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Life
only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it
resides in the
moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the
shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one fact the world
hates, that the soul becomes, for this for ever, degrades the past,
turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame.
-- Emerson's Self-Reliance
If Emerson
is right, if the world really does hate the fact that the self becomes,
then how must the world regard this statement: "Being here has come to me,"
an assertion that troubles past and present and future selves by threatening
them with dislocation in space and time wherever and whenever it appears in
Don DeLillo's The Body Artist. “Being here has come to me,” (76) says
“Mr. Tuttle,” the mysterious unannounced houseguest whose identity
stubbornly refuses to take shape. “Being here has come to me” (123), says
Lauren Hartke, the body artist of the title, to herself,
paradoxically, since only moments before she said to herself, of herself: "I
am Lauren. But less and less" (119). "Being here has come to me,” says
The Body Artist, or, at least, we might almost believe that the novel
says this of itself. And yet, I must add again, paradoxically, because
The Body Artist actually seems to say far less than it is
or, as the novel itself might put it, has come to be.
And this
seems to be the case because the novel's rather convincing since palpable if
impossible way of both “being here” and having come to be stands in sharpest
contrast to the way the novel's words and sentences both are and have come
to us. Its words and sentences rarely signify fully, often they barely mean.
Indeed, The Body Artist 's words and sentences often seem less
written than softly intoned, weakly echoed, merely heard second-hand, mostly
muffled as if heard through a closed door. And just as echoes of
conversations and remarks often reach us without their clarifying contexts,
so the words and sentences that echo through spare rooms and spare hallways
in the spare house and the sparse landscape and the even sparser narrative
of The Body Artist often reach us without the context needed for full
understanding.
Still, something does come
through and the something that comes through in the novel is like that
something that often comes through in life. And to see what that something
might be I want to leave the present for a moment. It was the American poet
Robert Frost, who, in a letter he wrote to a friend in 1914, described what
comes through, perhaps better than anyone who has tried to do so since:
What we do get in life and miss so often in literature is the sentence
sounds that underlie the words. Words in themselves do not convey meaning,
and to [prove] this, which may seem entirely unreasonable to any one who
does not understand the psychology of sound, let us take the example of two
people who are talking on the other side of a closed door, whose voices can
be heard but whose words cannot be distinguished. Even though the words do
not carry, the sound of them does, and the listener can catch the meaning of
the conversation. This is because every meaning has a particular
sound-posture; or, to put it in another way, the sense of every meaning has
a particular sound which each individual is instinctively familiar with and
without at all being conscious of the exact words that are being used is
able to understand the thought, idea, or emotion that is being conveyed.
Now Frost sometimes calls this principle "getting the
sound of sense," but here he is quite careful to call it "sound-posturing,"
which as Frost uses it here seems like a less literal phrase, but which
makes poetic meaning as much as product of the physical act of speaking with
all of its accompanying gestures and bodily shiftings and turnings and
tensings and relaxations that shape the bodily act of shaping utterance as
of words. Thus Frost can also write in another letter: "Words exist in the
mouth not in books. You can't fix them and you don't want to fix them. You
want them to adapt their sounds to persons and places and times. You want
them to change and be different."
Of course, "Mr. Tuttle"'s words and
Lauren Hartke's words and the narrator of The Body Artist's words
exist as text, but in their refusal to be fixed, in their change and
difference, their words always suggest something present and alive,
something embodied and living and already here though ever arriving, its
utterances imparted with motions and posturings and gestures, all aimed at
announcing itself as it is, here and now, yet always on its way. In brief,
it is difficult to conceive of acts of language without "a person's body"
and the many kinds of physical activities (gesture, posture, intonation that
aid in the production, reproduction, and communication of diverse meanings
that are not strictly the product of words and the semantic and syntactic
relationships between them.
