Sport Fiction And The Untellable:
Cliché And Language In Don Delillo’s
End Zone
Richard Landon
T
hough it is often acknowledged as one of the best novels written
about sport, Don DeLillo’s End Zone has never really struck me as a sports
novel. Michael Oriard and Christian Messenger, respectively, have described
DeLillo’s book as a “complex sport novel” (241) and as the “most provocative
and intelligent of all football fiction” (302), but I question such easy categorization. Just a few weeks ago Michael Nelson suggested in the Chronicle Review
that End Zone was one of the 10 best college sports books ever. Though he
acknowledged the book was about a lot of things, Nelson concluded that it
was “mostly about college football” (B7). But is it? After all, though it is a story
that revolves around a college football team in West Texas, End Zone’s narrator,
Gary Harkness, seems less interested in personal athletic accomplishments
or the success of his football team than he is with little obsessions scattered
throughout the story: obsessions with language and routine, food and weight,
nuclear warfare, and silence. As one might guess from the story about a team
from Logos college—a name that not only means “word” but also evokes the
religious implications of “the Word”—End Zone seems to be much more about
the problems of language that David Cowart has identified in all of DeLillo’s
fiction than it does about football.1
I suspect that DeLillo isn’t really interested in football at all, but rather, he
writes about football because of the ways language structures what is normally
1 Of the many fine book length studies of DeLillo, Cowart’s Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language is the only work that focuses significantly on DeLillo’s “career-long exploration of language as cultural index, as ‘deepest being,’ as numinosum” (2).
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seen by many as mindless barbarism. Yet in conversations I have had with those
in the Sports Studies department at the University of Iowa, this seems to be
a common explanation for all contemporary sport fiction. They aren’t really
about sports, we say of various stories. One novel might be about the relationship
between a parent and a child. One might be about letting go of the past. One
might be about the unhealthy grip of obsession. But they never seemed to be
about sports. And perhaps this is good. I am weary of describing, categorizing,
or evaluating a book based on what it is about. It seems much more relevant
to focus on what the book does.
Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter whether End Zone is about football or
not. Nor does it matter whether DeLillo is interested in the sport, or whether
his novel should be categorized as sport literature. What does matter is the way
DeLillo uses the system of language to show readers a new way of looking at
sport, and at sport literature in general. He does this in three ways. First, DeLillo
discloses the linguistic foundation of a sport that few might initially associate
primarily with language. Football has always been seen as the most violently
physical of American team sports, yet DeLillo manages to “unbox the lexicon
for all eyes to see” (113). Second, through the systematicity of language that
DeLillo identifies as underpinning sport, he is able to show how football reflects
and relates to the larger systematicities of life. Football may seem to some to
be just a silly game, but DeLillo treats it no differently than the silly-yet-serious
game of nuclear war. Finally, End Zone challenges the larger assumption of any
writing about sport: that sport is both knowable and tellable. We watch and
participate in games decided by tangible scores, measured by innings, periods,
and time clocks, that leave behind lists of statistics measuring each performance.
But any good sports writer knows that those numbers don’t capture the actual
aesthetic of the game, and so we try to describe, explain, and analyze the performances with words. End Zone makes us question whether or not words are
enough to try to explain and understand sport, or whether the experiences we
try to reproduce are, at some level, untellable.
DeLillo makes us think hard about sport, but End Zone doesn’t look like
what many would expect of sport fiction. There are no mythic sports heroes in
End Zone. Sure, there is the star athlete, Taft Robinson, a “natural” talent whose
gift is the essence of sports myth and lore. Robinson is the first black football
player (or student) at Logos College (his name, itself, intimates the history of
racial integration in sport), and is described as easily the best football player
in the entire Southwest. But as DeLillo confesses at the start of the novel, Taft
is not a central character in the story, but instead is a ghost haunting the book,
filling the double entendre of “invisible man” (3).
