The Angel Esmeralda Group Read | Week 9 | Hammer and Sickle
First published in Harpers in 2010, Hammer and Sickle is the longest story in the collection, running to 34 pages and comprising 18 short(ish) sections (in my Picador paperback). It unfolds from/alongside real-world events (the global economic crash of 2007-8 and the ensuing downturn) and revolves around a similar central theme to Cosmopolis, namely the relationship between technology and capital. I've started the discussion by introducing six salient elements/concepts, adding a note on my favourite aspect of Delillo's writing at the end, language.
Summary:
(Seems to be the norm to include a summary but please skip ahead to ‘Discussion’ if you generally recall what happens in the story)
Jerold Bradway, our narrator, is a hedge fund manager serving a sentence in a minimum-security prison for mainly white-collar criminals. The inmates converse in their dorms, receive visitors, occasionally cross a highway bridge to play in/spectate on a soccer game on the grounds of an old school, and watch TV in one of the common rooms. A fifteen-minute news broadcast on a children’s TV channel is shown in the afternoons. As part of the programme, Jerold's two young daughters present a stock market analysis, delivering a series of strange and inflammatory reports on the global economic crash, their lines eventually devolving into rhymed incantations of famous communist leaders’ names. The inmates become increasingly excited by the reports, apparently cheering and yelling in support of the communist figures, seeming to welcome the disintegration of the capitalist system. At the end of the final report, as the inmates file out of the common room, Jerold stays in his chair facing his eldest daughter, who has remained on camera. After some moments of father and daughter staring at each other through lens and screen, the image cuts out. In the final section, Jerold wakes in the night and sneaks out of the prison. He goes to the highway bridge and stands above the traffic, watching it pass, knowing that he will return to the compound. He looks down at the cars and imagines himself from their perspective, looking up, wondering who he is.
Discussion:
The traffic
The story is bookended by descriptions of highway traffic seen from the vantage of an overpassing bridge. The highway is depicted as a domain of fast-paced activity and forward motion, populated by countless discrete lives following their own private trajectories. It produces pollution, loud noise, and an impressive visual spectacle. It’s a precarious system, approaching unstable, and places large amounts of destructive power and responsibility in the hands of fallible individuals. The traffic, then, comes to represent the modern capitalist system for Jerold Bradway. He takes the extra ideological step of equating this system with civilization itself:
“This is civilization, I thought, the thrust of social and material advancement, people in motion, testing the limits of time and space. Never mind the festering stink of burnt fuel, the fouling of the planet.” p.179
This is the voice of the post-industrial mystic, one we often encounter in Delillo, most notably in Underworld, and specifically in the passages about waste. Jerold is awe-struck by the spectacle of the traffic, wondering to himself, “Why don’t they crash all the time?”, likely a comment on the assumed resilience of global markets.
In his closing declamation, Jerold seems to echo Francis Fukuyama’s claim that the dominance of liberal capitalism constitutes the “end of history”, for better or worse:
“He is Jerold Bradway, I thought, and he is breathing the fumes of free enterprise forever.” p.181
Soccer and capitalism
This distinction between European capitalism and American capitalism is explored in the story through soccer, an English invention, most popular in Europe (and South America), that has struggled to establish itself as a matter of national interest in the US due to competition from other American-made sports.
In the story, the game takes place on a “haunted campus” of “antique buildings”. These are “partly demolished now, a few wrecking machines still there, asquat in mud.” p.157 The campus represents Europe's historical grandeur in a state of decline. (The disused construction machines and apparent lack of maintenance resources is perhaps a nod to EU austerity.)
Jerold philosophizes about soccer, deciding that the prohibition against players using their hands is a perverse inclusion. In his American-capitalist worldview, it seems too restrictive, the denial of an essential human urge to “grasp and hold, that make, take, carry, create.” p.158 He asks:
“If soccer were an American invention, wouldn’t some European intellectual maintain that our historically puritanical nature has compelled us to invent a game structured on anti-masturbatory principles?” p.158
In his 1905 work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capital, the European intellectual Max Weber asserted that protestant norms, principles, ethics and values, combined with the Calvinist doctrines of asceticism and predestination, gave rise to capitalism. Or, as Niall Ferguson, another European intellectual, summarizes in a New York Times article titled The World; Why America Outpaces Europe (Clue: The God Factor):
“there was a link between the self-denying ethos of the Protestant sects and the behavior patterns associated with capitalism, above all hard work.”
