COSMOPOLIS: METROPOLIS
The first impression obtained by readers of Don Delillo’s Cosmopolis will most likely be influenced by it’s late 20th century political jargon that relates quite well to today’s fast paced society. Eric Packer, the main character, is an odd pastiche of traits and observances, an amorphous mass of needs and beliefs so unidentifiable as to grind this otherwise fine novel to a halt. Cosmopolis takes place in one day, as Eric Packer descends from his New York apartment of 48 rooms, complete with lap pool, card parlor, gymnasium, screening room and shark tank. Surruptitiously deciding on a haricut, he hops into his limousine and instructs the driver across town to his preferred barber. Of course the trip is not going to be so easy, as Packer’s progress is stalled by a presidential parade, a funeral march for a Sufi rapper by the name of Brutha Fez and a protest on Times Square. During the trip, employees, bodyguards and old lovers stop in and out of the limo, most of them concerned with a risky gamble on the value of the yen, or a threat on his life that has been made by some unknown person. Eric’s uncanny philosophy considers the value of all this: violence, traffic, technology, global finance and even sex. In between the dialogue and his mental awareness of his surroundings, Delillo shows readers how a corporate egomaniac dwindles amongst the pressures of today’s changing global economy. Eric’s self-centered approach to his day overshadows his search for life’s meaning and his purpose in it as a rich civilian. This is due in part to technology and how it revolves around the human mind, thereby determining and critiquing human capabilities, attempting to prove whether their pace is too fast or too slow. To cope with the demands of his position in society, Eric uses violence as a tool to express his freedom, completely distancing himself from any emotional level of consciousness and rationality. After reading through the final pages, one main question stands out in Delillo’s novel: How does one critique capitalism or get out of the system entirely, especially in the postmodern whirlpool of Manhattan New York?
Delillo’s greatest skill lies in playing quintessentially American events off of one another and finding meaning in their intersection. The spectacles that feed so many tabloids and television reports also serve as a template for Delillo, as he stages absurd scenes that could easily come from real life and watches his characters react to them. Eric Packer is an asset manager, so his world is full of the speculation of market movements and the rise and fall of currencies. His success is fed by an obsessive desire for information and a need to find “a common surface, an affinity between market movements and the natural world” (Delillo: 34). Packer’s information-lust is of course aided by modern technology, and as a result, Delillo obsesses over video displays, LCD monitors and computer screens in this novel like most male authors his age obsess over young women. Eric’s ego is mislead from the get-go when his wife of twenty two days says, “You’ve done great work for our investors in strong and choppy markets both. Most asset managers under perform the market. You’ve outperformed it…and have never been influenced by the sweep of the crowd” (53). First lesson for readers: do not provoke a technology-driven extremist to capitalize, because he or she will try until death.
A capitalist’s penchant for power and money becomes a burden that forces the whole economic network to adjust. Critiquing a capitalist’s lifestyle is irrelevant to postmodernism, because of the choice’s that abound when money is at the ready. Instead, the conflict arises, because of the increase in electrical appliances and communication tools such as the internet, which provide more complex frames of reference for people. This completely contrasts with the 1920’s flappers and T-mobile era, where information traveled at a slower rate. With a faster flow of information, people are therefore challenged to keep up and the pace itself becomes a source for competition, much like Eric and the Japanese yen. According to the Postmodern critic, Ihab Hassen, “continuity and discontinuity” of historical instability and concepts of change are both “complementary and partial” (84). Because of this, a cultural and global perspective invokes two “divinities” at once and engages readers in a partial view of an era; more specifically, view of a city and the changes within it. “Sameness and difference, unity and rupture, filiation and revolt, all must be honored if we are to attend to history” and change both as a “spatial, mental structure” and as a temporal, “physical process, both as pattern and unique event” (85).
Eric’s rickety train of thought might be looked upon as a side effect of postmodernism. Postmodernism attempts to “merge the qualities of disjunction, irrationalism, anti-illusionism, and self-reflexiveness” (Trachtenberg: 3). Postmodernism is an entity separate from its origins. The term’s application to many artistic and cultural forms bring up more complex attitudes of new ideas in the western frame. Delillo uses Eric to portray a victim of his own standard. He relies too much on his intimacy with technological extensions of his consciousness. According to Eric, technology is crucial to civilization, “because it helps [people] make [their] fate” yet it can also “go either way,” (Delillo 95). This means one of two things: one, the mainstream civilian engages in its splendors and accepts the intellectual changes made by progressive human intentions. Or two, the capitalists who use it to compete with others for money and power are invisible to the masses. When people join forces, they are capable of taking down a neurotic, over zealous money monger, such as Eric, and when they come together like they did in the streets of Cosmopolis, not even the stealthiest limousine couldn’t hold back the anger and confusion which ruptures due to separate, divided and lastly, nationalistic desires to keep national resources untainted.
