My favorite Delillo so far, by a wide margin, inclusive of Underworld.First Nobel in mathematics goes to teenage protagonist, whose work was “understood by only three or four people” (4), which work kid has designated as “zorgs” (20): “it’s pretty impossible to understand unless you know the language. A zorg is a kind of number. You can’t use zorgs for anything except in mathematics. Zorgs are useless. In other words they don’t apply” (id.). These statements are of course manifestly dishonest, as kid was really saying on the inside (i.e., the same manner in which I launch dreadful broadsides contra wife when her wrath is upon her), that “beauty was mere scenery unless it was severe, adhering strictly to a set of consistent inner codes, and this he clearly perceived, the arch-reality of pure mathematics, its austere disposition, its links to simplicity and permanence” (13) (emphases added). We should expect therefore that the aesthetic principles of this novel are laid out strictly as a consistent inner code, insofar as the text discloses rules for its own construction. It is of course pleasant when one’s expectations come to fruition, such as in one character’s description of her own writing, which is appropriately self-referential: “it’s an experimental novel, an allegory, a lunar geography, an artful autobiography, a cryptic scientific tract, a work of science fiction” (57). We know that “strict rules add dignity to a game” (334). I plan to make strict rules that I plan to follow. Reading my book will be a game with specific rules that have to be learned. I’m free to make whatever rules I want as long as there’s an inner firmness and cohesion, right? Just like mathematics.” (352) Certain ‘notes’ on the final third’s ‘Logicon’ project might serve as hermeneutic rules here (cf. 330-332, 365-66, 383, 391-92); a clever reading might work through those, as well as any mandatory grammars or peremptory language otherwise deployed in the text—I’m not doing it because that’s work and this is pro bono. Regardless, “This is where zorgs fit in, the technicality, the precision, the mathematics, the language. Strict rules” (359).Text proceeds as kid’s somewhat picaresque journey through several special projects related (vel non) to an alleged alien broadcast. He meets many other science types, all memorable, witty confrontations. A few of these characters recur, but many of them are pynchonian one-offs. There are nevertheless some basic principles that recur with regularity, and might be the rules of the text.For instance, protagonist’s “kind of mathematics are undertaken solely to advance the art. In time to come, of course, what had been pure might finally be applied” (33). The most important rule, then: “There is no reality more independent of our perception and more true to itself than mathematical reality” (48). Mathematics has no content. Form, it’s nothing but form. It stands on thin air. The symbols we use are everything. What they represent we discard without the slightest misgiving. The focus of our thought, the object of our examination, our analysis, our passion if you will, is the notation itself. (286) The next recognizable rule is “the terror of the irrational” (22), specifically that “no definition of science is complete without a reference to terror” (36). We then see ‘terror’ (lovecraftian terror, rather than osamaniac) reiterate often: “Of course if evidence of universal blueshifting is ever found, it will merit the smallest note. This is documentary void. Not void whose essence is terror. Not the human sensorium streaked with darkness” (50); “There may be a lot of crazy things in the world that scare you and me but mathematics is the one thing where there’s nothing to be afraid of or stupid about or think it’s a big mystery” (67); “Terror is everywhere. […] Take demons, for example. You wouldn’t think there’s a connection between demons and the sperm in your testicles. The terror of onanism is that bodiless demons are able to make bodies for themselves from the spilled seed” (227); “But math struck terror” (234); Protagonist hasn’t “had time to drift away from your psychic origins, whatever these may have been, however replete with terror, darkness and fetal shrieks. Routine horripilation” (265).The terror of the irrational that is inherent to the definition of science leads quite plainly into the second rule of the text: “By common consent the star code is no longer an ongoing project. I’m amazed anyone took it seriously in the first place. Radio signals weren’t even repeated. A jumble of pulses” (264) (emphasis added). That is to say, the rules of the text are no longer an ongoing project, a baudrillardian dissimulation that disavows rules even while following them. Consider the following constantly changing reports of the scientist administrators regarding the text’s underlying mystery, the receipt of an apparent transmission from the eponymous celestial object:1: “We’ve been contacted by someone or something in outer space” (46);2: “The star is a common G dwarf. It’s called Ratner’s Star. It lies away from us a bit toward the galactic center. We’ve analyzed the variation or wiggle in its path and we believe the object in question is a low-mass planet that occupies