I read Jerold’s thoughts as a comment on how essentially unbound American capitalism is compared to the European model due to its emphasis on freedom of choice and enterprise above all else. This is how Jerold reflexively explains America’s relative success, regardless of whether European intellectuals attribute it to a “historically puritanical nature” or “anti-masturbatory principles.”
Walls
The typical fictive prisoner grows to abhor the very idea of walls, walls to him representing enclosure and confinement. But in Delillo’s prison of once-rich criminals, we have this exchange:
“I miss my walls,” he said…
I thought of telling him that we all miss our walls, we miss our floors and ceilings. p.151
The rich man has the means to turn a wall into an extension of himself, to manifest his desires and ambitions in the physical structure, building it high and beautiful, hanging it with expensive art. He lives through his walls:
“What about the art on your walls? Make you live longer?”
“I don’t know about the art. Good question, the art.” p.170
For the poor prisoner, the absence of walls is synonymous with freedom. For the rich prisoner, separation from his own private walls represents a diminishment of his identity or amputation of his personality.
The culture of the prison
Though it’s an all-male population of mainly white-collar criminals, there’s a sense in which the inmates represent a microcosm of a modern capitalist society.
There is an unequal distribution of luxuries and privileges:
“a special detention suite with audiovisual systems, private bath, smoking privileges and a toaster oven. There were only four of these in the camp..." p.148
The colour coding system of the uniforms described on visitor’s day could be read as a comment on the obvious signifiers of class, race and caste.
"zippered into jumpsuits in five colours, classified, catalogued, this colour for that level of offense." p.168
We have a man who runs everywhere, “the Dumb Runner he’s called” p.149, which could be anyone competing in the rat race, “He has a heartbeat, a racing pulse”, working hard, not working smart.
The gamblers—“gesturing operatically, numbers flashing neon in the air” Ibid—are players of the stock market, men of finance and speculation.
A religious man, one “who aspires to be a biblical scholar” Ibid, seems to maintain a spiritual distance from the reality of the prison, opting out of the prevailing culture by choosing to live in his head.
Icarus
In an article for the Guardian published in 2001, Delillo wrote:
“In the past decade the surge of capital markets has dominated discourse and shaped global consciousness. Multinational corporations have come to seem more vital and influential than governments. The dramatic climb of the Dow and the speed of the internet summoned us all to live permanently in the future, in the utopian glow of cyber-capital, because there is no memory there and this is where markets are uncontrolled and investment potential has no limit.”
Delillo has written and spoken elsewhere on his anxiety about humanity 'losing control' of the global systems of money. In this framing, there is an Icarian pathos to an economic crash, a sense that people got too greedy, aimed too high, and brought it all crashing down to new lows.
Some of the inmates, due to the nature of their crimes, relate to the fall of Icarus on a personal level. Delillo combines the system- and person-level metaphors in a passage about a work detail undertaken by the prisoners at a nearby Air Force base, where the assigned inmates:
“sometimes just stood and watched as a fighter jet roared down the runway and lifted into the low sun. It was a beautiful thing to see, aircraft climbing, wheels up, wings pivoting back, the light, the streaked sky, three or four of us, not a word spoken. Was this the time, more than a thousand other moments, when the measure of our ruin was brought to starkest awareness?” p.163
Accelerationism
The story takes a fairly bewildering turn as the inmates react to the communist chanting and news of a global economic downturn. Jerold observes:
“The men yelled and clamoured, these flabby white-collar felons, seeming to reject everything they’d believed all their lives.” p.175
And this from ostensibly pro-capitalist crooks...
Perhaps the most plausible interpretation is that the ruthlessness associated with the communist figures resonates with the criminals—they see themselves as capitalist counterparts.
