“Everything is Connected”: Things and Posthuman Subjectivity in DeLillo’s Underworld

原文载于Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 2026年9月

       ABSTRACT

Attending to DeLillo’s subtle shift toward a more relational understanding of the human–nonhuman relationship around the turn of the millennium, this article argues that Underworld rethinks things beyond the subject–object paradigm in consumer society and foregrounds their role in shaping a nonunitary, relational form of posthuman subjectivity. Drawing on Kant, Heidegger, Bill Brown, and Rosi Braidotti, it situates DeLillo’s writing of things within a broader intellectual genealogy of thingness. Specifically, the article examines DeLillo’s engagement with things from three dimensions: as commodities that shape human desire and subjectivity in consumer culture; as the thing-in-itself that unsettles the modern subject–object paradigm; and as participants in a relational, non-unitary posthuman subjectivity. By doing so, this study illuminates how things have filtered into the fabric of the everydayness of DeLillo’s characters and opens new possibilities for understanding his broader dialogue with contemporary American culture and society.

  作者简介：

袁杰，郑州大学外国语与国际关系学院副教授，郑州大学英美文学研究中心研究员。研究方向为当代美国文学与比较文学。主持河南省哲学社会科学项目等，在《外国文学》《当代外国文学》、Neohelicon、Critique等刊物发表学术成果10余篇。

张莉，郑州大学外国语与国际关系学院副院长，博士生导师，河南省高校人文社科重点研究基地“郑州大学英美文学研究中心”主任。主要研究方向：英美文学、比较文学。

Some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the Milky Way.

From Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (430)

      Introduction

Things have always occupied an important place in Don DeLillo’s works. At the end of his late-twentieth-century novel Underworld, DeLillo features a transcendent image: waste buried beneath the soil generates gases that continuously rise upward, producing “a shimmer of desert ruin” that “deepens the aura of sacred work” (DeLillo, Underworld 810). DeLillo explains that it is because “maybe we feel a reverence for waste, for the redemptive qualities of the things we use and discard” (809). But how can garbage with gas produce light, “glow” or “radiance” (526)? In what sense does waste evoke our reverence? And what, precisely, are the “redemptive qualities of the things”? It may be assumed that the shimmer originates from the evening light reflected on machines, illuminating the gases that rise from the waste. However, a closer reading of DeLillo’s work reveals that this luminosity is far from incidental, and that the “redemptive qualities” of things constitute one of the novel’s central concerns. Richard Hardack suggests that DeLillo’s waste is understood through “an Eastern ethos of impersonal reincarnation” as part of a “redemptive cycle” and in this process, it “is transformed, recycled, revenant, switched from weapons to god” (166), yet this claim remains largely conceptual and does not explain how this transformation happens through the narrative of Underworld. Moreover, beyond waste, numerous other things play important roles throughout the narrative, such as washing machines, dishwashers, televisions, baseballs, B-52 bombers, shoes, orange juice, and more. These things form a rich and multilayered network through which, as we will argue, DeLillo explores the relationship between the human and the nonhuman, interrogates the problem of the traditional humanist subject, and envisions the posthuman subject emerging from material entanglements. More importantly, this attention to things is consistent in DeLillo’s works from Americana (1971) to The Silence (2020), making a systematic study of his engagement with things particularly meaningful.

Scholars have already noted DeLillo’s writing of things. “Finding, curating and contemplating things appear central to the material and existential practice” for the lives of Don DeLillo’s characters, Tim Jelfs regards DeLillo as “an artist of the found object, a category of art-making that has long sought to trouble any presumed distinction between ordinary, everyday things and objets d’art” (94). These everyday things have also drawn the attention of other critics. Stephanie Lambert, for instance, attempts to connect such things to the socio-ecological violence of the capitalist world-system that undergirds this “everydayness”, thereby foregrounding the exploited labor and land required to sustain accumulation and the toxic consequences of the US cycle (111). Like Lambert, Stefan Mattessich is concerned with what the representation of things reveals about American society. However, his focus lies more on the individual and the hollowing out of American democracy in the postwar period. He seeks to uncover in Underworld what he calls “psychic topologies of a distinctly two-dimensional compression, in which unconscious depth, telescoped to a sentient surface, forms a kind of blind spot in thought” (1). Drawing on Freud, Lacan, and other philosophers, Mattessich shows how DeLillo’s characters endlessly circle the unnamable “thing”, which serves as the object-cause of desire and the motor of the death drive at both personal and historical levels. David Evans follows a different path. He situates DeLillo’s writing on the most prominent thing “garbage” within the broader genealogy of “trash writing” in Western literature. He argues that DeLillo’s treatment of garbage differs from that of Pynchon, whose waste serves merely “to wipe the screen between you and your unattained desires—all point to a history of missed opportunities and unfulfilled hopes” (116). DeLillo, by contrast, concentrates on the garbage’s own “shocking force.” As Evans writes, he “insists that we pay attention to the resistant and repulsive thing itself”. Through waste, Evans seeks to recover an important theme in DeLillo’s work, namely “the power of an ordinary life” (117), or, as DeLillo himself puts it, “radiance in dailiness” (DeCurtis 70-71).

Although existing scholarship has addressed the special significance of things in Underworld and has attempted to relate them to DeLillo’s representation of individual lives, it tends to overlook an ontological examination of the thing as a mode of being in its own right. That is, they do not sufficiently consider whether and how things may acquire a distinctive “underworld” significance once detached from the modern humanist subject–object paradigm. Moreover, they fail to explain how connections between things and human beings are established, and more specifically, in what ways and on what levels things shape everyday life, influence the trajectories of human life, and participate in the formation of human subjectivity, thereby contributing to “the power of an ordinary life.” In fact, the attention to “ordinary life” and relationship between things and human life in DeLillo’s fiction can also be situated within the broader context of contemporary American literature. Peter Boxall argues that twenty-first-century fiction “has seen a deep and far-reaching crisis in our understanding of the limits of the human” and has consequently developed “a fascination with the shifting boundary between the human and the nonhuman” (Twenty-First Century Fiction, 12–13), and DeLillo has long been one of the contemporary American writers most deeply engaged with this question. As some scholars have accordingly noted, DeLillo’s postmillennial fiction is marked by “the central idea being the shift from a liberal humanist … to a posthuman space” (Trendel 116). We argue, however, that this shift can be traced back to the end of the twentieth century. Rather than constituting a sharp break with his earlier concern with the instability of the modern subject, Underworld extends and reorients that concern by increasingly bringing the relational conception of human and nonhuman existence. It is in this regard that we turn to DeLillo’s things to examine their role in this broader shift toward a posthuman dimension of subjectivity, namely how human subjectivity is formed through encounters between humans and the material world, as part of “our embodied and embedded processes of engaging with the world” (Hayles 151), and how these material encounters give rise to the non-unitary, relational forms of posthuman subjectivity that Braidotti describes through the concept of “relational ontology” (The Posthuman 93).

