Tough it is often acknowledged as one of the best novels written about sport, Don DeLillo's End Zone has never really struck me as a sports novel. Michael Oriard and Christian Messenger, respectively, have described DeLillo's book as a "complex sport novel" (241) and as the "most provocative and intelligent of all football fiction" (302), but I question such easy categorization. Just a few weeks ago Michael Nelson suggested in the Chronicle Review that End Zone was one of the 10 best college sports books ever. Though he acknowledged the book was about a lot of things, Nelson concluded that it was "mostly about college football" (B7). But is it? After all, though it is a story that revolves around a college football team in West Texas, End Zone's narrator, Gary Harkness, seems less interested in personal athletic accomplishments or the success of his football team than he is with little obsessions scattered throughout the story: obsessions with language and routine, food and weight, nuclear warfare, and silence. As one might guess from the story about a team from Logos college--a name that not only means "word" but also evokes the religious implications of "the Word"--End Zone seems to be much more about the problems of language that David Cowart has identified in all of DeLillo's fiction than it does about football. (1)
I suspect that DeLillo isn't really interested in football at all, but rather, he writes about football because of the ways language structures what is normally seen by many as mindless barbarism. Yet in conversations I have had with those in the Sports Studies department at the University of Iowa, this seems to be a common explanation for all contemporary sport fiction. They aren't really about sports, we say of various stories. One novel might be about the relationship between a parent and a child. One might be about letting go of the past. One might be about the unhealthy grip of obsession. But they never seemed to be about sports. And perhaps this is good. I am weary of describing, categorizing, or evaluating a book based on what it is about. It seems much more relevant to focus on what the book does.
Ultimately, it doesn't really matter whether End Zone is about football or not. Nor does it matter whether DeLillo is interested in the sport, or whether his novel should be categorized as sport literature. What does matter is the way DeLillo uses the system of language to show readers a new way of looking at sport, and at sport literature in general. He does this in three ways. First, DeLillo discloses the linguistic foundation of a sport that few might initially associate primarily with language. Football has always been seen as the most violently physical of American team sports, yet DeLillo manages to "unbox the lexicon for all eyes to see" (113). Second, through the systematicity of language that DeLillo identifies as underpinning sport, he is able to show how football reflects and relates to the larger systematicities of life. Football may seem to some to be just a silly game, but DeLillo treats it no differently than the silly-yet-serious game of nuclear war. Finally, End Zone challenges the larger assumption of any writing about sport: that sport is both knowable and tellable. We watch and participate in games decided by tangible scores, measured by innings, periods, and time clocks, that leave behind lists of statistics measuring each performance. But any good sports writer knows that those numbers don't capture the actual aesthetic of the game, and so we try to describe, explain, and analyze the performances with words. End Zone makes us question whether or not words are enough to try to explain and understand sport, or whether the experiences we try to reproduce are, at some level, untellable.
DeLillo makes us think hard about sport, but End Zone doesn't look like what many would expect of sport fiction. There are no mythic sports heroes in End Zone. Sure, there is the star athlete, Taft Robinson, a "natural" talent whose gift is the essence of sports myth and lore. Robinson is the first black football player (or student) at Logos College (his name, itself, intimates the history of racial integration in sport), and is described as easily the best football player in the entire Southwest. But as DeLillo confesses at the start of the novel, Taft is not a central character in the story, but instead is a ghost haunting the book, filling the double entendre of "invisible man" (3).
Of course, another typical anchor of any traditional sport narrative--the adversity of the underdog's big game against its powerful rival--is present in End Zone. But this obvious climax of the story occurs only halfway through the book, disrupting any expectation of parallels between story structure and football season as the second half of the novel winds down during the dead months of winter following the final game. In one of his few interviews given over the years, DeLillo has described the intentional narrative construction in End Zone as similar to that in White Noise, where he created "an aimless shuffle toward a high-intensity event" halfway through the book, and then an ensuing "kind of decline, a purposeful loss of energy" to an anticlimactic end (Begley, 93).
The absence of a recognizable sport narrative should not be surprising, because, in DeLillo's own words, "End Zone wasn't about football. It's a fairly elusive novel. It seems to me to be about extreme places and extreme states of mind, more than anything else" (DeCurtis, 65). But he has acknowledged that End Zone is also about games, of which football is the most obvious--but certainly not the only--example. Gary Storoff has shown that End Zone denies the reader the "comfortable conception of a game as frivolous play," because DeLillo sees games as "the fundamental character of civilization" (Storoff, 244). These games permeate the story, with different games being played by students and teachers, teammates and opponents, friends and mentors. DeLillo describes games like "Bang! Your Dead," created by the players to (forgive the pun) kill dead time between practices. He wrote about games created by an ROTC instructor to simulate the escalation of nuclear war. And, of course, End Zone is itself, as DeLillo has suggested in an interview with Thomas LeClair, about the game of fiction. "The games I've written about have more to do with rules and boundaries than with the freewheeling street games I played when I was growing up," DeLillo said in the interview. He added:
People leading lives of almost total freedom and possibility may secretly crave rules and boundaries, some kind of control in their lives. Most games are carefully structured. They satisfy a sense of order and they even have an element of dignity about them.... Games provide a frame in which we can try to be perfect. Within sixty-minute limits or one-hundred-yard limits or the limits of a game board, we can look for perfect moments or perfect structures. (LeClair, 5-6)
Here is where End Zone begins to offer a real understanding of sport: it is the structure of football that DeLillo is interested in. As he explains in a lengthy author's aside that prefaces the big game, "sport is a benign illusion, the illusion that order is possible." Spectators, he suggests, find values in the details of sport that reinforce this structure--the "impressions, colors, statistics, patterns, mysteries, numbers, idioms, symbols" that make up the game. And indeed, it is football that best represents the illusion of order, because more than any other it "is the one sport guided by language, by the word signal, the snap number, the color code, the play name" (112).