But it made me wonder if Delillo was introducing the farcical idea that the inmates subscribe to a form of accelerationism, the radical theory that capitalism should be sped-up and intensified in order to aggravate its internal contradictions and force it towards self-destruction. After all, the inmates contributed to the failure of the system by exemplifying the very attitudes and values the system encourages, namely greed, competitiveness, wealth-accumulation etc...
(This is a stab in the dark and I want to say I look forward to being corrected, but instead I'll double down by quoting Jerold's bunkmate, Norman Bloch: “Don’t tell me I’m not right. I sense things. I read into things."p.161)
As a side note: the girls wear matching uniforms for the first time for those final “pro-communist” reports, which could signal the Communist commitment to party conformity and fundamental equality.
A note on language
In a letter to Delillo about Underworld, David Foster Wallace wrote about how Delillo needs to be read “aurally”, “musically”, in order to “feel the thump and stop and stress”, observing how Delillo uses subtle alliteration, assonance, and repetition to carry the rhythm of his prose. In a reply, Delillo confirms that his prose construction includes all these elements more or less automatically, plus a conscious “sensitivity to the actual appearance of words on a page, to letter-shapes and letter-combinations.”
A couple of passages in the story stood out as strong examples of these stylistic features:
“The other inmates sat half dazed, heads down. It was a matter of time of day, time of year, dusk nearly upon us, the depressive specter of last light stirring at the oblong windows high on one wall. The men sat distanced from each other, here to be alone. This was the call to self-examination, the second-guessing of a lost life, no less compelling than the believer’s call to prayer.” p.150
and:
“Okay, we were grown-ups, not bug-eyed kids in tribal bondage... We lived in real space, unaddicted, free of deadly dependence. But we were bereft. We were pulpy and slumped. It was a thing we rarely talked about, a thing that was hard to shake.” p.162
I scanned the whole story for such passages and these were the two best examples. The fact that they are both quite long descriptive paragraphs (i.e. they do not have an essential function in terms of driving the narrative forward, like action or dialogue or essential exposition) makes me think that Delillo is doing it here less than "automatically", quite intentionally, in fact. My guess is that he noticed a subconscious tendency to do this earlier in his career and was able to consciously exploit it in his later writing.
In other parts of the story, we see Delillo’s familiar delight in the pure shape and sounds of certain words, how words can be aesthetic ends in themselves, or how two words can constitute a type of formal pair that compliment one another:
“What’s this business about hammer and sickle?”
“Means nothing. Words,” I said. “Like Abu Dhabi.”
“The Hang Seng in Hong Kong.”
“Exactly.”
“The girls like saying it. Hammer and sickle.”
“Hammer and sickle.”
“Abu Dhabi.”
“Abu Dhabi.”
“Hang Seng.”
“Hong Kong,” I said. p.165
He also shows how repetition can make a word sound absurd (I was reminded of Pammy and Ethan’s obsession with the word “Maine” in Players):
'“The word is Dubai.”
“Say it.”
“Dubai,” Kate said. p.154
(Interestingly, I discovered that one theory on the etymology of the name “Dubai” invokes an Arabic proverb that says "Daba Dubai" meaning "They came with a lot of money.")
The reports themselves can be read as a sort of satire on modern financial news reports, a couple of friendly/personable talking heads producing a barrage of esoteric terms that leaves the lay viewer none the wiser.
“What is a credit default swap? What is a sovereign default? What is a special-purpose entity?”
“We don’t know. Do you know? Do you care?”
“What is Wall Street? Who is Wall Street?” p.163
An improved sense of timing and stagecraft in the girl's latter appearances makes Jerold ask: “Was the daily market report becoming a performance piece?” which can be read in relation to either the girls’ report specifically or market reports in the age of media spectacle generally.
Questions to consider:
- Why does Jerold change the spelling of his name?’
- Is his ex-wife writing the scripts? What's her motive?
- “He was a man watching an ancient truism unfold on wide-screen TV” - what is the ancient truism?
- What’s the significance of the stare-off between Jerold and his daughter at the end?