This article therefore approaches DeLillo’s posthuman subjectivity by examining his three layers of representation of things. First, Underworld portrays things as commodities within late capitalist society and dramatizes how these material things in a consumer culture shape human desire, alienate human behavior, and participate in the construction of individual subjectivity. Second, through a critical reflection on the paradigms that structure this relationship between individuals and commodities and more broadly between subjects and objects in consumer society, DeLillo rethinks the modern humanist dichotomy of subject and object. By doing so, he detaches things from the semiotic logic of consumption and exchange, endowing them with their own ontological significance. These things possess a transcendental radiance of their own, a quality that might be understood, borrowing from Kant, as the “thing-in-itself”, or even a posthuman subject. Finally, based on these two dimensions, we suggest that in Underworld things not only possess their own ontological significance but also enter into dynamic posthuman relations with humans. By doing so, we argue that Underworld not only traces a history of things, but also demonstrates how things become entangled within the complex social milieu of the late twentieth century in response to the dilemma of selfhood and subjectivity in postmodern American society. If DeLillo’s earlier works repeatedly interrogate the fragmented (post)modern subject (Veggian 2), Underworld and his subsequent fiction increasingly explore a more multifaceted conception of posthuman subjectivity, in both its affirmative and unsettling forms. This subtle shift can also be situated within a broader development that scholars have identified in DeLillo’s twenty-first-century fiction as his “late style” (Veggian xv; Lewin and Ward 3). Whether this late style is understood in terms of a “heightened anxiety regarding the future” (Shipe 4) or as an attempt to represent how “an unraveling or self-erasing mind is held within the matrices of space and time and within the webbing of the body” (Boxall, “A Leap out of our Biology” 528), Underworld already anticipates these later concerns. Its representation of anxiety, “webbing of the body”, and thing-in-itself as well as its sustained attention to the ways in which human beings are connected to things and to larger networks of existence, suggests that the posthuman imagination associated with DeLillo’s later fiction is already taking shape here, making Underworld an important transitional moment in the development of his late style and late concerns.

      “Das Kapital”, Commodity and the Predicament of Subjectivity

Underworld, with its narrative structure and interwoven plotlines, constructs a vast panorama of American society in the latter half of the twentieth century. The novel unfolds in reverse chronological order through six sections that intertwine protagonist Nick Shay’s life with those around him. Rather than centering on a single character, the story shifts among multiple perspectives, those of Nick’s lover Klara Sax, Klara’s first husband and Nick’s former high school teacher Bronzini, and Nick’s younger brother, Matt Shay, forming a multifaceted and dynamic narrative pattern. Through fragmented storytelling and delicate psychological depiction, Don DeLillo represents the social, cultural, and personal dimensions of Cold War America, presenting a postmodern fusion of history and individual experience. Yet, as we delve deeper into these intricate plots, grand narratives, and the psychological worlds of DeLillo’s characters, we find a recurring predicament that runs throughout the novel: the loss and search for the self.

Nick is constantly trying to find his “self”. He often feels “a loneliness”, something he “tried never to admit to and knew how to step outside of” (637). He enjoys walking the empty streets at night, feeling “ego gone” (635), but never achieves a “soul of self-completion” (796). His brother Matt works for the U.S. government’s nuclear weapons program in New Mexico, known as “the Pocket operation”. Yet he does not like the work and wants to leave. His girlfriend Janet also wishes he would leave the desert of New Mexico and live with her in Boston, where she might finally feel safe and secure. As a matter of fact, Matt hopes she will persuade him to leave as well. He wants her to say, “leaving the Pocket for wife and child” (461). Why, then, does he stay? He is there to find his “the identity, the … sense of honing his silhouette, knowing himself a little better” (402) because he is “basically dead” and “de-ego’d” at eleven (457). Richard Shay, Nick and Matt’s father, leaves the family for his lover, Sue Ann. DeLillo explains, “She made him feel real, talking on the phone. She gave him the feeling he was taking shape as himself, coming into the shape he’d always been intended to take, the thing of who he really was,” making him become his “true self” (269).

The self, or more broadly, the question of subjectivity in postmodern American society, emerges as one of the most central issues in the novel as well as in DeLillo’s other works. In his debut novel Americana, the protagonist David Bell resigns as a network television executive and journeys deep into the American West to make an autobiographical film, ultimately exhausting “all hope of defining who or what I am” (146). In DeLillo’s later works, characters such as Bucky Wunderlick in Great Jones Street, Gary Harkness in End Zone, and all the way to Jeffrey Lockhart in Zero K continue this pattern of “a religious journey into the heart of the American soul” (Dewey 18), repeatedly heading into the desert in pursuit of what DeLillo describes as the impulse whereby “a thousand years ago a man may have wandered into the desert and tried to lose his sense of selfhood” (Feeney 171). As one of DeLillo’s earliest critics, Frank Lentricchia, observes, DeLillo writes “to move readers to the view that the shape and fate of their culture dictates the shape and fate of the self” (2). Joseph Dewey, on the other hand, contends that DeLillo “has zealously guarded the notion of a self and the persistence of dignity” (13). Across these works, however, the recurring search for the self is never simply an inward psychological quest. It is repeatedly triggered and mediated by social institutions, technological environments, commodities, and material worlds. Consequently, “the most conspicuous fault line among DeLillo criticism concerns DeLillo’s representation of subjectivity” (Laist, Technology and Postmodern Subjectivity 1).

Indeed, Underworld is deeply concerned with the predicament of subjectivity, which confronts not only Nick and Matt but also characters such as J. Edgar Hoover, Klara Sax, and Janet. What, then, produces this crisis of subjectivity? Since Descartes declared “cogito, ergo sum”, modern Western thought has been preoccupied with the question of subjectivity, namely the capability of the subject to think and reason, and with the dualism of self and other. Later Kant’s epistemological “Copernican revolution” further prescribed the role of critical reason. It is quite different from those eastern cultures, which tend to emphasize holism and downplay the role of human subjectivity. Yet after centuries of the development of humanism and the metaphysics of subjectivity, the modern subject faces a profound crisis by the twentieth century. As Michel Foucault predicted, “man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (The Order of Things 422). This is not only a philosophical diagnosis shared by Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida, but also a persistent question haunting DeLillo’s fiction. If White Noise depicts how “a new form of subjectivity colonized by the media and decentered by its polyglot discourses” becomes trapped in a media-saturated reality (Wilcox, 348), then Underworld extends this critique by asking how human–object relations become problematic and how individuals navigate among objects in search of what we call “thing-mediated subjectivity”.

