Garbage is a running theme in Underworld, Don DeLillo’s great attempt to write a Ulysses for post-war America. The hero-narrator, Nick Shay, is an executive in a waste disposal firm. Brian Glassic, Nick’s close friend and colleague, has an epiphany at a garbage dump in New Jersey. Nick’s sometime lover, Klara Sax, is a painter who transforms discarded objects into artworks. The collecting of baseball memorabilia – garbage by another name – is the thread that ties together the entire narrative. The book’s final set piece is a nuclear test site in Kazakhstan, where shifty post-Soviet entrepreneurs are devising a plan to destroy garbage by nuclear explosions. DeLillo is reminding us that modernity’s most great and terrible creation is a mechanism capable of turning the entire planet into a radioactive garbage dump.
DeLillo’s point is that garbage, on an unthinkable scale, constitutes one of the core products of the industrial age, hidden but omnipresent. Garbage is thus one of our secular underworlds, with the threatening permanence and enigmatic horror of all kingdoms of the dead.
However, although Underworld ends with an evocation of cyberspace, DeLillo did not yet seem fully conscious of what the internet’s rise has made achingly clear: that the mass-produced garbage of modernity takes the form not just of objects, but of language itself. Besides the mountains and chasms of detritus pock-marking the planet, a foul sludge of language-as-garbage is pumped day and night out of the worldwide network of machines.
The mass-produced garbage of modernity takes the form not just of objects, but of language itself.
Indeed, as with other empires of waste, the rise of linguistic garbage is secondary to the rise of the machines. Writing itself has only been around for five millennia of the several hundreds of mankind’s existence. Before writing, there were no words but those which men and women spoke to each other, to their children, and to their gods and beasts. Writing itself, for most of its history, has been a handcraft: there were no books or documents except those written out by hand, and written on hand-made surfaces of stone, clay, wood, papyrus, parchment, paper, wax. Even the sloppiest and most ephemeral writing required a considerable sacrifice of time and care to exist at all. Eventually, printing vastly increased the speed and reduced the labour with which the written word could be produced and circulated. But still – a book, a document, had to be a concrete object, and this set some restraint on the frenzy of production. Cheap paper and cheap paperbacks, the rotary printing press, the typewriter, the photocopier, all gradually gnawed away at that restraint. Then came the computer and the internet, and with them the disappearance of almost every practical limit on the quantity of words that can be produced, or on their sphere of circulation. Now Large Language Models appear to be opening yet another chapter, where the machines are no longer the mere enablers, but the very creators, of mass-produced language.
Large Language Models appear to be opening yet another chapter, where the machines are no longer the mere enablers, but the very creators, of mass-produced language
Nor is writing the full story. We have also devised the means to bottle and distribute the spoken word. Here too, a trickle has become a flood. The radio, cinema and the vinyl record were shoved to the side by television and the CD, only for this whole complex to be subsumed into the endless, omnipresent nexus of digital distribution, where everything is on offer all the time.
We know from every other industry what happens once mass production and distribution become possible. The marketplace is flooded with cheap junk, to be used to meet the moment’s need or desire, and then discarded into the underworld of garbage, and replaced with the next item of junk off the assembly line. A few eccentrics and connoisseurs may resist the allure of junk, but the manifest social significance of that resistance is minimal. It is no different with language – select and beautiful words are still whispered here and there, but they are drowned out in the furious babble and numbing drone of instantly discardable junk language.
There is no sphere of life into which this Styx of linguistic garbage has not oozed. The workplace sloshes with the garbage of Codes of Conduct, mission statements, meeting minutes, policies, trainings, and incessant, vacuous e-mails. Public spaces are plastered with the garbage of advertising and propaganda. PA systems assault us with nonsense words in our trains and train stations, airports and airplanes. In our houses, the digital portals pump out throwaway insta-content from the bottomless wells of the internet. Nor is there refuge in the old homes of prayer, learning or healing – church, school and hospital have all been infected with the gibberish outside their walls. How could it be otherwise, when we each carry in our pocket an untiring machine that can feed us our choice of junk through our every waking hour?
The workplace sloshes with the garbage of Codes of Conduct, mission statements, meeting minutes, policies, training, and incessant, vacuous e-mails.
It is not, of course, that there is only junk, or that the taste for more lasting food has been entirely deadened. The precious words of the past can still find purchase, and new jewels can still be carved. But the linguistic landscape in which these words now live, and in which we live with them, has been changed at maddening speed, and beyond all recognition. Even those of us who can remember the pre-digital age cannot really remember how it was to live with its relative silence. Still less can we imagine a world without the omnipresent printed and recorded word, let alone a world without writing at all. The only reality we truly know is the present one, where most of the language we confront and produce has as little value or meaning, and inspires as little love, as half-empty soda bottles, opened yesterday, and left to fester in the heat. We may not have any urge to drink that soda, but we’ve accepted that we must live in a space where every surface is strewn with such detritus. And so a current of enervating disgust runs through our every moment, do what we may to tip-toe around the garbage, and seek out a modicum of quiet, or a few words of comfort and sense.
In short, unless we are to be hermits, all of us, however much or little we were taught to care for language’s marvels and monstrosities, have become, in our linguistic universe, like those poor souls in the sprawling, rickety mega-cities of impoverished nations, who live inside the very garbage dumps themselves, and make their living gleaning whatever they can find of value amidst the rubbish. Like them, we have no means to escape our condition, so, like them, we had better make the best of it.
