In his best seller novel Underworld, Don Delillo comprehensively analyzes the American culture since the Second World War. The novel consists of random narratives that ultimately converge, showing both ugly and beautiful with full realism. This analytical narrative shows the characteristics and the origins of the American culture, by the prominent events in the recent American history and by the effects of those events on the lives of the ordinary citizens. The ideas behind the culture are given in the thoughts of the characters, tracing the philosophical sources of the American culture. The reader can see that the American culture is shaped by many European thinkers, as well as the American ones. Terminologies that Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Nietzsche have created are always in the language across the Atlantic from Europe. Especially Nietzsche’s way of thinking is embedded in American thought, thus in the thought of the characters of Underworld. Nietzsche discloses the realities hidden under the cultural illusions in his work Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and also offers a mindset to deal with the heavy reality, a mindset that can be called the “religion” of Zarathustra. As the illusions in the American culture are uncovered by Delillo, it becomes clear that Zarathustra’s religion has settled in the minds of the American society.
Nietzsche’s influence in Underworld begins with the juxtaposition of illusions and reality. In the novel, the people who still live with the illusions that Nietzsche denied are the religious characters and the characters that lack will. Through these characters Delillo displays the remnants of the forces that Nietzsche fights against in his writings. However, the examples of Nietzsche’s indirect followers are more common. The three evils that the German philosopher endorsed are among the strongest characteristics of the modern capitalist culture Delillo illustrates. Sensual pleasure, selfishness and will to power are the three evils, which are depicted through the characters and subplots in the novel. To Delillo, the total destruction, which is the inevitable and desired end according to Nietzsche, is a very close possibility. A possibility transforming the American thought system.
Both Nietzsche and Delillo show that what we see on the surface with the eyes that our culture shaped may not be the truth. Very often, thoughts that seem to belong to us are imposed by the culture upon us. “What good is my reason? Does it long for knowledge as the lion for its food? It is poverty and dirt and a miserable ease!”[1]: To Nietzsche, the judgment is useless as long as it is not used to find the real knowledge underneath the cultural illusions. Man should search the truth by himself without any outside influences. The reader can see this inability to see the truth due to the cultural way of reasoning in the novel by the example of waste. The waste manager Brian Glassic understands that there is something strange about waste: “To Understand all this. To penetrate the secret. The mountain was here, unconcealed but no one saw it or thought about it, no one knew it existed”[2] Although its presence is so big that it is impossible to ignore, the common mindset can ignore it. No one except a few is able to break through the limitations of perception and recognize the important presence of waste. Another culturally ignored reality shown in the novel is death, which is reminded to the reader by a Brueghel painting in the hands of J. Edgar Hoover: “It is the “real” hidden in the dream, enveloped in the underworld of the cultural unconsciousness, that the novel probes, and one aspect of this real is precisely linked to the Brueghel painting”[3] Although death is the inevitable end of every single life, and thus extraordinarily common, the culture makes people unable to recognize it. Using the themes of waste and death, Delillo shows that Nietzsche is right about the fact that if a person does not break through the cultural way of reasoning, he is unable to search for the truth.
Not yet disillusioned, the religious people in Underworld have a mindset that Nietzsche opposes strongly. Delillo criticizes them the same way Nietzsche does, showing their humbleness. Nietzsche explains the origin of the religion by the lack of desire to live: “ Weariness, which wants to reach the ultimate with a single leap, with a death leap, a poor ignorant weariness, which no longer wants even to want: that created all gods and afterworlds.”[4] This description is still true for the religious people of today, who always look down on to the worldly desires. In Delillo’s work this hypothesis is supported by the character Sister Edgar, who is an old nun in the Bronx. “She eats the food without tasting it because she decided years ago that the taste is not the point. The point is to clear the plate”[5]: In addition to showing the insensitivity to pleasure of the nun, this is also a metaphor for her whole life. The nun lives to fulfill her ostensibly predetermined duty in life, lives to “clear the plate”, not to enjoy life or have desires, not to “taste”. Nietzsche would certainly agree with Delillo on the characteristics of a mind that has a strong belief in God. They are tired of life, and are not able to create new values in the world because they do not possess a desire.
