Miwon Kwon’s discussion of DeLillo’s Valparaiso helped me better understand the play, though I’m still not convinced it would succeed theatrically. That is, it’s a very academic play with scenarios that already feel dated.
The way Kwon describes it, though, Michael Majeski’s physical journey to Valparaiso leads him to a journey of self-discovery where he, along with input from his wife and surrounding reporters, re-constructs himself. The mistaken journey to South America destabilized his identity to such a degree that he begins to define himself through memorized and repeated lines as well as taking in “help” from the ever-present media:
Michael: …What is going on?
Interviewer: Where am I?
Michael: Who am I?
Interviewer: How did I get here? (16)
I wonder about the relationship between Michael and his wife, Livia. At one point he describes their making love before the trip. The description is both dreamy and anonymous. On Delfina’s talk-show, after the trip they again describe sex, though now it is “sex the way it sounds…the syllable. Hard and tight.” There is no haziness, no fuzzy borders, and yet they still have no real sense of self. Livia is “a little bit of everything around [her]” (71). Michael’s life has become a literal open book. He’s aware that the (physical) journey, being in the wrong/right place as Kwon describes, has taken effect, but it’s unclear if the effect turns out positively or negatively. Michael believes “there’s something in the symmetry of my mistake that shakes the heart and approaches a condition of wonder” (75). Not even their unborn baby is really connected to either of them. It’s interesting to note, too, that Michael still refers to the trip as a “mistake.” It was not supposed to happen.
In addition to the trip, the media also accounts for the disruption and destabilization of Michael’s (and Livia’s?) identity. Although they are both willing to give interviews and offer “some numbers you can call…if any additional questions come to mind,” at some point Delfina and her crew take over (18). They seem to feed on Michael’s shattered sense of self:
Teddy: We need to know everything. We need to show everything.
Delfina: Because eveything’s accessible. (90)
Towards the end of the interview, there is an interesting turnaround and Delfina becomes, if briefly, the subject of Michael’s interrogation. (”How do you tell the difference between identity and desperation?” 93). All we learn, though, is how she has sacrificed her self to the station, to the viewers, that each time they leave her, she approaches a little closer to death (and hell) (94).
That proximity to death that is echoed in the reveal of Michael’s experience in the bathroom of the airplane. The “mistake” of having gone to the wrong place, and a place so wrong, so out-of-place that there is no explanation, that nearly kills him on the plane and later shatters him beyond recognition. It is almost with compassion that Delfina helps to strangle him.
In the rest of Kwon’s article, I found her discussion of Jameson’s description of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel most interesting. While I can imagine a similar kind of feeling on-line, it’s almost unbelievable to image a physical place where “there remains no vantage from which to take in a perspective” (37). I wish she drew a more direct line between the economic environment and the creation of “a new spatial paradigm” beyond simply, capitalism creates a sense of disorientation (38). It makes me want to hear about positive results from capitalism. (Could there be some positive effect from the “production of difference?” Our willingness to pay for unique-ness aside, there is something to recognizing difference, right?)