the star’s habitable zone” (50);3: “Is Ratner’s star an illusion? Of course not. It’s out there and everyone knows it. Is the planet’s existence a hoax? Ridiculous. There’s clear evidence of a planet in orbit around the star. Is someone transmitting signals? Absolutely. Is our synthesis telescope receiving on the secret frequency? Nods of affirmation” (63);4: “The star is part of a two-star system” (93);5: “Ratner’s star is a main sequence star and its sister star is a black hole” (101);6: “Ratner’s star is on the verge of becoming a red giant […] increase in luminosity. Startling increase in radius” (140);7: “Space Brain has now confirmed a two-satellite configuration” (151);8: “the computer retrovert we’ve just run indicates error in the receiving equipment” (240);9: “I’d like everyone to stop using expressions like ‘Ratnerians,’ ‘superbeings,’ ‘extraterrestrials’ and so forth. It’s a radio source we’re in touch with. If Moholean relativity is the real thing, the source isn’t even where it seems to be. So why assume it’s a planet orbiting a star? Remember the homely adage: ‘Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.’ So let’s from now on be sure to use the term ‘artificial radio source.’ And let’s find a more precise name for the so-called beings who are presumed to have initiated the transmission. How about ‘artificial radio source extants’? ARS extants” (274);10: “Because Ratner’s star lies within a suspected Mohole, which is a fractional part, as I understand it, of the value-dark dimension, meaning no spatial area and no time, it was thought the signal picked up by the synthesis telescope was originating from Ratner’s star. But it wasn’t […] It was just that the Mohole had trapped the signal and sent it our way. Ratner’s star is a binary dwarf. Couldn’t possibly sustain a planet of any size” (357);11: “Using information gathered by satellite, balloon-borne instruments, and, most of all, by a device of recent concoction called an echolocation quantifier, we believe we have traced the radio signals to their source […] The source of the message is the planet Earth […] The signals originated somewhere in this planet. Were absorbed in some component of the Mohole totality. Were eventually reflected back this way” (402);12: “What we’ve apparently discovered is that we are in the Mohole, if that’s the way to phrase it. This solar system appears to be what we call Mohole-intense. We are part of the value-dark dimension” (410). I’m sufficiently Hegelian to recognize this process as a dialectical reversal of some sort or another; either “the solidarity of opposites is completely shattered” thereby, reduced to “essential dichotomies” (34), or it’s just a pedestrian “reconciliation of opposites” (313). (As M&E otherwise lay out in the Manifesto, class struggle shall result either in the ‘revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.’)It may well be swiftian satire of science, though of course Swift was misanthropically rightwing, whereas Delillo strikes me as nothing if not a strident exemplar of enlightenment. (One may be forgiven if one is confused however by such bits as “He was part of a committee formed to define the word ‘science’ […] the debate continued to drag on and the definition at present ran some five hundred pages” (30).) Text presents plenty of bogus theory at the research compound: ‘slyphing’ (49 et seq.); ‘bi-levelism (66); challenge to phenomenal basis of empiricism (87); a “lust for abstraction” that leads inexorably and completely reasonably to the grafting of a brain on a computer (146, 244); and then moholes (179 ff.), which are the undisputed champion of douchitude in the text.Anyway, most of these clowns win Nobel prizes (306). As the text is pleased to reiterate, “keep believing it, shit for brains” (27, 57, 167, 258). (KBISFB is likely a rule of the text, of course.)There likely a rule in the recurrent discrete/continuous binary (95, 245, 348, 389), but am not sure about it beyond the punchline: “The discrete-continuous quality of zorgs is what really helped us work out the necessary mathematics of Moholean relativity and made Mohole identification practically inevitable” (418).A further rule: We are assured that there’s “something about waste material that defied systematic naming” (38), which is of course the primary concern of the epistemology of the accursed share provided by Underworld. But this is also a consideration of “things beyond expression” in general: the names of deities, infernal beings, totemic animals and plants; the names of an individual’s blood relatives of the opposite sex (a ban related to incest restrictions); the new name given a boy at his initiation; the names of certain organs of the body; the names of the recently dead; the names of sacred objects, profane acts, leaders of cults, the cults themselves. Double substitutes must be used.” (38) Looping back to the rule on terror: To bear a name is both terrible and necessary. The child, emerging from the space-filling chaos of names, comes eventually to see that escape from verbal designation is never complete, never more than a delay in meeting one’s substitute, that alphabetic shadow abstracted from its physical source. (19) We might consider these