Abstract
Via a deep dive into DeLillo’s Underworld, this chapter also proposes the concept of archival geology, by which we can read the documentation of our species in geophysical verticalities—landfills, boreholes, orbital arcs, nuclear debris and fallout, and the underground vestiges of imperial genocide—as a means of grappling with time beyond human measure. Project Mohole offers Whitmarsh a unique set of parameters to lump together novels such as Red Mars, Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (2008), and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990), all of which he argues offer accounts of “modernity’s geological unconscious” and “afford us a critical and historical distance through which we can trace the continuing cultural import of the project—its understated effects on the literary imagination, but also its association with the fossil fuel industry and postwar energy concerns” (57). DeLillo’s short story “Human Moments in World War III” (1983), Tim O’Brien’s The Nuclear Age (1985), and Pynchon’s Rainbow.