Of course, another typical anchor of any traditional sport narrative—the
adversity of the underdog’s big game against its powerful rival—is present in
End Zone. But this obvious climax of the story occurs only halfway through the
book, disrupting any expectation of parallels between story structure and foot-
Landon / Sport Fiction and the Untellable
73
ball season as the second half of the novel winds down during the dead months
of winter following the final game. In one of his few interviews given over the
years, DeLillo has described the intentional narrative construction in End Zone
as similar to that in White Noise, where he created “an aimless shuffle toward
a high-intensity event” halfway through the book, and then an ensuing “kind
of decline, a purposeful loss of energy” to an anticlimactic end (Begley, 93).
The absence of a recognizable sport narrative should not be surprising,
because, in DeLillo’s own words, “End Zone wasn’t about football. It’s a fairly
elusive novel. It seems to me to be about extreme places and extreme states
of mind, more than anything else” (DeCurtis, 65). But he has acknowledged
that End Zone is also about games, of which football is the most obvious—but
certainly not the only—example. Gary Storoff has shown that End Zone denies
the reader the “comfortable conception of a game as frivolous play,” because
DeLillo sees games as “the fundamental character of civilization” (Storoff,
244). These games permeate the story, with different games being played by
students and teachers, teammates and opponents, friends and mentors. DeLillo
describes games like “Bang! Your Dead,” created by the players to (forgive the
pun) kill dead time between practices. He wrote about games created by an
ROTC instructor to simulate the escalation of nuclear war. And, of course, End
Zone is itself, as DeLillo has suggested in an interview with Thomas LeClair,
about the game of fiction. “The games I’ve written about have more to do with
rules and boundaries than with the freewheeling street games I played when I
was growing up,” DeLillo said in the interview. He added:
People leading lives of almost total freedom and possibility
may secretly crave rules and boundaries, some kind of control
in their lives. Most games are carefully structured. They satisfy a
sense of order and they even have an element of dignity about
them … .
Games provide a frame in which we can try to be perfect.
Within sixty-minute limits or one-hundred-yard limits or the
limits of a game board, we can look for perfect moments or
perfect structures. (LeClair, 5-6)
Here is where End Zone begins to offer a real understanding of sport: it is
the structure of football that DeLillo is interested in. As he explains in a lengthy
author’s aside that prefaces the big game, “sport is a benign illusion, the illusion that order is possible.” Spectators, he suggests, find values in the details of
sport that reinforce this structure—the “impressions, colors, statistics, patterns,
mysteries, numbers, idioms, symbols” that make up the game. And indeed, it is
football that best represents the illusion of order, because more than any other
it “is the one sport guided by language, by the word signal, the snap number,
the color code, the play name” (112).
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End Zone is about language and, more than word signals or play names,
football (like all sports) offers a wealth of jargon. It is both the meaningful and
meaningless nature of this jargon with which DeLillo—and through DeLillo,
the narrator, is enthralled. After years of his father’s subjecting him to sayings
such as “suck in that gut and go harder” and “when the going gets tough, the
tough get going,” a teenage Gary Harkness “began to perceive a certain beauty
in [the sayings],” especially the latter:
The sentiment of course had small appeal but it seemed that
beauty flew from the words themselves, the letters, consonants
swallowing vowels, aggression and tenderness, a semi-self-recreation from line to line, word to word, letter to letter. All
meaning faded. The words became pictures. It was a sinister
thing to discover at such an age, that words can escape their
meanings. (17)
Though supposedly meaningless, the words, like football, help provide Gary
with a certain structure protecting him from the silence that he fears. Because,
though he appreciates his self-imposed exile out in the middle of the Texas
desert, there are some features of his desire for asceticism that he can’t quite
accept. He explains that “of all the aspects of exile, silence pleased me least”
(30). He “felt threatened by the silence,” but found that “silence is dispersed
by familiar things” (31). This is why Gary finds comfort in the endless repetition and familiar pieces of meaningless jargon in football. Though he builds
his own vocabulary by teaching himself a new word from the dictionary every
day, Gary sees no shame in the ritualistic repeating of clichés that fill most talk
about sports. “Most lives are guided by clichés,” he says. “They have a soothing
effect on the mind and they express the kind of widely accepted sentiment that,
when peeled back, is seen to be a denial of silence” (69). But I don’t agree with
Michael Oriard that DeLillo is trying to satirize those who “cheapen experience”
through the use of clichés, or that he believes a “sufficiently fertile imagination” could or should avoid such un-nuanced speech (245). DeLillo sees these
clichés as attempts to capture experiences and ideas that seem to escape the
words that try to describe them. These clichés are a “denial of silence” because
the person who uses them refuses to accept the notion that words might fail
to express how he or she is feeling.2
The same is true of the maxims barked by coaches at practice every day.
