Murder, Mystery and noMenclature

Don DeLillo – The Names

Cover: The Names (Picador, 1982) - no information on the above edition, but it is certainly the more visually interesting cover (the sleek 2011 edition I purchased is stylish, bot not interesting enough for this post).

FROM what I can gather, not having read any other DeLillo, his later works are not really representative of his older. The Names has none of the irony or popular references that I have come to associate with post-modernism, though it does represent American life through the juxtaposition of its characters with the backdrop of (mostly) Athens.

This is not to say that The Names was disappointing or inferior. The characters, particularly the protagonist and his family, are really well put together and have an easy realism, without becoming burdensomely tedious. Indeed, what would seem to be a mystery novel a la The Name of the Rose, is really an intimate portrait of David and his separated, but not divorced wife, and his son.

DeLillo’s narrative is touched with a sense of alienation that comes from being in a foreign country and a feeling of being estranged from one’s family. Simple daily tasks, such as preparing food for a meal, are transformed into quite ritualistic practices:

Another man had joined the first, the boat owner’s son. They stood on the narrow gravel beach, in the light of the second restaurant, each beating an octopus against the rock, taking turns, working to a rhythm - The Names, The Island, Chapter 2

This isolation is reflected by the protagonist’s ignorance of anything more than very basic Greek and his son’s invented language “ob”.

            This theme is also reflected in the overall mystery aspect of the novel. The people obsessed with language and communication – a cult which, it is implied but never directly confirmed, are simply called The Names. Their obsession with language, and unwillingness to communicate in their own, inserts a degree of separation between them and the protagonist’s wife’s archaeological supervisor, Owen.

            The language cult itself comes to the attention of the protagonist due to a series of murders and the reader later learns that the “rules” by which these people kill by is that a person’s initials match the initials of a place name. This seemingly random rule, shows us that really, DeLillo’s novel is about the arbitrary nature of human communication and perhaps cultures as a whole. The apparent clandestine organisation turns out to be a mere shambles:

“In once sense we barely exist. There are many setbacks. People die, they go out one day and disappear. Differences arise. For months nothing happens. The cells lose touch with each other. No one knows we are here.” - The Names, The Mountain, Chapter 9

At the end of the novel, we are given an extract from David’s son’s writing. This boy, Tap, we have been told writes with terribly bad spelling and the protagonist let’s the reader know that as he reads through the writing, he is able to see the words for what they actually are – just as arbitrary and hollow as the cult’s methods. Unfortunately, and perhaps in this way characteristically post-modern, the reader is given no solution to this semantic problem, and is just encouraged to look, along with the protagonist, at what has been written and what these words signify. The words, like the characters, like the American people in the text, have been taken outside of the symbolic systems that they are ordinarily placed within.