The Unreal State of America

'Americana' by Dom DeLillo (first published 1971)

If postmodernism began when the self-mythologising of the American Dream and the consumerism of the Affluent Society came into brutal contact with the cynical realities of the military-industrial complex and the techno-automisation of public/private corporatism, sometime between My Lai and Watergate, then this flawed, sprawling first novel by Dom DeLillo, the finest contemporary chronicler of America's multiple and contradictory narratives, artificial imagery, and comforting lies, marks a moment when the deconstructionism of the elite campuses took literary form in a way accessible to the general reader, reified as that most comforting of American aesthetics, the western road trip and the discovery of the so-called real United States.

DeLillo, one of the original Mad Men, who sought to tell Americans stories that were not real in order to get them to buy things they did not need, divorced himself from that world and over four years took upon himself the task of eviscerating its vacuous materialism and of displaying its gory entrails in this book, first published in 1971. DeLille's antihero, David Bell, is a product of the same status-chasing, commercial media business world as his creator, although Bell is a television network executive rather than a copywriter, but their sceptical and ironic, offbeat perspectives are the same, as is the disgust they feel in a world that has given them plenty of material, and in Bell's case at least, promiscuous sexual, rewards, but burnt them out before the age of thirty, with DeLillo escaping to the realm of literary fiction, while his alter ego seeks his artistic rebirth in the cinema verité of recording on film the prosaic images of the nobodies he encounters in the Mid West, speaking - and sometimes not speaking - the semiautobiographical and factually malleable words of the protagonist. What Bell is seeking in his escape from corporate pseudo-reality is never made clear - a handsome, preppy Vladimir, his Godot never turns up - because it is not ends that matter, but the means, for in postmodernism, it is only the medium that is real, all else being but a derived construct determined by our subjective perception of the ideas and images to which we are exposed by that medium.

There is no doubt that 'Americana' is an indulgent novel, and one that, as DeLillo later said, would be unlikely, at least in this form, to be published today, while it is true that it would benefit from both sharper editing, particularly of scenes that in their effort at iteration can be repetitive, and from a tighter structure, which, while retaining the episodic approach and allowing for nonlinear narratives, would give a greater clarity to DeLillo's intentions, and more closely aline his meaning with the form and pacing he provides, so that the Iowan chapters do not feel quite so meandering and purposeless in style, even if that is message he wishes to convey, when compared to the tauter, sharper, and more overtly satirical New York chapters.

However, that the Midwestern and Western parts of the book seem disjointed in comparison with the earlier sections is no doubt in part due to an intended spacial variation, so that the urban structures and busy formalism of New York determine a similar structuralism in the related text, while the open spaces of Iowa and Texas provide a slower tempo and more amorphous environment for the indulgent behaviours of Bell and his companions. And this results in a counterintuitive perception that it is in Middle America that Bell is able to express, or at least try to express, his sexual fantasies within a constructed reality, rather than in the city, where his womanising and drinking is normalised by the behaviour of his fellow corporate toilers. Bell lacks the moral abhorrence he needs to give validity to his actions until he can play these out, not in real-time, but as memories revalidated by film, in a nondescript hotel room in a nothing town, with actors of no consequence. Any yet, when finally Bell partially participates in a scene of unbridled pornographic sex and consensual violence in southern Texas, a scene that makes all that has gone before seem tame in its bleak, mechanistic nihilism, he is abhorred by both it and himself, crawling away to find the shame he has not satisfactorily found in his earlier tepid and tolerated perversions. Bell's encounter with this animalistic and orgiastic rawness is in its brutal reality not for him truly real - his explicit narration is overtly filmic - because for him not only is, as it turns out, there no 'real' America to be discovered, but reality can only be approached through a refracting medium to give the formless the form Bell ultimately desires, in his case provided by film. When he encounters a visceral pseudo-violent no-holds barred group sexuality, a thing that in his preconception must be a true reflection of the actuality of consumerist America beneath its corporatist and conformist skein, he is disgusted by what he finds and must escape, just as he previously left the Native-hippie commune he had been with the days before, because, disassociated as he is, the people he observes are not truly engaged in their asocial activities as acts of true self-discovery, but instead playing out roles in public theatres of their own creation, performing rather than being, conforming to the created image of what they think is reality, just as much as the corporate executives he left back in the East. Bell cannot find the real America because its reality does not exist, beyond its spacial and human perception, until it is realised through media, and postmodern America only truly exists in the films that show its stories and the books which relate its tales, constructed by the filmmaker and the writer in narratives where fiction has more truth than contested fact, and where only the medium has meaning.

Film gives a meaning by its technique, direction, and editing to events in the life of Bell that would otherwise remain meaningless, and it is only through celluloid that he feels he can express what he means, even when to the cast he assembles, a cast that serves as both chorus and audience, his words and imagery appear incoherent. To Bell, just as life is ultimately selfish, so the art which derives from it can only have meaning for its creator and he alone if it is to be true, and this truth is to be found in the medium's representation of the events of the subject-auteur's life only when put onto film: without a medium to record and represent a life as an artistic form that life remains without meaning. And, because Bell is a film studies major who goes to work in television as a creative-producer, this allows DeLillo a few discourses on film theory, but more vitally it allows him to show how it is film that provides his protagonist with the only way he can make sense, and construct a reality, from his disturbed and unsatisfying life, just as DeLillo can only realise his disassociation from the false reality of executive advertising through fiction writing. For the postmodernist, reality must be constructed within the medium by which it is given form.

DeLillo's style is that of a true lover of words and his sentences ring with witty axioms and beautifully constructed phrases. The world he describes maybe both mundane and ugly, but the text by which it is realised is never less than artistically conceived and often beautifully expressed, as an intentional act of art, in which life can never be beautiful, but the way in which it is memoralised and given form can be, so that in this work, the tawdry, sexually exploitative soullessness of David Bell's life is first given meaning to himself by his filming of others and then given meaning to the reader by the author's literary skill and lexical sophistication, allowing the reader to find meaning in what without its author's skill would be just another counterculture tale of meaningless ennui. Instead, as both a mirror of its own time and a foretaste of the media-determined, techno-consumerist, identity-driven world of today, where meaning is to be found in the message and objective reality is for the birds, 'Americana' is a fine if flawed novel of our disillusioned and illusionist, postmodern world.