I argue that a graphic depiction of pain and the male body—a patriarchy of pain —reveals a tension between the newer and the older, the local and the transnational in the field of contem
Trang 1AND THE H IERARCHICAL C OSMOPOLITANISM OF
Ripe fruity notes, supported by a delightful mix of East African and Central American acidity
—Description of Bin Sixteen coffee, Picholine restaurant, New York
This article examines a conflict of cosmopolitanisms in contemporary literary production and reception I argue that a graphic depiction of pain and the male body—a patriarchy of pain —reveals a tension between the newer and the older, the local and the transnational in the field of contemporary literature and in its reception This tension adumbrates what I call the hierarchical cosmopolitanism of contemporary fiction, which results from an encounter of different cosmopolitanisms Firstly, I elaborate these different cosmopolitanisms by reading
Nam Le s Meeting Elise, from The Boat , Le s much-awarded collection of short stories
set across the globe, alongside Philip Roth s late work and Don DeLillo s Cosmopolis (2003), a
novel that depicts the daylong journey in a limousine of a billionaire currency trader down New York s th Street Secondly, ) compare Le s newer cosmopolitanism and DeLillo s older cosmopolitanism against the cosmopolitan scene of New York City book reviews
By an older New York cosmopolitanism, ) refer to what Bruce Robbins identifies as an attitude of detachment from one s place of origin and a transfer of primary loyalty to a larger social collectivity which claims an antithesis to local loyalties Pheng Cheah argues that this mode of cosmopolitanism primarily designates an intellectual ethic, a universal humanism
Trang 2that transcends regional particularism This ethic ranges across the (international) world
of literary production, distribution and consumption, and is assumed in New York book reviews New York book reviews, then, are an apposite field in which to explore the fate of contemporary cosmopolitanism, because the older cosmopolitanism enters into relations with newer cosmopolitanisms in the space of a global city The newer cosmopolitanisms emerged, Robbins contends, in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall Cosmopolitanism was democratised; what was previously an exclusively Western, exclusively upper-classed Robbins attitude became available to all in a globalised and decolonised planet of late capitalist relations i
What ) call hierarchical cosmopolitanism emerges from these relations, but it also lies nascent within the older cosmopolitanism )n his essay On Cosmopolitanism, Jacques Derrida recognises a productive contradiction within )mmanuel Kant s claim for universal hospitality as
a natural right, which has the effect of making the basic condition of cosmopolitanism—the acceptance and opening of a historical place to all newcomers; that is, universal hospitality— precede culture, institutions and the state (20-21) Kant s cosmopolitanism is almost pre-human: limits and borders emerge as soon as the pragmatics of finite space, economic imperatives, personal autonomy, and bodily safety are taken into account Consequently, cosmopolitanism becomes conditional; it only makes sense if its constitutive hospitality can be withheld, bestowed, curtailed
In its articulation of contradictions and limits Derrida s thinking on cosmopolitanism originally presented in 1996 before the International Parliament
of Writers, and citing its constitution s call for the opening of cities of refuge , sits at and, in a sense enunciates, the juncture between the older and newer cosmopolitanisms The reception of Le and DeLillo in the field of New York book reviews foregrounds the encounter of the different cosmopolitanisms What Donald C Goellnicht calls Le s refugee cosmopolitanism one of the newer cosmopolitanisms made available by democratisation, globalisation, and decolonisation) is regarded differently from the older New York cosmopolitanism ascribed to DeLillo This regard is shaped by the conditional hospitality of the older cosmopolitanism of the New York book reviews.ii
Le s Meeting Elise provides a productive point
of intervention because it recognises and challenges the scene of New York s older and ascriptive cosmopolitanism The story depicts Henry Luff, a decrepit figure who hobbles through New York An internationally-recognised painter, Luff has reaped the financial benefits
of his aesthetic capital But his time is almost up He is diagnosed with colorectal cancer that has metastasised into his lymphatic system Both the first paragraphs of Meeting Elise and the sentences within the subsequent paragraphs alternate between representations of the pain in Luff s body, and memories These paragraphs are centred on a bathtub that, in Luff s present bodily sense or time, has drops of blood leaked from his anus into the water Described as little roses, these drops evoke the memory of Olivia, Luff s muse and dead lover, with whom he spent hours soaking in this tub
