Decoding computers

In the final chapter focused on screens, we turn to the computer. DeLillo’s fiction has followed and often anticipated the evolution of vast, increasingly autonomous and integrated computer networks as they become ever more deeply embedded in everyday life and culture, global economy and geopolitics. Two features are immediately noteworthy in DeLillo’s engagement with computers: first, the sheer range of contexts in which they appear; and second, the ongoing commitment to a dialectical critique of both perils and potentialities in relation to this dominant technological form. DeLillo’s sustained scrutiny of technologies of vision aligns his work with science fiction, but it never subscribes to the polarising impulses and crude determinism with which that genre is sometimes associated. The computer screen in DeLillo offers neither the comforts of utopian futurism nor the consolations of dystopian pessimism but rather a complex series of nuanced scenarios precisely situated in distinctive settings. The chapter considers the appearance of computer screens in Ratner’s Star, White Noise, Underworld, Cosmopolis, Zero K and The Silence . The final section offers an overview of the DeLillo screen as ‘double-sided with a sharp edge’.