Sorry I'm late. I have a cold and I am one of those really wimpy sick people that uses illness as an excuse not to do anything at all.

My first impulse with this book is to apply my theoretical interests to it (and it is so easy with DeLillo): The game itself as spectacle (Debord) or event (Badiou...maybe). There is also the Brueghel painting and the fantastic description of Hoover's fascination with wounds: "Dear germ-free Edgar, the man who has an air-filtration system in his house to vaporize specks of dust - he finds a fascination in cankers, lesions and rotting bodies so long as his connection to the source is strictly pictorial" (50). This section lends itself to analysis using any number of theorists of the abject (and of mediation through language): Mary Douglas, Kristeva, Lacan.

However, my impulse to haphazardly apply these theories to DeLillo is never very sucessful, because the writing is too sopisticated and the characterization/plotting too complex. This prologue is about time and place and, as a result, about history. There is something truly American about this novel, which is not something I would necessarily say about all of DeLillo's work. The prologue is nostalgic and lacks that scathing satirical quality of a novel like White Noise (even though there is still something critical happening). One of my major impulses while reading was to compare the descriptions of baseball in this novel to the descriptions of football in End Zone. In the latter novel, football serves the same purpose for Americans and the Triumph of Death serves for Hoover in the prologue: a mediated, yet violent, distraction that distracts from real violence. Baseball is something entirely different in this novel and I'm not sure what it is. A spectacle and distraction certainly, but again this game is a great event in American history, and the game itself is essentially American.

I don't know what to do with all this yet (even though I've read pretty far into the book in the past). I think that to apply a theoretical framework to DeLillo without considering the importance of history is a disservice. So, to analyze a passage like the one I quote from above, it seems really essential to acknowledge how it is Hoover's gaze that frames the painting, and how Hoover's historical position undermines a simple reading of that passage.

"This is the people's history and it has flesh and breath that quicken to the force of this old safe game of ours."
And at the end of the prologue the whole of history of this moment that the narrative voice spends sixty pages revealing is reduced to a single snapshot (like the snapshot of the painting from the magazine in Hoover's pocket)and "[i]t is all falling indelibly into the past" (60).