End Zone is about language and, more than word signals or play names, football (like all sports) offers a wealth of jargon. It is both the meaningful and meaningless nature of this jargon with which DeLillo--and through DeLillo, the narrator, is enthralled. After years of his father's subjecting him to sayings such as "suck in that gut and go harder" and "when the going gets tough, the tough get going," a teenage Gary Harkness "began to perceive a certain beauty in [the sayings]," especially the latter:
The sentiment of course had small appeal but it seemed that beauty flew from the words themselves, the letters, consonants swallowing vowels, aggression and tenderness, a semi-self-recreation from line to line, word to word, letter to letter. All meaning faded. The words became pictures. It was a sinister thing to discover at such an age, that words can escape their meanings. (17)
Though supposedly meaningless, the words, like football, help provide Gary with a certain structure protecting him from the silence that he fears. Because, though he appreciates his self-imposed exile out in the middle of the Texas desert, there are some features of his desire for asceticism that he can't quite accept. He explains that "of all the aspects of exile, silence pleased me least" (30). He "felt threatened by the silence," but found that "silence is dispersed by familiar things" (31). This is why Gary finds comfort in the endless repetition and familiar pieces of meaningless jargon in football. Though he builds his own vocabulary by teaching himself a new word from the dictionary every day, Gary sees no shame in the ritualistic repeating of cliches that fill most talk about sports. "Most lives are guided by cliches," he says. "They have a soothing effect on the mind and they express the kind of widely accepted sentiment that, when peeled back, is seen to be a denial of silence" (69). But I don't agree with Michael Ofiard that DeLillo is trying to satirize those who "cheapen experience" through the use of cliches, or that he believes a "sufficiently fertile imagination" could or should avoid such un-nuanced speech (245). DeLillo sees these cliches as attempts to capture experiences and ideas that seem to escape the words that try to describe them. These cliches are a "denial of silence" because the person who uses them refuses to accept the notion that words might fail to express how he or she is feeling. (2)
The same is true of the maxims barked by coaches at practice every day. DeLillo presents the assistant coaches as mechanically spouting vague jargon regardless of who is heating it. One coach approaches the running backs and addresses them:
Guards and tackles, I want you to come off that ball real quick and pop, pop, hit those people, move those people out, pop them, put some hurt on them, drive them back till they look like sick little puppy dogs squatting down to crap. (28)
When the players inform him that he is addressing the wrong group, he seems undeterred and tells them to "Hit somebody. Hit somebody. Hit somebody." And that is exactly what the players do. We are told many times that the action on the field is clear and simple. Players run, hit and execute, and the "daily punishment" on the field reduces complexity (31). Because, as Gary insists early on, "football players are simple folk. Whatever complexities, whatever dark politics of the human mind, the heart--these are noted only within the chalked borders of the playing field" (4).
But this, of course, is taken ironically by the reader, because nowhere else in sport are we presented with more cognizant athletes. For example, there is Bing Jackmin, the kicker who speaks of the "psychomythical" and "hyperatavistic" double nature of football players. There is Anatole Bloomberg, Gary's three hundred pound roommate who has come to Texas to "unJew" himself and escape from pressures of historical guilt, and who often talks of the expansion of his own body, describing his weight as being like an "overwritten paragraph" (48). There is also Billy Mast, the player who is taking a class on the "untellable," where students are asked to recite words from a language they have never spoken or heard before in an effort to find if there are words that exist beyond speech. Though Billy never fully describes or explains his class to teammates, the "untellable" is perhaps the central theme of the book. The recitation of unfamiliar languages, just like the recitation of over-familiar cliches, represents a grasping for an experience beyond the words we use to express ourselves. DeLillo has suggested that
The "untellable" points to the limitations of language. Is there something we haven't discovered about speech? Is there more? Maybe this is why there's so much babbling in my books. Babbling can be frustrated speech, or it can be a purer form, an alternate speech. (LeClair, 8)
This babbling is best demonstrated when Gary meets his friend Myna in the library. Myna, an overweight girl who initially refuses to lose weight to succumb to the obligations and responsibilities of accepted standards of beauty, usually meets with Gary on picnics; their encounters marked by the consumption of food. But like Bloomberg, Myna's weight seems to represent the comfort of language for Gary. In their encounter in the library, though, a simple game of reading words from the dictionary out loud to each other begins to animate passions between them. "The words were ways of touching and made us want to speak with hands," Gary said. But instead, the sexual excitement causes Gary to start babbling, looking for that purer form of speech. He began to make "bubbling noises," he made "strange noises of anticipation (gwa gwa)," he "brought new noises to the room, vowel sounds predominating" (217). Myna doesn't reply with sound, but her body answers by "positing herself as the knowable word, the fleshmade sigh and syllable" (218).
