Just like our brief poetic respite between The Great American Novel and The Art of Fielding, we're going to have another palate-cleanser between Harbach and our final novel of the semester, W.P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe, though we're still in the prose mode. Subtitled "The Shot Heard Round the World," Don DeLillo's Pafko at the Wall is concerned with just that: Bobby Thompson's game-winning home run against the Brooklyn Dodgers that won the 1951 NL Pennant for the New York Giants, which is widely considered to be one of the game's defining moments.
Pafko was first published in a folio edition in Harper's in October 1992 — this is the source of the version that we'll be reading — and would later appear under the title "The Triumph of Death" as a prologue to DeLillo's epic novel Underworld (1997), before appearing on its own as a single-printing hardcover (shown at the left) in 2001.
You'll notice that unlike so much of the prose we've read so far, DeLillo's characters exist in our own real world rather than a fictional one, and this is a popular postmodern literary technique called "historiographic metafiction" (impress your friends with that one) — he'd also use this to great effect in novels including Mao II and Falling Man — and this, along with our foreknowledge of the game's outcome, create a fascinating literary tension for us as readers. It's also worth noting once again, that like Malamud, Roth and Chabon, here we have one of the leading literary voices of his respective era making baseball a central part of his writing, which speaks to the place it occupies in our collective imagination.
You'll notice that unlike so much of the prose we've read so far, DeLillo's characters exist in our own real world rather than a fictional one, and this is a popular postmodern literary technique called "historiographic metafiction" (impress your friends with that one) — he'd also use this to great effect in novels including Mao II and Falling Man — and this, along with our foreknowledge of the game's outcome, create a fascinating literary tension for us as readers. It's also worth noting once again, that like Malamud, Roth and Chabon, here we have one of the leading literary voices of his respective era making baseball a central part of his writing, which speaks to the place it occupies in our collective imagination.
You'll find a PDF copy of the novella here, and we'll be reading it in its entirety for April 2nd. If you'd like a little more info on the game itself, check out the videos below.
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