In Underworld, subjectivity is first mediated by commodities, particularly everyday household items like televisions, washing machines, and refrigerators, as well as culturally significant items like the baseball and waste. The novel opens in the 1950s, during Nick’s childhood in the Bronx. This period also marks the era of America’s postwar economic boom and the surge in mass consumption. It was a time when consumerism flourished. As DeLillo observes in Underworld, “the 1950s were calm. People dressed in the same style, spoke in the same way. What concerned them were kitchens, cars, and television sets” (410). People are immersed in a growing desire for material goods. In the novel, the word “TV” alone appears fifty times, which indicates not only the central role television plays in the narrative but also its ubiquity in American everyday life from the 1950s onwards. In the early part of that decade, only nine percent of U.S. households owned a television. By the late 1950s, that number had risen to ninety percent, with the average person watching about five hours per day (Spigel 1). For Nick Shay’s mother, “The TV set was always on when my mother was in her room” (87). Television shapes the subjectivity of Nick’s family on two levels. On one hand, the act of watching TV shapes the desire and aspiration of Nick and his family through a hyperreal world. Information about reality is represented through the medium rather than through direct human perception, becoming increasingly detached from authentic lived experience. What emerges is what Jean Baudrillard describes as “an implosion of the message in the medium” and “the implosion of the medium itself in the real” (82), ultimately producing what he terms “a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (1). This condition also underlies DeLillo’s well-known observation in White Noise: “once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn” (12). On the other hand, television is not merely a tool for entertainment. Together with the widespread use of refrigerators, washing machines, and automobiles, it becomes a symbol of domestic happiness and modernity. It is also the case in White Noise, where this symbolic association is manifested in an almost page-long, exhaustive consumer inventory that seems to list nearly everything in modern life: “suitcases full of light and heavy clothing; with boxes of blankets, boots and shoes, stationery and books, sheets, pillows, quilts; with rolled-up rugs and sleeping bags; with bicycles, skis, rucksacks, English and Western saddles, inflated rafts[…]”(3) It is precisely through the repeated acts of consumption that people seem to realize their own subjectivity and fulfill their aspirations and sense of self. Leonard Wilcox deems this a “new form of subjectivity colonized by the media and decentered by its polyglot discourses” (348). Whether the objects of consumption and the commodities themselves possessed any real value or function seems to become a secondary concern.

If the consumption of everyday objects such as television shapes the subjectivity of the characters in the novel, then the baseball, the novel’s central “object”, is likewise commodified, and through this process it also influences and constructs the subjectivity of the characters. For Duvall, this transformation of all things into commodity production is an embodiment of the American postmodernity and the logic of late capitalism as articulated by Fredric Jameson (20).  At the beginning of the novel, the brand-new baseball is not a commodity at all. That is, until it is used in a historic 1951 Giants–Dodgers game. In the years following the event, the winning baseball passes from Cotter Martin to Manx Martin, then to Marvin Lundy, and finally all the way to Nick. Seven individuals owned the ball at one time or another. However, it should be noted that the baseball moves from one owner to another not because of its use value (because no one actually plays baseball with it) but because of its acquired value as a commodity. As Nick recounts at the end of the novel: In the process of rearranging the books, he comes across the baseball. He looks at it, holds it tightly in hand, then puts it back on the shelf between a tilted book and an upright one, having forgotten the reason for buying it. What is certain, however, is that it is now “an expensive and beautiful object” (809). There will be men in the coming years who will “pay fortunes for these objects. They’ll pay unbelievable. Because this is desperation speaking” (182). For Nick, the baseball no longer functions as an athletic ball or even as a fan’s collectible or any connection between him and the players. Rather, the social relations and collective memories once formed among players and spectators through the game of baseball now appear condensed within the object itself, which seems to possess value as an intrinsic property. The baseball therefore exposes a paradox at the heart of commodity culture: the more social relations are condensed into the commodity, the more the commodity appears to possess value independently of those relations. This transformation exemplifies what Karl Marx termed “commodity fetishism”. According to Marx, any natural or man-made thing possesses use value, a quality determined by its very nature as a thing. Thus, we often measure things in quantitative units, such as a ton of iron or several yards of linen. Yet under capitalism, things increasingly appear in the form of commodities whose social significance is mediated through exchange (1-2, 31). The act of exchange or consumption itself tends to focus not on their use value, but rather on their exchange value, or more precisely, their price.

Therefore, the novel’s epilogue, “Das Kapital,” is less a concluding section than a conclusion given by DeLillo on capitalist society: “Capital burns off the nuance in a culture. Foreign investment, global markets, corporate acquisitions, the flow of information through transnational media, the attenuating influence of money” (785). Underworld’s reflection on capital directly alludes to Marx’s masterpiece Das Kapital, and the two works display a strong intertextual relationship. In the post-industrial era, commodities increasingly circulate not merely as useful things but as repositories of symbolic value and desire. They now express only that “human labor in the abstract has been embodied or materialized in it” (Marx 4). In fact, this way of transforming commodities and indeed all things into mere objects is, as Heidegger points out, a typical feature of the modern metaphysics of subjectivity and of modernity itself that a “being’s being consist[s] in its being brought before man as the objective” and “in being placed in the realm of man’s information and disposal” (Off the Beaten Track 68). At the very moment when things become objects, human subjectivity undergoes a corresponding alienation. As the character Detwiler puts it, “Consume or die” (287). It seems that individual’s subjectivity can only be attained through advertising, product, and consumption (Nadotti 115). This critique of commodity-mediated subjectivity had already become one of the central concerns in DeLillo’s previous novel Mao II. There, the protagonist Bill Gray bluntly declares: “I’ve become someone’s material […] There’s the life and there’s the consumer event” (43). As Mark Osteen observes, Bill thereby “inscribes his position as a commodity or medium of exchange: he is just a ‘bill,’ a universal equivalent, a blank commodity” (“Becoming Incorporated” 649). The significance of this continuity between Mao II and Underworld lies in DeLillo’s sustained interrogation of how late capitalist culture reduces both objects and persons to circulating commodities within systems of exchange. Clearly, DeLillo takes a critical stance toward such commodity-mediated subjectivity in consumer society. The commodity-mediated subjectivity revealed in Underworld shows how individuals seek to construct their sense of self through commodities, but at the same time, this subjectivity is inevitably alienated by the logic of capital and signification.

