The reason for the initial groundswell of interest in Don DeLillo in the mid- 1980s and the reason that White Noise (1985) has quickly become one of the most frequently taught postwar novels is that DeLillo is seen as representing the turn to postmodernism in American literature. But the vital question is: in what sense is DeLillo a postmodern writer? Is it his detailed anthropological attention to those aspects of contemporary Western – and perhaps specifically American – life in the age of media saturation and globalized free market capitalism that is characterized by the term postmodernity? Or is it his deployment of a set of stylistic techniques that makes him an exponent of a new artistic register that goes by the name of postmodernism? Or is it a stance of opposition to contemporary economic and political trends that renders him less a gung-ho postmodernist than a determined if somewhat oblique antipostmodernist? The basic debate that has fascinated many readers of DeLillo is whether his writing is able to maintain a critical distance from the culture he describes. Put simply, is his writing a symptom, a diagnosis, or an endorsement of the condition of postmodernity?

After modernism

The critics who have examined DeLillo’s recurrent interest in modernist writers such as James Joyce and William Faulkner and in artistic techniques such as cinematic montage and literary surrealism are undoubtedly correct in suggesting that he has a greater formal and spiritual affinity with the early twentieth-century avant-garde in particular and modernism in general than with other contemporary postmodernist writers. But the irony is that it is the explicitness with which DeLillo acknowledges his enormous debt to modernism that ends up rendering him postmodern.

A discrimination of mysteries

Like many postmodern novelists, Don DeLillo plays seriously with the forms of popular fiction. He draws regularly on the forensic plotlines of detective mysteries and espionage fiction. Who is plotting to blow up the New York Stock Exchange (Players) (1977)? Who has the film of Adolf Hitler's last days (Running Dog) (1978)? For whom is James Axton really working (The Names) (1982)? Who has Dylar, the drug that supposedly represses the fear of death (White Noise) (1985)? Who killed JFK (Libra) (1988)? The plots of esoteric fiction, filled with quests for secret knowledge and cosmic conspiracies, also fascinate him. The Names features a search for a secret cult obsessed with obscure languages and ritual murder, and Libra muses, as its title indicates, over the secrets encoded in the esoteric systems of astrology. In these popular narrative traditions, all mysteries are for solving, all disruptive forces can be managed, and human dignity is closely linked to the acquisition of exact knowledge.

But DeLillo is preoccupied as well with a third and very different discourse of mystery. Many of his novels – including Players, The Names, White Noise, Mao II (1991), and Underworld (1997) – climax in dramatic episodes of worshipful communion that recall the religious “mysteries” of DeLillo's Catholic heritage. In these episodes characters unfulfilled by quests for knowledge and control or by practices of privileged superficiality find comfort in experiences of sacramental communion that recall the “mysteries” of the Catholic sacraments, sacred practices that channel grace to those who perform them from sources that cannot be fully understood.

The (postmodern) way we live now

The pilgrimage to Graceland that capped Junichio Koizumi's 2006 visit to the United States testified to more than just a mutual appreciation of rockabilly's favorite son, the outfitting of Air Force One with Elvis DVDs, an all-Elvis public address system, and grilled peanut butter and banana sandwiches notwithstanding. According to the New York Times, in fact, the trip to Graceland was “partly a reward” to the Japanese prime minister for supporting the US president on Iraq and, more recently, for reopening Japan's markets to US beef after a ban related to concerns over mad cow disease. More than just a result of George Bush's desire to “treat” Koizumi “nice,” then, the pilgrimage to Graceland proved that those ties between the USA and Japan that Bush found “very strong” were as much political and economic as they were (pop) cultural. This inextricable link between politics, the economy, and culture attests to the way we live now, to borrow the title of an Anthony Trollope novel. Just how that “we” has come to be constituted and whether there remain any grounds for recovering an “I” of individual subjectivity in such a climate are issues at the heart of Don DeLillo's White Noise (1985). They inform not only the acts of DeLillo’s protagonist, a college professor forced to realize that he is just every man in any city, but also the task faced by DeLillo himself, namely, finding a critical position from which to delineate a cultural phenomenon without being wholly absorbed by it.

