a narrative long before he was born” (Cosmopolis 9).  Detractors may contend that such language is stilted, unreal, or lacks a sense of naturalism.  Fans of DeLillo would regard such a passage as, well, DeLilloesque.  As in many of his works, DeLillo’s language seems to aim at locating the strange in the mundane, and, in this particular instance, refocuses our attention to a pre-tragedy version of Manhattan, when towering buildings had perhaps become invisible through their familiarity.  DeLillo’s practice of defamiliarization through language is an ongoing feature of his art, and there seems to be little middle ground between those readers who respond well to this style and those who do not.  While Wood claims of Cosmopolis that “the success of the book hangs on DeLillo’s ability to make the old-fashioned heart of the novel animate its postmodern body” there is a problem with such a premise.  Unlike White Noise, Cosmopolis has no “old fashioned heart.”  DeLillo rather creates a bleak, insular Manhattan, and the abstract ruminations voiced by his characters work to further pare them down to their essential, unornamented qualities. 

For example, the denizens of other ostentatious limos include “the investment banker, the land developer, the venture capitalist, . . . the software entrepreneur, the global overlord of satellite and cable, the discount broker, the beaked media chief, . . . the exiled head of state of some smashed landscape of famine and war” (10).  Each are types, rather than characters, who form a backdrop to the novel’s tightly confined narrative space, and reinforce tension among such powerful roles, if not the complex interactions of individuals.

One might assume that this cast of quasi-characters who comprise traditional targets of antiglobalization movements positions the narrative toward an incisive critique of power structures in contemporary American culture.  As David Cowart cautions in “Mogul Mojo,” “the picture of antiglobalism in this novel should not be understood as authorial side-taking,” suggesting that “though noisy and disruptive, [the protesters] lack stature”—they remain nameless and faceless in there multiple appearances (4).  DeLillo indeed stops short of condemning the force of power capitalism and seems more concerned with delineating the complex interplay of these forces.  The literal struggles depicted on the streets of Manhattan are but manifestations of attempts to control, or at least modify, the world narrative.  By juxtaposing these various narratives—the narrative of commercial trading, the narrative of protest, and the narrative of violence—DeLillo articulates the terms of modern conflict within a global media culture and opens the door for his speculations on the relationship between power and protest.[2]

In the context of instant communication, one need only generate the perception of power to wrest control, even if temporarily, of the world narrative.  DeLillo explores this further in an essay written shortly after the September attacks, “In the Ruins of the Future,” in which he offers some insight into both the force of narrative and what everyone meant by the claim “everything has changed” since 9/11: 

Today, again, the world narrative belongs to the terrorists.  But the primary target of the men who attacked the Pentagon and the World Trade Center was not the global economy.  It was America that drew their fury.  It was the high gloss of our modernity.  It was the thrust of our technology.  It was our perceived godlessness.  It was the blunt force of our foreign policy.  It was the power of American culture to penetrate every wall, home, life and mind . . . . It is our lives and minds that are occupied now. (33)

            What emerges from Cosmopolis in this context is an effort to bring multiple threads of “official” narrative (government, the market, mainstream media) and counternarrative (protests, terrorism) together.  Thus, in DeLillo’s post-9/11 rendering of pre-9/11 New York, a number of innocuous, even humorous, moments of “protest theatre” now become charged with the potential for violence.

            A reading of Packer divorced from the reality of these looming disasters amounts to disregarding the shadow the doomed vessel Titanic casts over its preceding historical narrative. 

Cosmopolis is regarded to best effect as a work—and this is key—of dramatic irony, and it borrows its strategies, and references from the language of theater.  Despite the drift of criticism to the contrary, Cosmopolis finds traction in the “real world” on this very point.  Theater is a powerful force in shaping narrative, and elements of theatrical spectacle are advanced in each of these narrative expressions, both within the novel, and the world surrounding it which DeLillo critiques.  While watching the protesters swarm, he reflects “even with the beatings and the gassings, the jolt of explosives, even the assault on the investment bank . . . there was something theatrical about the protest, ingratiating, even, in the parachutes and skateboards, the styrofoam rat, in the tactical coup of reprogramming the stock tickers with poetry and Karl Marx . . . this was a market fantasy.  There was a shadow transaction between the demonstrators and the state (99).  From the relative safety of his limo, Packer finds himself on the verge of an epiphany, discovering that the both the market and those who oppose it are imbricated in the fabric of spectacle.  