      The “Thing-in-Itself” Or the Posthuman Subject?

The traditional humanist subject has gone through the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the critical reflections of the twentieth century and becomes increasingly problematic toward the end of the twentieth century. The rise of cybernetics and genetic engineering at that same historical moment further blurs the boundary between the human and the nonhuman. Against this intellectual backdrop, literature at the turn of the millennium thus faces a double task. On the one hand, it seeks to explore how computers and biotechnological enhancement have extended the limits of the human self, granting new powers of transgression, perfection, and augmentation. On the other, and more importantly, it is compelled to reexamine the genealogy of the humanist subject itself, to problematize the modern subject–object divide, and to “adapt new ways of regulating subjectivity under posthuman conditions […] and new ways of responding to the ethical, political and intellectual challenges that the dismantling of the human poses” (Boxall, Twenty-First Century Fiction 90). Underworld is precisely such a work. It not only offers a critique of consumer society and a reflection on commodity-mediated subjectivity, but also problematizes the very paradigm of thinking that treats things merely as objects. Instead, it reopens, in literary form, the longstanding question of the “thing” in Western modernity, further exploring the autonomy and unknowability of things themselves. DeLillo attempts to reconceptualize objects beyond the semiotic logic of consumption and exchange, endowing them with an ontological significance of their own. This shift marks a rewriting of subjectivity, namely, humans are no longer at the center of the world, but coexist with things within the same network of posthuman being. From this posthuman perspective, things are no longer mere projections of human desire or objects of consumption. Rather, they possess the potential to become posthuman actants or subjects, compelling humanity to reexamine its relation to the material world.

With commodity as a starting point, DeLillo extends his interest in things far beyond the sphere of consumer goods. Whereas humanism, from its inception, has sought to assure us that the external world and all things within it can be known through “the absolute authority of human reason,” logical deduction, and scientific progress (Davies 118), DeLillo, by contrast, pointedly asserts, “I tried to get under things, into them and under them and frequently there is no logical explanation for many of the things” (Chénetier and Happe 110). The question, then, is how to get under things. This article argues that such an endeavor constitutes one of the grand ambitions of Underworld and reveals the unique value of DeLillo’s posthuman writing of things. Part Three of the novel is titled “Clouds of Unknowing,” echoing a medieval mystical text that the protagonist Nick reads at age seventeen. Though he barely remembers its contents, its worldview profoundly shapes him: he realizes he is a “wretched weakling”. There are many things in the world, including God, that “we can’t know through the intellect”. He learns to “respect the power of secrets” (295). This worldview leads Nick, in many moments of his life, to remain fully open to the unknown, including the unknowability of things themselves.

Those things that cannot be known “through the intellect” open up for DeLillo a posthuman dimension of cognition concerning things themselves. In other words, the human is no longer “the foundation of all knowledge and the principle of all signification” (Ethics 176), to borrow Michel Foucault’s formulation. The meaning of things no longer derives from the meaningful humanist subject, but increasingly from the thing itself. Among all the things in the novel, garbage is perhaps the most important image through which this issue can be explored. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, garbage refers to waste or refuse, and by extension, it means material or ideas that are considered to have no value or meaning. In other words, garbage is what has been discarded by humans, something that no longer holds value or significance in relation to humanity. However, when considering the portrayal of garbage in Underworld, it is clear that DeLillo problematizes this definition. The protagonist, Nick, is the CEO of a waste management company. His company designs, manages landfills, and arranges the transportation of waste and hazardous materials across the world, and its employees are described as “Church Fathers of waste in all its transmutations” (102). Many critics interpret Nick’s waste management work as an attempt to “contain” waste “at both professional and personal levels,” one that ultimately fails (Evans 120). David H. Evans, however, argues that Nick’s company “does not just sequester garbage”; rather, through an almost “magico-religious” process and belief system, it “makes it disappear, by turning it into something useful.” Thus, for Evans, within Nick’s company “garbage is only a moment in an endless process of transformation and circulation” (120) in what he calls a liquid modernity that “pull[s] everything, everyone, and everyplace into the orbit of commerce” (109).

However, since our reading is concerned less with garbage as a circulating commodity than with how garbage is transformed in DeLillo’s writing into a thing possessing an autonomous mode of existence or even a posthuman subject, the question we wish to ask is: in what sense does Nick’s quasi-religious understanding of waste, and its placement within a “process of transformation and circulation,” enable him and his company to “entomb contaminated waste with a sense of reverence and dread” (88)? In addressing DeLillo’s representation of things, his Catholic background should not be overlooked, as it contributes to his “insistence on something like the immanence of transcendent meaning in the material of daily life”(Hungerford 346). Garbage takes on an almost religious significance in Nick’s eyes. Nick’s perception of garbage is closely tied to his childhood reading of the religious text Clouds of Unknowing, where “the Jesuits taught me to examine things for second meanings and deeper connections [...] Waste has a solemn aura now, an aspect of untouchability” (88). In this light, it is the layer of “second meanings” and “aura” that endows garbage with profound meaning. Garbage for Nick is no longer a “useless” object in relation to humanity. On the contrary, it opens onto an unknown world with its own forms of existence and agency. As the novel states, garbage “has a life of its own” (363). As we will further argue, not only garbage but also paper itself possesses such vitality. At the end of the novel, garbage, soil, and machinery form a “mystical light”, seemingly narrating its own underworld story and generating its own discourse. As Latour observes, “discourse is not a world unto itself but a population of actants that mix with things ……for things too have to be elevated to the dignity of narrative” (90). The gas from buried waste rises slowly from the earth and “produces a wavering across the land and sky that deepens the aura of sacred work. It is like a fable in the writhing air of some ghost civilization, a shimmer of desert ruin”. In that moment, we “feel a reverence for waste, for the redemptive qualities of the things we use and discard” (809-10). The glow of garbage can be seen as a mystical metaphor used by DeLillo. Through this image, garbage is no longer a useless object opposed to the human subject, but it has its own world and becomes a posthuman actant and subject.