Myna and Gary's roommate, Bloomberg, give him comfort because their weight and their willingness to consume is marked with this association to language. Gary affectionately envisioned being overweight as "the new asceticism" and saw it as "the opposite of death" (49). But it also marked the opposite of his own hunger strikes that surface when his fear of silence takes hold. Early on, when the "menacing" silences of the desert unnerved him, he gave up eating meat (31). At the end of the book, after finding out Myna had given up on her own obesity and shed pounds in an attempt at redefinition, Gary seemed confronted with another menacing silence that words could not protect him from. "Don't use words," a friend says when asking his opinion of the new Myna. "Either you like her this way or you don't. You can't get out of it with words" (229). This time Gary eventually gave up eating and drinking altogether, leaving him hospitalized and brain damaged, being fed through a tube in the book's anti-climactic ending.
Gary's demise is presented in direct contrast to Taft Robinson, whose real haunting of the book comes at the end when his own personal achievements tower over Gary's failure. For Taft has learned to embrace the silence that Gary still fears. Taft's acceptance of this silence finally brings on the only telling reference to Wittgenstein, whose study of the limitations of language seeps through the pages of the entire book. "Two parts to that man's work," Gary thought of Wittgenstein. "What is written. What is not written. The man himself seemed to favor second part [sic]. Perhaps Taft was a student of that part" (233). DeLillo's reference reminds us, as Gary Storoff pointed out, of Wittgenstein's belief in a "transcendental reality, which to him does exist but is ineffable and 'unthinkable'" (Storoff, 240). Clearly the inspiration for the theme of the "untellable," DeLillo's reference alludes to Wittgenstein's ending of the Tractatus, where he suggests that "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" (108).3
This understanding that there are unattainable truths better accepted in silence comes easily to Taft, though remains frightening for Gary.
In the final pages, Taft is given his only meaningful exchange in the book, where he reveals that he no longer intends on playing football. Gary meets the news with shock, and feebly tries to construct an argument against the decision out of meaningless jargon: "It becomes a question of pursuing whatever it is you do best. It's a damn shame to waste talent like yours. It almost goes against some tenuous kind of equilibrium or master plan. Some very carefully balanced natural mechanism" (234). But the real equilibrium that is upset is Gary's sense of security in the jargon and repetition of football. After already losing a thinning Myna as a source for comfort, Gary seems less upset by the departure of Taft from the team than he is by the thought of his own alienation from football. Taft, who now claims to think only about football in "historical perspeaive," has learned to accept the silence that Gary still fears and that seems to be keeping him in the game. Telling Gary that he tries "to create degrees of silence" in his life, Taft explains:
The radio is important in this regard. The kind of silence that follows the playing of the radio is never the same as the silence that precedes it. I use the radio in different ways. It becomes almost a spiritual exercise. Silence, words, silence, silence, silence. (239-240)
Though this silence seems to Gary to be tainted with death, the main notions of mortality in the novel are emphasized more by his obsession with nuclear holocaust. This theme of apocalypse mirrors the use of football in the novel, but contains the gravitas and severity that some may see missing in sport; it is the extreme that helps balance the use of sport for structure in life. Just as he did with the jargon of football, Gary finds comfort in the words describing nuclear warfare: manuals describing technology and fallout, "words and phrases like thermal hurricane, overkill, circular error probability, post-attack environment, stark deterrence, dose-rate contours, kill-ratio, spasm war" (21). Gary seeks out Major Staley, an ROTC instructor on campus, to ask about what the destruction might be like, and eventually they play a crude war game--a simulation meant to demonstrate the sequence of events that may lead to a full-scale global nuclear war. Like football, this game creates a sense of order modeled around the language supporting it.
DeLillo, whose work is always concerned with the violence of everyday life, intentionally mirrors the violence of nuclear war to the violence on the football field. But DeLillo is not interested in the tired comparison between football and war. Man Zaplac, one of Gary's professors, insists that he "reject[s] the notion of football as warfare. Warfare is warfare. We don't need substitutes because we've got the real thing" (111). Though DeLillo plays with this at times, even having the Major describe the humanization of war as being like football, rather than vice versa. Instead of the intense escalation most assume would accompany nuclear war, the Major suggests "there'd be all sorts of controls. You'd practically have a referee and a timekeeper" (82). DeLillo's comparison of football and war does not ultimately revolve around the violence of the two, but rather it is centered on the way jargon is used to create order from that violence; he is interested in the shared language of end zones. "Major, there's no way to express thirty million dead. No words," Gary suggests. "They don't explain, they don't clarify, they don't express. They're painkillers. Everything becomes abstract" (85). But just as Emmet Creed is known for "bringing order out of chaos" on the football field (10), the Major explains to Gary that the clean, clinical language used to describe nuclear war can bring meaning out of violence:
I'm not some kind of monstrous creature who enjoys talking about the spectacle of megadeath, the unprecedented scale of this kind of thing. It has to be talked about and expounded on. It has to be described for people, clinically and graphically, so they'll know just what it is they're facing. (85)
This need to talk about and expound on inflicted violence comes across clearly after the football game against their rival, Centrex Biotechnical College. The team from Logos does not just lose, it loses badly, and amidst the mood of post-game depression Gary asks Billy Mast for a summary of the damage. In the same simple, clinical language that the Major saw needed in nuclear terminology, Billy gives him the injury report with technical precision and no emotion. Going from player to player, he lists each injury with a simple phrase before describing it in detail: collarbone, knee, knee, ankle, shoulder separation, bit tongue, pulled hamstring, broken finger. The team captain comes around to say more about the loss, but describes it only in cliches:
We didn't give it enough. We didn't let it all hang out. But it's over now and we still have two games to play. Next week we find out what we're made of ... We have to shake it off and come back. We have to guard against a letdown ... Kimbrough's over in the other bus saying the exact same thing. We worked it out at breakfast, word for word (148-149).