In Don DeLillo's first novel, Americana (1971), the narrator remembers juvenile inebriation as a slipping into “the river which is language without thought” (A 189). The figure recurs in The Names (1982), in which, commenting on the displacement of Aramaic, “the language of Jesus,” by Arabic, the language of Mohammed, a character declares, “The river of language is God” (N 150,152). Neither of these pronouncements quite makes sense – unless, as DeLillo intends, one pauses to reconsider familiar or received ideas about language, what it means, and how it works. Whoever does this enters a labyrinth long thought to harbor a poststructuralist minotaur; in fact, it harbors only a cunning artificer.

Although he did not, like Dedalus, build the labyrinth, DeLillo is very much its master. Certainly his writings feature, as given or constant, a thematics of language. In a number of interviews, the author has affirmed the centrality, in his thinking and in his writing, of ideas about the great ocean of words in which, dolphin-backed, he swims. As early as the writing of End Zone (1972), his second novel, he comments, “I began to suspect that language was a subject as well as an instrument in my work.” “[B]efore everything,” he remarks in a 1993 Paris Review interview, “there's language. Before history and politics, there's language.” In another interview, in 1997, he restates this credo: “For me the crux of the whole matter is language.” But DeLillo's meditations on language tend to take place in a kind of parallel universe – a vantage from which the author can reframe, reconfigure, or subvert certain of the tendentious and reductionist elements in linguistics, psychology, and literary theory. Poetic and startling without ever lapsing into the merely fanciful, DeLillo’s language games remind readers that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in the poststructuralist episteme.

Despite consistently laudatory reviews, DeLillo's early fiction did not have the popular success that his work since White Noise (1985) has achieved. One reason why fewer readers appreciated DeLillo's early work is that it consistently thwarts readers' expectations. It does not do so gratuitously or perversely but rather as a reflection of a profoundly altered cultural landscape, a world for which he considers conventional storytelling frameworks inadequate. As DeLillo once wrote, “For me, well-behaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherent reality of modern life.” Nevertheless, DeLillo often deploys familiar devices and conventions, both literary and cinematic. In two novels published just a year apart, Players (1977) and Running Dog (1978), he borrows heavily from a longstanding genre of popular literature and movies, the political thriller, only to rearrange and subvert the genre's conventions at every turn.

Popular since the 1950s, the political thriller has become a familiar vehicle for entertainment, thanks in large part to such bestselling novelists as Robert Ludlum, John le Carré, and Tom Clancy and to such audiovisual spectacles as the numerous James Bond films and the Mission: Impossible television and film series. The political thriller emerged primarily in response to the post- World War II establishment of such national intelligence organizations as the American CIA and the British MI5. In these narratives primarily white male protagonists battle threats to the national and global order against a backdrop of governmental operatives, elusive saboteurs, and alluring women, who typically function as distractions for the protagonists from their otherwise single-minded efforts.

The fall of the Towers

Many lives came to an abrupt end on the morning of September 11, 2001, among them those of a financial analyst with Cantor Fitzgerald in the World Trade Center who did not return to meet his wife at a suburban New Jersey commuter train station; a busboy in the Windows on the World restaurant with a second job lined up that evening in the Bronx; and a firefighter from Queens who had expected a day of camaraderie at the fire station. The 1990s had been marked by the technological acceleration and financial excesses of the information economy; but the freeze-frame shot of American Airlines Flight 11 penetrating the glass and steel carapace of the North Tower at 8:46 am brought this symbol of the United States's preeminent place in multinational capitalism to ruins. Don DeLillo, who had nearly finished drafting his thirteenth novel, Cosmopolis (2003) at the time, shared in the collective seizure of the American mind. “Terror,” he observes, “is now the world narrative, unquestionably. When those two buildings were struck, and when they collapsed, it was, in effect, an extraordinary blow to consciousness, and it changed everything.” After the terrorist attacks, DeLillo claims, “I took a long pause. I just didn't want to work for a while, although I wrote an essay on the attacks themselves. The attacks didn't affect the novel directly, but they certainly affected me.”

