79 LITERATURE
Mirna Radin Sabadoš
University of Novi Sad
Faculty of Philosophy
Novi Sad, Serbia 
Zero-oneness of the world: geometries of space and time be-
tween subtext and surface – re-coding the structures of life
Summary
"e proposal that the world is made of sequences of zeros and ones, overtly expressed in DeLillo’s 
early novel Ratner’s Star (1976), marks the !rst time in DeLillo’s !ction that he introduces the 
idea that the (creation of) reality is of mathematical nature. "e “zero-oneness” of the world 
thirty odd years later, although it still may be an uncommon thought in literature, is ubiquitous 
in the visual arts, in !lm and in architecture, and binary code has become the basis of our 
digitally enhanced reality. Looking at DeLillo’s Millennial novels, this paper seeks to explore 
models of the space-time continuum of the !ctional reality that DeLillo constructs; focusing on 
Ratner’s Star as a literary exploration of a three-dimensional space and on the novel Body Artist as 
an investigation of the fourth dimension, pondering time, we hope to register the “sum total of 
one’s data” (WN) as the only palpable texture of DeLillo’s reality.
Key words: Don DeLillo, Ratner’s Star, Body Artist, space-time in !ction
Ničelnost sveta: geometrije prostora in časa med podtek-
stom in  površino – vnovično kodiranje struktur življenja
Povzetek
V svojem zgodnjem romanu Ratner’s Star (1976), ki odkrito obravnava svet kot zaporedje ničel in 
enic, DeLillo prvič izpostavi zamisel, da je ustvarjanje realnosti matematične narave. “Ničelnost” 
sveta kakih trideset let pozneje, čeravno ne tako pogosta misel v književnosti, je vsepovsod 
prisotna v likovni umetnosti, !lmu in arhitekturi, medtem pa tvori binarni sistem podlago za 
našo digitalno okrepljeno realnost. Članek proučuje DeLillove romane ob prelomu tisočletja 
in skuša odkriti modele avtorjevega prostorsko-časovnega kontinuuma !kcijske realnosti; s 
posebnim ozirom na roman Ratner’s Star, ki pomeni literarno raziskavo tridimenzionalnega 
prostora, in Body Artist, ki odkriva četrto dimenzijo ‒ čas, se članek nadeja vpogleda v »skupno 
vsoto vseh podatkov« kot edinega oprijemljivega tkiva DeLillove realnosti.
Ključne besede: Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star, Body Artist, prostor-čas v !kciji
UDK 821.111(73)–3.09DeLillo D.
DOI: 10.4312/elope.8.2.79-88

80 Mirna Radin Sabadoš Zero-oneness of the world: geometries of space and time between subtext and surface 
Zero-oneness of the world: geometries of space and time be-
tween subtext and surface – re-coding the structures of life
the structure of life itself has changed and will rapidly change in the near future.
Vinko Penezić and Krešimir Rogina 
the project “Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”
La Biennale di Venezia 2008
1. Universe expanding
T echne in Heideggerian terms is understood as a part of poeisis as much as of epistemology, a process 
of revealing as much as a process of creation.
1
 An architectural investigation into technology and 
the foundational elements of space of Croatian architects Vinko Penezić and Krešimir Rogina is 
an excellent example of how techne may be introduced into architecture as a strategy of creation. 
"eir project for the 2008 Venetian Biennial Exhibition “Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?” 
crafts a space which addresses “the structure of life” in its texture, implying its “zero-oneness”. 