In another episode, as Packer makes one of his frequent exits from the limo in his Odyssean cross-town journey, he’s halted by an attack, of sorts:  “He stepped onto the sidewalk and a man approached running and struck him . . . He felt the sludge, the sort of mush of blood and matter on his face . . . but he was confused about the taste on his tongue” (141).  Flashes immediately follow:  the omnipresent media capture and instantly disseminate the attack.

            At last, the assassin speaks, “Today you are crèmed by the master . . . [t]his is my mission worldwide.  To sabotage power and wealth” (142).  We learn, “This was Andre Petrescu, the pastry assassin, a man who stalked corporate directors, military commanders, soccer stars and politicians.  He hit them in the face with pies.  He blindsided heads of state under house arrest.  He ambushed war criminals and the judges who sentenced them” (142).  This rather whimsical form of attack, this bit of theater performed for the popular press, is not an invention of DeLillo; we might remember that Bill Gates was similarly attacked in Brussels, or that such an attempt was made recently on Ann Coulter at University of Arizona.

            Noël Godin, the man behind the Gates attack (and many others), remarked in an interview, "The attack against Bill Gates is symbolic, it's against hierarchical power itself" (Henry).

If only such theatrical enactments were restricted to pie-throwing, but we know otherwise.  DeLillo illustrates that such “performances” can be enacted on an increasing scale of violence and destruction, once the identities of the intended victims are reduced to mere symbolic targets.  DeLillo’s rendering of Packer’s stunned reaction of shock and fear humanizes the targets of such attacks in a surprising way.   While the engines of power capitalism, the unblinking eye of media, and rogue acts of protest engage in a type of performance, individual humans tend to get lost in the fray.  In dramatizing the relationships, and, in fact, the interdependence among media, media targets, and acts of protest in microcosm, in scaling these cultural forces to the level of the subject, and by providing first-person perspective of this incident, DeLillo complicates the process of reducing people to symbols, no matter what their level in the power hierarchy.  The implicit message of such theatrical protest, both within and without the novel, is that anyone can be gotten to, even those dwelling in the superterrestial realm of power and privilege, whether the message is delivered via cream pie, bullets or bombs.  That DeLillo terms the activities of the protesters as “market fantasy” is quite significant in this economy of narrative control.

“To be a prop in someone else’s fantasy is not a pleasant experience,” writes Lee Harris in Policy Review, “especially when this someone is trying to kill you” (8).  This impulse is thoroughly explored in Harris’s discussion of what he terms “Fantasy Ideology,” a system of thought which requires props to sustain itself and even gain enthusiastic recruits.  He writes “What is common in such interactions is that the fantasist inevitably treats other people merely as props—there is no interest in, or even awareness of, others as having wills or minds of their own” (4).

Harris relates an experience in which he learned how greatly his notion of protest differed from a friend’s during the Vietnam War.  His friend planned to join a “massively disruptive demonstration in Washington,” one which, in all likelihood, would actually reverse some sympathetic supporters against the war protesters (3).  The response from his friend was surprising, “even if it was counterproductive, even if it turned people against war protesters, indeed even if it made them more likely to support the continuation of the war, he would still participate in the demonstration . . . because it was, in his words, good for his soul” (3).  “Thus” Harris writes, “when he lay down in front of hapless commuters on the bridges over the Potomac, he had no interest in changing the minds of these commuters . . . they were there merely as props, as so many supernumeraries in his private psychodrama.  The protest for him was not politics, but theater . . . in short, he was acting out a fantasy” (4).