Small wonder Don DeLillo abandoned advertising. In 1964, five years into a promising career with Ogilvy & Mather, DeLillo quit, not to do anything as grand as write (though he had published two stories) but more because he found the premise of advertising, with its cheesy delight in surfaces, empty and incompatible with the larger perspectives that intrigued him. The son of Italian immigrants, DeLillo was raised amid the pageantries of pre-Vatican Two Catholicism and attended a Catholic prep school, where the drama of a material universe destined for purification by imminent apocalypse was as real as math or biology. Among the Jesuits at Fordham, DeLillo was enthralled by the far-reaching implications of philosophy and theology, encouraged, despite (or perhaps because of) the evident spiritual desiccation of his postwar boom culture, to approach the material universe as the abiding mystery of a created thing and, in turn, the complex circuitry of the human creature as infinitely more intriguing through its possession of something called a soul, which altered the very understanding of understanding itself.

Such conceptions, of course, put DeLillo at odds with his cultural moment. Emerging amid the Beat energy and avant-garde audacities of 1950s New York, DeLillo in his early fictions tested but could not endorse the chic existential angst of the New Wave films he admired. Such emotional thinness flatlined into glib ennui, glamorous self-destruction, and self-serving alienation. Living amid the quiet panic of civil defense drills, the nerveless assembling of piles of nuclear weaponry, and the wonderland logic of Mutual Assured Destruction, DeLillo cast a wary eye on his culture's horizontal sense of apocalypse, a shoddy sort of cataclysm defined by a culture uninterested in lifting its collective vision above the material realm.

Published in 1997, Underworld is widely regarded as Don DeLillo's major novel to date. In many ways it represents the culmination of DeLillo's novelistic career, though one must exercise caution in making such monumental statements about a living author who shows no signs of slowing down. We can say with certainty that Underworld brings together and extends themes that DeLillo has explored throughout his fiction: the relation between humans and technology; the contrast between history (and the subjects of history) conceived as a totality and history (and the subjects of history) conceived as multiple, fragmented, accidental; the excesses of consumer capitalism and its effects on individual life; the relation between language and the social order; the possibility of community amid the failure of politics; the contestation of secrecy and transparency in the contemporary world; and the world as waste and waste as art.

Underworld's range and discursive multiplicity suggest that it is an example of encyclopedic narrative, comparable to Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759), Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), or more recently, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973), a novel that anatomizes the West from World War II to the Nixon era, and to which DeLillo's multilayered portrayal of American life during the Cold War is often and easily compared. To be sure, Underworld takes the Cold War as its backdrop. The prologue, “The Triumph of Death,” published separately as “Pafko at the Wall” in the October 1992 issue of Harper's, is one of the most extraordinary openings in contemporary fiction.

Since the 1985 publication of White Noise, winner of the National Book Award, Don DeLillo has become one of the most significant contemporary American novelists, standing in the first rank with Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, and John Updike. In a 2005 poll conducted by the New York Times Book Review that asked 125 prominent writers and critics to name the best American novel of the past 25 years, three of DeLillo's novels ranked in the top twenty: Underworld (1997) (runner-up to Toni Morrison's 1987 Beloved), White Noise, and Libra (1988).

The recognition of DeLillo's achievement has not been limited to America. In 1999 DeLillo received the Jerusalem Prize at the Jerusalem International Book Fair. The award, given every two years since 1963, honors a writer whose body of work expresses the theme of the individual's freedom in society. The first American recipient of the award, DeLillo joined an international group of previous winners that includes such distinguished novelists, playwrights, and philosophers as Bertrand Russell, Simone de Beauvoir, Jorge Luis Borges, Eugene Ionesco, V. S. Naipaul, Milan Kundera, and Mario Vargas Llosa. In selecting DeLillo, the jury characterized his work as “an unrelenting struggle against even the most sophisticated forms of repression of individual and public freedom during the last half century.”