The warnings incurred by Delillo tug on the reader’s sense of stability and purpose by depicting a successful man to be caught in ridiculous conundrums at the top ofNew York’s hierarchy. The power of the rich is either looked upon as creditable or ineffectual and Delillo presents a character which is caught in the middle. In this sense, Erik represents a parodied figure that has bumped into rebellion, terrorism, sadistic sex (self-induced), Hip-Hop, a presidential march, celebrities and even their funerals. The spontaneity of the day brings about strands of postmodernist philosophy blended into moments of cultural panic and an increasingly expansive interest in money; all of which were driven by the forces of mass media (utilized by the Stock Market and financial splendors). Television’s pervasive nature in theU.S.society and the sensationalistic, surreal reality that it propagandizes, links directly into Eric’s thought process. For instance, a desire for large sums of cash precedes the “high-end” social mingling Eric naturally involves himself with. These wealthy crowds constantly clash with the “FedEx and UPS trucks,” “hagglers and talebearers,” and the “street dealers with stray talk.” On this day, Eric was witnessed an “offense to the truth of the future” (Delillo: 65). Though Delillo stretches the truth in such drastic tones, it still remains clear that Eric felt it enter “every receptor and vault electrically to his brain” (65).
The T.V. inside the limo accelerates Erik’s thought process by emitting news of the currency fluctuations in rapid succession. The future is entwined in the mass media drive to propel the business world into a money making machine and he rhapsodizes over the data that runs on these screens, saying,
“In fact data itself was soulful and glowing, a dynamic aspect of the life process. This was the eloquence of alphabets and numeric systems, now fully realized in electronic form, in the zero-oneness of the world, the digital imperative that defined every breath of the planet’s living billions. Here was the heave of the biosphere. Our bodies and oceans were here, knowable and whole” (Delillo: 24).
Erik Packer’s position in this chain of digital technology is thus strained by any dipping of money value and his over-reliance on technology. This is his life and it sticks with him until the end of Cosmopolis when he embodies the spiritual essence of death and somehow remains in “original space” (Delillo: 209), much like the waves of information themselves.
These choppy musings enter Erik’s head as fast as they exit and push themselves into reality as far as postmodernist subjectivity will allow. They also remind him that the city, as well as his life, is almost completely dependent on the signals received via media waves. One interpretation for Eric’s day might also be that he bumps into every cultural corner there is to find in a big city and the only way “one learns about the countries where unrest is occurring is by riding the taxis there” (Delillo: 16). This, along with his scientific and media references, shows how Delillo expends on screens and data what another author might save for the scenery and the surroundings. The supporting characters of “Cosmopolis” (ie: Chin, Jane, Fez) are not immune to this need for information. In conversation, they tend to spout verbal essays at each other in much the same way that Packer’s arrays of monitors throw out information. Their ideas eject from their mouths in thin streams and hit dead air, where they hover, offering themselves up for analysis so that their meaning can be extracted it whatever way possible.
It’s human nature to push certain limits and Cosmopolis makes a plea with readers that those revolving around capitalism and technology may be winding cultures out of control. Delillo believes in incorporating the cultural trends which surround him, hence the paranoia and conspiracy stricken plot line. Propriety and early 20th century conventionalism is an idea of the past in this novel. Delillo utilizes postmodern writing styles and presents a society “informed by new psychic possibilities often induced by hallucinatory drugs…adopting even madness as a redemptive political principle” (Trachtenberg: 3). For example, the protests surrounding Erik’s limo were vigorously “rocking the car.” There were “teenagers on skateboards spraying graffiti at advertising displays on the sides of buses. The rat was toppled now and there were police in tight formation advancing behind riot shields” (Delillo: 89). The political principle referred to in this particular instance was the “rat,” a comic device used by Delillio to symbolize the currency for any country being referred to in conversation. Financial success is a tension which never leaves Erik and his advisors. The tornado of events outside his limo represents a crashing of systems, cultures and ideas, which, according to Torval (one of Erik’s advisors/friends), are themselves, a “fantasy generated by the market,” exemplifying the “free market system itself” (90) and perhaps rebelling against free market trade as well. Delillo’s visualization of the emerging economic strain in the future is far fetched. However, it brings about an alert system which strongly states that humanity’s dependency on the “rat” or trade agreements may lead to corruption and division. “The more visionary the idea, the more people it leaves behind. This is what the protest is all about, visions of technology and wealth. The force of cyber-capital[ism] will send people into the gutter to retch a die” (90).