T echnology is presented as a process of modeling of the domain of the real, rather than as an 
assembly of amusing gadgets. I take their project as an example, since it is my !rm belief that it 
represents an analogy and a rather well formed visual representation of the strategies Don DeLillo 
deploys in constructing his !ctional space-time continuums. Representing !ctional worlds from 
a similar perspective, in Body Artist as well as in Cosmopolis and more recently in Point Omega, 
Don DeLillo’s writing, leaving the ways of consumer society on the surface, focuses on exposing 
the evolution of the proposed “structure of life” and on the outcomes of the process. His !ctional 
worlds have often been understood and interpreted as postmodern, consumerist, arti!cial and on 
occasion even one-dimensional, inhabited by ideas, rather than by “real” characters. However, in 
an attempt to present an ultimately di*erent outlook and interpretation, the focus of this paper 
will be on his novels as an exploration of ideas about space, time and identities, possibly revealing 
disturbances in presenting “the real” through the layers of meaning which, as it turns out, do 
not always rise to the surface. "is will be an attempt to provide the argument that DeLillo’s 
writings address the “structure of life”, which we observe in development of thought, along with 
the development of technology, and in the change of worldviews.
It is my intent to explore a portion of DeLillo’s !ctional world which I believe best re+ects 
cultural outlooks through ideas of mathematics as its intertext or as its materialization of space/
time, expecting to !nd sometimes a desired equilibrium of texture, and at other times only a 
single thread of thought, establishing a foundation for the narrative world. I expect it to be a 
productive process inevitably involving destruction as one of its highest potentials, relying on the 
proposition that “[m]athematics is what the world is when we subtract our own perceptions” (RS 
432). "erefore, it is my intention to examine portions of the !ctional worlds DeLillo constructs 
1
 If we understand technology as deriving from this concept of techne, Heidegger continues, then we will see that its essence lies 
not in the instrumental production of goods or manipulation of materials, but in »revealing.« Remember that Heidegger has said 
something similar about the silversmith, who, through his techne, brings together the form and matter of the chalice within the idea 
of »chaliceness« to reveal the chalice that has been »on its way« to existence.
 »The Question Concerning Technology« as it appears in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, trans. William Lovitt, 
New York: Harper & Row, 1977 . http://www2.hawaii.edu/~zuern/demo/heidegger/

81 LITERATURE
in his novels Ratner’s Star, and Body Artist with respect to the ideas of “mathematical structures” 
involved in their creation. 
2. Cracks/strings/textures – fearful symmetries of space and time
Early in the novel Ratner’s Star, DeLillo, through one of the numerous characters, introduces 
one of the ideas which perhaps should be considered crucial for all the three novels and their 
changing worlds:
“In some shape or other we try to !nd the pictorial link between the universe and our own 
senses of perception,” Nyquist said. “What does the universe look like? A balloon that’s 
expanding? A funnel full of ball bearings? A double helix? A strip of paper twisted and 
connected in a one-sided ring? Where are we in the universe? We can’t see enough of it to 
say.” (RS 49)
"e metaphor in the project by Penezić and Rogina emphasizes that the change of beliefs about 
the structure and function of space on a macro level (i.e. the universe in di*erent historical 
periods) introduces a change in the attitudes on a micro level. In their Manifesto of Architectural 
Counterrevolution, they propose that human perception of the world/universe has changed 
from a +at plane to a !rm structure of a globe and further to the impalpable sequences of 
endless networked structures, and that the change in our understanding of the world facilitated 
the change in the perception of architecture as one of the most obvious manifestations of the 
physical world; the new vision accepts only for its most vital structures a process of destruction 
as a mechanism of creation. Applying similar logic, DeLillo in his novel Ratner’s Star (1976), 
plays with the ideas which are the basis for the conceptualizing of the universe, incorporating 
both widely accepted models as well as some purely theoretical ones. In his novel Body Artist 
(2001), however, he explores the ideas of time from the perspective of the Millennium, focusing 
on di*erent micro levels of perception. We observe the shift of thought – from a system in which 
the concept of reality and its shape is represented by the either/or opposition in Ratner’s Star, to 
the parallel universes co-existing inside human consciousness symbolized by streaks of time in 
Body Artist, which will further extend to the idea of spatiotemporal networking whose vitality 
embraces the processes of creation and destruction equally, in Cosmopolis. One of the basic ideas 
bringing us into the process is overtly expressed already in Ratner’s Star:
Once we go beyond planar surfaces we see how mysterious a subject is the geometry of 
space and time. Who is turning the laws of the universe upside down and were they true 
laws to begin with? (RS 89)
DeLillo’s geometries of space and time grow more abstract as the propositions (mathematical 
foundations) they are presumably based upon become more explicit. In other words, in Ratner’s 
Star, mathematics is most explicitly a part of its text, while the space and time of the narrative 
are bordering on pure abstraction. However highly elaborated, they seem as if they never left the 
blackboard. On the other hand, in his Millennial novels, mathematics is not close to the story, it 
is buried in the deep structure of events; it is a subtext, whilst the !ctional space-time seems to 
belong to the realm the reader would recognize as his or her own reality. 