The author of fourteen novels, DeLillo has become a fixture on college course syllabi and is often selected to represent the American postmodern novel in undergraduate literature surveys. Given DeLillo's undeniable significance to contemporary American fiction, this volume seeks to provide the reader with an overview of DeLillo's achievement as a novelist, taking up the author's poetics and themes, as well as providing more in-depth coverage of his best-known and most frequently taught novels.

Don DeLillo's fiction suggests that masculinity, rather than being inherent, is an insecure construction based on dominant societal norms and presented via mediated images. His writing offers a number of hypermasculine characters torn between upsetting and upholding the status quo; they display the inadequacy of stereotypes while suggesting that the concept of individuality is flawed and unsustainable. Literature can potentially aid the embedding of social conditioning; however, it can also provide a critical purchase from which to scrutinize social norms. While it is difficult to identify ideal alternatives in any cultural text, literature at least offers a forum for thinking about difference and boundary breaching. This is what DeLillo's writing does in its treatment of masculinity. Rather than replace one defunct cultural narrative with an equally invalid alternative, it displays the insecurity of masculinity without offering a facile replacement. What the reader instead becomes aware of is an emergent male self-consciousness, which is crucially and increasingly knowing about the performative nature of men's roles. For example, when Jack Gladney, the satirical protagonist of White Noise (1985), muses to himself about what his father-in-law might think of him, he reveals his own feelings of inadequacy, which may or may not reflect what Vernon thinks.

PART I: SUNNISM

A few initial points need to be made about the nature of Islamic theology in its later stages before a discussion of some of its main themes and thinkers can be attempted. First, there often exists no clear distinction between Islamic theology, in the sense of kalām, and the other Islamic and not so Islamic sciences, such as grammar, jurisprudence (fiqh), philosophy (falsafa/hikma), Sufism, and the even more specific activities of learning how to operate with the Traditions of the Prophet, and how to assess and rank the chains of narrators which differentiate their levels of reliability. Islamic theologians did not usually strictly separate what they did from all these other activities, and so it is not easy to provide a neat account of precisely what is “theological” and what is not.

The first four centuries of Islamic theology had been a time of vibrant creativity. The whole structure of the subject was being created, with its novel vocabulary and its distinctive hermeneutic techniques, but by the time of Ghazelī the basic paradigms were already well established, and kalem was rivalling or outstripping falsafa in intellectual eminence. It is often said that the assault of Ghazelī on philosophy destroyed the latter in the Islamic world until (and perhaps even in) modern times, and that he replaced philosophy with theology and Sufism. This is not true; for one thing falsafa as a discipline did not die; it continued to flourish in the Persian world and to some extent among the Ottomans, and it was only in the Arabic-speaking regions of Islam that it sank into a marked decline, until reviving in the nineteenth century as part of the Nahda or Arabic-Islamic “renaissance”. However falsafa's key concerns and methods lived on, and flourished, within developed kalām.

Broadway musicals can continue to live long after their initial productions close. They can tour, play at local community theatres, become staples of high school repertoire, and even open abroad (as discussed in chapter 15). Years later they sometimes return to Broadway, occasionally finding even greater success than when they first appeared. They can become films or television specials, and in these incarnations play to exponentially larger audiences than is possible in live performance. And thanks to recordings, these shows can be accessed wherever and whenever the necessary technology is available.

Revivals

Most successful Broadway revivals are ones that do something to the original material that is powerful, unexpected, or so deft that audiences are interested in returning to it. These shows are sometimes beloved classics filled with popular tunes and presented with a fresh interpretation and a strong cast. They can also be underappreciated, complex scores that deserve a second chance to find an audience. Yet the longest-running revival in Broadway history is a series of silly skits that generated no hit songs or complicated messages. Oh! Calcutta! holds a record that few revivals are ever likely to surpass: it ran for 5,959 performances between 1976 and 1989. A comedy revue featuring sketches by many writers, songs by multiple composers, and an often-nude cast, the show continued to draw audiences thanks to its novelty and air of ridiculous fun. But past this novelty of a revival, most producers, directors and performers have the same impulses when it comes to remounting a Broadway show: they wish to explore its inherent artistic possibilities and find new audiences.