Eric’s method of relaxation is another extreme: sex and violence. Postmodernism attempts to “merge the qualities of disjunction, irrationalism, anti-illusionism, and self-reflexiveness” (Trachtenberg: 3). It is an entity separate from its origins. The term’s application to many artistic and cultural forms bring up more complex attitudes of new ideas in the western frame. Delillo uses Eric to portray a victim of his own standard. He relies too much on his intimacy with technological extensions of his consciousness. Someone with such financial responsibility and high success rate would most likely have little time for leisurely activities. On the contrary, Eric manages to completely disconnect with himself and breach violence and his surroundings, irrationally disconnecting from his business decorum entirely.
History is always articulated from somewhere. The postmodern reader therefore expects different cultural representations within Cosmopolis than a reader of a past era or movement. However, despite these alienated viewpoints,
“The postmodern temper has carried the skepticism and antirealism of modern literary culture to an extreme beyond which it would be difficult to go. Though it looks back mockingly on the modernist tradition and professes to have got beyond it, postmodern literature remains tied to that tradition and unable to break with it” (Gerald Graff: 79).
Readers must always remember to incorporate the “deaths” which have occurred in the past to be able to mold their present outlook on Delillo’s writing. Although critics have trapped themselves into believing Delillo’s concepts to be stuck in the 1980’s, his view of the future’s lack of communication between people may be the very ideal he’s pitting against our society. Furthermore, he suggests that Eric’s “heated sex” three times a day may be pardoned, because in essence, it doesn’t matter, as long as the bottom line is reached. Leisure or no leisure, good mannerisms or lack thereof, only one clear-cut ideal must be set in place for a human on any step of the hierarchy to understand the value of selflessness and how to cope with reality:
“You have to die for how you think and act. For [Eric’s] apartment and what [he] paid for it. For the medical checkups. This alone. Medical checkups every day. For how much [he] had and how much [he] lost, equally. No less for losing it than making it. For the limousine that displaces the air that people need to breathe inBangladesh. This alone” (Delillo 202).
Eric had noticed the poor end of society throughout his journey down the avenues ofManhattan, but he never once acknowledged the effect the mere presence of his limousine had on them. That effect being a washed down sense of hopelessness. The only way to realize one’s mistakes is to fail, and in Eric’s case, fail miserably and end up dead. Then, perhaps a new idea will emerge from the impact such a death has on the deceased beneficiaries, friends and family, turning the perspective of wealth and the media crazed buzz around completely. Eric should look inside the limo from the outside instead of the other way around the whole time.
Instead of using effective communication, the characters in Cosmopolis soliloquize, while Eric assimilates. They are the donors of information while he is the recipient, employing their organized thoughts and challenging remarks, to help him uncover what he believes to be “an order at some deep level, a pattern that wants to be seen” (115). The characters, then, for whatever life might first appear to be in them, seem to be nothing more than living, breathing counterparts to the streams of numbers on video screens. In order to reduce his story as much as possible to pure information, Delillo undermines his characters to the status of talking heads that materialize, produce their ideas like engineers uploading new programs, and then disappear. In Delillo’s attempt to make readers realize the potential threat of technology, he seemed to have forgotten to create realistic characters to supplement his argument. Instead, he relies on parodies which few of us can relate to. Nevertheless, he manages to think of the present with an emphasis on the disturbing implications of one’s “hyperrational imperialistic aggression” (Graff: 69), a precaution which serves his audience well. Sometimes even a master of postmodernism is caught in a vortex of his own titanic project. For the sake of postmodernists and present day civilians, remember to categorize Eric Packer as a character from fiction, not fact, but be weary of all the possible consequences Delillo portrays to present day capitalists and the victimized non capitalists alike. Much of what is depicted may very well be accurate, but not to an outsider looking in. One thing’s for sure however and that’s the ideology that sparkle and shine is only skin deep. If Delillo’s trying to sell that through Mr. Packer, he has a viable claim. The rest is up for grabs.
WORKS CITED
1.) Delillo, Don. Cosmopolis. New York: Scribner, 2003.
2.) Trachtenberg, Stanley ed. Critical Essays on American Postmodernism. New York: Macmillan, 1995.
3.) Hassen, Ihab. Postface 1982: Toward a Concept of Postmodernism. Milan: Bompiani, 1984
4.) Graff, Gerald. The Myth of the Postmodern Breakthrough. New York: Norton, 1992
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