DeLillo’s ontological imagination concerning things in his works is far from rare in the history of modern thought. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant divides the objects of human inquiry into “phenomena” and “noumena”. The former refers to the way things appear to us, while the latter denotes the thing-in-itself. “Our manner of intuition does not pertain to all things, but only to objects of our senses”, which means we can only analyze the phenomenal world; human “categories alone are not sufficient for the cognition of things in themselves(noumena)” (380). In other words, for Kant, human knowledge is confined to the realm of phenomena; the true nature of the noumena or thing-in-itself can be thought but remains inaccessible to human cognition. But how does this thing-in-itself become an object for the human subject, and ultimately turned in capitalist society into the consumed object depicted in DeLillo’s novels after almost 200 years? In the view of Martin Heidegger, beginning with René Descartes’s famous dictum “cogito ergo sum”, and further reinforced by Kant’s delineation of the limits of human reason, Western modern thought gradually developed an objectifying mode of thinking and a subject-object dualistic paradigm that regarded the human as subject and the world of things as object. “Until Descartes every thing present-at-hand for itself was a ‘subject’; but now the ‘I’ becomes the special subject, that with regard to which all the remaining things first determine themselves as such “(Heidegger, What is a Thing 105). The thing then became “the object” of the subject, standing “as something else in relation to the ‘subject,’ which lie[s] over against it as objectium” (What is a Thing 105). From that moment on, the human became the rational subject who thinks, describes, and manipulates the object, we “calculate or count” in mathematics and modern science in dealing with things (What is a Thing 75), while the thing’s meaning came to be derived entirely from its relation to the human.

It should be noted that, together with his Catholic background, this examination of the history of the humanistic relationship between humans and things within the tradition of Western thought is crucial for understanding DeLillo’s posthuman writing of things. As DeLillo remarked in an interview, this mode of thought originated from his intensive engagement in his youth with modern Continental philosophy, especially existentialism, as well as thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, which he subsequently incorporated into his literary works of the 1970s and beyond (Zhou, “An Interview with Don DeLillo” 148). This sustained engagement with ontology, epistemology, metaphysics, phenomenology, and the broader history of Western thought also finds an echo in Martin’s intellectual interests in DeLillo’s most recent novel, The Silence (68). In DeLillo’s view, the historical process through which the thing-in-itself was transformed into the object can also be understood as a history of the evolution of the humanist subject. Consequently, when we trace back the history of things and reconsider the relationship between humans and things, we begin to see both a prehuman and a posthuman history (Wolfe xv), a history of the thing as thing-in-itself, and even as a posthuman subject.

In the novel, garbage, once regarded as useless, is not only recycled by Nick but also artistically reconfigured by the artist and sculptor Klara, completing its transformation from object to thing, from waste to posthuman subject. Klara insists “that you have to go to roof level to see ... thing[s] distinct” (371). Through DeLillo’s “aesthetic” modification, no longer is junk merely humanist waste, useless debris scattered across streets and alleys, covering fire hydrants and bus signs, and “everyone agreed together not to notice” (388). Instead, junk is rewritten. “We took junk and saved it for art,” she explains, because art is fundamentally “a way of looking at something more carefully” (393). In other words, for Klara, art becomes art precisely because it enables people to look “a little deeper,” allowing things to become themselves. While “waste is abandoned in the process of modernization. It is contrary to rationality, instrumentalization, and efficiency, the end of which being death.” At the same time, “it [waste] offers a radical critique of history’s myth of linear development and universal progress” as well (Zhou, “The Reincarnation of Waste” 319). When “you take your object out of the dusty grubby studio and stick it in a museum with white walls and classical paintings,” “it becomes a forceful thing in this context.” Even if the so-called artwork consists merely of “old factory window glass and burlap sacking”, it may nonetheless “become philosophical” (393). As critic Jeffs reminds us, “this way of thinking …… about how fluid, fertile and unstable the conceptual and aesthetic terrain of subject–object relations can therefore be, is worth bearing in mind as we approach the historical context of DeLillo’s work”(97). As things, rather than merely objects defined within a subject–object relationship, junk finally receives the attention it deserves in the museum and in the artwork.

This idea also recalls the museum sequence that opens Point Omega, where the significance of the museum space lies precisely in forcing viewers to attend seriously to things, because “it takes close attention to see […] it takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at.” The depths of things, DeLillo writes, are “so easy to miss in the shallow habit of seeing” (16-17). When such a mode of perception is extended to every moment of life, “a pond in summer, a leaf in the wind” can, through these “new ways of thinking and seeing,” acquire renewed significance and become fully a thing-in-itself. This is one of the central themes of Point Omega, which, as James Gourley observes, “approves of high modernist difficulty, and the possibility of producing important meaning through modernist form and style” (87). DeLillo’s reflections on art thus constitute a rebuttal to the long-standing anthropocentric, subject-oriented conception of art. As Heidegger points out, in terms of the artwork, “to suppose that our description, as a subjective action, had first depicted everything thus and then projected into the painting would be the worst kind of self-delusion.” (Off the Beaten Track 15). What, then, is art? For Heidegger, as well as for Klara and DeLillo, art means, through an artwork, this particular “being steps forward into the unconcealment of its being”. Whether it is a pair of peasant shoes or a piece of salvaged burlap, its artistic quality lies in the fact that “the truth of the being has set itself to work. ‘Set’ means here: to bring to stand. In the work, a being, a pair of peasant shoes, comes to stand in the light of its being. The being of the being comes into the constancy of its shining.” (Off the Beaten Track 16). In other words, the thing-in-itself, its thingness, and its artistic quality consist in it becoming itself in the artwork, rather than conforming to human aesthetic judgment as an object in the traditional humanist framework.

In fact, when discussing Klara’s artistic transformation of things, Stefan Mattessich has already touched upon this issue. As he argues, “the generality of the ‘thing’ allows it to maintain the nameless dimension of what eludes the semantic patterns of representational order” (8). Our reading extends this general characterization by arguing that “what eludes the semantic patterns of representational order” is what DeLillo artistically represents as the posthuman subject. Klara’s greatest artistic achievement is undoubtedly her transformation of the “waste” of the Cold War arms race, the B-52 long-range bomber planes, into artworks. The B-52 is merely a carrier of nuclear weapons through which the United States proclaims its military power to the world, and a symbol assuring its allies of the protective shield provided by American armed forces. In other words, it exists only as an “Object” of military science within the United States’ war narrative, pre-structured by the system of Cold War ideology and state power that can be used, displayed, and ultimately discarded. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the aircraft lost its function and became waste, abandoned by the U.S. military. Klara’s art takes the following form: the vast, empty desert spreads out around the planes, becoming their surrounding milieu. On the aircraft she paints insignia, squadron emblems, animals, and female figures. Through artistic expression and sustained attention, she wants people to get rid of the old idea of power, violence, and utility. These airplanes are now “down out of the sky and I’ve walked and stooped and crawled from the cockpit to the tail gun armament and I’ve seen them in every kind of light and I’ve thought hard about the weapons they carried and the men who accompanied the weapons and it is awful to think about.” (76). These planes turn from “shit”, “garbage”, “waste material”, and an object to “a whole big megillah”, a thing, an actant and a posthuman subject (77). They tell their own long, tangled stories; they help us “trespass and declare ourselves, show who we are” (77).

