THE TECHNOCRATIC MONKS: ART, DEFENSE SYSTEMS, AND LAPSED CATHOLICS IN DON DELILLO’S UNDERWORLD
THE TECHNOCRATIC MONKS: ART, DEFENSE SYSTEMS, AND LAPSED CATHOLICS IN DON DELILLO’S UNDERWORLD

Summary/Abstract: A kaleidoscopic narrative encompassing all of Don DeLillo’s recurrent motifs – sport games and war games, paranoia and secret codes, obsessed collectors of secular relics, religious rituals superseded by consumerism, dysfunctional relationships –, Underworld (1997) is at least as relevant today as it was in the late ’90s. My paper centers upon land art and desert lore as tropes meant to convey loneliness and the feeling that we have become a mere abstract audience in the political theatre, but it also takes into consideration the main protagonist’s Jesuit education.

• Details
• Contents