Memory and also a sense of temporal duration connects Luff, his lover, and his estranged daughter Luff met Olivia when she was seventeen Seventeen years have elapsed
Kant s cosmopolitanism is
almost pre-human: limits and
borders emerge as soon as the
pragmatics of finite space,
economic imperatives, personal
autonomy, and bodily safety
are taken into account
Consequently,
cosmopolitanism becomes
conditional; it only makes
sense if its constitutive
hospitality can be withheld,
bestowed, curtailed
Trang 3since he last saw his daughter, Elise, who has come to
New York from Russia to play at Carnegie Hall to
receive the global recognition that affirms her value as
a musician Luff reads in a newspaper review of his
cellist daughter s inventive fingering for passagework
(77), which foreshadows the pain of his rectal
examination in the story s next section When he
imagines the hard lump outside his rosebud, a
memory of his daughter as a baby is triggered, just a
bloody, scraggly mess between my wife s harness-hung
legs , which again connects through florid imagery
to the blood in the bathwater Thus, even Luff s rectal
blood is made valuable in its association with
procreation and its aestheticisation by his painterly eye
This hold on value and creation—domineering yet vulnerable, defiant yet impotent—in the face of bodily, explicitly male pain, defines the patriarchy of pain that Le exploits and challenges Luff has been unable to paint since Olivia died from a heroin overdose His incapacity is redoubled on other fronts (is rectal examination reveals his impotence: There s
a girl in the room who ) d jump if ) could stand up, but even if ) did – get this – her face wouldn t budge from the same mix of tenderness and pity holding it together now Other distant connections, instances of Anthony Giddens intensification of worldwide social relations under globalisation (64), press upon Luff His ex-wife has an extra-territorial claim on him from Russia, extracting money for a cello worth hundreds of thousands of dollars (is daughter s music manager and fiancé is a Briton whom Luff calls The Leech —more bloodletting and figuration Luff s aesthetic capital is riven with the blood and money that underwrite global markets and exchange
Similar to Robbins dating of the democratisation and pluralisation of the previously monolithic cosmopolitanism, Goellnicht notes in Meeting Elise an intergenerational jostling between older Eastern European Jewish émigrés, such as Luff, and a displacing influx of
post-1989 Eastern Europeans, such as his daughter (208) A similar relevance-questioning displacement befalls Philip Roth s Nathan Zuckerman, that most horny and sexed of characters
in American literature Roth, like DeLillo, occupies a canonical position in contemporary American fiction.iii In Exit Ghost (2007), Roth portrays Zuckerman, a kind of alter ego that has
appeared in seven novels since 1979, as incontinent and impotent after the removal of his prostate ) know it s no comfort, says Zuckerman s urologist, but you re not alone—this disease has reached epidemic proportions in America Your struggle is shared by many others )n
Roth s previous novel, Everyman , a doctor pushes on the main character s groin, and the pain is so excruciating that he, the unnamed Everyman, feels on the verge of vomiting (35) At another point he phones his friend Ezra, who was expected to live about a month; Ezra says, Sometimes my prostate feels like ) m trying to excrete it
In their graphic depiction of pain and looming death in ageing artists in the characters
of Luff and Zuckerman, Le and Roth portray a patriarchy of pain that intersects across New York and maps ailments that are gendered male by association with the prostate and consequent impotence ) d say it s in part about the dissolution of [Zuckerman s] creative force, says Roth in an interview with Amazon.com Roth continues that Zuckerman has suffered the consequences of a prostate surgery for cancer, juxtaposing an ailing mind with an ailing body
In their graphic depiction of pain and looming death in ageing artists in the characters
of Luff and Zuckerman, Le and Roth portray a patriarchy of pain that intersects across New York and maps ailments that are gendered male by association with the prostate and consequent impotence
Trang 4The inability to create is associated with dysfunction in the male reproductive system.iv Similarly, in Meeting Elise, Luff s artistic and physical incapacities are linked to impotence (Luff cannot seduce the young female medical student), and exacerbated by foreign intervention (the Leech) and foreign aid (money for a European cello in Russia)
In Cosmopolis, DeLillo resists the dissolution of age, and of sexual and artistic potency,