            Harris links this discussion to the often-quoted comment by composer Karlheinz Stockhausen which characterized 9/11 as “the greatest work of art of all time” (Harris 3).  While many of us may balk at such an aesthetic description of mass murder, at core, the objective of the attack was grand spectacle.  As Harris contends,

the terror attack of 9-11 was not designed to make us alter our policy, but was crafted for its effect on the terrorists themselves:  It was a spectacular piece of theater.  The targets were chosen by al Qaeda not through military calculation . . . but entirely because they stood as symbols of American power universally recognized on the Arab street.  They were gigantic props in a grandiose spectacle in which the collective fantasy of radical Islam was brought vividly to life. (8)

DeLillo centers the weight of his critique, it seems, not on the processes which allow market systems such influence in the world, but rather on the dubious way any force can sustain itself through the use of humans not as a means to an end, which would be contemptible enough, but, worse, as mere set pieces in a publicly enacted private drama.  In his own response to the attacks, DeLillo explores the ways in which the global narrative can be ruptured through such performances:

We like to think that America invented the future.  We are comfortable in the future, intimate with it.  But there are disturbances now, in large and small ways, a chain of reconsiderations.  Where we live, how we travel, what we think about when we look at our children.  For many people the event has changed the grain of the most routine moment.  We may find the ruin of the towers in implicit in other things.  The new Palm Pilot . . .the stretch limousine parked outside the hotel, the midtown skyscraper under construction, carrying the name of a major investment bank—all haunted in a way by what has happened, less assured in their authority. (39)

The protesters in Cosmopolis display a banner which modifies the first line of The Communist Manifesto: “A Specter is Haunting the World, and that Specter is Capitalism,” but DeLillo’s offering leads us toward a recognition that the world-shaping influence of capitalism is but one of a complex of components constructing the global narrative (96).  The towers, the protesters, the flurry and stasis of the Manhattan grid all seem prologue to an unnamed disaster.

Early in Packer’s last day on earth, he observes, “The bank towers loomed just beyond the avenue.  They were covert structures for all their size, hard to see, so common and monotonic, tall, sheer, abstract, with standard setbacks, and block-long, and interchangeable, and he had to concentrate to see them.”

            And like Packer himself, “they looked empty . . . . They were made to be the last tall things, made empty, designed to hasten the future.  They were the end of the outside world.  They weren’t here, exactly.  They were in the future, a time beyond geography and touchable money and the people who stack and count it” (36).  By setting the stage of Cosmopolis with fictional, disposable props, DeLillo highlights the failings of any ideology or system that similarly reduces genuine humans. 

Works Cited

Cowart, David. “Mogul Mojo.” American Book Review 24.5.  (Jul./Aug. 2003): 1, 4.

DeLillo, Don. Cosmopolis. New York: Scribner, 2003.

---. “In the Ruins of the Future.” Harper’s Dec. 2001: 33-40.

---. White Noise. 1984.  New York: Penguin, 1986.

---. Reading. Steppenwolf Theatre Co.  Chicago. 9 Apr. 2003.

Harris, Lee. “Al Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology.  Policy Review 114 (Aug.

2002). 13 Mar. 2005 <http://www.policyreview.org/aug02/harris.html>.

Henry, Hughes.  Interview with Noel Godin. Netly News. 9 Feb. 1998. 13 Mar.

2005 <http://www.whisperedmedia.org/Godin.html>.

Kirn, Walter.  “Long Day’s Journey Into Haircut.” New York Times Book Review

13 Apr. 2003: 8.

Walker, Martin. “America’s Virtual Empire.”  World Policy Review  Summer 2002:

13-20.

Walker, Rob.  “Cutting it Close.” Washington Post  27 Apr. 2003: BW04

Wood, James.  “Traffic.” New Republic 14 Apr. 2003.  2 Feb. 2005

            <https://ssl.tnr.com/p/docsub.mhtml?i=20030414&s=wood041403>. 

Notes