That the team captains agreed, "word for word," that these cliches were the best way to address the loss is consistent with the ways in which DeLillo has his characters try to simplify their reality through various jargons in the book. But I don't think for a minute that this novel is a critique of the simplicity of sports or even a condemnation of the meaninglessness of jargon. DeLillo shows that the simple cliches used in football, as well as Major Stanley's clean, clinical description of nuclear war, do have a meaningful purpose--to create a sense of order out of the chaos of life--but he also shows that they ultimately fail in their job. The sense of order created by language in football or war, as well as all the other games in the novel, never seem to bring as much comfort as they are expected to. In this regard, DeLillo's vision is certainly bleak, but it is not satire, as Jill Benton has previously suggested in Aethlon. (4) Football is a game structured in part by language, offering a sense of order--even if that perceived order is illusory or incomplete--but in that regard, it is no different than the game of fiction that DeLillo, himself, plays. Just like Wittgenstein's idea that, in different language games, words can do more than simply describe the world, DeLillo sees fiction as a realm determined as much by the aesthetics of a word as it is by its meaning. He has admitted that he will freely change the meaning of a sentence while writing merely to preserve a certain rhythm or beat that he feels developing in the words, because he sees the "basic work" of writing as being "built around the sentence."
That is what I mean when I call myself a writer. I construct sentences. There's a rhythm I hear that drives me through a sentence. And the words typed on the white page have a sculptural quality. They form odd correspondences. They match up not just through meaning but through sound and look. They rhythm of a sentence will accommodate a certain number of syllables. One syllable too many, I look for another word. There's always another word that means nearly the same thing, and if it doesn't then I'll consider altering the meaning of a sentence to keep the rhythm, the syllable beat. I'm completely willing to let language press meaning upon me. (Begley, 91)
To a certain extent, all sports fiction--actually, all sports writing--plays this same game of language. It is a game in which we try to drape language over physical actions and experiences that often challenge, frustrate, and defy words. This is why Taft and all other "naturals" in sport really are, like Wittgenstein, students of what is not written. It is also, I believe, why we often claim that good sports books are not really books about sports, because the true meanings of the games we watch and play do not rest in the scores or statistics or even the words used to describe them. The meaning of sport can be found in the experiences that surround and reinforce the game. But these are often experienced somewhere beyond speech, and require longer metaphors for us to situate in the known and familiar. The challenge of sports writing is somehow to convey this mystery; that sport itself does at times become the unreliable.
Works Cited
Begley, Adam. Interview, 1993. Conversation with Don DeLillo. Ed. Thomas DePietro. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005.
Benton, Jill. "Don DeLillo's End Zone: A Postmodern Satire." Aethlon XII:1, Fall 1994: 7-18.
Cowart, David. Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002.
DeLillo, Don. End Zone. New York: Penguin Books, 1972.
DeCurtis, Anthony. Interview, 1988. Conversation with Don DeLillo. Ed. Thomas DePietro. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005.
Lanham, Richard. Style: An Anti-Textbook. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974.
LeClaire, Thomas. Interview, 1982. Conversation with Don DeLillo. Ed. Thomas DePietro. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005.
Messenger, Christian. Sport and the Spirit of Play in Contemporary American Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.
Nelson, Michael. "College Sports Books Go Varsity." The Chronicle Review, June 10, 2005: B6-B9.
Oriard, Michael. Dreaming of Heroes. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1982.
Storoff, Gary. "The Failure of Games in Don DeLillo's End Zone." American Sport Culture: The Humanistic Dimensions. Ed. Wiley Lee Umphlett. Toronto: Bucknell University Press, 1985: 235-245.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by C. K. Ogden, New York: Dover Publications, 1999.
(1) Of the many fine book length studies of DeLillo, Cowart's Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language is the only work that focuses significantly on DeLillo's "career long exploration of language as cultural index, as 'deepest being,' as numinosurn" (2).
(2) Quite far from satirizing the simplicity of cliches, DeLillo seems to admire the sentiment and the aesthetics behind the proverbial statements. His attention to cliche and jargon reflects Richard Lanham's "anti-textbook" on style, in which Lanham explained that, "cliches are petrified metaphors. The moralist stresses the petrified, berates the stale language and, if a critic, numbers the blessings of poetry. Poetry, by putting language under pressure in new verbal environments, creates it anew, refreshes it, invents new meta- phors or ... galvanizes the cliches with irony. Stress the metaphor and we see jargon begin. Cliches work paradoxically, as a generally shared specialist language (special to situations, not speakers). They develop from the pleasures men take in language" (82).
(3) Many analyses of End Zone, like Messengers or Storoffs, either quote or paraphrase D. E Pears's and B. E McGuinnesgs translation of the Tractatus, in which the last line reads "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence." But like David Cowatt, I choose to quote C. K. Ogden's translation, instead, because its structure, balance and rhythm better reflect the attention that DeLillo, himself, applies to language
(4) While it is clear that End Zone represents DeLillo's view of language-as-game, I think Benton's description of this game as one "whose tales can only produce reified human experience" (7) oversimplifies DeLillo's relationship with language. As David Cowart has suggested, DeLillo is certainly "an adept parodist of the specialized discourses that proliferate in contemporary society--in sport, business, politics, academe, medicine, entertainment, and journalism." But Cowart adds that DeLillo's "interest in these discourses goes beyond simple parody, and it is the task of criticism to gauge the extra dimensions of DeLillo's thinking about language" (2).