portrayed by the patriarchy of pain in the work of Le and Roth Instead of creating a man on the edge of obsolescence, DeLillo has the novel s main character render the world obsolescent Born in 1973, the year that the American currency was fully floated, Eric Packer, twenty-eight, multibillionaire futures and currency trader, lives in a 104-million-dollar penthouse towering above the United Nations building in Manhattan He is chauffeured in his super hi-tech limousine on what will be, literally, a death drive, for he we will be shot dead when he reaches (ell s Kitchen, where he was raised Packer is a master cosmopolitan, a self-described world citizen with a New York set of balls (e deliberately loses his heiress wife s old-money European fortune, squanders his good old American self-made wealth by irrationally but intentionally betting against the rise of the yen, survives an attack by anti-World Trade Organisation protesters after they bomb the NASDAQ, kills his bodyguard, shoots himself in the hand in front of his assassin, and has an onanistic sexual encounter whilst having his prostate examined
Throughout his journey, the integrity of the present and the future is teased apart because Packer continually sees images of future events before they occur; what Joseph Conte
identifies as repeated images of hysteron proteron (186)—putting his hand on his chin, a bomb
explosion, and finally, his own death—via video screens in his car and his bleeding-edge electron wristwatch Far from death and dysfunction, Packer is ahead of time, denying the deterministic drive toward death that shadows Luff and Zuckerman This visual remediation of time and experience is illuminated keenly by Sean Cubitt s discussion of the post-cinematic era
of the digital moving image in The Cinema Effect (2004) In a section fortuitously entitled
Cosmopolis, concerning the transnational production and consumption of Ang Lee s film
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon , Cubitt denotes the field of the cosmopolitan battle :
Inseparable from the concept of globalization, informationalization describes the way in which communication has changed during the course of the twentieth century Since the emergence of
a world economy in the sixteenth century, the dominant medium of human communication has been money During the last seventy years or so, that centrality has begun to be displaced by information, understood here in its technical definition, a structured pattern of data Informationalization is the process through which economic domination becomes information domination (336)
As James Annesley notes, Packer dominates globally and locally: [Packer] is, as he drives across New York, not just at the centre of the market (and by implication history), but in the heart of everyday life (is prousted limousine is littered with screens feeding him televisual information from around the globe.v Sometimes the images are information itself, a flux of digits representing the erratic movements of global markets that he can affect by a small hand movement or an abbreviated utterance, bringing the weight of his mathematical genius and massive wealth to bear on the world via a slight bodily gesture: The context was nearly touchless He could talk most systems into operation or wave a hand at a screen and make it go black
Pace Derrida s understanding of antiethical, as against the home, Cubitt writes that [b]y abandoning the ethical commitment to hospitality, the cosmopolitan abandons the ethic
of the face-to-face, the ethics of communication The other becomes a data set, an object to be
Trang 5managed When Packer reaches the end of his journey, he refuses the integrity of the name of the man who is standing in front of him and wants to kill him
Sheets Richard Sheets
Means nothing to me
He said these words into the face of Richard Sheets Means nothing to me He felt a trace of the old
stale pleasure, dropping an offhand remark that makes a person feel worthless So small and forgettable a thing that spins such disturbance (192, emphasis in original)
Packer stares down the responsibility demanded by the face of the other—here, his former employee Sitting in the home of Richard Sheets a squat in an abandoned building in (ell s Kitchen), the older kind of cosmopolitan, comfortable and authoritative anywhere in the world, declares that neither the perception of the other, nor the claim the other makes to its own identity and humanity, means anything
Yet recognition and identification linger; despite the novel s concentration on newness, the future, sexual prowess, and global power, the patriarchy of pain manifests The asymmetry
of Packers daily-examined prostate is an extended joke throughout Cosmopolis, occurring five
times , , , , until its punchline near Packer s death )ts significance perplexes Packer until he meets his assassin Richard Sheets (alias Benno Levin), who also possesses an asymmetrical prostate Packer asks,
What does it mean?