comments in connection with Derrida’s On the Name (not now; that’s work).Derridean concerns will provide other rules of the text, which notes a “direct correlation between writing and memory” (361-62) (that’s the Speech & Phenomena, yo); “writing is memory, she thought, and memory is the fictional self” (362). We are presented with “the very uselessness of Logicon” project (409), which seeks to develop an ideal language to correspond with the ARS extants, who of course, supra, turn out to be Earthlings. The uselessness (‘it does not apply,’ recall) is considered a virtue by those who do ‘pure work’: “I do pure work. A lot of it is so abstract it can’t be put on paper or even talked about. I deal with proof and nonproof” (46), which is both uselessly virtuous but also another “thing beyond expression,” an excess exorbitant to language. “There are things past spelling and far beyond counting” (147). Other interesting bits in this connection: a guy’s voice is a “proto-laryngeal reconstruction of the sound of a lost language” (147-48); another guy believes in “the secret power of the alphabet, the unnameable name, the literal contraction of the superdivinity, fear of sperm demons” (215) (KBISFB?). Something about the Heideggerian polemos (217), the “beginning of distinctions.” Elsewise, a “thing beyond naming” (226). One guy eats post-circumcision foreskin (105); another guy eats post-natal placenta (140). As our teen protagonist notes, “I make no reply” (9, 155). We make a brief listing of other potential miscellaneous rules of the text: a typology of ignorance (157); “truth accumulates. It can be borrowed and paid back” (193); “The whole history of mathematics is subterranean, taking place beneath history itself” (195); “worship of the body always ends in fascism” (361); “latent in any period’s estimation of itself as an age of reason is the specific history of the insane” (387) (cf. Foucault!).Not rules, but kinda cool: teen protagonist’s mentor is a brilliant, extremely sexually active person afflicted by dwarfism, and is described as an “idealized Hollywood dwarf” (312). Perhaps a source for Tyrion Lannister?Teen protagonist is the inventor of the “stellated twilligon” (116-17), a quadrilateral of some alleged import in the setting, and which shows up repeatedly throughout. Kid receives fill-in-blank quiz questions in the mails (294 ff.) from one of the other Nobel prize winners: “In a tricky situation it is your best friend, above all others, who would find it easiest to ___________ you. ___Deceive ___Believe.” So, am wondering: After reading Ratner’s Star, the fictive quadrilateral is best described as a _________________? ___stellated twilligon __fellated dellilogon?(view spoiler)[By the end, kid deciphers the signal, which communicates a specific time, which time marks the end of the world. That end is appropriately named a “noncognate celestial anomaly” (420, 434) by some characters, which is the most kickass name for the end of the world that I’ve seen. Teen protagonist by contrast refers to it simply as “zorgasm” (438). That is also kickass. (hide spoiler)]
Man, woman or child:Do not be alarmed. Ratner’s Star is complete bullshit. Your assessment within the first few pages will prove to be correct. This is a powerful study on the the excesses, the triumphs and failures of the human mind. Bruce Allen from the Chicago Tribune sums it up best. Ratner’s Star is a prodigious satire on those pioneers who journey beyond the frontiers of knowledge and end up more ignorant than they were when they set forth.Billy, our Nobel Prize winning mathematical genius, is but a mere pup catapulted into an arena of world renown crazies and fellow mathematicians on a scary hyper-genius level. A radio signal is captured from the outer reaches of space (presumed to be shot off from or around Ratner’s Star, which may or may not be binary, which may or may not even be real). Billy's impossible role is to decode the message itself among other mental hybrids. What we know about Billy, what we need to know, is that Billy is essentially a non-character just like every other person or thing he meets in the story; he didn't speak out loud until he was three years old, etc. doesn’t matter in the end. Billy is an outsider, and takes over as a proxy for the reader's inquisitive mind. And what he witnesses on every page is fevered with eccentrics that blur the line between genius and insanity. They are contained and straight-jacketed by their own ploys to outdo one another; is it no wonder that the title of the book is in the possessive case? Mathematics made sense, bi-level coding, the mysteries of the Space Brain, Field Experiment Number One, the strange elusive semblance of the self when staring up at the mirroring black sky. This is the lost chapter of Infinite Jest written two decades before Infinite Jest with all the hilarity and absurdity, all of its special effects and technical wizardry kept intact. “Consider the fact that, relative to their respective diameters, the average distance between stars is roughly the same as the average distance between atomic particles in interstellar space. Is this mere ‘coincidence’?” One of many questions not offered to us as a challenge, but as a matter of reverence