Sport fiction and the untellable: cliche and language in Don Delillo's End Zone.Tough it is often acknowledged as one of the best novels written about sport, Don DeLillo's End Zone has never really struck me as a sports novel. Michael Oriard and Christian Messenger, respectively, have described DeLillo's book as a "complex sport novel" (241) and as the "most provocative and intelligent of all football fiction" (302), but I question such easy categorization. Just a few weeks ago Michael Nelson suggested in the Chronicle Review that End Zone was one of the 10 best college sports books ever. Though he acknowledged the book was about a lot of things, Nelson concluded that it was "mostly about college football" (B7). But is it? After all, though it is a story that revolves around a college football team in West Texas, End Zone's narrator, Gary Harkness, seems less interested in personal athletic accomplishments or the success of his football team than he is with little obsessions scattered throughout the story: obsessions with language and routine, food and weight, nuclear warfare, and silence. As one might guess from the story about a team from Logos college--a name that not only means "word" but also evokes the religious implications of "the Word"--End Zone seems to be much more about the problems of language that David Cowart has identified in all of DeLillo's fiction than it does about football. (1)
I suspect that DeLillo isn't really interested in football at all, but rather, he writes about football because of the ways language structures what is normally seen by many as mindless barbarism. Yet in conversations I have had with those in the Sports Studies department at the University of Iowa, this seems to be a common explanation for all contemporary sport fiction. They aren't really about sports, we say of various stories. One novel might be about the relationship between a parent and a child. One might be about letting go of the past. One might be about the unhealthy grip of obsession. But they never seemed to be about sports. And perhaps this is good. I am weary of describing, categorizing, or evaluating a book based on what it is about. It seems much more relevant to focus on what the book does.
Ultimately, it doesn't really matter whether End Zone is about football or not. Nor does it matter whether DeLillo is interested in the sport, or whether his novel should be categorized as sport literature. What does matter is the way DeLillo uses the system of language to show readers a new way of looking at sport, and at sport literature in general. He does this in three ways. First, DeLillo discloses the linguistic foundation of a sport that few might initially associate primarily with language. Football has always been seen as the most violently physical of American team sports, yet DeLillo manages to "unbox the lexicon for all eyes to see" (113). Second, through the systematicity of language that DeLillo identifies as underpinning sport, he is able to show how football reflects and relates to the larger systematicities of life. Football may seem to some to be just a silly game, but DeLillo treats it no differently than the silly-yet-serious game of nuclear war. Finally, End Zone challenges the larger assumption of any writing about sport: that sport is both knowable and tellable. We watch and participate in games decided by tangible scores, measured by innings, periods, and time clocks, that leave behind lists of statistics measuring each performance. But any good sports writer knows that those numbers don't capture the actual aesthetic of the game, and so we try to describe, explain, and analyze the performances with words. End Zone makes us question whether or not words are enough to try to explain and understand sport, or whether the experiences we try to reproduce are, at some level, untellable.
DeLillo makes us think hard about sport, but End Zone doesn't look like what many would expect of sport fiction. There are no mythic sports heroes in End Zone. Sure, there is the star athlete, Taft Robinson, a "natural" talent whose gift is the essence of sports myth and lore. Robinson is the first black football player (or student) at Logos College (his name, itself, intimates the history of racial integration in sport), and is described as easily the best football player in the entire Southwest. But as DeLillo confesses at the start of the novel, Taft is not a central character in the story, but instead is a ghost haunting the book, filling the double entendre of "invisible man" (3).
Of course, another typical anchor of any traditional sport narrative--the adversity of the underdog's big game against its powerful rival--is present in End Zone. But this obvious climax of the story occurs only halfway through the book, disrupting any expectation of parallels between story structure and football season as the second half of the novel winds down during the dead months of winter following the final game. In one of his few interviews given over the years, DeLillo has described the intentional narrative construction in End Zone as similar to that in White Noise, where he created "an aimless shuffle toward a high-intensity event" halfway through the book, and then an ensuing "kind of decline, a purposeful loss of energy" to an anticlimactic end (Begley, 93).
The absence of a recognizable sport narrative should not be surprising, because, in DeLillo's own words, "End Zone wasn't about football. It's a fairly elusive novel. It seems to me to be about extreme places and extreme states of mind, more than anything else" (DeCurtis, 65). But he has acknowledged that End Zone is also about games, of which football is the most obvious--but certainly not the only--example. Gary Storoff has shown that End Zone denies the reader the "comfortable conception of a game as frivolous play," because DeLillo sees games as "the fundamental character of civilization" (Storoff, 244). These games permeate the story, with different games being played by students and teachers, teammates and opponents, friends and mentors. DeLillo describes games like "Bang! Your Dead," created by the players to (forgive the pun) kill dead time between practices. He wrote about games created by an ROTC instructor to simulate the escalation of nuclear war. And, of course, End Zone is itself, as DeLillo has suggested in an interview with Thomas LeClair, about the game of fiction. "The games I've written about have more to do with rules and boundaries than with the freewheeling street games I played when I was growing up," DeLillo said in the interview. He added:
People leading lives of almost total freedom and possibility may secretly crave rules and boundaries, some kind of control in their lives. Most games are carefully structured. They satisfy a sense of order and they even have an element of dignity about them.... Games provide a frame in which we can try to be perfect. Within sixty-minute limits or one-hundred-yard limits or the limits of a game board, we can look for perfect moments or perfect structures. (LeClair, 5-6)
Here is where End Zone begins to offer a real understanding of sport: it is the structure of football that DeLillo is interested in. As he explains in a lengthy author's aside that prefaces the big game, "sport is a benign illusion, the illusion that order is possible." Spectators, he suggests, find values in the details of sport that reinforce this structure--the "impressions, colors, statistics, patterns, mysteries, numbers, idioms, symbols" that make up the game. And indeed, it is football that best represents the illusion of order, because more than any other it "is the one sport guided by language, by the word signal, the snap number, the color code, the play name" (112).