Benno nodded for a while He was happy to sit there nodding
Nothing It means nothing, he said )t s harmless A harmless variation Nothing to worry about Your age, why worry?
Eric didn t think he d ever known such relief, hearing these words from a man who shared his condition (199)
That a shared asymmetry does not mean anything is one of the greatest things that the cosmopolitan Packer has ever heard.vi There is a perverse pleasure in this patriarchy of pain; the pleasure is a way of denying the ailing and obsolescence that it indicates in Luff and Zuckerman Nonetheless, after Packer shoots a hole in his own hand, pain is all: The pain was the world (201) But its significance here is undermined in being self-inflicted, another attempt to control
death, which looms in the near future In Underworld , DeLillo declares, Pain is just another form of information Packer will be killed, but his economic-cum-information domination means that he sees his death before it occurs (on the video screen in his electron wristwatch) and that he lives on in the time warp of informationalisation made possible by his genius, wealth, and cutting-edge technology
Russell Scott Valentino has noted that sacrifice is signalled early in Cosmopolis— When
he died he would not end The world would end —and will lead to a rupture of sorts in the time-space dimension Valentino 5 Packer is presented by his Chief of Theory the option
of living on a disk when he dies, becoming an idea beyond the body Packer moves from
a cosmopolitan world citizen with a New York set of balls to beyond the grounding in his body
to become the information he mastered in life Packer exits his limousine only to have sex with women Per Serritslev Petersen calls Packer s frequent sexual encounters, Packer s favoured embodiment therapy , take part in a rave with ecstatic, youthful revellers high on a new
kind of drug, and to die a death that is deferred by the preposterous figure of hysteron proteron
Trang 6and his digital afterlife Here, as in the stories of Le and Roth, the male reproductive system acts
as a metonym for the ailing body and its looming death, the patriarchy of pain from which Packer seeks both sustenance and escape
While ) read Packer s eternal digital presence as a resistance to the challenges of displacement and dissolution that looming death and newcomers present for canonical figures
of older cosmopolitanism like Roth and DeLillo, this is not to say that other constituents of this cosmopolitanism scene—the book reviewers—recognise this resistance Recognition of the resistance would admit the abovementioned challenges Moving on to the New York book reviews, I argue that the conditional hospitality of cosmopolitanism affects Le s work and that this is further inflected by the hierarchical cosmopolitanism of its reception In his review of
The Boat for The New York Times, (ari Kunzru perceives the problems of a non-white writer trying to negotiate the world of contemporary fiction production, particularly in the collection s first story, Love and (onor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice vii
Most acclaim for The Boat has focussed on this story and The Boat, the final story, which provides the title for the collection Both can be traced to Le s biography: Le came to Australia
as a Vietnamese refugee when he was three months old and, after quitting a corporate life as a lawyer in Melbourne, he wrote much of the collection at the )owa Writers Workshop The Boat
is a harrowing account of the weeks at sea of a group of refugees, heading from Vietnam to Australia Love and (onor is a metafictional, self-reflexive narrative of a Vietnamese-Australian writer at the )owa Writers Workshop Blighted by writer s block, he struggles with the question of ethnic literature and the ethics of using his family s biography in stories like The Boat
Tellingly, aside from Goellnicht s insightful essay, little critical or academic attention has been paid to Meeting Elise, which is referred to archly in Le s first story as depicting New York painters with haemorrhoids —an apt gloss Indeed, the attention that the story has received has largely been negative After praising Love and (onor and The Boat, Kunzru condemns Meeting Elise by passing it over )t falls, then, under the banner of empty virtuosity that Kunzru flies over Le s other stories, set in Medillín, Tehran, and (iroshima