82 Mirna Radin Sabadoš Zero-oneness of the world: geometries of space and time between subtext and surface 
T o reach for the “mathematical” which is hidden beyond the obvious in order to illustrate the 
process, I have decided to try to rely on the visual, exposing geometrical !gures which are either 
present in the narratives or are considered symbolic in the interpretation of the narratives – the 
imaginary, yet ever so realistic “stellated twilligon” and a concept of a mohole in Ratner’s Star, and 
a Moebius strip as a symbol of in!nity in Body Artist. All the !gures, although very di*erent, 
correspond to the idea that the fabric of the real is always a sequence of “ones and zeros” as its 
smallest constitutive meaningful units.
3. From Armillary Sphere to a Stellated Twilligon,  
into a Mohole (Ratner’s Star) and back
Ratner’s Star is not thought to be one of DeLillo’s major works, although the author himself 
considers it to be his best early work – one of the greatest obstacles to its reading being the setting 
of the story, which, although it had been interpreted as a postmodernist rabbit’s hole where the 
main character, Billy T erwiliger, would correspond to (a version of) Alice in Wonderland, still 
is a much less arbitrary or random place than one would expect. Although it seems also to be 
governed by unstable principles not easily understood, Mark Osteen in his elaborate study on 
Ratner’s Star (2000) suggests that the lack of understanding of the novel should be sought in its 
“cartoonish characters, static structure and arcane subject matter” (Osteen 2000, 61). Osteen 
declares that the inner model of Ratner’s Star’s “speculative meditations on the ‘unsolvable knot’ 
of the science and mysticism” (61) experiments with the blending of many genres and struggles 
to lead the narrative towards numerous possible aims. Although it is undoubtedly impossible 
not to agree with Osteen’s observations, for the purposes of this analysis, I would choose to 
follow an isolated thread of this narrative which exposes, before all, the power of a belief in the 
“genesis” narrative (scienti!c hypotheses included) and focuses on the testing of vitality of the 
reality-structure based on a foundation lacking certainty – vitality being its capability of adapting 
to “the change of belief”. 
"e story of Ratner’s Star revolves around two simple tasks – a coded message believed to originate 
from outer space, namely from the direction of “the Ratner’s star”, and the processes involved 
in !nding a solution to the proposed riddle, namely: who sent it, what the message means, how 
it will change the course of history. It tells a story of human perception of the (single, relevant) 
reality structured from the perspective of science, incorporating as its text history and the logics 
of mathematics on the one hand, and juxtaposing it with experience and belief presented as 
an integral part of scienti!c processes. Beyond this fairly simple story stretches a vast network 
of events and characters who perform numerous tasks and whose presence or absence may be 
interpreted in many di*erent ways to serve as many purposes. However, some of the people, and 
some of their ideas, strike us, as Osteen declares, as a “dream-text that dramatizes the powerful, 
unforeseen e*ects of the underworlds that exist beneath our day-time reality” (61). One such 
idea, challenging the power of belief and introducing a “dark side” to the equation of this 
narrative universe, is the idea of a “stellated twilligon” as the model of the world accompanied by 
the idea of a mohole as the measure of its reality.