When Nick leaves Klara’s site and climbs a hill to look down upon the scene, he sees that “there were two hundred and thirty planes, swept winged, finned like bottom creatures”. Hundreds of aircraft, as a single mass, “exchange with the framing desert” under the reflection of the setting sun; they “pushed and pulled,” forming a magnificent artistic tableau of interwoven light and shadow (83). The planes and the desert merge into a whole existence. What Klara does as an artist is to allow both to become themselves. Through her painting, the planes and the desert are no longer merely objects of human projection; instead, they mutually disclose, reflect, and interact with one another. At the same time, they narrate the history of a nation, the calamities and blessings of those who once fought aboard these planes, victory and disgrace, endurance and degeneration. At this moment, Klara’s aircraft art practice stands in the desert much like the Greek temple in Heidegger’s celebrated discussion of the work of art. As Heidegger writes, the Greek temple “portrays nothing. It simply stands there in the middle of the rock-fissured valley” (Off the Beaten Track 20). This “resting of the work draws out of the rock the darkness of its unstructured yet unforced support. Standing there, the building holds its place against the storm raging above it and so first makes the storm visible in its violence.” Through the work, “tree, grass, eagle and bull, snake and cricket first enter their distinctive shapes and thus come to appearance as what they are” (Off the Beaten Track 21). Klara’s work functions in this way. It allows the desert and the aircraft to appear as what they are, no longer confined within the framework of humanist subjectivity but disclosed in their own “coming forth”. As Heidegger explains, “early on, the Greeks called this coming forth and rising up in itself and in all things φύσις. At the same time, φύσις lights up that on which man bases his dwelling. We call this the earth” (Off the Beaten Track 21). When the artwork, waste, aircraft, desert, and human beings are all placed within this open clearing, DeLillo, through Klara’s artistic practice, transforms the existence of both things and human into posthuman subjects, detached from the humanist paradigm and continually engaged in processes of becoming through openness and through the interactive relations between humans and things.

      “Everything Is Connected”: Posthuman Connections between Human and Things

Underworld is, above all, a novel about connection. Words related to “connection” appear more than a hundred times throughout the novel. These connections encompass not only relations between people and things but also the multiple linkages that constitute the novel’s “underworld” itself. In posthumanist discussions, connection and relationality are regarded as core dimensions of posthuman subjectivity as well. As Rosi Braidotti points out, the key distinction between posthuman subjectivity and humanist subjectivity lies in the fact that the former is not a self-sufficient, enclosed subject, but rather an embodied, embedded, and relational self (The Posthuman 90). Posthuman subjectivity “respects the bond of mutual dependence between bodies and technological others, while avoiding the contempt for the flesh and the trans-humanist fantasy of escape from the finite materiality of the enfleshed self” (91). DeLillo’s multi-layered representation of things is not merely an imaginative exploration of things as potential posthuman subjects. By treating things as guiding threads of the underworld, it also constructs a posthuman world in which all beings are fundamentally interconnected.

In other words, the thing in DeLillo is not merely “thing-in-itself”. Its significance becomes apparent when its ontological autonomy gives rise to relations with humans and other nonhuman actants. Through these relations comes a form of subjectivity that is itself relational rather than autonomous or self-contained. Posthuman subjectivity is no longer an isolated and self-contained entity; rather, “it emphasizes relationalities in general […] relocating the human within the web of life while also recognizing that the web of life can be framed as internal to human interventions and perspectives” (Hayles 38).  Waste, as noted above, functions as a central thing in the novel. But it also becomes a posthuman force that gathers together people and things throughout the novel; it is both a material entity and a literary metaphor, serving as a bridge between the human and nonhuman. When Nick’s colleague Brian Glassic oversees the clearing of three thousand acres of waste, he suddenly realizes that the trash before him is not merely trash. Rather, it is “all the appetites and hankerings, the sodden second thoughts came runneling out, the things you wanted ardently and then did not” (185). In a consumer society driven by perpetual desire, people are constantly buying and discarding, producing endless accumulations of waste. Trash thus becomes “a unique cultural deposit” (185). Among the refuse are brightly colored strips of cloth and fragments of plants mixed with soil, as well as “a bikini brief that belonged to a secretary from Queens”. She may be “dark-eyed and reads the tabloids and paints her nails and eats lunch out of molded Styrofoam” (185). The waste heap thus preserves more than discarded matter. It also preserves fragments of individual lives and the social relations that produced them. These human stories are connected, preserved, and revealed through the things in the waste heap, churning amid the roar of bulldozers, rolling toward a posthuman world in which humans and garbage are interconnected. This also echoes Stacy Alaimo’s discussion of trans-corporeality, which holds that “humans are interconnected not only with one another but also with the material interchanges between body, substance, and place” (77). In this sense, humans have always been posthuman and have never been separated from the material world in which they live.

When we re-examine humanity, and even the world itself, from the perspective of things, we can probably gain a new mode of storytelling: the thing becomes “critically different … looms both within and beyond those things” (Brown 17), opening toward a broader posthuman world and, in their respective ways, binding the human and the nonhuman together in a tightly interwoven relation. If the “cultural deposit” that Brian observes at the landfill reveals the horizontal breadth of garbage as cultural accumulation, then the baseball game that opens the novel demonstrates the historical significance of garbage and baseball in the vertical dimension of history. While such historic events are usually remembered through the game itself and its star players, DeLillo shifts his attention to the overlooked vitality and agency of things.  At 3:58 p.m., when the Giants clinched their victory, the stadium erupts in thunderous noise, followed by a rain of paper from the stands. Throwing garbage becomes a mode of celebration:

It is coming down from all points, laundry tickets, envelopes swiped from the office, there are crushed cigarette packs and sticky wrap from ice-cream sandwiches, pages from memo pads and pocket calendars, they are throwing faded dollar bills, snapshots torn to pieces, ruffled paper swaddles for cupcakes, they are tearing up letters they’ve been carrying around for years pressed into their wallets, the residue of love affairs and college friendships, it is happy garbage now, the fans’ intimate wish to be connected to the event[…].(44-45)

As Evans notes, at this moment, paper as waste seems to remain “after our participation in the cycle of production and consumption” and “is that which maintains the most intimate and personal relation to the private self”(109).  The scraps of waste function as expressions of collective emotion and turn from personal waste to “a thing that carries a shadow identity” (45) and, more radically, to a posthuman identity/subject that “asserts the material totality of and interconnection with all living things” (Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge 45). Waste connects the game not only to the people present at the time, but also to Marvin decades later when he searches for the baseball. During this pursuit, Marvin encounters fragments of this waste, which DeLillo suggests may have made Marvin, Dodgers and fans enter “the underground of memory and collection” (321). In DeLillo’s writing, the status of trash as a mere object is profoundly called into question. Its relationships with characters grow increasingly complex and heterogeneous as the narrative unfolds. As Bill Brown incisively notes, in Underworld, “Don DeLillo has become both critic and poet of the late-century American object world,” articulating the idea that “subject and object, human and nonhuman, are inextricable” (14). Fragments of waste thus serve as repositories of both personal and historical memory, forging posthuman connections across national, individual, and collective histories.