The Boat is transparently a product of the increasingly formalized milieu in which American writers train – a well-wrought collection that, in its acute self-consciousness, trails a telltale whiff
of the industry that is its initial concern, of the heap of fellowship and job applications the fictional Le needs to draft and submit when he s interrupted by his father Ethnic lit is unhappily what emerges when identity politics head into the marketing meeting, and for any writer with a non-WASP name, it s all too easy to feel one is being pimped for one s background and life experience (real or imaginary), and somehow colluding in the production of a crude, essentialized version of oneself in return for an advantage over ethnically uninteresting peers Le
is starting to grapple with the subtleties of authenticity, but one comes away feeling that it s not really his subject, that he has a future as a very different kind of writer
Le s stories that are not linked to his biography are empty because the traces of research, says Kunzru, indicate an attempt to remind us that we are far away from )owa, and Vietnam They become an excluded middle enveloped by the success of the authentic, ethnically interesting stories that begin and end the collection, which frame the collection as informed experience The excluded middle might be a place, or a future, in which to move away from a narrative of exclusion, but Kunzru s charge seems to be that we are too close to )owa or Vietnam in the excluded middle, as if veering toward the authentically ethnic pole pushes us away from the recognisably local pole, or that the proximity to the imagined locations is laboured.viii
Trang 7Other critics found fault along similar lines Laird (unt, in New York s Bookforum,
praised the collection, but found the anomaly in this otherwise stellar gathering is Meeting
Eliose [sic], which predictably triangulates love, death, and futile New Yorker-esque longing Michiko Kakutani, in The New York Times, spies the puppet-strings: Some of his attempts at
ventriloquism – like his portrait of an ailing New York painter … can feel strained, like creative-writing exercises in point of view ix So perfect must be the outsider s mimicry of his host s milieu that one is not supposed to even know that he is a visitor Yet, naming his efforts as
ventriloquism or finding their basis in The New Yorker defines Le as an outsider that,
nonetheless, clarifies and thus challenges the contradictory scene of cosmopolitan hospitality
When Le is taken by Patricia Cohen for his New York Times interview to Picholine, he orders
the same dish that Luff orders but does not eat in Meeting Elise : sea urchin panna cotta Like
most details in The Boat, writes Cohen, they were pulled from assiduous research he did from
a fungus-plagued farmhouse in )owa City )t is Le s first visit to the restaurant (e conceals neither his research nor his craft: I picked the dishes because they were so exotic sounding, said Le ) ll confess to you ) didn t know what panna cotta was, he says, his Australian accent stretching out each vowel like Silly Putty
Le s openness creates every possibility for what
Jahan Ramazani might describe as cosmopolitan fellow
feeling By roving assiduously across the globe, Le s
transnational method deploys what Ramazani calls,
interstitial poetries, which articulate a verbal space
that resembles a cosmopolitan public sphere
Ramazani repeats some of the
humanistic-cum-utopian language of the older cosmopolitanism, but he
includes within it a translocal cosmopolitanism that
allows dialogic encounters between different groups,
from the global to the parochial But Cohen attends to
Le s voice, concentrating on the trans and foreclosing
the local Le s Australian accent does not connect
smoothly to his name or his Southeast Asian
appearance—it looks like ventriloquism Further,
describing his accent as Silly Putty makes him sound childish and false, thinly veiling a cringe
as the outsider betrays his outsiderness
Even while they praise him, Le s champions recapitulate the insider-outsider, host-guest model of literary production and reception of the older New York cosmopolitanism It reads as
quaint, and not cosmopolitan or translocal, that Le finds New York haute cuisine to be exotic
Further, Marilynne Robinson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning teacher of Le at )owa, Cohen assures
