Barker, S; (2021) Static, Glitch, Lull: Don DeLillo’s The Silence. [Review]. Moveable Type , 13 (1) , Article 13. 10.14324/111.1755-4527.123.

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Abstract

Don DeLillo’s The Silence speculates a day in the future when technology inordinately fails. Yet, prior to this apocalypse, The Silence is ordinary, beginning mid-flight, somewhere between Paris and Newark, on Super Bowl Sunday, 2022. On schedule to join their friends in time for kick-off, Jim Kripps and Tessa Berrens pass the time: Jim, muses over the flight tracker — ‘Altitude, thirty-three thousand and two feet’; ‘I’m reading whatever appears’— while Tessa records her memories — ‘I need to see it in my handwriting, perhaps, twenty years from now, if I’m still alive’ (4,8,10). By prefacing with futility and anticipation, existentialism and nihilism, with airline talk—an ‘automated process…generated by the nature of airline travel itself”—DeLillo frames his atmospheric meditation on morality with a world suspended by signals (7). More than the impending event of technological blackout, Jim’s passive willingness to be inundated by the screen and Tessa’s yearning to find and make meaning through records, set the stage for DeLillo’s apocalyptic rendering of not only a crisis in the datasphere, but the crisis of the datasphere itself.

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