The problem of lacking will is not unique to the religious people in the American society of Underworld, but very common in other characters, too. The lack of will is explained by Nietzsche as a result of the marketplace economy, which has become even more dominant in modern world. “All great things occur away from glory and the marketplace: the inventors of new values have always lived away from glory and the marketplace.”[6] In the capitalist America, where fame and affluence are the dreams of every growing individual, Nietzsche would be sure that there would be no will for creating new values. In the novel, the relationship between Janet, a nurse living in New York City, and Matt, an engineer working in a desert in the Mid-West, shows that Nietzsche’s opinion on capitalism is true. When Matt possesses will to stop working on weapons because of moral reason Janet says: “And you should do the thing you do best. That’s what safe is.”[7] His girlfriend represents the pressure of the capitalist norms that want to make him do the job he does best to maximize the material gain, regardless of his will. Real individuals with their own wills are not wanted by the capitalist system, and certainly this system does not create such individuals: “Willing liberates for willing is creating: thus I teach. And you should learn only for creating!”[8] The liberty that capitalism brings about is not the real liberty, as it is also shown by Delillo. Following the relationship of Matt and Janet, the reader sees that they, conforming to the social norms, become insignificant as they grow older: “He felt little. He felt small and lost. His wife was little. He had undersized kids. They did nothing in the world that would ever be noticed.”[9] This is an incarnation of lack of will that Nietzsche certainly despises. Like Matt and Janet, many characters in Underworld conform to others so much that they forgot that they can desire things.
Although Delillo shows that phenomena that Nietzsche dislikes still exists in modern society, the German philosopher’s ideas have an increasing influence in the modern world. The increased acceptance of desire for sensual pleasure is the establishment of first evil of Nietzsche. It was supported by the German philosopher nearly a hundred years before it became accepted in America: “Sensual pleasure: A sweet poison only to the withered, but to the lion-willed the great restorative and reverently-preserved wine of wines.”[10] He believes that it is beneficial for the people who have strong will, harmful only to the people who can not handle it. In Underworld, this restorative comprehension of pleasure is shared by the character Donna, with whom Nick has sexual intercourse although he is married to Marian, in Underworld: “Sex is what you can get. For some people, most people, it’s the most important thing they can get without being born rich or smart or stealing… And it’s not religion and it’s not science but you can explore it and learn things about yourself.”[11] Sex is not only a pleasure but also a way of learning and of revenging against injustices. Nietzsche would classify such people as “lion-willed” who have right to enjoy sensual pleasures as much as they can. Furthermore, the character of J. Edgar Hoover shows the importance of the sensual thoughts in the modern mind by his reading of the Brueghel painting. “`the positioning is sexual, unquestionably’ Hoover is momentarily mesmerized by the Brueghel painting’s ecstatic death fugue, by the conjunction of sex and death, by the death drive itself, implied in the images: `Edgar loves this stuff’”[12] Although it is juxtaposed with death, or perhaps since it is juxtaposed with death, sexual image pleases Hoover. Delillo proves the success of Nietzsche’s thoughts in making sensual pleasures covertly or at times openly desired.
Another “evil” of Nietzsche is selfishness, which is very common in the American culture as it is depicted often in Underworld. Nietzsche rediscovered the value of selfishness that has been condemned to be evil by the many cultures. “Yes, this Ego, with its contradictions and confusions, speaks most honestly of its being – this creating, willing, evaluating Ego, which is the measure and value of things.”[13] Since only selfishness comes from the non-conformist and thus creative side of man, it is more valuable than communal behavior. Every important person develops a very strong sense of self, which is also narrated by Delillo. Lenny Bruce, the entertainer satirically explains the difference between common people and people who has the power; “I am just another Lenny… But that’s not what ordained people do. McGeorge, Roswell, Adlai. They remove themselves from any taint of big middle… Doesn’t matter where they go to church. Their name is their church.”[14] To become important and to change the world according to their will, the initial step is worshiping the self, making the name the church. This satire of Lenny Bruce is more than a satire, but the claim of Nietzsche about the validity of his assertions about selfishness.
