ABSTRACT
To assert this sometimes subtle, sometimes tumultuous evolution in the work of our authors we must first accept the seemingly obvious proposition that all writers change during the course of their careers, that except in very rare instances an author does not plan out his entire career as if it were a single grandiose work of art. Systems theorist Tom LeClair, however, describes DeLillo’s career as a strategic “loop” epitomizing the potentialities of an open, multifarious living system opposed to the closed, binary systems that define capitalism and much of Western thought-patriarchy, industrialization, statistical analysis, monotheism. This loop limits the possibility of true evolution, assuming, for instance, that plot lines discarded or inadequately addressed in one book are left so by design, to be addressed in subsequent novels, just as in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow seemingly minor statements, characters, plot elements, symbols, mantras, and theories of occult or scientific nature continually resurface in moments of presumably pivotal import. LeClair’s approach to DeLillo is to analyze his entire body of work as if it were a single, massive novel, the literary career as metanovel.