End Zone is about language and, more than word signals or play names, football (like all sports) offers a wealth of jargon. It is both the meaningful and meaningless nature of this jargon with which DeLillo--and through DeLillo, the narrator, is enthralled. After years of his father's subjecting him to sayings such as "suck in that gut and go harder" and "when the going gets tough, the tough get going," a teenage Gary Harkness "began to perceive a certain beauty in [the sayings]," especially the latter:
The sentiment of course had small appeal but it seemed that beauty flew from the words themselves, the letters, consonants swallowing vowels, aggression and tenderness, a semi-self-recreation from line to line, word to word, letter to letter. All meaning faded. The words became pictures. It was a sinister thing to discover at such an age, that words can escape their meanings. (17)
Though supposedly meaningless, the words, like football, help provide Gary with a certain structure protecting him from the silence that he fears. Because, though he appreciates his self-imposed exile out in the middle of the Texas desert, there are some features of his desire for asceticism that he can't quite accept. He explains that "of all the aspects of exile, silence pleased me least" (30). He "felt threatened by the silence," but found that "silence is dispersed by familiar things" (31). This is why Gary finds comfort in the endless repetition and familiar pieces of meaningless jargon in football. Though he builds his own vocabulary by teaching himself a new word from the dictionary every day, Gary sees no shame in the ritualistic repeating of cliches that fill most talk about sports. "Most lives are guided by cliches," he says. "They have a soothing effect on the mind and they express the kind of widely accepted sentiment that, when peeled back, is seen to be a denial of silence" (69). But I don't agree with Michael Ofiard that DeLillo is trying to satirize those who "cheapen experience" through the use of cliches, or that he believes a "sufficiently fertile imagination" could or should avoid such un-nuanced speech (245). DeLillo sees these cliches as attempts to capture experiences and ideas that seem to escape the words that try to describe them. These cliches are a "denial of silence" because the person who uses them refuses to accept the notion that words might fail to express how he or she is feeling. (2)
The same is true of the maxims barked by coaches at practice every day. DeLillo presents the assistant coaches as mechanically spouting vague jargon regardless of who is heating it. One coach approaches the running backs and addresses them:
Guards and tackles, I want you to come off that ball real quick and pop, pop, hit those people, move those people out, pop them, put some hurt on them, drive them back till they look like sick little puppy dogs squatting down to crap. (28)
When the players inform him that he is addressing the wrong group, he seems undeterred and tells them to "Hit somebody. Hit somebody. Hit somebody." And that is exactly what the players do. We are told many times that the action on the field is clear and simple. Players run, hit and execute, and the "daily punishment" on the field reduces complexity (31). Because, as Gary insists early on, "football players are simple folk. Whatever complexities, whatever dark politics of the human mind, the heart--these are noted only within the chalked borders of the playing field" (4).
But this, of course, is taken ironically by the reader, because nowhere else in sport are we presented with more cognizant athletes. For example, there is Bing Jackmin, the kicker who speaks of the "psychomythical" and "hyperatavistic" double nature of football players. There is Anatole Bloomberg, Gary's three hundred pound roommate who has come to Texas to "unJew" himself and escape from pressures of historical guilt, and who often talks of the expansion of his own body, describing his weight as being like an "overwritten paragraph" (48). There is also Billy Mast, the player who is taking a class on the "untellable," where students are asked to recite words from a language they have never spoken or heard before in an effort to find if there are words that exist beyond speech. Though Billy never fully describes or explains his class to teammates, the "untellable" is perhaps the central theme of the book. The recitation of unfamiliar languages, just like the recitation of over-familiar cliches, represents a grasping for an experience beyond the words we use to express ourselves. DeLillo has suggested that
The "untellable" points to the limitations of language. Is there something we haven't discovered about speech? Is there more? Maybe this is why there's so much babbling in my books. Babbling can be frustrated speech, or it can be a purer form, an alternate speech. (LeClair, 8)
This babbling is best demonstrated when Gary meets his friend Myna in the library. Myna, an overweight girl who initially refuses to lose weight to succumb to the obligations and responsibilities of accepted standards of beauty, usually meets with Gary on picnics; their encounters marked by the consumption of food. But like Bloomberg, Myna's weight seems to represent the comfort of language for Gary. In their encounter in the library, though, a simple game of reading words from the dictionary out loud to each other begins to animate passions between them. "The words were ways of touching and made us want to speak with hands," Gary said. But instead, the sexual excitement causes Gary to start babbling, looking for that purer form of speech. He began to make "bubbling noises," he made "strange noises of anticipation (gwa gwa)," he "brought new noises to the room, vowel sounds predominating" (217). Myna doesn't reply with sound, but her body answers by "positing herself as the knowable word, the fleshmade sigh and syllable" (218).