- Do Jerold's crimes resemble those of any high-profile real-world white-collar criminals?
- Are Hammer and Sickle communism's answer to Diamond and Silk?
A couple of my favourite lines:
- “as if she were reporting, herself, from a desk in a studio humming with off-camera tensions.”
- “money the coded impulse, ideational, a kind of discreet erection known only to the man whose pants are on fire.”
Next up:
- The Starveling
- 9 September
- Lead: W_Wilson
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Posted Sep 2, 2020, 9:02 AM UTC
Thanks u/TryinaWriteMore for the really comprehensive reading of this story. I particularly enjoyed how you picked apart the elements that related to capital and capitalism, how these relate to DeLillo's other work/outlook, and the close reading. Here are my notes, and I will follow up on the questions you raise that I don't cover once I have a moment:
This, and the final story in the collection, are the two I remember least from previous readings--I suspect as on rereads I didn’t always finish the collection, so have probably read them fewer times. This is later DeLillo, colder but still quite funny (particularly the set-up of middle class criminals obsessed with a children’s news broadcast). But I think this is the first story in the collection where, on rereading and pulling it apart, it didn’t really click so much for me. I don’t know if that is the setting, the style or the characters, but I didn’t end up enjoying this as much as everything we have covered up to now.
Our protagonist is Jerold, a relatively recently arrived inmate at a minimum security prison, as he tries to come to terms with his surroundings and situation. He has two young daughters who present a segment concerned with the markets on a children’s news programme. The story cuts between Jerome’s reflections and their broadcasts, which have become a hit with the other inmates.
Jerold is still finding his feet. Like Robby in “Midnight in Dostoevsky”, he is freshly arrived and “still trying to figure out who I wanted to be” (148). In his previous life he was “acquiring meaningless degrees, teaching a freshman course in the dynamics of reality TV” (154). He mentions as a teen he “wanted to be phantasmal, someone who slips in and out of physical reality” (149), an urge he feels again in prison, where he is “learning how to disappear” (160). He states he doesn’t have a “philosophy of money” (170). His married life has gone badly, Jerold noting “we fell apart. We didn’t drift apart, we fell apart” (161). Jerold’s crimes are not clear. “I don’t remember why I did what I did to put myself in this place” (155). DeLillo teases, but never lets us know--the penultimate lines being “who is he? what is he doing there?” (181).
The title has evocations of communist or Soviet setting or theme. In a later broadcast the girls call for “peoples of Europe, rise up. Peoples of the world, unite” (174 - 5), echoing the final lines of The Communist Manifesto (available here). The repeated references to “the camp” (e.g. 148, 151, 156, 160, 178) reinforces this, and it is somewhat reminiscent of how the school was described in “Midnight in Dostoevsky”. However we later learn this may have a different meaning, via Norman: “we’re not in prison, he liked to say. We’re at camp” (161). The title of the story is explicitly referenced in a number of the broadcasts and then discussed by Jerold and Norman (164 - 5).
White collar criminals and crimes populate the prison: “tax delinquents, alimony delinquents, insider traders, perjurers, hedge-fund felons, mail fraud, mortgage fraud, securities fraud, accounting fraud, obstruction of justice” (153).
Punishment in a low security, white collar prison is very much about removal and reflection as they are “entombed in cubicles, suspended in time” (171). We are told on the first page of the story that “it’s a killing business, reflection (147) and later that “the call to self-examination, the second-guessing of a lost life, [is] no less compelling than the believer’s call to prayer” (150). The “musings of idle time” make him consider that they may be “men in Maoist self-correction” or “just tons of assimilated meat” (168). In the end, he decides that “we can’t do justice to our dreams, reworking them in memory” (178), perhaps an indication of the ultimate futility of such reflection leading to meaningful understanding.
Norman, Jerold’s cellmate, reflects on what has been taken away from and “missed his walls” but is also “mostly disentangled from his personal drives, his grabbiness, the lifelong mandate to accrue, expand...he was at peace here” (152 - 3). Jerold lacks this peace, and is concerned that “in four years I’ll still be here, puddling horribly in this dim waste (154). But he is forced to consider the smaller world around him. Soccer, its rules and cultural meaning, is “one of the things I think about that I never had to think about before” (159). He considers what as been lost by those within the system, including “data systems...tacit awareness...information” the trappings and devices of the mediated and information heavy age--for better or worse, but still leaving them “bereft...pulpy and slumped” (162).