Throughout
The Body Artist, then, selves—the characters' selves, the narrator's
self or selves —seem simultaneously here already and always arriving. These
arrivals, moreover, take place not so much through what they say as through
their having spoken, uttered words and sentences to themselves and others,
shaped their bodies or imagined bodies and gestures around those words and
sentence, even if the immediate contexts of these utterances are rarely if
ever clear: "She followed what he said, word for word, but had to search for
the context. The speech rambled and spun" (63). Indeed, Lauren's strange and
intermittent guest "Mr. Tuttle" seems to always seems to speak out of
context since he only says things that others have already said or will say
in other contexts, other languages:
There's a
code in the simplest conversation that tells the speakers what's going on
outside the bare acoustics. This was missing when they talked. There was a
missing beat. It was hard for her to find the tempo. All they had were
unadjusted words. She lost touch with him, loss interest sometimes, couldn't
locate rhythmic intervals or time cues or even the mutters and hums, the
audible pauses that pace a remark. He didn't register facial responses to
things she said and this threw her off. There were no grades of emphasis
here and flatness there. She began to understand that their talks had no
time sense and that all the references at the unspoken level, the things a
man speaking Dutch might share with a man speaking Chinese—all this was
missing here. (67-68)
Even so, as
Frost suggests and as I've tried to suggest, this failure to establish a
context need not make for a failure of communication or communion with
others since words and contexts are only part of the equation. It is true
that Mr. Tuttle's utterance and tone generally reveals his inability to make
verbal sense, "to make himself up" (92) as DeLillo says elsewhere: "There
was a certain futility in his tone, an endlessness of effort, suggesting
things he could not easily make clear to her no matter how much he said"
(48). And yet, when he does approach sense, in however fragmented or
incomplete a manner, the absence of context or, inversely, the presence of
what DeLillo calls "counter-surroundings" grants his utterance genuine
transforming power, that is, the power to release the auditor, in this case,
Lauren Hartke, from the bounds of selfhood.
"I know how
much." He said, "I know how much this house. Alone by the sea."
He looked
not pleased exactly but otherwise satisfied, technically satisfied to have
managed the last cluster of words. And it was in fact, coming from Mr.
Tuttle, a formulation she heard in its echoing depths. Four words only. But
he'd placed her in a set of counter-surroundings, of simultaneous insides
and outsides. The house, the sea-planet outside it, and how the word
alone referred to her and to the house and how the word sea
reinforced the idea of solitude but suggested vigorous release as well, a
means of escape from the book-walled limits of the self. (50)
It is as if
Mr. Tuttle's utterance forces Lauren out of her own habitation, as if by his
voice's agency she's been turned out of doors, as we like to say in America.
Yet here, once again, the habitation, the enclosure, is nothing other than
"the book-lined limits of the self."
A few pages
later, we encounter another self-releasing moment as Mr. Tuttle continues to
speak his strange language toward a communication the end of which is
neither sense not its denial but a kind of suspension between both:
"Coming and
going I am leaving. I will go and come. Leaving has come to me. We all,
shall all, will all be left. Because I am here and where. And I will go or
not or never. And I have seen what I will see. If I am where I will be.
Because nothing comes between me.… It was pure chant, transparent, or was he
saying something to her? She felt an elation that made it hard for her to
listen carefully. Was he telling her what it is like to be him, to live in
his body and mind? She tried to hear this but could not. The words ran on,
sensuous and empty, and she wanted him to laugh with her, to follow her out
of herself. This is the point, yes, this is the stir of true amazement. And
some terror at the edge, or fear of believing, some displacement of the
self, but this is the point, this is the wedge into ecstasy, the old deep
meaning of the word, your eyes rolling upward in your skull. (76-77)
It hard to
see how Mr. Tuttle's words could be as "empty" as Lauren says they are.
Perhaps she is speaking merely semantically. For the words are "sensuous."
They possess the power to amaze, to arrest the auditor, with fear and
terror, at the verge of ecstasy, "the old deep meaning" of which is quite
literally "standing outside," "standing without," or more figuratively
"without standing," that is, "of no account" or, alternatively, "outside
one's self." DeLillo chooses his words carefully, but the meaning of his
words is not the point here. It is their power to displace, to sever the old
bonds between self and some of its safer and more conventional harborings in
language.