83 LITERATURE
A Mohole,
2
 according to Ratner’s Star, traps all the forces in the universe; they are not entities, 
nor are they forces, they cannot be represented and constitute a “value-dark dimension”. It is a 
rather self-centered theory represented by a controversial !gure of a scientist by the name Orang 
Mohole:
"is is Moholean relativity, just beginning to attract attention, very controversial, named by 
me after myself. What I theorize happens in a mohole is that X-rays, gamma rays, ultraviolet 
light, radio waves, gas, dust clouds and so forth are trapped and held by relativistic forces 
we don’t fully understand as yet — forces created in the !rst one thousandth of a second 
after the universe began. (RS 181)
As Osteen suggests (2000, 78), Mohole’s is a theory composed out of the portions and fragments 
of Einsteinian relativity and Heisenbergian quantum mechanics modeled so as to invert the 
principles of General theory of relativity. "e theory states that, instead of being the same for 
everyone in the system, space and time are actually di*erent for everyone in a mohole universe, and 
what is more, that in order to exist, a moholean universe depends on the observers’ interpretation 
(a touch of empiricism) and on the uncertainty principle which presupposes that one can never 
be certain that anything exists to observe, since the process of observation alters the observed 
(which belongs to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle). "e model of such a Moholean universe 
in the novel would be a “stellated twilligon” – a !gure of a “boomerang”, bearing a somewhat 
di*erent signi!cance for the protagonist Billy T willig.
“My model of the universe is open at the bottom, closed at the top. Imagine two triangles 
sharing the same base. With one abnormality: the base is invisible. "is gives us two apexes, 
representing the closed top, while the lack of a base signi!es the invisible mass. Can you 
visualize such a !gure?”
“A stellated twilligon.” (RS 181)
"e analogue universe of this !ctional place drifting outside geography which functions as the 
setting for the story, Field Experiment Number One, or FENO, is burdened by the spatial 
forms of cycloid and of an armillary sphere and by a mindset grounded !rmly in traditional 
science. Even though such a world may not be identi!ed as a “possible reality”, it nevertheless 
resists the temptation of embracing a possible variation – a Moholean universe. It remains only a 
gateway, granting access to the world of a Wonderland, a “realm of dreams that constantly change 
according to the dreamer’s needs or desires” (Osteen 2000, 78) to the more or less deserving. 
"e possibility of existence of such a reality is being challenged with ardor by the idealistic, high-
modernist tirades, glorifying the space-time grounded in o<cially recognized mathematics; a 
stream of consciousness of another controversial scientist in the novel, by the name of Endor:
Mathematics is the only avant-garde remaining in the whole province of art. It’s pure art, 
lad. Art and science. Art, science and language. Art as much as the art we once called art. It 
2
 Project Mohole historically belongs to geosciences and represents a term a 1960s project which was to be an equivalent to the 
space race in the Earth sciences. Named after a Croatian scientist, Andrija Mohorovčić, the project aimed to drill through the Earth’s 
crust to the area called Mohorovčić discontinuity, which is thought to separate Earth’s crust from its upper mantle. The project was 
discontinued in 1966.

84 Mirna Radin Sabadoš Zero-oneness of the world: geometries of space and time between subtext and surface 
lost its wings after the Babylonians !zzled out. But emerged again with the Greeks. Went 
down in the Dark Ages. Moslems and Hindus kept it going. But now it’s back bright as 
ever. I got too careless for mathematics. Forgot how swift and deadly it can be. (RS 85)
"is juxtaposition of ideas, each creating a fabric of reality of its own and being mutually exclusive, 
functions as a guideline for the reader which should lead to a conclusion that mathematics, 
too, is the fruit of human imagination, as much as a Mohole universe is. However, as Osteen 
comments, for Endor, even so, the !ctions which mathematics has to o*er, are privileged, 
universally veri!able, and engender real-world improvements (Osteen 2000, 79). And indeed, 
in the !rst half of the novel, mathematics is the belief presented as the grounds of reality for the 
protagonist, as well as for the reader.