to the very real existing unknown out there. Even our current powers of scientific deduction will look at such a profound question with another question; every answer once began as a theory inside someone's head; everything is susceptible to a transformation, whether remarkable or deranged; ”Why sad?” Bill said. “The birth of a baby equals the death of a fetus. This experience recreates itself throughout our lives.” Billy asks a relatively mundane question like where the bathroom is, and is given a two page expose on seemingly unrelated topics, breaking news hits that Ratner’s Star is in fact a binary star, oh, wait, it isn't, then several paragraphs later the mutant responds, “Upstairs and to the left.” Little Billy Twillig stepped aboard a Sony 747 bound for a distant land. This much is known for certain are the opening lines to the book. DeLillo does his part keeping us in the know that we’re under the derangement of bullshit. Even when there is no resounding purpose other than to bludgeon you over the head with the fact that what you’re reading is characterless and pointless. This is the slick meditation of a mathematical know-it-all recounting Pi just to show you that he can. The book as a whole does not exist. Readers decide if it has to. But "We’re talking around it. We’re making sounds to comfort ourselves. We’re trying to peel skin off a rock. But this, according to Mainwaring, quoting Mohole, is simply what we do to keep from going mad.”Just when the book becomes fascinating, when we delve deeper into the mystery of the message sent to them from space, a character goes on a psycho babble rampage, and they dismiss the importance of said mystery outright. They're right, though. There exists no mystery in plot here. You are to be entertained by the wild imaginative things people say and then move on. The Post-Modern jibber-jabber exists to tell you that the Post-Modern jibber-jabber exists. Its purpose is to enlighten you on how to unravel your very own ego via a Socratic mantra. The important thing is the language, not the machine. In this way, DeLillo has created a means of bombarding you with so much bullshit, it elevates you to a level of understanding with our own destructive genius. "Our knowledge of the world. The world itself. Each, the other and both. They’re one and the same, after all. It’s been said that philosophy teaches us to talk with an appearance of truth about all things and to make ourselves admired by the less learned. There’s one branch of philosophy this definition doesn’t cover. Bi-Levelism. Bi-Levelism teaches us to talk with an appearance of truth and falsity about all things to make ourselves admired by the more learned.”The secret task of logic may be the rediscovery of play. There’s no doubt that DeLillo is a genius. He’s a threat to the general popcorn-munching Pepsi-guzzling populace. Often times Ratner's Star jumps around incoherently just to show us the inevitable failure within us all. And because of this, if Ratner’s Star wasn’t continuously jarring in its cold brilliance, it would have easily gotten one regular old nameless star. "Alternate physics, if it teaches us anything,” Speidell said, “it teaches us that once you go across the line, once you’re over the line and left without your classical sources, your rational explanations, the whole of your scientific ethos, once this happens you have to pause. You have to pause as we may have to pause someday in the future. You’re over the line, sure, but that doesn’t mean you have to keep going or hurl yourself into the uncharted void. This is nonsense. You pause. You reflect.DeLillo leaves the reflecting up to the reader. But just as the Mainwaring whispered: ”Things are interesting up to a point. Then they aren’t interesting anymore.” The inevitable screw loose in our perfected armor, DeLillo proposes that we are the smartest creatures in the universe, that is, until we meet someone or something that is smarter. He also proposes, at least to me, that we have no evidence to deny the fact that a rainbow-colored space whale lives in the center of the universe. Where he fails, though, is that he prematurely assumes that our patience is ready for this haul of bullshit and hilarity and profundity as well. (view spoiler)[As to the mystery of the space message? If you actually reach the end of the book, it's assumed that it was sent from Earth many millions (?) of years ago. If so, this is probably the most eye-opening part of the book, because would not then Billy and his freak show friends be the future of ourselves? Could it be that the people who sent that message out into space was us to begin with, as in you and I? If so, doesn't Ratner's Star, the book, its language, actually become the code or cipher itself? Are we all internalizing DeLillo's words and propelling them out into space? Is the rainbow-colored space whale that sits and waits in the center of the universe just hungry for our interpretations and inner reflections? Is there an even greater kind of intelligence that thrives on chaos and seemingly random ideas? What if that rainbow-colored space whale is actually turquoise? What if you and me are actually right? (hide spoiler)]
What do You think about Ratner's Star (1991)?