Baseball likewise connects the history of the American nation. In Underworld, it functions as far more than a mere commodity. Although the previous discussion has already examined how baseball becomes implicated in capitalism’s logic of sign exchange and value circulation, DeLillo’s deeper insight lies in his simultaneous granting of baseball another, seemingly contradictory yet ultimately complementary, function. Baseball is both a consumable object and an active agent that connects characters and the structure of the novel, generates relations and connects different personal and national historical periods. This duality reveals the complexity of “things” in DeLillo’s fiction. As DeLillo explains in an interview, “the ball is the object that connects people in the story […] every character in the book, every character who speaks, every character who has some sort of significance[…]is connected to the baseball” (Chénetier and Happe 105). Structurally, the prologue centers on the description of the baseball game on October 3, 1951. Then the novel unfolds into six parts and an epilogue. Almost every section contains a section titled “Manx Martin,” each of which traces the whereabouts of the baseball. On the day of the game, a young boy, Cotter Martin, skips school to attend the match. In the chaos following Bobby Thomson’s decisive home run, Cotter manages to seize the ball. He brings it home, only to have it stolen later that night by his father, Manx Martin, who sneaks into his bedroom. As the novel moves backward chronologically from the 1990s to the 1950s, the baseball also changes hands multiple times. After stealing it, Manx sells the ball to Charles Wainwright, who passes it on to his son Charlie. The baseball later falls into the hands of Marvin, a collector of baseball memorabilia. After years of searching, Marvin eventually sells the ball to the protagonist Nick. With baseball they try to “piece together a version of the past that will explain their present” and “imagine that with the ball they can recover the game’s original aura”(Parrish 702). Obviously, the baseball undergirds the novel’s narrative architecture, linking together the life trajectories of its characters. For Marvin, the search for the baseball becomes an all-consuming pursuit. He overlooks no clue, rummaging through broken attics, old boxes, even elderly women’s underwear drawers in his relentless quest. For twenty-two years he searches, initially without understanding why he is driven to do so. He says to himself “a thousand times. Why do I want this thing? What does it mean? Who has it?” (175). He ultimately finds the ball in an old crate of discarded objects, and gradually comes to realize that his long search for “exhausted object” has been a way of coping with the grief of his wife’s death years earlier and of resisting “the dark shape of some unshoulderable loss. Memorabilia.” (191-192). At the same time, he hopes that through the baseball he might “match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life” (323). The baseball forges networks of connection among the destinies, emotions, and experiences of different individuals on the one hand, and also embodies the underworld’s powerful, unknowable forces that exceed humanist rational mastery, gesturing toward DeLillo’s posthumanist, almost mystical yearnings, on the other.

For DeLillo, baseball connects America as a nation, and “bears more history than any other American sport”(Osteen, American Magic and Dread 218). Human-thing interaction not only constitutes Marvin’s posthuman subjectivity, but also shapes American national identity and brings American “history and desire and consciousness into expression” (Boxall, Don DeLillo 184). Baseball has long been one of the most popular sports in the United States. The 1951 game appeared on the front page of The New York Times alongside the Soviet Union’s first airdropped atomic bomb test. The game unites the entire nation in a shared moment of experience. People watched the game at the stadium or listened on the radio: a sixteen-year-old boy on a rooftop, a housewife cooking cabbage, a man struggling to quit drinking. The game makes them “connected” (32). It became part of America’s collective memory, such that when people recall this scene, they feel themselves to be “a carrier of some solemn scrap of history” (16). Thus, in the novel, DeLillo not only writes about a baseball that, like waste, possesses its own identity. “It had its own epic character, its history of comebacks and sweet memories and family picnics and buggy evenings on the back porch and hopes that rise and fall and the song of loss that goes unwritten in the records” (309). Also, it is a baseball that co-constitutes a posthuman relational subjectivity with humans. This subjectivity encompasses not only individuals, but Americans as a people. The collective is constituted through a shared attachment to a material object that carries memories across generations. To say “I am an American” is to say “I go to ball games” (280). Personal stories and national narratives “would be exalted, absorbed by something larger, the long arching journey of the baseball itself” (318). DeLillo’s posthuman articulation of the relationship between humans and things is in conversation with Bill Brown’s theory of thing when the latter asks what role might things “play in human life, what kind of knowledge they congeal, what kinds of agency they assume” (Brown 132).

It is worth noting that baseball is not only the most significant thing in Underworld; it also plays an indispensable role in many of DeLillo’s other novels. His Mao II (1991) likewise opens with a baseball-related spectacle. The mass wedding at Yankee Stadium transforms the baseball crowd into a model of collective identity. Baseball is described as the word that can “sum up a hundred happy abstractions, themes that flare to life in the crowd shout and diamond symmetry, in the details of a dusty slide. The word has resonance if you’re American, a sense of shared heart and untranslatable lore” (9). In Americana, baseball is one of the most frequently recurring sports motifs in the novel and is characterized as America’s “version of the café life” (371). As Tang points out, baseball players and spectators in DeLillo’s fiction “form a community around the game that transcends class, race, and age” (24). These earlier works thus already establish baseball as both a national pastime and a cultural symbol through which community is represented. This significance is further amplified in Underworld, where baseball serves not merely as a cultural symbol but as a narrative thread that connects the novel’s disparate characters and stories, binding them together and intertwining their lives with the broader trajectories of American history. In this sense, Underworld extends a concern already visible in DeLillo’s earlier fiction toward a more explicitly relational understanding of subjectivity.