It seems, however, that
for all of the power attributed to Mr. Tuttle's utterances, they have merely
enabled Lauren to accomplish an escape that she had already been rehearsing
for some time. Even before Mr. Tuttle appears, Lauren flirts with the
prospect of self-abandonment. She often "inserts herself into certain
stories in the newspaper. Some kind of daydream variation" (16). She
frequently notes "how an incident described in the paper seemed to rise out
of the inky lines of print and gather her into it" (20). This may seem at
first to represent a desire to be absorbed into language, but there is a
something else happening in such passages, a shift toward something that is
not purely language:
You separate the Sunday
sections and there are endless identical lines of print with people living
somewhere in the words and the strange contained reality of paper and ink
seeps through the house for a week and when you look at a page and
distinguish one line from another it begins to gather you into it and there
are people being tortured halfway around the world, who speak another
language, and you have conversations with them more or less uncontrollably
until you become aware you are doing it (21)
I say that there is
something other than language at work here is because of the passage's
attention to physical sensations and material detail. There is the emphasis
on "the reality of paper and ink," Lauren's own sense of being "gathered
in." Perhaps most suggestive however is the inclusion of the one thematic
detail: that of "people being tortured halfway around the world." Lauren,
the body artist, would be drawn, of course, to news stories about the
tortured human body and her own performances bear the mark of such
awareness. Here's a description of one of her performances, by a fictional
reviewer, which suggests her art's affinity with the convulsions and
writhings of the human body under pain of torture.
The last of
her bodies, the naked man, is stripped of recognizable language and culture.
He moves in a curious manner, as if in a dark room, only more slowly and
gesturally. He wants to tell us something. His voice is audible,
intermittently, on tape…His words amount to a monologue without a context.
Verbs and pronouns scatter in the air and then something startling happens.
The body jumps into another level. In a series of electro-convulsive
motions, the body flails out of control, whipping and spinning appallingly.
Hartke makes her body do things I've only seen in animated cartoons. It is a
seizure that apparently flies the man out of one reality and into another.
(109-110)
Lauren's performance is not
intended to represent the torture victim; it is a representation of Mr.
Tuttle and his efforts to communicate, his strange ability to convey himself
into the past, the present, the future unexpectedly, and then rapidly
between tenses. Yet the surging body in physical shock, its mad and
incoherent confessions cannot help but evoke the body in pain. And this is a
feature of the work of many body artists. As Johannes Birringer has
proposed, perhaps thinking about the Vienna Actionists of the 1960's, these
artists seek, through transgressions against the body, to free that same
body from the constraints of theatrical representation, and, in particular,
from the tendency within theater to reproduce cultural and gender
stereotypes (220).
And yet, even once we
acknowledge that Lauren's art has everything to do with self-abandonment and
its bodily performance, such an acknowledgement cannot fully account for her
interest in moments when the self is displaced or disappears. Her interest,
in other words, is not strictly professional, as we Americans like to
say, though I've long ago lost any sense of what this phrase might have once
meant. That is, is anything we do with interest or out of interest
strictly professional? Nevertheless, Lauren's fascination with
selflessness is also evidenced in moments that have very little to do with
her art. Such moments of displacement are most likely to occur in fact while
she is engaged in ordinary activities like watching a bird outside the
kitchen window:
What a
shedding of every knowable surface and process. She wanted to believe the
bird was seeing her, a woman with a teacup in her hand, and never mind the
folding back of day and night, the apparition of a space set off from time.
She looked and took a careful breath. She was alert to the clarity of the
moment but knew it was ending already. She felt it in the blue jay. Or maybe
not. She was making it happen herself because she could not look any longer.
This must be that it means to see if you've been near blind all your life.
(24)
Here self-displacement
begins with the act of identifying herself with, and as part of the
perception of another being, in this case, the bird, a non-human being. But
there are more radical acts of self-displacement in which consciousness is
not transferred to another being but to no being actually present, but
rather to a future and merely possible being. One day, while trying to
decide what to make herself for lunch, Lauren abandons herself again:
She thought about broiling a cutlet, self-consciously alone, more or less
seeing herself from the edge of the room or standing precisely where she was
and being who she was and seeing a smaller hovering her in the air
somewhere, already thinking it's tomorrow. (36)
As I have said, moments like
these occur frequently in The Body Artist and it would seem
that much of Lauren's energy is directed toward not losing herself in such
moments, not giving into the temptation to dissolve, a temptation that grows
increasingly powerful in the weeks after her husband Rey's suicide. She must
work hard to keep herself in the world, to ground her self in its
environment. But language, especially as Mr. Tuttle uses it, seems to be an
especially unreliable medium for such a task. After all, Mr. Tuttle's own
self seems to be a trick of grammar or syntax: "Being here has come to me."