DeLillo presents the assistant coaches as mechanically spouting vague jargon
regardless of who is hearing it. One coach approaches the running backs and
addresses them:
2 Quite far from satirizing the simplicity of clichés, DeLillo seems to admire the sentiment and the aesthetics behind the proverbial
statements. His attention to cliché and jargon reflects Richard Lanham’s “anti-textbook” on style, in which Lanham explained that,
“clichés are petrified metaphors. The moralist stresses the petrified, berates the stale language and, if a critic, numbers the blessings
of poetry. Poetry, by putting language under pressure in new verbal environments, creates it anew, refreshes it, invents new metaphors or… galvanizes the clichés with irony. Stress the metaphor and we see jargon begin. Clichés work paradoxically, as a generally shared specialist language (special to situations, not speakers). They develop from the pleasures men take in language” (82).
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Guards and tackles, I want you to come off that ball real quick
and pop, pop, hit those people, move those people out, pop
them, put some hurt on them, drive them back till they look
like sick little puppy dogs squatting down to crap. (28)
When the players inform him that he is addressing the wrong group, he seems
undeterred and tells them to “Hit somebody. Hit somebody. Hit somebody.”
And that is exactly what the players do. We are told many times that the action
on the field is clear and simple. Players run, hit and execute, and the “daily
punishment” on the field reduces complexity (31). Because, as Gary insists
early on, “football players are simple folk. Whatever complexities, whatever
dark politics of the human mind, the heart—these are noted only within the
chalked borders of the playing field” (4).
But this, of course, is taken ironically by the reader, because nowhere else
in sport are we presented with more cognizant athletes. For example, there is
Bing Jackmin, the kicker who speaks of the “psychomythical” and “hyperatavistic” double nature of football players. There is Anatole Bloomberg, Gary’s
three hundred pound roommate who has come to Texas to “unJew” himself
and escape from pressures of historical guilt, and who often talks of the expansion of his own body, describing his weight as being like an “overwritten
paragraph” (48). There is also Billy Mast, the player who is taking a class on
the “untellable,” where students are asked to recite words from a language
they have never spoken or heard before in an effort to find if there are words
that exist beyond speech. Though Billy never fully describes or explains his
class to teammates, the “untellable” is perhaps the central theme of the book.
The recitation of unfamiliar languages, just like the recitation of over-familiar
clichés, represents a grasping for an experience beyond the words we use to
express ourselves. DeLillo has suggested that
The “untellable” points to the limitations of language. Is there
something we haven’t discovered about speech? Is there more?
Maybe this is why there’s so much babbling in my books.
