It is a key element of DeLillo’s late style, this essay argues, that the tautology becomes its dominant formal feature. We might think of The Body Artist: ‘The word for moonlight is moonlight’. Or we might think of Zero K: ‘The ceiling was low, the bed was bedlike, the chair was a chair’.

This essay asks what the function and effect of the tautology is in late DeLillo, as this relates to his relationship with history on one hand, and with the materiality of embodied being on the other. In one sense, the tautology might appear to be the mark of a loss of attachment to the world, or to a historical materialism. The tautology might enact the failure of language to refer to anything beyond itself. But if this is so, the essay suggests that the tautology is the mark not only of a kind of failure of reference in late DeLillo, but also a new kind of referential structure, a new way in which language refers both to the body and to history, both to space and to time.