But Lauren's self, DeLillo seems to want to show us, cannot be reduced to
grammar merely and this is because the self though hardly separable from
language or from an individual's linguistic performances is nevertheless not
reducible to these. And to understand why I want go back a few more years
in American literature to Walt Whitman. (You may have noticed by now that I
have a funny way of trying to link DeLillo, who is often described as the
most consistently "postmodern" of major American novelists, to canonical
American figures like Emerson and Frost and Whitman. Of course, I have a
reason for this, but I'd rather you figured it out for yourselves.)
The most famous spider in
American literature crawls silently among Whitman's Leaves of Grass
as the good gray poet himself, ever shaping and reshaping himself in posture
and movement and words, regards its every motion:
A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you O my soul where you
stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect
them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
Just as the
spider "launch[es] forth … out of itself" the threads by which it makes
itself part of the world's wide web and makes the wide world part of its
web, just so, we must spin out of ourselves threads to anchor ourselves,
ductilely, lithely, loosely, flexibly, yieldingly, to the world. Without
these threads, the self remains untethered, "detached," "surrounded" merely
by "measureless oceans of space." As it turns out, Whitman may well have
spun his web from a passage that appears in Emerson's "The Poet." Observe
how the following paragraph turns on the vocabulary of detachment and
re-attachment and how it figures the spider's handiwork:
For, as it is dislocation
and detachment from the life of God, that makes things ugly, the poet, who
re-attaches things to nature and the Whole, --and re-attaching even
artificial things, and violations of nature, to nature, by a deeper insight,
--disposes very easily of the most disagreeable facts. Readers of poetry see
the factory-village, and the railway, and fancy that the poetry of the
landscape is broken up by these. For these works of art are not yet
consecrated in their reading; but the poet sees them fall within the great
Order not less than the bee-hive, or the spider's geometrical web.
Some have supposed, not wholly
inaccurately I think, that Whitman's spider's filaments stand for the
linguistic makings of a concrete language of material reality, that the same
linguistic threads that structure the self connect self to world. Yet as
attractive as this reading may be to literary critics and others who make
their living thinking and writing about words, I think that it misrepresents
the poem. It does not acknowledge the bodily character of the effort
describe in the first stanza, the self-made substance of this launching of
the self's gossamer projections of itself, or its supple anchorings of
itself to the material world.
Whitman
probably also means for us to take the web for language, as Emerson did
before him, but both also take account of the nature of the work that brings
this web into being, the acts of and with language, those acts
not merely within language that shape our experience. What is
surprising, then, is that critics tend to seize on that wholly linguistic
extension or projection of the self that Whitman himself never mentions
directly, even as they tend to ignore his actual suggestions whether these
point literally to forms of bodily extension and projection or merely
metaphorically to our words.
In fact,
as America's first body artist, Whitman does not mention language in the
poem, and while it is seductive to say that the threads we make and send out
of ourselves are composed of words, that the webs we spin are of language,
the actions Whitman describes point less to verbal activity than to bodily
or occasionally mental motion: musing, venturing, throwing, seeking,
flinging, catching. And while what is spun from the body's and the
self's own substance may seem to defy literal description, we must try, for
this reason, to resist the conclusion that these extensions are of language
merely and leave things at that. For the self, it is once again being
suggested, is not simply language, and the system of linguistic signs out of
which the world and our engagements with it are generated is not the only
means of signification by which the world and our engagements with it may be
expressed. And to see this even more clearly in the context of
The Body Artist we
can turn to the novel's opening:
Time seems to pass. The world
happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed
to its web. There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined
precisely and streaks of running luster on the bay. You know more surely who
you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf
is stabbed with self-awareness. The wind makes a sound in the pines and the
world comes into being, irreversibly, and the spider rides the wind-swayed
web. (9)
Like
Whitman's "noiseless patient spider" which it evokes with its dual motifs of
self-projection and self-knowledge, The Body Artist’s first
paragraph rides a web from a vague, even doubtful sense of time passing
["Time seems to pass"] to a bright day world of things perceived within and
as time passing ["unrolling into moments,"] to the near certainties of a
self emerging out of its own visual and aural engagements with the world
["You know more surely who you are"].