Babbling can be frustrated speech, or it can be a purer form, an
alternate speech. (LeClair, 8)
This babbling is best demonstrated when Gary meets his friend Myna in the
library. Myna, an overweight girl who initially refuses to lose weight to succumb
to the obligations and responsibilities of accepted standards of beauty, usually
meets with Gary on picnics; their encounters marked by the consumption of
food. But like Bloomberg, Myna’s weight seems to represent the comfort of
language for Gary. In their encounter in the library, though, a simple game of
reading words from the dictionary out loud to each other begins to animate
passions between them. “The words were ways of touching and made us want to
speak with hands,” Gary said. But instead, the sexual excitement causes Gary to
start babbling, looking for that purer form of speech. He began to make “bub-
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bling noises,” he made “strange noises of anticipation (gwa gwa),” he “brought
new noises to the room, vowel sounds predominating” (217). Myna doesn’t
reply with sound, but her body answers by “positing herself as the knowable
word, the fleshmade sigh and syllable” (218).
Myna and Gary’s roommate, Bloomberg, give him comfort because their
weight and their willingness to consume is marked with this association to
language. Gary affectionately envisioned being overweight as “the new asceticism” and saw it as “the opposite of death” (49). But it also marked the
opposite of his own hunger strikes that surface when his fear of silence takes
hold. Early on, when the “menacing” silences of the desert unnerved him, he
gave up eating meat (31). At the end of the book, after finding out Myna had
given up on her own obesity and shed pounds in an attempt at redefinition,
Gary seemed confronted with another menacing silence that words could not
protect him from. “Don’t use words,” a friend says when asking his opinion of
the new Myna. “Either you like her this way or you don’t. You can’t get out of
it with words” (229). This time Gary eventually gave up eating and drinking
altogether, leaving him hospitalized and brain damaged, being fed through a
tube in the book’s anti-climactic ending.
Gary’s demise is presented in direct contrast to Taft Robinson, whose real
haunting of the book comes at the end when his own personal achievements
tower over Gary’s failure. For Taft has learned to embrace the silence that Gary
still fears. Taft’s acceptance of this silence finally brings on the only telling reference to Wittgenstein, whose study of the limitations of language seeps through
the pages of the entire book. “Two parts to that man’s work,” Gary thought of
Wittgenstein. “What is written. What is not written. The man himself seemed to
favor second part [sic]. Perhaps Taft was a student of that part” (233). DeLillo’s
reference reminds us, as Gary Storoff pointed out, of Wittgenstein’s belief in a
“transcendental reality, which to him does exist but is ineffable and ‘unthinkable’” (Storoff, 240). Clearly the inspiration for the theme of the “untellable,”
DeLillo’s reference alludes to Wittgenstein’s ending of the Tractatus, where he
suggests that “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (108).3
This understanding that there are unattainable truths better accepted in
silence comes easily to Taft, though remains frightening for Gary.
In the final pages, Taft is given his only meaningful exchange in the book,
where he reveals that he no longer intends on playing football. Gary meets the
news with shock, and feebly tries to construct an argument against the decision out of meaningless jargon: “It becomes a question of pursuing whatever
it is you do best. It’s a damn shame to waste talent like yours. It almost goes
against some tenuous kind of equilibrium or master plan. Some very carefully
balanced natural mechanism” (234). But the real equilibrium that is upset is
3 Many analyses of End Zone, like Messenger’s or Storoff’s, either quote or paraphrase D. F. Pears’s and B. F. McGuinness’s translation of the
Tractatus, in which the last line reads “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” But like David Cowart, I choose to quote C.
K. Ogden’s translation, instead, because its structure, balance and rhythm better reflect the attention that DeLillo, himself, applies to language.