Although initially it seemed that the two possible universes belonged to di*erent planes of 
existence, one being reality, and the other something else, much to the protagonist’s disbelief, 
the two proposed systems start to overlap, and not only in claiming the !gure of stellated 
twilligon. "e world of FENO will start to +uctuate, resembling the realm of dreams 
constantly changing with the dreamer’s needs in the attempts to break the code and to create 
a meaningful message out of sequence of zeros and ones. At the same time, the shared space 
and time will indeed become di*erent for everyone in the underground research unit, in the 
bat caves, in their canisters and in the padlocked rooms. At one point Billy will ask himself 
if Endor became a recluse and an eccentric not because he had not solved the problem but 
because he has – towards the end of the story – the cracking of the code also produces cracks 
in the reality of the FENO universe:
What they’ve apparently discovered is that we are in the mohole, if that’s the way to 
phrase it. "is solar system appears to be what we call mohole-intense. We are part of 
the value-dark dimension. All along we’ve been anxious to identify a mohole somewhere 
out there. We felt it would help us con!rm the path of the radio message. And it has, 
it has. In a wider application we were sure it would shed valuable light on the mohole 
phenomenon itself. But we never anticipated !nding a mohole so close to right here, to us 
right here. Evidently it’s just happened, it’s extremely recent, we’re right in it. Everything 
around us on out at least to the most distant planet and right in to the sun itself, our sun, 
we ourselves, all of us, people, matter, energy, we’re part of a mohole, we’re in it, we’re 
mohole-intense. (RS 410) 
Finishing the novel with a solar eclipse as the solution to the riddle – more speci!cally, the 
solution to the riddle was the exact time of the eclipse in binary code – DeLillo seems to initiate a 
new cycle that is to produce a texture of reality rather di*erent from the one of three-dimensional 
space.  Here, time, the fourth dimension, is the key, or our perception of it is the key, since telling 
time and keeping it has so many di*erent implications. 
Accordingly, although they do not belong to the same plane chronologically, Ratner’s Star on a 
subtext level seems to have a lot in common in the observations of reality through the fourth 
dimension with DeLillo’s !rst Millennial novel the Body Artist.

85 LITERATURE
4. Model of the world inside out – a Moebius strip (The Body Artist)
“What does the universe look like? … A strip of paper twisted and connected in a one-
sided ring? Where are we in the universe?”  (RS 49)
Never mind the time theorists, the cesium devices that measure the life and death of the 
smallest silvery trillionth of a second. He thought that we were the only crucial clocks, our 
minds and bodies, way stations for the distribution of time. "ink about it, Einstein, my 
fellow Albert. (Underworld 235)
Time observed through human experience is a rather complex notion, if we bear in mind that 
the process of transformation of the perception of time through information technology became 
the basis for a new contemporary social system, resulting in the formation of the “space of +ows”. 
Perception of time has changed through history depending on the context, however, in Western 
societies, Newtonian interpretation of time as absolute, placed time in a position of the highest 
organizational principle in nature. Before Newton,  time existed in portions of variable size – 
changes of day and night, seasons, changing, religious holidays, all served as time markers. "ey 
were points in time which traced its +ow, which could be !rstly described as circular, and only 
then as linear. When societies introduced mechanical devices to measure time, and relied on the 
movement of planets and stars to mark its +ow, or when we dived into the insides of an atom 
of cesium to build an “atomic clock”, time lost its circular movement and became purely linear, 
absolute and objectively quanti!able. Such “time” conditions how we perceive history as human 
experience, as a !nite and de!nite sequence of reference points on a timeline. 
DeLillo plays with the idea by constructing a character, Lauren Hartke, a conceptual artist, 
the protagonist of the novel Body Artist, and has her in her performance “Body Time” portray 
precisely these aspects of our perception of time. She seems to be looking for a balance between 
the time which has stopped inside her being and the machine-constructed time ticking away 
from her computer screen even when no conscious minds register its +ow. In the process the 
reader discovers a multitude of universes sprouting inside out, building individual portions of 
in!nity.