Myna and Gary's roommate, Bloomberg, give him comfort because their weight and their willingness to consume is marked with this association to language. Gary affectionately envisioned being overweight as "the new asceticism" and saw it as "the opposite of death" (49). But it also marked the opposite of his own hunger strikes that surface when his fear of silence takes hold. Early on, when the "menacing" silences of the desert unnerved him, he gave up eating meat (31). At the end of the book, after finding out Myna had given up on her own obesity and shed pounds in an attempt at redefinition, Gary seemed confronted with another menacing silence that words could not protect him from. "Don't use words," a friend says when asking his opinion of the new Myna. "Either you like her this way or you don't. You can't get out of it with words" (229). This time Gary eventually gave up eating and drinking altogether, leaving him hospitalized and brain damaged, being fed through a tube in the book's anti-climactic ending.
Gary's demise is presented in direct contrast to Taft Robinson, whose real haunting of the book comes at the end when his own personal achievements tower over Gary's failure. For Taft has learned to embrace the silence that Gary still fears. Taft's acceptance of this silence finally brings on the only telling reference to Wittgenstein, whose study of the limitations of language seeps through the pages of the entire book. "Two parts to that man's work," Gary thought of Wittgenstein. "What is written. What is not written. The man himself seemed to favor second part [sic]. Perhaps Taft was a student of that part" (233). DeLillo's reference reminds us, as Gary Storoff pointed out, of Wittgenstein's belief in a "transcendental reality, which to him does exist but is ineffable and 'unthinkable'" (Storoff, 240). Clearly the inspiration for the theme of the "untellable," DeLillo's reference alludes to Wittgenstein's ending of the Tractatus, where he suggests that "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" (108).3
This understanding that there are unattainable truths better accepted in silence comes easily to Taft, though remains frightening for Gary.
In the final pages, Taft is given his only meaningful exchange in the book, where he reveals that he no longer intends on playing football. Gary meets the news with shock, and feebly tries to construct an argument against the decision out of meaningless jargon: "It becomes a question of pursuing whatever it is you do best. It's a damn shame to waste talent like yours. It almost goes against some tenuous kind of equilibrium or master plan. Some very carefully balanced natural mechanism" (234). But the real equilibrium that is upset is Gary's sense of security in the jargon and repetition of football. After already losing a thinning Myna as a source for comfort, Gary seems less upset by the departure of Taft from the team than he is by the thought of his own alienation from football. Taft, who now claims to think only about football in "historical perspeaive," has learned to accept the silence that Gary still fears and that seems to be keeping him in the game. Telling Gary that he tries "to create degrees of silence" in his life, Taft explains:
The radio is important in this regard. The kind of silence that follows the playing of the radio is never the same as the silence that precedes it. I use the radio in different ways. It becomes almost a spiritual exercise. Silence, words, silence, silence, silence. (239-240)
Though this silence seems to Gary to be tainted with death, the main notions of mortality in the novel are emphasized more by his obsession with nuclear holocaust. This theme of apocalypse mirrors the use of football in the novel, but contains the gravitas and severity that some may see missing in sport; it is the extreme that helps balance the use of sport for structure in life. Just as he did with the jargon of football, Gary finds comfort in the words describing nuclear warfare: manuals describing technology and fallout, "words and phrases like thermal hurricane, overkill, circular error probability, post-attack environment, stark deterrence, dose-rate contours, kill-ratio, spasm war" (21). Gary seeks out Major Staley, an ROTC instructor on campus, to ask about what the destruction might be like, and eventually they play a crude war game--a simulation meant to demonstrate the sequence of events that may lead to a full-scale global nuclear war. Like football, this game creates a sense of order modeled around the language supporting it.
DeLillo, whose work is always concerned with the violence of everyday life, intentionally mirrors the violence of nuclear war to the violence on the football field. But DeLillo is not interested in the tired comparison between football and war. Man Zaplac, one of Gary's professors, insists that he "reject[s] the notion of football as warfare. Warfare is warfare. We don't need substitutes because we've got the real thing" (111). Though DeLillo plays with this at times, even having the Major describe the humanization of war as being like football, rather than vice versa. Instead of the intense escalation most assume would accompany nuclear war, the Major suggests "there'd be all sorts of controls. You'd practically have a referee and a timekeeper" (82). DeLillo's comparison of football and war does not ultimately revolve around the violence of the two, but rather it is centered on the way jargon is used to create order from that violence; he is interested in the shared language of end zones. "Major, there's no way to express thirty million dead. No words," Gary suggests. "They don't explain, they don't clarify, they don't express. They're painkillers. Everything becomes abstract" (85). But just as Emmet Creed is known for "bringing order out of chaos" on the football field (10), the Major explains to Gary that the clean, clinical language used to describe nuclear war can bring meaning out of violence:
I'm not some kind of monstrous creature who enjoys talking about the spectacle of megadeath, the unprecedented scale of this kind of thing. It has to be talked about and expounded on. It has to be described for people, clinically and graphically, so they'll know just what it is they're facing. (85)
This need to talk about and expound on inflicted violence comes across clearly after the football game against their rival, Centrex Biotechnical College. The team from Logos does not just lose, it loses badly, and amidst the mood of post-game depression Gary asks Billy Mast for a summary of the damage. In the same simple, clinical language that the Major saw needed in nuclear terminology, Billy gives him the injury report with technical precision and no emotion. Going from player to player, he lists each injury with a simple phrase before describing it in detail: collarbone, knee, knee, ankle, shoulder separation, bit tongue, pulled hamstring, broken finger. The team captain comes around to say more about the loss, but describes it only in cliches:
We didn't give it enough. We didn't let it all hang out. But it's over now and we still have two games to play. Next week we find out what we're made of ... We have to shake it off and come back. We have to guard against a letdown ... Kimbrough's over in the other bus saying the exact same thing. We worked it out at breakfast, word for word (148-149).
