The result for the observer is an emotion “dead earnest in the affairs of the imagination. For Kant the sublime “is to be found in an object even devoid of form, so far as it immediately involves, or else by its presence provokes, a representation of limitlessness, yet with a super-added thought of its totality” (90). In Libra DeLillo returns to the more familiar Kantian sublimes of magnitude and ineffability.
Messmer reveals an “activist (Kantian) sublime” (410) in White Noise which centers on the ability of the Gladneys to respond to the terrifying sublimity of the airborne toxic event, to question the gains of science if they produce such aberrations. The sublime of belatedness Frow formulates does not exhaust DeLillo’s excursions into the category Michael W. This is not the eighteenth-century sublime of Kant or Burke, however, but one more specifically postmodern: “the inadequacy of representation comes not because of the transcendental or uncanny nature of the object but because of the multiplicity of prior representations” (176).
Jack Gladney wonders why he should try to describe what the sunsets have become. As John Frow has shown, White Noise‘s airborne toxic event and the sunsets it subsequently influences trigger a representational inadequacy on the part of their viewers.
The sublime appears in DeLillo’s fiction in several forms. Again and again DeLillo’s characters are faced with the inexplicability of events and the giddy suspicion, terrifying in its eventual impact, that a darker force determines reality.
The terror is not simply the terror ism with which DeLillo is almost obsessively concerned, but also that of a sublime dimension of experience. Frank Lentricchia comments on DeLillo’s “yoking together terror and wild humor as the essential tone of contemporary America” (“American” 2), while Arnold Weinstein observes that “one is tempted to posit terror itself as the ground for the psyche in DeLillo, an indwelling creatural horror that underlies all the codes and systems” (294). University of Michigan – from their humor, Don DeLillo’s novels are noted almost as frequently for their brilliant terror, manifested as a frisson at the core of contemporary existence.
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