Of course,
the passage turns on its language as well. Here as elsewhere in DeLillo's
writing, we observe the primacy of language and its capacity to construct
and to order both selfhood and experience, though I would add not
thoroughly. And certainly many of DeLillo's admirers have noted in his
treatment of the character the typically postmodern distrust of any stable
account of selfhood and its trappings. DeLillo's efforts at characterization
are thus as likely as not to trace the self's gradual dissolution into a
system of verbal and visual signs where, as Kaja Silverman writes, the
subject "has no existence outside of the specific discursive moments in
which it emerges" (199). We should not be surprised, then, when we encounter
in many of his novels moments in which the self is assimilated into its
images. Here is Jack Gladney, the hero of White Noise, unexpectedly
encountering his wife's image on television:
What did it
mean? What was she doing there, in black and white, framed in formal
borders? Was she dead, missing, disembodied? Was this her spirit, her secret
self, some two-dimensional facsimile released by the power of technology,
set free to glide through wavebands, through energy levels, pausing to say
good-bye to us from the fluorescent screen?… With the sound down we couldn't
hear what she was saying. But no one bothered to adjust the volume. It was
the picture that mattered, the face in black and white, animated but also
flat, distanced, sealed off, timeless. It was but it wasn't her. (104)
Assimilation
does not occur without some resistance from the viewer—in this case, her
husband and family—and I wonder sometimes why postmodernists never seem to
take the complicating perspective of the interested viewer into account,
that is, the viewpoint of the wife, the husband, the parents, the children,
the lover of the subject as these struggle to keep the loved one whole. But
the subject of this passage has been dispersed as images, as "waves and
radiation,…[endlessly] coming into being, endlessly being formed and
reformed as the muscles in her face worked at smiling and speaking, as the
electronic dots swarmed" (104). It's no wonder that DeLillo was only
prevented from adopting Panasonic as title for the novel that was
ultimately published as White Noise by the Japanese corporation that
refused him permission to use their product line's name as his preferred
title.
Thus it
is surprising when we discover that other of DeLillo's characters, like
Lauren Hartke, stand as a powerful challenge to the postmodernist claim that
that self is merely an unstable product of the multiple images and media and
commercial discourses and various languages for which it serves as a
momentary nexus. If you'll look again at the first paragraph of The Body
Artist, you will see how the sense of the palpable, of that which can be
touched and felt overwhelms that of mere perception, of words and images. We
find such paragraphs throughout the novel:
She walked
on the grounds, feeling what was here, all sky and light, the sound of
hammering somewhere in one of the hutments off the dirt road, nearly half a
mile off, tactful on the wind, and how the clarity of things can deepen your
step, given you something to catch at and grip… (82)
"Tactful on
the wind," that word "tactful" is deployed not in it usual sense of
"diplomatic" or "considerate" in its unfamiliar sense, one no doubt
suggested by another connotation, "sensitive," of what is "palpable,"
"tangible", capable of being touched, being sensed directly without
mediation.
Another
passage, this one from the last paragraph in the novel, rounds out the sense
of bodily knowing that emerges in the very first one.
She walked into the room and went to the window. She opened it. She threw
the window open. She didn't know why she did this. Then she knew. She wanted
to feel the sea tang on her face and the flow of time in her body, to tell
her who she was. (126)
"To tell her
who she was": neither language nor images "subject" the character here.
Lauren is constituting herself by rehearsing and performing, without knowing
why, those physical actions and bodily postures that quite literally gesture
back toward her own material presence. If she is told anything—the passage
says, "she wanted to feel..."—that which will do the telling is her own
skin's registering of the salt breeze on her face, her own body's sensing of
the passage of moments within itself. It just will not do to speak of
language shaping or subjecting consciousness since much of her activity here
is either unconscious or just entering into consciousness.