In Underworld, DeLillo not only narrates an official grand historical narrative unfolding along a linear timeline, but also constructs a posthuman counter-narrative, namely an “underworld” centered on things and the extensive connections they generate among human and nonhuman beings. Beginning with garbage and baseball, this network of relations expands outward to encompass virtually every thing in the novel. Indeed, nearly every thing appears to enter into relations with people across different temporal and spatial coordinates, participating in the construction of their posthuman subjectivities. In the novel, orange juice is something the artist Ismael paints with orange juice; Charlie designs refined and visually striking advertisements for it; and Sister Edgar gazes at a roadside billboard advertising orange juice. At a certain moment, with a particular convergence of light and shadow, Sister Edgar “sees Esmeralda’s face take shape under the rainbow of bounteous juice and above the little suburban lake and there is a sense of someone living in the image, an animating spirit” (822). She “feels something break upon her. An angelus of clearest joy.” And she became “nameless for a moment, lost to the details of personal history, a disembodied fact in liquid form, pouring into the crowd” (823). When Matt goes to fight in Vietnam, the U.S. military uses Agent Orange, whose packaging strikingly resembles that of Minute Maid orange juice. “In bypassing human senses, this conjunction of media and military technologies… are beyond the limits of human comprehension” (Spencer 95). Orange juice becomes a material node connecting advertising, art, suburban life, military technology, and the Vietnam War. What appears to be an arbitrary chain of associations is precisely the form that relationality takes in DeLillo. The connection forged through orange juice appears darkly absurd, yet within DeLillo’s posthuman imagination of things it seems to possess its own internal logic.

At another moment, Sister Edgar happens to pick up a copy of Time magazine one day on her way to a restaurant, which features a large color photograph of a woman seated in a director’s chair, with the wing of a U.S. bomber in the background, and the woman turns out to be Klara. By coincidence, Nick owns a copy of the very same issue of Time, which he hides in the basket Marian usually uses to store fashion magazines. In this way, the magazine links together characters who would otherwise have no connection. “Long Tall Sally,” the title of the first part of Underworld, is the name of a song, the phrase printed on the T-shirts worn by the people Nick encounters in the desert, and also the title of one of Klara’s paintings. At the same time, it points back to the U.S. military personnel who once operated these bombers: they “lived in a closed world with its particular omens and symbols and they were young and horny to boot,” and such images of a tall, blond girl “with amazing legs” formed part of their everyday diversions (77). In Mark Osteen’s words, these moments for DeLillo’s characters are “forms of magic—quasi-religious rituals, pseudodivine authorities, miraculous transformations”(American Magic and Dread 1). They are both “ordinary and the transcendental” (Barrett 107), both mysterious and posthuman.

The posthuman connection between humans and nonhuman beings in a broader sense becomes an even more prominent concern in DeLillo’s later fiction, to the extent that it may be regarded as a defining feature of his late style (Herbrechter 6; Tang 22). In Point Omega, Richard Elster invokes the philosophy of consciousness associated with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and asks: “Do we have to be humans forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to the inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field” (67). As critic Pieter Vermeulen observes, this nonhuman impulse reflects DeLillo’s attempt to reimagine the relationship between the human and the nonhuman as one that “figures intercultural connectedness as geographical extension” and in which “globalization merges with other decidedly non- or post-human powers”(3). In Zero K, this relationality is further developed through the cryonic facility known as the Convergence, where humans and things, consciousness and non-consciousness, are reconfigured into a form of “hyper-connection” (127). The novel consequently raises the question: “What happens to the idea of continuum—past, present, future—in the cryonic chamber”(68)? Stefan Herbrechter argues that in this work DeLillo “shifts the perspective from a slow ‘geological’ posthumanism to the frantic transhumanist fantasies of human life extension”(14). We would suggest, however, that Zero K represents not transhumanist fantasies but a further expansion of his conception of posthuman connection and subjectivity. What emerges is a form of posthuman subjectivity that transcends the binary oppositions of traditional Western humanism, embodying a non-self while simultaneously remaining open to unlimited relational connections (Yuan, “Writing as Enlightenment” 376; Laist, Technology and Postmodern Subjectivity 35). This subjectivity is constituted not through autonomy, self-enclosure, or individual sovereignty, but through its embeddedness within an ever-expanding network of relations among human and nonhuman beings alike.

In DeLillo’s narrative, every thing enters into relations with human beings across space and time, shaping the subjectivity of individuals in different ways. One summer afternoon, during Klara’s “rooftop summer”, she sits on a Chelsea roof and looks south toward the World Trade Center. From her vantage point, the towers “siamesed” and “joined at the waist by a transit crane” (487). For DeLillo, every event, every thing, and every person seems to be connected in some way beyond the limits of human knowledge. “Everything connects in the end” (465). The scene Klara witnesses on the rooftop, in which a skywriting aircraft passes before the Twin Towers, seems eerily echoed by the photograph by André Kertész, taken in 1972 and selected by DeLillo as the cover image for the 1997 edition of Underworld, in which a solitary bird flies through the mist toward Tower One. Together, these images seem to foreshadow, four years later, an “eerie and religious” association between aircraft and the Twin Towers (Passaro). While it is difficult to claim that any element of coincidence is at work here, and even more untenable to suggest the presence of some posthuman connection from the “underworld”, or to cast DeLillo as a “prophetic” writer (DePietro x; Conte 180; Laist, “The Concept of Disappearance” 257), it may nonetheless be said, in the spirit of DeLillo’s own words, that “everything is connected in the end” (826).

      Conclusion

Underworld reveals DeLillo’s sustained engagement with the relationship between individuals and things in contemporary American society. In his work, things are no longer passive entities or mere background elements; instead, they become active participants in shaping posthuman subjectivity. This reconfiguration of the human–object relationship also resonates within the literary field, with the discussions of new materialism and posthumanist thought over the past several decades. In this sense, DeLillo’s observation and representation of American society and culture at the turn of the millennium not only reflect, as I have suggested above, a subtle shift in his own literary concerns and style, but also enter into conversation with a broader intellectual effort around the turn of the millennium to reassess some of the fundamental assumptions underlying Western philosophical and humanist traditions. It is not to produce “new kinds of persons,” but to “bring into focus” the previously taken-for-granted “ontological residues” that have shaped conceptions of the human. Such essentialized, modern notions of the human, Brown suggests, must be re-examined within new contexts, and one of the most significant of which is posthumanism, which has “made modernity’s distinction between human subjects and inanimate objects appear increasingly artificial” (250–51). This modern distinction itself is inseparable from humanism: “Modernity is often defined in terms of humanism, either as a way of saluting the birth of ‘man’ […] But this habit itself is modern, because it remains asymmetrical. It overlooks the simultaneous birth of ‘nonhumanity’—things, or objects, or beasts” (Latour 13). DeLillo’s work revises modernity precisely in this sense. From multiple dimensions, it exposes the forms of subjective crisis in the modern division between the human and the nonhuman. If the narrative of modernity constitutes an official history, a grand, progressive story of human advancement and self-perfection, then DeLillo’s novels can be read as a counter-narrative that unsettles this teleology.

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