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Contemporary Literature 47.3 (2006) 343-380

Don DeLillo's Latin Mass
Amy Hungerford
Yale University

Don DeLillo has described himself as a writer essentially formed by the experiences of his early life in the Bronx, where he was born and raised, and where he attended Catholic schools until he graduated from Fordham University in the late fifties. While he does not discuss his family's Roman Catholicism in the same way he talks about his discovery of modern art and jazz in the city in the sixties, he nevertheless points to the Catholic fabric of his childhood and adolescence as the source of his most enduring preoccupations.1 The traces of this source can be found everywhere in DeLillo's novels, interviews, and essays: in his choice of words, in his subjects, in his imagery, in the ways he understands faith, belief, agency, guilt, redemption, and human relations. I will argue in this essay that DeLillo ultimately transfers a version of mysticism from the Catholic context into the literary one, and that he does so through the model of the Latin mass. This transfer does not, moreover, mark him as either doctrinaire or conservative in the sense that one might think; rather, it marks the way he skirts doctrine while maintaining a Catholic understanding of immanent transcendence. [End Page 343]

Because I am interested in how DeLillo makes that transfer, I focus on three novels from the middle stage of his career that have little thematic relation to Catholicism: Libra (1988), Mao II (1991), and The Names (1982). I discuss Underworld (1997) only briefly, precisely because that novel directly takes up the Catholic culture of the Bronx neighborhood and Italian immigrant family in which DeLillo was raised. It is not surprising, given the thematic presence of Catholicism in the novel, that Underworld has started many critics thinking about religion in DeLillo's work in a sustained way.2 I place Underworld last in my own analysis of religion in DeLillo because it plays out, in Catholic terms, the mystical structures articulated in the earlier work. I argue that Underworld shows how the version of the mystical that DeLillo constructs in the earlier novels is used in the later novel to account for, and in some ways to recuperate, the religion of his childhood. In this sense, DeLillo's work imagines how religion that is abandoned in most respects can persist in a literary form and, I will argue, how it can do so without ceding religious experiences or meanings to secular versions of the same. The [End Page 344] readings show how such a structure is imagined in the characters and situations within DeLillo's fiction. My invocation of DeLillo's biography hints at the perhaps more provocative claim I approach at the end of the essay, that there is some evidence to suggest that DeLillo's own conception of his work demonstrates a similar conservation of an ostensibly abandoned religious practice.

The two ideas at work here—that DeLillo represents a mysticism of language and also sees himself as practicing that mysticism in his fiction—are not necessary to one another. That is, DeLillo need not see his own writing practice as mystical in order to write novels in which his characters do see language as mystical, or even in order to write novels that seem to endorse such mysticism at the level of form. The interest of connecting these two arguments is thus not in their potential to reinforce one another—though their capacity to do so may nevertheless be persuasive—but in what the juxtaposition of the artistic and the biographical reveals about the work literature does historically. DeLillo's status as a nonpracticing American Catholic sets him within a significant demographic in the late twentieth century. His turn to language as the site of the mystical, and his embrace of a writing practice based on this notion, demonstrates an individual's transposition of religion from its traditional setting to the realm of art at a particular moment; the popularity of novels that themselves imagine...

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