Closely related to selfishness, the will to power is another common “evil” of the modern society, affecting world perhaps more than everything else. Delillo, certainly, does not miss this aspect of the modern America, and depicts it in his work. Both Delillo and Nietzsche believe that the will to power is inherent in everybody. “Where I found a living creature, there I found will to power; and even in the will of the servant I found the will to be the master.”[15] Here Nietzsche shows how common this will is, even common among the people who are most distant to power. Delillo shows the same fact by the son of Nick, using the child’s imagination as a proof: “My son used to believe that he could look at a plane in flight and make it explode in midair by simply thinking it. He believed, at thirteen, that the border between himself and the world was thin and porous enough to allow him to affect the course of events.”[16] Delillo’s claim is that we all have the inner will to change the world, but as we experience defeats to this end, we lose the necessary will. As a person who lost his will, Nick can feel good about his life only when he reclaims his will to power by hitting Brian Glassic, who has an affair with Nick’s wife: “Someone bigger than he is, readier to act, sitting between him and the door.”[17] This is the return of the will to power, which means the return of his personality. He experiences it once more in the novel as he kills George Manza, a middle aged waiter. “The latter [shooting], which happens when Manza inexplicably tells Nick the gun he has just handed him is not loaded, is a confrontation with death in all its horrifying arbitrariness.”[18] This event will change Nick’s life in a good direction, although the cultural norms would assume that it should be in a noxious direction. As Nick feels the will to power, he gathers some personal strength that helps him change his own life, starts reading books and thinking about his future in prison. Despite the number of characters who lack the will, Delillo shows us the instants in the modern world when the will to power is working in a very powerful way.
As a result of the dominance of the three evils, the end that Nietzsche predicts, the total destruction, becomes a very probable event in the modern life. Narrating the Cold War era, when the will to power of two super powers was about to create a nuclear total war, Delillo emphasizes the importance of this possibility on daily life. Nietzsche’s description of peace can be the summary of what peace meant during the Cold War in Underworld: “You should love peace as a means to new wars. And the short peace is more than the long.”[19] The peace during the Cold War is a preparation for the upcoming war, which can be the last war. The line that Lenny Bruce loves to repeat “We’re all gonna die”[20] is a vocal version of the cry that is always present in the mind of man of the era, either consciously or unconsciously. A generation that keeps the total annihilation in its mind for a few decades becomes an omen coming true of Nietzsche. This unconscious knowledge is so ordinary that people see it as a daily fact of life: “The front page astonished him… to his left Giants capture the pennant… and to the right, symmetrically mated, same typeface, same-size type, same number of lines, the USSR explodes an atomic bomb – kaboom – details kept secret.”[21] A source of total destruction is an ordinary piece of news now; thus, it is very easy to commit themselves to sensual pleasure, selfishness and the will to power. Wilcox explains how the trauma of the A-bomb helps with the annulment of old values: “Shocks and aftershocks radiate outward from this traumatic point, disturbing the symbolic order much as the gravitational force of a black hole, with its presence/absence, disturbs trajectory of neighboring astral bodies.”[22] As the trauma caused by the presence of nuclear bombs damages the validity of old symbols and the old morals, Nietzsche’s new values based on the recognition of destruction replace the “old law tables”, as Nietzsche calls them.
Reading Underground, the reader can trace the Nietzsche’s values becoming eventually more powerful in the modern American culture. Delillo makes this possible by emphasizing the difference between appearance and reality throughout his novel. In the novel the reader can see the assumptions of Nietzsche about the people who lack will are true. The characters who conform to the capitalist system can not be the leaders of new advancements, just as the life-weary religious people are unable to contribute to the progress of humanity. “The three evils” are not considered evil in Underground, because like Nietzsche the “underground people” has seen the futility of the old values. The sensual pleasures are commonly practiced and even appreciated by the characters. The selfishness is a common trait in the novel, and widely approved by the culture under the name of individualism. The will to power, although often suppressed, is realized in different ways in characters’ lives, and becomes a very important factor in their lives. The people of the modern America, as shown in the novel, are able to appreciate these “three evils” because just like Nietzsche they can recognize destruction and death staring at their faces.
[1] Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 43
[2] Delillo, Don. Underworld, 185
[3] Wilcox, Leonard. Don Delillo’s Underworld and the Return of the Real, 123
[4] Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 59
[5] Delillo, Don. Underworld, 818
[6] Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 79
[7] Delillo, Don. Underworld, 456
[8] Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 223
[9] Delillo, Don. Underworld, 221
[10] Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 207
[11] Delillo, Don. Underworld, 297
[12] Wilcox, Leonard. Don Delillo’s Underworld and the Return of the Real, 121
[13] Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 60
[14] Delillo, Don. Underworld, 593
[15] Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 137
[16] Delillo, Don. Underworld, 88
[17] Delillo, Don. Underworld, 797
[18]Wilcox, Leonard. Don Delillo’s Underworld and the Return of the Real, 125
[19] Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 74
[20] Delillo, Don. Underworld, 506
[21] Delillo, Don. Underworld, 668
[22] Wilcox, Leonard. Don Delillo’s Underworld and the Return of the Real, 128