us, says his background sensitized him to very different cultural settings, giving him an unusual ability to identify with his characters; he never seems to be looking at them from the outside Kunzru takes an opposing view that nonetheless reinforces a value based on proximity:
We read about basuco and kami, but through the lens of ethnic lit the main effect of such well-chosen words is a kind of empty virtuosity, a way to remind us that we are far away from
)owa, and Vietnam Yet nothing is made of the authenticating exotica of tiet canh – a specialty
– mincemeat soaked in fresh congealed duck s blood Le , over which the father in Love and (onor recounts his personal experience of the My Lai Massacre
So perfect must be the outsider s mimicry of his host s milieu that one is not supposed
to even know that he is a visitor Yet, naming his efforts
as ventriloquism or finding
their basis in The New Yorker
defines Le as an outsider that, nonetheless, clarifies and thus challenges the contradictory scene of cosmopolitan hospitality
Trang 8Le s value comes from, is recognised, as elsewhere Christopher Lee, pace Paul De Man
on the resistance to theory, argues that in Love and (onor, Le reveals … the tropological nature
of the ethnic story and its constituting elements While Lee privileges an ethnic story that can be authenticated by Le s biography, he does so by interrogating Rey Chow s concept of coercive mimeticism, whereby writers categorised as ethnic or marginal must reproduce the features of their ethnicity or marginality ascribed to them from a native or central group (33) )nstead, Lee finds that the reproductions of marginality in Love and (onor end up acquiring
a materiality of their own through slippages of meanings and misinterpretations as when
a homeless man does not realise that the narrator and his father are visitors to the US from
Australia, not new immigrants By concentrating on the framing stories and the middle stories,
Goellnicht detects Le s refugee cosmopolitanism Unlike the New York reviews, Goellnicht
recognises the coercive mimeticism in Love and (onor when Le references tiet canh, though
he assigns this move to the narrator: Nam thus fulfils the stereotype of producing ethnic writing dismissed as shallow by his friends At the same time, Goellnicht sees in the stories cast otherwise as an excluded middle Le s refusal to be trapped in the role of the Vietnamese ethnic writer , citing Le s own concern that the inauthentically ethnic stories might be misread
as five-finger exercises qtd in Goellnicht —mere inventive passagework, to re-associate
Le and his translocal character, Elise
Goellnicht sees Le as a newer kind of cosmopolitan, one who is not detached or above the fray, who is suspicious of the aestheticisation created by the distance between writer and what is written Indeed, Le does not hide his engagement with the questions posed by his presence as a writer with a particular and particularising background )t s barely clear what the lines would be separating, he says of ethnic literature in a Knopf Q&A, available on his website, especially when you consider how fiction necessarily invokes contradictory impulses: what s most authentic is rooted in the most contrived artifice, truth and verisimilitude are often poles apart, biography is essential yet irrelevant, sometimes you can tell a story only by not telling it
Le recognises that his outsiderness gives him a certain capital that, at the same time, renders the older form of cosmopolitanism elusive The interaction of the attendant cosmopolitanisms
of these milieux draws out the hierarchical cosmopolitanism of the New York reviews
Instead of being tempted, then, to read the reviewers inhospitable censures and patronising pats-on-the-head as unbefitting cosmopolitan critics and the critical sphere in which they operate, one should recognise these pronouncements as precisely that of the older cosmopolitanism For Derrida, quoting Kant:
hospitality signifies the claim of a stranger entering foreign territory to be treated by its owner without hostility The latter may send him away again, if this can be done without his death; but,
so long as he conducts himself peaceably, he must not be treated as an enemy It is not a right to
be treated as a guest to which the stranger can lay claim … but he has a right of visitation