That the team captains agreed, "word for word," that these cliches were the best way to address the loss is consistent with the ways in which DeLillo has his characters try to simplify their reality through various jargons in the book. But I don't think for a minute that this novel is a critique of the simplicity of sports or even a condemnation of the meaninglessness of jargon. DeLillo shows that the simple cliches used in football, as well as Major Stanley's clean, clinical description of nuclear war, do have a meaningful purpose--to create a sense of order out of the chaos of life--but he also shows that they ultimately fail in their job. The sense of order created by language in football or war, as well as all the other games in the novel, never seem to bring as much comfort as they are expected to. In this regard, DeLillo's vision is certainly bleak, but it is not satire, as Jill Benton has previously suggested in Aethlon. (4) Football is a game structured in part by language, offering a sense of order--even if that perceived order is illusory or incomplete--but in that regard, it is no different than the game of fiction that DeLillo, himself, plays. Just like Wittgenstein's idea that, in different language games, words can do more than simply describe the world, DeLillo sees fiction as a realm determined as much by the aesthetics of a word as it is by its meaning. He has admitted that he will freely change the meaning of a sentence while writing merely to preserve a certain rhythm or beat that he feels developing in the words, because he sees the "basic work" of writing as being "built around the sentence."
That is what I mean when I call myself a writer. I construct sentences. There's a rhythm I hear that drives me through a sentence. And the words typed on the white page have a sculptural quality. They form odd correspondences. They match up not just through meaning but through sound and look. They rhythm of a sentence will accommodate a certain number of syllables. One syllable too many, I look for another word. There's always another word that means nearly the same thing, and if it doesn't then I'll consider altering the meaning of a sentence to keep the rhythm, the syllable beat. I'm completely willing to let language press meaning upon me. (Begley, 91)
To a certain extent, all sports fiction--actually, all sports writing--plays this same game of language. It is a game in which we try to drape language over physical actions and experiences that often challenge, frustrate, and defy words. This is why Taft and all other "naturals" in sport really are, like Wittgenstein, students of what is not written. It is also, I believe, why we often claim that good sports books are not really books about sports, because the true meanings of the games we watch and play do not rest in the scores or statistics or even the words used to describe them. The meaning of sport can be found in the experiences that surround and reinforce the game. But these are often experienced somewhere beyond speech, and require longer metaphors for us to situate in the known and familiar. The challenge of sports writing is somehow to convey this mystery; that sport itself does at times become the unreliable.
Works Cited
Begley, Adam. Interview, 1993. Conversation with Don DeLillo. Ed. Thomas DePietro. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005.
Benton, Jill. "Don DeLillo's End Zone: A Postmodern Satire." Aethlon XII:1, Fall 1994: 7-18.
Cowart, David. Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002.
DeLillo, Don. End Zone. New York: Penguin Books, 1972.
DeCurtis, Anthony. Interview, 1988. Conversation with Don DeLillo. Ed. Thomas DePietro. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005.
Lanham, Richard. Style: An Anti-Textbook. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974.
LeClaire, Thomas. Interview, 1982. Conversation with Don DeLillo. Ed. Thomas DePietro. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005.
Messenger, Christian. Sport and the Spirit of Play in Contemporary American Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.
Nelson, Michael. "College Sports Books Go Varsity." The Chronicle Review, June 10, 2005: B6-B9.
Oriard, Michael. Dreaming of Heroes. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1982.
Storoff, Gary. "The Failure of Games in Don DeLillo's End Zone." American Sport Culture: The Humanistic Dimensions. Ed. Wiley Lee Umphlett. Toronto: Bucknell University Press, 1985: 235-245.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by C. K. Ogden, New York: Dover Publications, 1999.
(1) Of the many fine book length studies of DeLillo, Cowart's Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language is the only work that focuses significantly on DeLillo's "career long exploration of language as cultural index, as 'deepest being,' as numinosurn" (2).
(2) Quite far from satirizing the simplicity of cliches, DeLillo seems to admire the sentiment and the aesthetics behind the proverbial statements. His attention to cliche and jargon reflects Richard Lanham's "anti-textbook" on style, in which Lanham explained that, "cliches are petrified metaphors. The moralist stresses the petrified, berates the stale language and, if a critic, numbers the blessings of poetry. Poetry, by putting language under pressure in new verbal environments, creates it anew, refreshes it, invents new meta- phors or ... galvanizes the cliches with irony. Stress the metaphor and we see jargon begin. Cliches work paradoxically, as a generally shared specialist language (special to situations, not speakers). They develop from the pleasures men take in language" (82).
(3) Many analyses of End Zone, like Messengers or Storoffs, either quote or paraphrase D. E Pears's and B. E McGuinnesgs translation of the Tractatus, in which the last line reads "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence." But like David Cowatt, I choose to quote C. K. Ogden's translation, instead, because its structure, balance and rhythm better reflect the attention that DeLillo, himself, applies to language
(4) While it is clear that End Zone represents DeLillo's view of language-as-game, I think Benton's description of this game as one "whose tales can only produce reified human experience" (7) oversimplifies DeLillo's relationship with language. As David Cowart has suggested, DeLillo is certainly "an adept parodist of the specialized discourses that proliferate in contemporary society--in sport, business, politics, academe, medicine, entertainment, and journalism." But Cowart adds that DeLillo's "interest in these discourses goes beyond simple parody, and it is the task of criticism to gauge the extra dimensions of DeLillo's thinking about language" (2).
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