Don Delillo, Underworld, and waste

An amazingly beautiful book, should you ever wish to take the time to read it, is Underworld by Don Delillo. It has, in my opinion, the most consistently tightly written opening chapter of any book. I remember when I first read it, I was stunned by this masterpiece of an opening.

It is not a short book. My paperback copy is 827 pages, and it deserves careful reading. But it repays itself in spades as a book of great complexity.

I won't attempt to explain the book here (mainly because it has been too long since I read it), but one of the themes in the book, and perhaps the inspiration for the title, is the waste that lies suppressed beneath society. It is quite literal (a key character is a waste management executive), but also figurative in the subconscious urges beneath the glittering conscious.

Delillo's writing around waste alone is quite astounding. Take this from Chapter 1 of Part 3:

The construction crew had gone for the day. We stood above a hole in the earth, an engineered crater five hundred feet deep, maybe a mile across, strewn with snub-nosed machines along the terraced stretches and covered across much of the sloped bottom by an immense shimmering sheet, a polyethylene skin, silvery blue, that caught cloudmotion and rolled in the wind. I was taken by surprise. The sight of this thing, the enormous gouged bowl lined with artful plastic, was the first material sign I'd had that this was a business of a certain drastic grandeur, even a kind of greatness, maybe - the red-tailed hawks transparent in the setting sun and the spring stalks of yucca tall as wishing wands and this high-density membrane that was oddly and equally beautiful in a way, a prophylactic device, a gas-control system, and the crater it layered that would accept thousands of tons of garbage a day, your trash and mine, for desert burial.

He captures that horrific grandeur that comes from the extraordinary feat of seaming together hectares of plastic. The creation of incredible vastness, a mark on the world that surely leaves nature in awe. It is "man over nature", the awe that inspired totalitarian regimes (communist and fascist), a sense of total release into the void of utter disempowerment. That is landfill. Truck after truck streaming in, disgorging, overwhelming you with the sheer scale and tempting you to retreat to you safe shell of domesticity.

Or this, from Chapter 4 of Part 1:

We built pyramids of waste above and below the earth. The more hazardous the waste, the deeper we tried to sink it. The word plutonium comes from Pluto, god of the dead and ruler of the underworld. They took him out to the marshes and wasted him as we say today, or used to say until it got changed to something else.

The connection between Pluto, ruler of the underworld (and in astrology, the subconscious), and waste is made explicit. Radioactive waste is sent down to Pluto, buried down deep with all of our other subterranean fears.

And finally (at least in this brief essay), the whole world of a waste manager is summed up in Chapter 3 of Part 2:

He looked at all that soaring garbage and knew for the first time what his job was all about. Not engineering or transportation or source reduction. He dealt in human behaviour, people's habits and impulses, their uncontrollable needs and innocent wishes, maybe their passions, certainly their excesses and indulgences but their kindness too, their generosity, and the question was how to keep this mass metabolism from overwhelming us.

I couldn't put it better myself, and his words provide a window into the underworld. An underworld that is much of my world (do I represent Pluto or Persephone?), and an underworld that I continue to explore through this blog.