In Episode 38, DDSWTNP talk to John Duvall, a major scholar of DeLillo, author of a 2002 reader’s guide to Underworld, and expert especially on how DeLillo’s 1992 novella “Pafko at the Wall” became, five years later, the Prologue, “The Triumph of Death.” In examining the 1951 Giants/Dodgers game and the Soviets’ bomb test, we discuss with Duvall in great detail the issues of race and racism in the portrayal of fourteen-year-old Cotter Martin, winner of the struggle for Bobby Thomson’s home run ball, as well as the major difference made by DeLillo’s change of the very last word of “Pafko” in Underworld: “It is all falling indelibly into the now”? Or “into the past”? Throughout this episode, Duvall gives us a rare critical glimpse at DeLillo as editor of his sentences and scenes. He speaks also to the mythologizing effects of baseball, what it means to aestheticize politics in DeLillo’s representations, DeLillo’s relationship to E. L. Doctorow’s work, and the competing visions of ideology and history embodied in FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and metafictional radio man Russ Hodges. Not only that, but Duvall has several intriguing, “paranoid” stories to tell about his correspondence with the author and how it’s possible his interpretations of “Pafko” in a 1995 journal article might have directly influenced some of DeLillo’s revisions as he shaped it into Underworld’s opening. Other topics in this probing discussion include how DeLillo fits in with conceptions of Fredric Jameson’s postmodernism and Linda Hutcheon’s historiographic metafiction, his claims about his art in “The Power of History,” and the motifs of “The Triumph of Death” that set up the 700+ pages to come.
For a profile of John Duvall’s scholarship and teaching, see https://www.cla.purdue.edu/directory/profiles/john-duvall.html
Stay tuned for a series of guest episodes on Underworld to come in the next few months!
Texts mentioned and discussed in this episode:
Don DeLillo, “Pafko at the Wall.” Harper’s (October 1992): 35-70.
—. Pafko at the Wall: A Novella. Scribner, 1997.
—. “The Power of History,” New York Times Magazine, September 7, 1997. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/books/090797article3.html
John N. Duvall, “Baseball as Aesthetic Ideology: Cold War History, Race, and Delillo's ‘Pafko at the Wall.’” Modern Fiction Studies 41.2 (Summer 1995): 285-313.
—. Don DeLillo’s UNDERWORLD. Continuum Contemporaries Reader’s Guide. 2002.
Mark Osteen, ed. “Notes.” Don DeLillo, Mao II and Underworld. Library of America, 2023. p. 1038.
David Remnick, “Exile on Main Street [interview with Don DeLillo].” New Yorker, September 7, 1997. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/09/15/exile-on-main-street-don-delillo-profile-remnick