Landon / Sport Fiction and the Untellable
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Gary’s sense of security in the jargon and repetition of football. After already
losing a thinning Myna as a source for comfort, Gary seems less upset by the
departure of Taft from the team than he is by the thought of his own alienation
from football. Taft, who now claims to think only about football in “historical
perspective,” has learned to accept the silence that Gary still fears and that seems
to be keeping him in the game. Telling Gary that he tries “to create degrees of
silence” in his life, Taft explains:
The radio is important in this regard. The kind of silence that
follows the playing of the radio is never the same as the silence
that precedes it. I use the radio in different ways. It becomes
almost a spiritual exercise. Silence, words, silence, silence,
silence. (239-240)
Though this silence seems to Gary to be tainted with death, the main notions of mortality in the novel are emphasized more by his obsession with
nuclear holocaust. This theme of apocalypse mirrors the use of football in the
novel, but contains the gravitas and severity that some may see missing in sport;
it is the extreme that helps balance the use of sport for structure in life. Just as
he did with the jargon of football, Gary finds comfort in the words describing nuclear warfare: manuals describing technology and fallout, “words and
phrases like thermal hurricane, overkill, circular error probability, post-attack
environment, stark deterrence, dose-rate contours, kill-ratio, spasm war” (21).
Gary seeks out Major Staley, an ROTC instructor on campus, to ask about what
the destruction might be like, and eventually they play a crude war game—a
simulation meant to demonstrate the sequence of events that may lead to a
full-scale global nuclear war. Like football, this game creates a sense of order
modeled around the language supporting it.
DeLillo, whose work is always concerned with the violence of everyday life,
intentionally mirrors the violence of nuclear war to the violence on the football
field. But DeLillo is not interested in the tired comparison between football and
war. Alan Zaplac, one of Gary’s professors, insists that he “reject[s] the notion of
football as warfare. Warfare is warfare. We don’t need substitutes because we’ve
got the real thing” (111). Though DeLillo plays with this at times, even having the
Major describe the humanization of war as being like football, rather than vice
versa. Instead of the intense escalation most assume would accompany nuclear
war, the Major suggests “there’d be all sorts of controls. You’d practically have a
referee and a timekeeper” (82). DeLillo’s comparison of football and war does
not ultimately revolve around the violence of the two, but rather it is centered
on the way jargon is used to create order from that violence; he is interested
in the shared language of end zones. “Major, there’s no way to express thirty
million dead. No words,” Gary suggests. “They don’t explain, they don’t clarify,
they don’t express. They’re painkillers. Everything becomes abstract” (85). But
just as Emmet Creed is known for “bringing order out of chaos” on the football
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field (10), the Major explains to Gary that the clean, clinical language used to
describe nuclear war can bring meaning out of violence:
I’m not some kind of monstrous creature who enjoys talking
about the spectacle of megadeath, the unprecedented scale of
this kind of thing. It has to be talked about and expounded on.
It has to be described for people, clinically and graphically, so
they’ll know just what it is they’re facing. (85)
This need to talk about and expound on inflicted violence comes across
clearly after the football game against their rival, Centrex Biotechnical College.
The team from Logos does not just lose, it loses badly, and amidst the mood
of post-game depression Gary asks Billy Mast for a summary of the damage.
In the same simple, clinical language that the Major saw needed in nuclear
terminology, Billy gives him the injury report with technical precision and no
emotion. Going from player to player, he lists each injury with a simple phrase
before describing it in detail: collarbone, knee, knee, ankle, shoulder separation,
bit tongue, pulled hamstring, broken finger. The team captain comes around
to say more about the loss, but describes it only in clichés:
We didn’t give it enough. We didn’t let it all hang out. But
it’s over now and we still have two games to play. Next week
we find out what we’re made of … We have to shake it off
and come back. We have to guard against a letdown …
Kimbrough’s over in the other bus saying the exact same thing.
We worked it out at breakfast, word for word (148-149).
That the team captains agreed, “word for word,” that these clichés were the
best way to address the loss is consistent with the ways in which DeLillo has
his characters try to simplify their reality through various jargons in the book.
