Dumpster Diving Through the Underworld:
or How I Learned to Start Recycling and Love the Abject
Fiction is all about reliving things. It is our second chance.
Don DeLillo, "The Power of History"
In Don DeLillo's Underworld, history is relived, reincorporated, and recycled much as the waste in the novel is recycled and reincorporated into various systems. This reincorporation of history into the present is a kind of reclaiming of the remainder of collective memory into a sanitized form of nostalgia. In doing this, the text attempts to reincorporate the remainder, the waste, the abject, back into a system of use, giving history a second chance.
By looking at how the text attempts to recycle the waste of consumerism and history back into systems of use, we see that the text displays anxieties not only about waste but also about its conflict with and containment by the systems of order in the text. In order to proceed through this argument, it is important to understand the idea of the abject as outlined by Julia Kristeva, the importance of recycling in disrupting abjection, how history is abjected and recycled as nostalgia in Underworld, and how successfully this attempt to reassume the abject into the system plays out in the text....
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