We'll continue after the X-Men with another one-day reading before we move on to Valeria Luiselli and the 21st century: Don DeLillo's Pafko at the Wall. Subtitled "The Shot Heard Round the World," DeLillo's novella is concerned with just that: Bobby Thompson's game-winning home run against the Brooklyn Dodgers that won the 1951 NL Pennant for the New York Giants, which is widely considered to be one of the game's defining moments.
Pafko was first published in a folio edition in Harper's in October 1992 and would later appear under the title "The Triumph of Death" as a prologue to DeLillo's epic novel Underworld (1997), before appearing on its own as a single-printing hardcover (shown at the left) in 2001. This last version will be what we read, whether you buy the book itself or rely on the PDF linked below.
You'll notice that unlike so much of the prose we've read so far, DeLillo's characters exist in our own real world rather than a fictional one, and this is a popular postmodern literary technique called "historiographic metafiction" (impress your friends with that one) — he'd also use this to great effect in novels including Mao II and Falling Man — and this, along with our foreknowledge of the game's outcome, create a fascinating literary tension for us as readers.
You'll notice that unlike so much of the prose we've read so far, DeLillo's characters exist in our own real world rather than a fictional one, and this is a popular postmodern literary technique called "historiographic metafiction" (impress your friends with that one) — he'd also use this to great effect in novels including Mao II and Falling Man — and this, along with our foreknowledge of the game's outcome, create a fascinating literary tension for us as readers.
Like the previous book, we'll spend just one day with DeLillo:
- Tues. November 12: Pafko at the Wall [PDF]
If you'd like a little more info on the game itself, check out the videos below.
[ footnote: 11/12 ]
As I was finishing DeLillo tonight, I had the sinking suspicion that something was missing. Then I remembered that, up until this semester, I had taught from a printout of the original Harper's version of the novella from 1992, and this time I was reading the special hardcover edition published in 2001 to mark the 50th anniversary of "The Shot Heard Round the World." What I've linked above is a PDF version of the official e-book published by Scribners.
So I dug up that old PDF, and as I thought, there was one relatively important part of Bill's post-game pursuit of Cotter that DeLillo opted to cut out of the final published version, which you can see to the right. I've left a little of their exchange before the cut (which falls in the middle of pg. 83) so you can orient yourself.
I'll be curious to hear your thoughts on that edit; whether it makes the story stronger or weaker, and why you think DeLillo might've chosen to cut it.
11/12 Questions by Jack Davidson:
ReplyDelete1. Nearly five years after its original publication, 'Pafko at the Wall' was included as the prologue for Delillo's ambitious 1997 epic 'Underworld' under the title "The Triumph of Death." What does this alternate title mean in the context of the novella? How does the story having this alternate title affect our understanding of it?
2. The story is told through many perspectives, whether it's the almost biblical third person omniscient POV Delillo uses to evoke the famous setting or the various real-life characters whose heads we get inside (J. Edgar Hoover, Russ Hodges, etc). How exactly does point of view function in the novella? What implications do Delillo's stylistic choices have?
Marie writes:
ReplyDeleteHello,
It wouldn't let me post the questions to the board so I'm sending you them in an email.
1. Within DeLillo’s writing, a recurring theme he explores is human relationships and the psychology of crowds. Within Pafko at the Wall, how does DeLillo use the interactions between Cotter Martin and Bill Waterson, including their skirmish over the game winning ball, to highlight race relations in Cold War America?
2. As an American novelist, Don DeLillo is fascinated with the power of history. In his novella Pafko at the Wall, he focuses on two historic events that ironically occurred on the same day in October 1951. During an interview, DeLillo commented that he thinks this day marked the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. How does he explore these conflicting events based in rivalry through the novella’s plot and characters?