It is never polite for a guest to mimic the host behind his or her back It is embarrassing if a ventriloquism of local customs is unsuccessful Surely, though, if there is an attempt to engage the host and the host s milieu, it deserves more than dismissal, or an encounter with a local reality (sea urchin panna cotta!) that reveals the artifice of the guest s product and its production While this might be a slightly supercilious application of one of Kant s Three Definite Articles for perpetual peace, the same criticism—traces of research, artifice, labour—
is not levelled at DeLillo by the New York reviews.x A native New Yorker, a cosmopolitan of its ilk, DeLillo would seem to possess Kunzru s subtleties of authenticity —think of the Bronx
sections of his magisterial Underworld, often praised as one of the best novels of the twentieth
century, in which DeLillo, apparently, reproduces the Bronx street slang of his youth.xi
Trang 9This is not to say that Cosmopolis was met with fawning reviews Indeed, the locals were hostile John Updike, in The New Yorker, felt Cosmopolis to be inauthentic because of its
narrative implausibility; it would be fine coming, he opines, from other patriarchs of American fiction, like Kurt Vonnegut or Paul Auster (to whom the book was dedicated) Updike encourages the reader to find better accounts of Masters of the Universe by reading Tom Wolfe.xii Yet, Updike manages to spot the authentic: (is limo ride … does, however, have a few stops in the world of the living, of the substantially felt The very notion of a daylong push along Forty-seventh Street is funny and metaphoric—a soul s slow-motion hurtle from the U.N s posh environs to the desolation of (ell s Kitchen, with the diamond block between Fifth and Sixth Avenues providing a splash of noontide sparkle
Injecting herself less belletristically into her review than Updike, Kakutani puffs DeLillo s place in the American literary canon: No American novelist has been more attuned to
the surreal weirdness of our recent history than Don DeLillo Yet she attacks Cosmopolis: )ts …
portrait of a millennial Manhattan is hopelessly clichéd… And shockingly for Mr DeLillo, some
of the details – like the proliferation of white limos like Eric s that swarm the city s street – feel strained, neither heightened and odd enough to create a satiric portrait of New York nor
dead-on accurate enough to capture a real moment in time xiii While Le works hard, tries, DeLillo,
who is an authentic native son, does not try hard enough DeLillo merely repeats what is in front of him without the illumination of embellishment or invention, or deploys clichés, something anyone, no matter his or her location, could also deploy
The title of Laura Miller s review for The New York Observer reveals her verdict: All Day
in a Rich Guy s Limo Makes for a Very Silly Novel Walter Kirn is more scathing in The New
York Times Book Review:
Our world has been transistorized to a fare-thee-well – now tell us something we don t know DeLillo refuses (is is a fossilized academic futurism )t s as though he had gone into permanent seclusion in 1968 or so following a New Wave film festival and has gathered all of his subsequent experiences via the reading of essays on poststructuralism and the viewing of remote-control security cameras trained on major urban landmarks
Kirn suggests that DeLillo assimilates a dated cosmopolitan aesthetic from the (presumably
French) New Wave Yet he grants DeLillo some authenticity, even if DeLillo s authenticity is
irrelevant and out-of-date And while Kirn might be slaying a literary father by his tying of DeLillo to the failed revolutionary year of ,xiv he gets it exactly wrong.xv
DeLillo s notes and drafts for Cosmopolis indicate not a preternatural grasp of the subtleties of authenticity, or laziness, but an anxiety of authenticity Amongst DeLillo s papers
held by the Harry Ransom Center, a five-page itinerary, in typescript, lists significant locations along th St / , handwritten in the upper right hand corner, indicates that the research trip was repeated—an attempt, it seems, to ensure his local knowledge is relevant and up-to-date DeLillo adds to the list of real places (as evinced by handwriting around and over
the typewritten itinerary) only on the west side of 47th St, where Cosmopolis becomes less