This passage, just as the one which
the novel began, indeed, The Body Artist as a whole requires a
reading that is sensitive enough to the novel's language to know when the
subject or self shaping itself before us as we read is shaping itself in
ways that resist purely linguistic constructions of that self. This is not
to say that we can jettison those words and sentences, those linguistic,
narrative, and figurative structures we commonly use to talk about fictive
selves. I am merely suggesting that much of that to which the novel's
language points is not a self constructed out of language only. I am merely
suggesting that the conception of the self that emerges in this novel asks
us to take account of utterances rather than sentences since the former are
not purely linguistic entities but register the physical motions and
attitudes and postures of their speakers. The briefest allusion to
Wittgenstein's late philosophy might be helpful here, since it in the
Philosophical Investigations that we are shown how a word's meaning is
always related to the specific setting in which the word is used. To
ascertain the value of a particular act of language, in other words, we must
first evaluate the total context in which the act took place. It is thus
quite impossible to imagine of a language without "a person's body" and its
actions, actions that produce, reproduce, read, and communicate various
meanings variously combined.
My sense, then, is that DeLillo is trying to imagine the self as something
that need not be thought of as mediated by language alone and thus while I
tend to agree with much of a recent estimate that places DeLillo among the
postmodernists in several important respects, I also find cause in The
Body Artist to disagree with the same estimate. As Curtis A.
Yehnert, who seems to conflate post-structuralism with postmodernism,
writes:
[DeLillo] shares with more traditional postmodernists the conviction that
language gives form to both self and world; in doing so it reflects not so
much a picture of reality as the force of our impulse to make sense of our
experience by investing it with a coherence, symmetry, and closure that is
imaginary, a fiction. He differs from those postmodernists in his particular
focus on this paradox: forms mediate and falsify, yet forms provide meaning
and coherence. Language screens us from but also connects us to the world of
real things.
I appreciate
Yehnert's dismissal of much contemporary and postmodern theory's doctrine of
the veiling and falsifying sort of mediation by language, a doctrine which
paradoxically implies that there could be a way for a self to get the self's
representations of the world right even as it assumes that both the self and
the world are purely linguistic constructs. But one doesn't need to be
either a representationalist or a linguistic determinist to say that
language "connects [selves] to the world of real things." And thus I think
Yehnert could go even further and propose, though not insist, that while
DeLillo believes that language forges connections between self and world, he
also holds forth the possibility that such connections may be forged by
other, non-verbal means as well.
Finally,
I'll suggest point to one moment in The Body Artist when out of the
self-authoring and self-confirming activities a presence may be said to
emerge, one that is the product both of naming and of doing, of language and
of gesture. The scene is one of many in the novel in which Lauren tries to
comprehend what Mr. Tuttle is trying to communicate. Sometimes there is an
understanding, a communion in the form of a self emerging out of utterance,
that is, out of bodily act and fact of language:
…air to
sounds, sounds to words, words the man, shaped faithfully on his lips and
tongue.
She whispered, "What are you
doing?"
"I am doing.
This yes that. Say some words." …
She didn't
know how to think about this. There was something raw in the moment,
open-wounded. It bared to her things that were outside her experience but
desperately central, somehow, at the same time. (64-65)
In this and
the other passage I have quoted to you already, what DeLillo finally seems
to be offering us is a glimpse of an irreducible self that cannot disappear
into the semiotic system because its has successfully and "ductilely
anchored" itself to the part or parts of the world to which it may now be
said to belong.
Works Consulted
Birringer,
Johannes. Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1993.
DeLillo,
Don. Americana. Boston: Houghton, 1971. New York: Penguin, 1989.
---.
The Body Artist. New
York: Scribner's, 2001.
---.
End Zone. Boston: Houghton, 1972. New York: Penguin, 1976.
---.
Great Jones Street. Boston: Houghton, 1973. New York: Penguin, 1989.
---.
Libra. New York: Viking, 1985. New York: Penguin, 1991.
---.
Mao II. New York: Viking, 1991. New York: Penguin, 1991.
---.
The Names. New York: Knopf, 1982. New York: Vintage, 1989.
---.
Players. New York: Knopf, 1977. New York: Vintage, 1989.
---.
Ratner's Star. New York: Knopf, 1976; New York: Vintage, 1989.
---.
Running Dog. New York: Knopf, 1978; New York: Vintage, 1989.
---.
Underworld. New York: Scribner, 1997.
---.
White Noise. New York: Viking, 1985. New York: Penguin, 1986.
Keesey,
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Tom
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