English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

Hobgoblins of the Timid

Don DeLillo. Love-Lies-Bleeding. New York: Scribner, 2005. 97 pp.  Paper,  $15.00.

By Joseph Dewey, University of Pittsburgh—Johnstown  

Don DeLillo’s most recent work, the stark stage piece Love-Lies-Bleeding, published in late 2005 and premiered at Washington’s Kennedy Center in summer, 2006, explores the tension between living and dying and the certainty that there is some fragile something that persists beyond the patient, methodical holocaust of physical deterioration. Although DeLillo, a robust seventy, undoubtedly has more to write, Love-Lies-Bleeding could serve as a fitting, even heroic capstone as DeLillo accepts the particular responsibility of visionary writers whose sensibility extends beyond the reach of the immediate: to trace without sentimentality the translation from “is” to “was” and ultimately to deny death’s apparent privilege. Environmental artist Alex Macklin (like DeLillo himself, an artist at 70) has suffered two debilitating strokes and is now seven months into what his doctors have defined as a persistent vegetative state. On stage, he is marooned, isolated in cloaking shadows, bound to a wheelchair strung by feeding tubes. An unnerving Beckettesque figure, Alex is unable to speak (literally a lex, without words), unable to gesture, his eyes wide open, a shattering reminder of the body’s proneness to catastrophic failure, now imprisoned within the claustrophobic grip of unendurable time—his doctors have diagnosed that the condition could stretch for years. 

With the humane confidence of a writer convinced that both time and the body are hobgoblins of the timid, DeLillo freely upends the omnipotence of both. He disrupts the lockstep of linear time: the play’s action freely shuffles, scene to scene, between past, present, and future.  In the past, we watch a vigorous Alex some six years earlier beginning an ambitious landscape project in the desert southwest, the construction of a meditation chamber cut into the hard rock of a precipitous mountain; in the present, we watch as Alex’s son, Sean, his second wife, Toinette, and his current wife, Lia, struggle with the decision whether to administer sublingual morphine to end Alex’s suffering; and in the future we attend the memorial service conducted after Alex’s death. Time thus denied, DeLillo undercuts as well the compelling grip of mortality. How are we to confront the terrifying evidence of our vulnerability as flesh and blood creatures given the grim immobility of the wheelchair-bound artist? Do not concede its apparent pull. DeLillo begins the play with Alex in conversation with Lia shortly before his second devastating stroke. Suddenly compelled to confront the reality of his own dying, he recalls a subway ride with his father when he was a child. He had noticed a man in the seat across the aisle, a man very much dead. But the corpse, the child’s first, had generated no excitement among the few dull-eyed commuters, even the boy’s father had been more interested in the racing handicaps. Unable to command the expected anxiety, death is thus rendered stingless, the body quietly, unobtrusively riding through the tunnels of the urban underworld, another unremarkable commuter.   

But it is difficult to pull free of the pull of the temporal. Lia, only in her thirties, emerges as DeLillo’s passionate (and ironic) defender of the horizontal plane. Lia clings to the body of Alex Macklin, the premise that Alex persists in the unresponsive thing that sits rigidly in the wheelchair, the form that Lia diligently washes, shaves, dresses, and puts to bed each night. Lia feeds on the clean energy of the immediate, declaims its conventional virtues: the confirmation of community, the satisfaction of family, the strength of love, the miracle of positive thinking, the consolation of memories, the healing power of sympathy. But Lia’s steady confirmation of the immediate represents the narrowest assessment of the human predicament; a joyless, even gutless concession to unthinking earth-hugging; its thinness vividly underscored by the physical ruin of Alex himself.

Is Alex Macklin then more than the ruin in the wheelchair?  Certainly, before its insufficiency became apparent, Alex long indulged the distracting persuasion of the immediate: the scattered evidence of his multiple marriages, each savaged by the destructive cut of self-inflicted betrayal; the emptiness of his career success in the Manhattan art world; his brooding struggle with cocaine; his disquieting urges toward violence, including a hapless self-inflicted gunshot wound; his cliche discontent; the dreary, persistent itch of the carnal; the cool distance he maintains from Sean, his only child.  Fattened on the horizontal plane, Alex’s soul languished, never approached scale, never neared sublimity. Then, like all pilgrims, Alex feels inexplicably beckoned to a holy place. With Lia in tow, Alex some six years earlier had journeyed to the remote reaches of western India to walk among the ancient caves of Ajanta, thirty magnificent artificial caves dating back to the second century, cut into the forbidding sides of a natural rock gorge, their walls decorated by religious frescos and statues, caves that have long served as meditation sites for Buddhist monks. In those caves, Alex touches a vastness at last appropriate to his neglected soul. Alex abandons studio painting, forsakes the grid-world of New York, and heads west to realize his desert project.

The ghastly hulk of Alex Macklin and its grim there-ness thus terrifies only those unable to see that long ago, bathed in the endless illumination of the open desert, Alex Macklin’s soul had soared free of its clumsy casing, such liberation suggested by the running shoes that Alex wears even as he sits immobile in the wheelchair throughout act one. Of course, DeLillo sorely tests our ability to accept the implications of that epiphany; as victims of the age of fetching surfaces, we resist relinquishing our own clingy fondness for the immediate.  It is difficult not to flinch as we must watch Toinette and Sean clumsily administer the morphine doses under Alex’s tongue; watch as nearly a half-hour of stage time passes as the morphine does its work with excruciating deliberateness (Sean suspects he has acquired a dated batch); listen as Sean and Toinette grimly discuss the back-up plan (Sean has brought along a turkey-sized freezer bag to asphyxiate his father); and finally listen to the last labored breaths of the dying artist.