Waste and Toxicity in Don DeLillo’s Underworld and Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom

As stated in the description of this conference, “geographical locations may act as the repository or emanation of human evil, made monstrous by the rituals and behaviours enacted within them, or by their peculiarities of atmosphere or configuration”. In “The Obsolescence of Mystery and the Accumulation of Waste in Don DeLillo’s Underworld”, Todd McGowan underlines how, although waste may appear monstrous for its conspicuousness and incongruity within our socioeconomic system, it is in fact the infrastructure aimed at regulating refuse which tends to have reductive – or monstrous - effects on our subjectivity. In such a context, waste may in fact be our ultimate point of resistance to commodification. Therefore, this paper focuses on articulations between space and waste, regulating infrastructures and agency. Both DeLillo and Franzen examine how spaces may be policed through discourse in manners which render them monstrous, be it through “bottom-up” or “top-down” phenomena. DeLillo’s waste executive Nick Shay admires the force of garbage and landfills precisely for their ugly aspects - as places where deeds and discourses ultimately come to shed and shit their material effects. Franzen’s Walter Berglund, however, becomes involved with the very corporations against which he is struggling due to his conspicuous lack of agency. A hardcore conservationist, he is stricken with hopelessness as he strives to preserve functional bird habitats within compartmentalized suburban landscapes. While Underworld is concerned with how the policing of the American West through Cold War discourse had trickle-down effects on national identity (as did the infrastructure subsequently put in place to manage the refuse which the conflict generated), Freedom centers on links between spatial configurations and personal identity, revealing a similar monstrosity within the structures, rituals and behaviors which give shape to suburbia as the locus of stifling traditionalism and regressive politics. This paper examines the monstrosity of waste and the systems which seek to regulate it. It investigates traits (e.g. form and formlessness) which may be described as monstrous and the manners in which they are rendered in literary texts so as to establish to what extent waste is indeed portrayed as a site of menace.