I don’t know how many times I’ve re-read Don DeLillo’s The Names. It’s a comfort in a moment of stress of moving house yet again. The imaginary world which connects so much with my lived world: New York City, Jersey City, being an exile in the Mediterranean, the journey into language and the pre-verbal. The personal resonance felt when reading of this imaginary cult obsessed by language whose members want to be catapulted into eternity; the resonance felt in understanding the use of mantra, or the base sound of Om or Ah that functions in meditation as just such a catapult: and the delusion that can arise on the success of the method that can lead to a justification of a way of seeing that is so far and away from freedom or any kind of liberation.
It’s not in the story that the satisfaction lies. The first time through, obviously, there are surprises and horrors and moments of denouement and these have their narrative satisfactions, but it’s with the constant deepening of DeLillo’s exploration of language where lies the real satisfaction with each subsequent reading; which is not to disparage the surface of the novel that is an engagement with the political, the economic and the historical; and without this engagement the novel would have less of a tie to the contemporary world of oil and terror, surveillance and capital, which is underpinned and can be undermined by recourse to language… and then being catapulted beyond it.
