Member-only story
Don De Lillo: “The Silence” in four (and a half) words
Initially, I had thought to devote the first paragraph to a brief retrospective of Don DeLillo, the “shaman” who in his books predicted the fragility of the Twin Towers, the Italian-American kid who parked cars in the Bronx as a job, the author who still writes with the same typewriter. But, despite having essentially just done so, I prefer to go straight talking you about “The Silence”.
It’s 2022: we are partly on a broken-down plane heading to New York, partly already in New York. The story, a short novel of just 100 pages, can easily be read as a small play divided in two acts. A blackout shakes the city, the East Coast, the World (the very blackout itself makes it impossible to know) just coming out of the Pandemic. A story that I have decided to synthesize in four fundamental narrative hinges:
Inversion
Don DeLillo is not a comedian. Sure, I happened to chuckle while reading him, but he doesn’t do the same job as George Carlin, in short. Yet, this work stands entirely on lateral thinking: the alternative resolution of critical issues, typical of comic processes. Besides using one precise comic tool typical of monologue: the inversion.
In Cosmopolis he talks about using rats as currency, in Underworld trash becomes a religious cult. In “The Silence” the…
