Dare to contemplate a story set two years into the future and on which on one of, if not the biggest, sports days of the year (the Super Bowl), the expansive intercourse that hundreds of millions of human beings conduct with technology is utterly choked off without warning.
In the real world we live in today, such an inconceivable event would be considered catastrophic. But even in a fictional context, novelist extraordinaire Don Delillo can make technology’s equivalent of falling off a cliff a lucid, haunting, and poignant mark. This is what he brings to the table in his topical novelette, “The Silence.”
As is the case in some of Delillo’s other works, “The Silence” comes across as something of a postmodern paradox. Cumulatively in his story, Delillo deals with the profound tension between technology and humans in a cautionary manner while implicitly pursuing the unavoidable idea that masses cannot live without their smartphones, laptops, tablets, game consoles, and online networking services.
In “Libra,” his 1988 literary interpretation of the JFK assassination and the characters and sensibilities surrounding that tragic event, Delillo, irrespective of all its flaws and drawbacks, passed on to his readers technology’s direction as he expressed it:
“Technology tends to represent a thrust toward the future, an accelerated promise of microrefined systems and networks, deeper probes into the way we live and think. Technology claims the future on our behalf. It also has the capacity to reclaim the past.”
Never reluctant to engage with the theme of technology, Delillo synthesizes this angle in “Silence” with a contemporary mosaic of a world that has become socially, intellectually, epistemologically, and politically displaced.
At this late stage of Delillo’s novelistic tenure, he has acquired a mythologized status as a sublime storyteller of a republic that has been altered into being more angst-ridden, alienated, and at risk of national devolution. “Silence” does little to change this reputation.
As is Delillo’s literary disposition, we find ourselves in “Silence” ushered into a universe where humans vainly attempt to wrap their arms around a momentous and inexplicable upheaval of infinite significance.
Still, there is something to be said about the importance that can be accorded to the inanimate calamity that Delillo’s readers experience vicariously through the minds of a New York City gathering of persons who have come together to watch the Super Bowl.
A lot of by now jaded Delillo skeptics will say “Silence” is one more penetratingly cerebral example of the author’s musing into a condition in which, as he writes in the novel, troubled if not traumatized people are “puzzled, abandoned by science, technology, common sense.” In other words, there’s nothing very new to read here. “The Silence” is Delillo just being Delillo.
For the more textually inquisitive model readers, the picture that emerges out of the story is an allegorical one, admonitory to be more precise. “Silence” takes measure of individuals who are trying to keep their heads clear in the throes of a double-edged information revolution.
That revolution’s both empowering and emasculating force runs deep in the collective unconscious and consciousness, overcoming observers and participants with dread and wonder, creativity and isolation. What technology gives, technology can take away.
Works like “The Silence” make us hope that many of us are willing to rise above the pablum in the marketing of technology that wraps consumers around its finger.
The fast-paced, compulsive evolution of technology has become a permanent fixture in our way of life for better or for worse. In turn, technology’s ultimate value has yet to be determined as we strive to come to grips with its all-encompassing nature.
ALLEN GABORRO
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