"Then we build a system to deal with It”: waste, the technological sublime, and the abject in Don DeLillo’s "Underworld"
Over twenty-five years after the publication of Don DeLillo’s magnum opus “Underworld” (1997), which depicts the shift from a naïve belief in technological progress at the beginning of the Cold War to disillusionment as it ended, the novel is more topical than ever, faced as we are with the growing...
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| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2023 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universidad de Alcalá (UAH) |
| Repositorio: | e_Buah Biblioteca Digital Universidad de Alcalá |
| Idioma: | inglés |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:ebuah.uah.es:10017/61732 |
| Acceso en línea: | http://hdl.handle.net/10017/61732 https://dx.doi.org/10.37536/ECOZONA.2024.15.1.5057 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Ecoaesthetics Waste Technological sublime The abject Contemporary U.S.-American literature Don DeLillo Ecoestética Residuos Sublime tecnológico Lo abyecto Literatura estadounidense Literatura Medio ambiente Literature Environmental science |
| Sumario: | Over twenty-five years after the publication of Don DeLillo’s magnum opus “Underworld” (1997), which depicts the shift from a naïve belief in technological progress at the beginning of the Cold War to disillusionment as it ended, the novel is more topical than ever, faced as we are with the growing recognition of the failure of both technorationality and capitalism to address humanity’s depredation and despoilment of the biosphere. This article argues that “Underworld” deploys what David Nye has called the technological sublime to depict the attempt to master recalcitrant nature, only to ironically reveal the impossibility of the endeavor. DeLillo connects waste’s ‘worthlessness’ and its consequent status as abject to the fantasy of mastery mediated by the technological sublime, thereby critiquing the U.S.-American ideology of progress through technological innovation. Seen within its own logic, the technological sublime is a project of liberation, a vision of impending omniscience, a permanent deferral of human limitation. Yet when waste becomes sublime, the progression toward mastery does not proceed smoothly. Although the technological sublime “undermines all notions of limitation, instead presupposing the ability to continually innovate and to transform the world” (Nye 60), “Underworld’s” aestheticization represents it at its limit, when it can no longer regulate the abject threat of waste. Ultimately, I argue that DeLillo asks readers to grapple with abjection by dramatizing the failure of the technological sublime as an aesthetic strategy, which inadvertently reinscribes the boundaries that it seeks to override: the finitude of the embodied human, the abjection that accompanies the awareness of our relative powerlessness, enmeshed amongst the world around and in us. |
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