La traducción no le hace justicia. Cuenta con varios pasajes (e ideas) satíricos memorables, pero el absurdo se agota muy pronto; el ritmo se disgrega; al igual que sucede con los objetivos de los experimentos, la historia va perdiendo en interés y, paralelamente, en propósito (el sin sentido es simplemente demasiado--y pertenece en exceso a su tiempo--1976-, en el que este tipo de experimentación resultaba novedoso); aunque, eso sí, las últimas cien páginas son verdaderamente buenas, trepidantes y guardan (¡bravo!) un eco innegable con el final de Teorema, de Pasolini (1968), en el que el ser humano simplemente da un grito de desesperación que, a la vez, tiene mucho de rebeldía, de humanismo y de afirmación.
—Bernardo
This is a really odd, somewhat incoherent and ultimately quite wonderful novel. I’d only previously read ‘White Noise’, ‘Underworld’ and some of the author’s later books and stories, so I was surprised to find a totally different style at work in ‘Ratner’s Star’, one more comparable to Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut or Philip K. Dick. To begin with it very much has the feel of a quirky mid-70s comic sci fi novel, being concerned in a fairly druggy way with conspiracy theories, secret transmissions from little green men and the threat of global annihilation.The plot follows Billy Twillig, a teenage mathematics prodigy who is taken by the government to a remote facility to join a group of scientists attempting to decode a mysterious radio signal received from the star of the title. We are quickly introduced to a large cast of weird characters who pop up and disappear as Twillig is led closer to the secret of the signal and the true purpose of a small group of scientists who are working on something quite different in the deepest parts of the facility. The basic conceit of the plot is presumably based on the discovery of Pulsars (which also formed the basis of a very different but also very interesting novel by Stanislaw Lem) but it’s really an excuse for the author to get all kinds of eminent scientific ideologues in one big space and bash them all together. I guess this was a time when all kinds of mind-expanding ideas about the universe were being propagated and popularised, and the idea that science itself could and should also expand to cover every possible aspect of the conceivable universe is just one element of the author’s broad satire here:"The problem concerns the true nature of expansion," the man said. "Consider science itself. It used to be thought that the work of science would be completed in the very near future. This was, oh, the seventeenth century. It was just a matter of time before all knowledge was integrated and made available, all the inmost secrets pried open. This notion persisted for well over two hundred years. But the thing continues to expand. It grows and grows. It curls into itself and bends back and then thrusts outward in a new direction. It refuses to be contained. Every time we make a breakthrough we think this is it: the breakthrough. But the thing keeps pushing out. It breaks through the breakthrough."If the defining image of ‘White Noise’ was that of the inexplicable Most Photographed Barn in America, the centrepiece around which ‘Ratner’s Star’ revolves is the image of a once-great scientist digging a hole in the desert and subsiding solely on larvae. In trying to crack the code, the researchers end up delving deeper into their own subconscious, which in turn is rendered as literally digging into the earth below the facility: it’s as though the mind could be represented as a series of geological layers, with some unexpected ancestral truth lurking in the deepest caves. The overarching suggestion is, I guess, one inherited from science fiction as far back as Wells and Mary Shelley; that for all their supposed arch-rationalism and clearly defined logical principles, the great scientist is as liable as any of us (perhaps more liable!) to not only personal delusions but also mental collapse.All of this is quite hard to follow, not least because Delillo had clearly been brushing up on his advanced maths and astrophysics in the research of this novel. But that need not bother you – this isn’t the kind of book you read for well-adjusted, ‘relatable’ characters, nor for an aspect of social realism or escapism. You read it for the writing. And the writing is absolutely astonishing on quite a frequent basis. Because I read this on an ebook reader I kept a list of