What would happen if our global digital infrastructure suddenly and completely collapsed? What adjustments would we have to make, as individuals, as communities, as a species? Which of us would thrive, which of us would fail to survive?
In The Silence, Don DeLillo's slim new novel, these questions guide the conversation of five people, gathered initially in a Manhattan living room to watch the 2022 Super Bowl, and now huddled in the creeping cold of a large-scale electro-technological blackout.
“Conversation” might be a generous description. Each encased in their own obsessions and anxieties, the characters in The Silence do not so much converse as make verbal noise, talking at each other in sardonic televisual soundbites, or in meandering monologues that seem pitched far beyond the confines of the room in which they are spoken. Unfolding for the most part in a single setting, and eschewing plot and character in favour of gnomic utterance and broken dialogue, DeLillo’s 17th novel reads remarkably like an absurdist play.
The statements and soliloquies that fill The Silence bear DeLillo’s hallmark combination of aesthetic poise and cutting cultural commentary, and in such a pared-back novel, the author’s uncanny knack for tuning into the exact frequencies of contemporary living is on stark display.
Take Max, husband to retired physics professor Diane, who, with no knowledge of what’s happening on the football field, opens a bottle of bourbon, plants himself in front of his blank superscreen TV, and spouts language “from a broadcast level deep in his unconscious mind”. First emulating the commentary of football pundits, then the chants of the crowd, Max moves on to channelling commercials:
“Wireless the way you want it. Soothes and moisturizes. Gives you twice as much for the same low cost. Reduces the risk of heart-and-mind disease.”
“Perpetual postmortem financing. Start your exclusive arrangements online.”
Such passages are undeniably funny. While DeLillo’s gift of prescience has long been acknowledged (he completed this end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it novel before Covid-19’s onslaught, although the virus gets a late editorial insertion), his drollness is seldom noted. In the tradition of two of DeLillo’s enduring influences – Beckett and Joyce, whose spectres haunt this book – The Silence contains moments of humour drier than a bone in the desert, and just as foreboding.
Power
The ways we measure lived reality according to the simulacra of the screen – whether television, movie, or computer – have preoccupied DeLillo from his debut novel onwards. Perhaps more painfully pertinent to our current conditions than at first publication, Americana (1971) imagines the future of the university to be a small room in which two TV sets face each other, playing prerecorded content: “the videotape of the students would then watch the videotape of the instructors.”
Once literally drained of their power, however, screens in The Silence reflect the gaps in our knowledge (of ourselves, of the world) that over-reliance on technology has produced.
On a plane from Paris to Newark, Jim Kripps reads aloud the flight information from the screen ahead of him. These are "words and numbers", comforting in their continuity, helping him "hide from the noise", "the twin drones of mind and aircraft". When his wife Tessa, a poet, recalls the name of Anders Celsius, the moment is both satisfying and oddly poignant:
“Came out of nowhere. There is almost nothing left of nowhere. When a missing fact emerges without digital assistance, each person announces it to the other while looking off into a remote distance, the otherworld of what was known and lost.”
What DeLillo’s novel indicates is that we may have wandered too far from that “otherworld” to come back with our sanity intact. We’ve filled every conceivable space with noise; we’ve populated the clouds with digital data, and without it, the silence is deafening. “What happens to people who live inside their phones?” asks one character after the blackout. “More or less unthinkable,” announces another, who lists her life events as “first marriage, first cellphone, divorce”. “What do we do? Who do we blame?”
There is no narrative climax to The Silence – but then, no-one reads a late DeLillo novel for the action. As we watch the characters unravel and the structures of civilisation deteriorate, The Silence’s horror resides in the dawning truth of Einstein’s prediction (and the novel’s epigraph): “I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
It's doubtful that the end of the electronic world would make much difference to DeLillo, a famously analogue writer who crafts his novels on a 1970s Olympia typewriter. But for most of us, screens have become lifelines. Locked into drastically reduced spheres of experience and grappling with the distortions the pandemic has wrought on our sense of time, readers of The Silence will feel the novel's existential terror keenly.
Catherine Gander is associate professor of American literature at Maynooth University