Jerold reflects that they are “the end products of the system, the logical outcome, slabs of burnt-out capital”, but also men with lives (homes, families) they have left behind (175). This idea of separation or abandonment is an important one throughout. Near the prison is an abandoned school with a soccer field, which the inmates maintain and use to play. This area and the games are used throughout the story. At one point we are told “the games became stranger. Rules were invented, broken and abridged...it began to feel like nowhere” (158).
At its heart, this is a story that revolves around a father’s fear of abandonment (of him abandoning his family and children, and them abandoning him in return). Jerold’s daughters, abandoned by Jerold first via the family breaking apart, then due to his imprisonment, sit at the core of the story with their news broadcasts, the only real link he seems to hold to a previous life. The broadcasts themselves are an amusement at first, even if Jerold wonders “did it seem crazy, a market report for kids...it wasn’t any crazier, probably, than most TV, and anyway who was watching? (151). Selected for viewing by “Feliks Zuber, the oldest inmate in the camp” whose crimes and punishment “impressed the rest of us”, who when viewing “was a man watching an ancient truism unfold on wide-screen TV” (156 - 7), the show becomes a hit among the inmates, giving the TV an almost religious or oracular power.
Jerold has not told anyone they are his daughters. But he changes his mind when speaking to Norman: “it was better that way...best not to speak of the girls. Then I spoke of them”--a passage clearly reminiscent of the narrator in “Baader-Meinhof”. We learn Jerold is convinced his wife (“we’re legally separated”) is “masterminding” the broadcasts (160). Norman suggests that “she’s talking directly to you..using the girls” (170). He rejects this idea, but later is found “watching the girls, wondering about their mother, what she had in mind, where she was leading us” (174). This seems, more than anything else, to reflect the common fear a separated or divorced parent may have when they think about the influence their partner may hold over their children (and their children’s view).
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The broadcasts become more emotive, and eventually the girls are chanting and the prisoners get whipped up alongside them, with Jerold wondering if they “want to replace one doctrine, one system of government with another...they were asserting that nothing mattered” (175). When the scene ends, Jerold and his daughter Kate are “looking at each other” via the screen, and he fears of what his imprisonment (and divorce) may mean to his children: “this is what I feared, that she would speak about the news, all news all the time...about how her father always said the news exists so it can disappear...we depend on the news to disappear, my father says. Then my father became the news. Then he disappeared” (177). At the end of the story he states he is “a truant, but one who would return” (180). We are left wondering what, if any, relationship he might eventually regain with his daughters.
As is a common trope in DeLillo’s work, television and the media are also touched upon in other ways. Early in the story Jerold notes that life is “like every prison movie we’d ever seen” (151), highlighting the importance of the medium in generating understanding of our circumstances. We also find out he was “teaching a freshman course in the dynamics of reality TV” (154), a surely important point that only really appears in passing--the backstory of Jerold once again just out of reach. When considering life inside, it is noted “we had TV but what had we lost, all of us”? (162).
DeLillo flora watch: A lot less this time around. A mention that “the traffic noise was a ripple at the treetops” (149) and that “a cluster of rain-swept blossoms was fixed to one of the high windows” (171), and Jerold walking “slowly along a row of trees” (179) was about all I came across. In a broadcast, the girls also suggest “think of islands shaped like palm trees” (156), but that is perhaps stretching the definition of this exercise.
Not sure where to stick this, but during one of the broadcasts when they start saying “Latvia has the lat/Tonga has the ponga/China has the rebimbi/the rebimbo/China is the rebobo/the rebubu” (173) I was reminded of Great Jones Street, in particular the song ‘Pee-Pee-Maw-Maw’ (114).
Note: Page numbers for The Angel Esmeralda and Great Jones Street are from the Picador UK softcover edition*.*