marked passages which I then transferred to a Pages document for safe keeping; many of them are too long to quote in full but I couldn’t bear the thought that I might lose the memory of them afterwards. Perhaps this is a feeling unique to ebooks where you never quite have the sense of being able to pluck a book off a shelf and flick back to the right page again? I don’t know. I was surprised to read that Delillo considers this his favourite of all his own works. It’s a difficult read, not only because the subject matter is somewhat arcane, but because it’s fairly tedious and occasionally boring from a dramatic point of view. Not much really seems to ‘happen’, which is another way of saying that although an awful lot of stuff does happen, much of it seems weirdly inconsequential or episodic. But in the end I didn’t think that really matters. For all its Joycean reveling in wordplay, this isn’t a book like ‘Ulysses’ which can be decoded into a realistic sequence of events muddled up in time. Perhaps that’s what marks this book out as postmodern rather than modernist: there is no one single thing which it can be said to be ‘about’, other than itself.One last thing: I was intrigued to note that David Foster Wallace kept a heavily annotated copy of this novel because it does bear a striking resemblance to that author’s own work (particularly ‘Infinite Jest’ with its similarly gifted protagonist, but also the general themes of obsession, depression, scientific materialism, etc). Both are comic novels in the broadest conceivable sense and both are very much of their own time in terms of technological, political and pop cultural references, but both have a certain amount in common stylistically too: there’s the same tendency towards snappy dialogue set against lengthy and insanely cleverly written passages of description where high and low vocab is constantly mingled to startling effect. This is not to suggest that Wallace was in any sense an imitator of Delillo, but one was certainly a big influence on the other, and it’d be an intriguing exercise to read both side-by-side.
—Patrick
This comes off to me as someone self-consciously trying to write a postmodern novel and not quite succeeding. There are big swaths of Gaddis, Pynchon, and Heller and little hints of Gass and Barth throughout this novel, but those authors did a far better job of combining the intellectual concerns Ratner's Star takes on with interesting stories. When Gravity's Rainbow (still a terrific novel, mind) has more narrative coherence than what you're doing, you're sort of in trouble.Ratner's Star is a novel with issues. DeLillo's characters are paper-thin, often demarcated by goofy gimmicks. "This guy dug himself into a hole! This guy shows people his nipples!" Contrast this against the still odd, still stilted, but also unforgettable characters of later novels, Murray in White Noise and DeLillo's interpretation of Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra, and you can tell that the guy still had a long way to go before he hit his later greatness in this early stage in the game. They don't really develop, either. Furthermore, while the novel tries to tell the fascinating story of decoding transmissions from far-off Ratner's Star, this terrific premise is unfortunately dropped off the nearest convenient cliff for long stretches at a time, only to be awkwardly shoehorned in later.What saves this one's bacon, besides the fact that DeLillo is always funny, are the big long intellectual monologues, which are clumsily delivered and as subtle as a sledgehammer to the face but which are about topics that interest me. I've gained a certain amount of patience for interruptive discourse as long as it's about a topic I personally am into, and for as badly as this book wanders off-course (and it's not like I mind digressive books, I just don't find these particular digressions delivered as well as Gravity's Rainbow's digressions), it's fascinating to read so much about language, astronomy and mythology. In the end, though, I only found Ratner's Star engaging in fits and starts. That third star is on account of a good concept and some cool content, as well as how much fun I had digging around for bits that reminded me of Infinite Jest: Billy Twillig is a less-developed Hal Incandenza, and there are those MIT language riots. I know DFW loved this book and understand why to a degree, but this is not the DeLillo of the '80s and '90s, that's for sure.
—Sentimental Surrealist