beholden to the actuality of New York s geography and veers into the imaginary
Further, perhaps recognising what Ramazani identifies as the common perception of poetry as being local, regional, and inward , DeLillo belabours the rap lyrics of Brutha Fez, whose funeral Packer encounters The lyrics are worked and re-worked across approximately twenty pages Just six short excerpts are included in the novel Even Brutha Fez s name is a laboured invention There are nearly fifty variations on the name in DeLillo s drafts: Fez (ead,
Trang 10Rhymer Fez, T-Bird Fez, and so on (ad DeLillo chosen, say, Macro Fez instead of Brutha Fez, the relationship between Packer and the Sufi rapper would be interpreted differently )nstead of Brutha being a means of exclusion Packer s association with Brutha Fez cannot fall under the filial bounds of religious and racial brotherhood, even as their masculinity and their wealth—features of the older cosmopolitanism—meant they met twice, and even though Packer plays Brutha Fez s music in one of his two elevators , Macro provides a global connection between the two through an inclusive image of worldwide financial structuration that elides or overwrites the difference, the newer and pluralised cosmopolitanism, contained
in Brutha
Both Le and DeLillo have worked assiduously on their texts, yet they have been judged
on different terms Le, whose biography is always explicitly noted, remains an outsider, a guest
to be admitted DeLillo s previous works provide most of his background, and this background always situates him as local.xvi Le s Meeting Elise, as well as its reception, grapples with New York as a site of contestation between bodies, generations, family, lovers, and memory This challenges the kind of literary parochialism, a host s protest, played out in Roth s and DeLillo s
patriarchy of pain, where the locals paint, trade, write and review in a formalized milieu (Kunzru) of hierarchical cosmopolitanism
As ) argue above, by portraying a patriarchy of pain in Meeting Elise, Le does Roth and
a version of DeLillo that DeLillo resists in Cosmopolis.xvii Placing Meeting Elise between the lauded and authentic or authenticating stories, The Boat and Love and (onor, leaks the transnationalism of its production and the patriarchy of pain signals a slipping grasp on cultural
and literary value The Boat jars with the New York reviewers because transnationalism is
methodical Goellnicht, less derisive of method and not beholden to the older cosmopolitanism,
cites Peter Nyers concept of abject cosmopolitanism :
These groups of outcasts, discarded and rejected, appear to be the opposite of the highly valued cosmopolitan who is at home everywhere, but they are in fact constitutive of the democratic cosmopolitan as the other is constitutive of the self Such groups have, in many instances, taken
up democratic agency in combating the restrictive measures that would seek to exclude or deport them, thus adopting a stance of critical cosmopolitanism (212)
The value of Le s transnational method becomes his refugee cosmopolitanism operating in his
final story, The Boat (is broader abject, critical cosmopolitanism, ) have argued, is present in
the middle stories This is especially the case for Meeting Elise, as it depicts the scene of older,
New York cosmopolitanism, and anticipates and resists the reluctant responses of the New York reviewers to its portrayal of the patriarchy of pain
The contradictory parochialism of the globalised field of literary production and the hierarchical cosmopolitanism of its critical reception is telling in the need to use DeLillo s archive to demonstrate that, despite the claims of the New York
reviews, he actually tried when he wrote Cosmopolis
That this labour is not used to criticise a DeLillo or a Roth but instead points to an obsolescence that nonetheless authenticates what is considered late work, indicates that what Paul Giles has identified as the reciprocal position of the United States in the transnational era of literary production actually resists
Both Le and DeLillo have
worked assiduously on their
texts, yet they have been
judged on different terms Le,
whose biography is always
explicitly noted, remains an
outsider, a guest to be
admitted DeLillo s previous
works provide most of his
background, and this
background always situates
him as local