But I don’t think for a minute that this novel is a critique of the simplicity of
sports or even a condemnation of the meaninglessness of jargon. DeLillo shows
that the simple clichés used in football, as well as Major Stanley’s clean, clinical
description of nuclear war, do have a meaningful purpose—to create a sense
of order out of the chaos of life—but he also shows that they ultimately fail in
their job. The sense of order created by language in football or war, as well as
all the other games in the novel, never seem to bring as much comfort as they
are expected to. In this regard, DeLillo’s vision is certainly bleak, but it is not
satire, as Jill Benton has previously suggested in Aethlon.4 Football is a game
structured in part by language, offering a sense of order—even if that perceived
order is illusory or incomplete—but in that regard, it is no different than the
4 While it is clear that End Zone represents DeLillo’s view of language-as-game, I think Benton’s description of this game as one
“whose rules can only produce reified human experience” (7) oversimplifies DeLillo’s relationship with language. As David Cowart
has suggested, DeLillo is certainly “an adept parodist of the specialized discourses that proliferate in contemporary society—in sport,
business, politics, academe, medicine, entertainment, and journalism.” But Cowart adds that DeLillo’s “interest in these discourses
goes beyond simple parody, and it is the task of criticism to gauge the extra dimensions of DeLillo’s thinking about language” (2).
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game of fiction that DeLillo, himself, plays. Just like Wittgenstein’s idea that, in
different language games, words can do more than simply describe the world,
DeLillo sees fiction as a realm determined as much by the aesthetics of a word
as it is by its meaning. He has admitted that he will freely change the meaning
of a sentence while writing merely to preserve a certain rhythm or beat that he
feels developing in the words, because he sees the “basic work” of writing as
being “built around the sentence.”
That is what I mean when I call myself a writer. I construct
sentences. There’s a rhythm I hear that drives me through
a sentence. And the words typed on the white page have a
sculptural quality. They form odd correspondences. They
match up not just through meaning but through sound and
look. They rhythm of a sentence will accommodate a certain
number of syllables. One syllable too many, I look for another
word. There’s always another word that means nearly the
same thing, and if it doesn’t then I’ll consider altering the
meaning of a sentence to keep the rhythm, the syllable beat.
I’m completely willing to let language press meaning upon me.
(Begley, 91)
To a certain extent, all sports fiction—actually, all sports writing—plays this
same game of language. It is a game in which we try to drape language over
physical actions and experiences that often challenge, frustrate, and defy words.
This is why Taft and all other “naturals” in sport really are, like Wittgenstein,
students of what is not written. It is also, I believe, why we often claim that good
sports books are not really books about sports, because the true meanings of
the games we watch and play do not rest in the scores or statistics or even the
words used to describe them. The meaning of sport can be found in the experiences that surround and reinforce the game. But these are often experienced
somewhere beyond speech, and require longer metaphors for us to situate in
the known and familiar. The challenge of sports writing is somehow to convey
this mystery; that sport itself does at times become the untellable.
Works Cited
Begley, Adam. Interview, 1993. Conversation with Don DeLillo. Ed. Thomas DePietro. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 2005.
Benton, Jill. “Don DeLillo’s End Zone: A Postmodern Satire.” Aethlon XII:1, Fall 1994: 7-18.
Cowart, David. Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002.
DeLillo, Don. End Zone. New York: Penguin Books, 1972.
DeCurtis, Anthony. Interview, 1988. Conversation with Don DeLillo. Ed. Thomas DePietro. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 2005.
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Lanham, Richard. Style: An Anti-Textbook. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974.
LeClaire, Thomas. Interview, 1982. Conversation with Don DeLillo. Ed. Thomas DePietro. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 2005.
Messenger, Christian. Sport and the Spirit of Play in Contemporary American Fiction. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1990.
Nelson, Michael. “College Sports Books Go Varsity.” The Chronicle Review, June 10, 2005: B6-B9.
Oriard, Michael. Dreaming of Heroes. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1982.
Storoff, Gary. “The Failure of Games in Don DeLillo’s End Zone.” American Sport Culture: The
Humanistic Dimensions. Ed. Wiley Lee Umphlett. Toronto: Bucknell University Press, 1985:
235-245.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by C. K. Ogden, New York: Dover
Publications, 1999.