"e novel Body Artist was published in 2001, and according to the majority of reviews, was 
surprisingly di*erent from his previous novel Underworld, both in volume and in scope. It is 
an intimate narrative about the personal drama of a lonely woman, and within her story, it is a 
manifesto disclosing layers of time – it tells about di*erent perceptions of time and about di*erent 
ways of registering time passing and measuring whatever we are left with inside the boundaries 
of our existence. It is constructed around a rather unusual artist and her attempts to come to 
terms with the trauma of her husband’s suicide and about her need to recreate sequences of 
time through her art, reconstructing segments of her universe between memory and the present 
linking perception of time to the performance of her own body. Her performative acts elaborate 
the idea that our perception of the body, i.e. the medium which signi!es the body, is inseparable 
from the body’s raw form (Wegenstein 2006, 32) – claiming that the body is always conditioned 
by the process of mediation. However, for Lauren Hartke, her body is not only a mediating form 
between the subject and the world; it is a place uniting the holistic and the fragmented. Within 

86 Mirna Radin Sabadoš Zero-oneness of the world: geometries of space and time between subtext and surface 
the !ctional universe, although it perhaps may appear di*erently, there is no objective world out 
there and another subjective universe inside her being. In accordance with Merleau-Ponty’s claim 
that “the subject and the world become one in the +esh” (ibid.), Lauren Hartke’s performance 
“Body Time” demonstrates precisely phases and layers of the fusion. 
In the performance Don DeLillo moulds Lauren’s body into a set of universal bodies, re+ecting 
feminist theory from Donna Haraway and Judith Butler to Elizabeth Grosz and Luce Irigaray. 
Lauren’s body is an accumulation of di*erent media layers which facilitates perpetuation of the 
identi!cation process, since layers may be deactivated or reinstated. Gender as a category is 
released from assumptions and stereotyping and it becomes a free nomadic performative feature 
of identity. Lauren’s friend Mariella Chapman will call it Lauren’s power of transformation, and it 
will render femininity mysterious and empower it to incorporate both of the sexes and numerous 
nameless states (BA 110).  "e body operated by “Body Time” is a direct demonstration of 
the perception of the body as a space of social interaction; Lauren makes her body a medium, 
creating the circumstances for it to accommodate the universal space of con+ict.
Behind the obvious, in the performance, there is an ongoing process which rede!nes the balance 
between body and mind, exaggerating mediation through the layers of time – merciless online 
“realtime” on her monitor, time trapped in a moment, symbolized by the old Japanese woman 
in the garden, the time of the wrist watch a woman needs to catch up with by trying to get a cab, 
and !nally her inner unspeakable time arising from Lauren’s grief projected as an interpretation 
Mr. T uttle. 
You are made out of time. "is is the force that tells you who you are. Close your eyes 
and feel it. It is time that de!nes your existence…Time is the only narrative that matters. 
It stretches events and makes it possible for us to su*er and come out of it and see death 
happen and come out of it. (BA 92)
Lauren is destroying dichotomies subject/object, or inside/outside which corresponds with the 
model of corporeality of Elizabeth Grosz, with the +uid body; her model assumes an open and 
+exible set of meanings, interventions and reconstructions, generating the metaphor of creation 
from inside out. Visualizing the process, Grosz uses the Moebius strip analogy – aspects of the 
inner in a subject directly lead to the outer planes of the body, which destroys all the dichotomies 
related to the perception of the body. 
"e model of the Moebius strip allows for the subjectivity to be interpreted not as a combination 
of psychic deep and corporeal surface (Wegenstein 2006, 23), but as a surface which records 
rotations in 3D space creating the e*ect of depth (Grosz 1994, 210). "e body, its image, 
according to Bergson contains two aspects which occasionally and paradoxically unite. On the 
one hand, body image is a materialization of the subject’s perception of their own corporeality. 
"e body is a necessary mediator between identity and the unknowable reality outside the body; 
it governs the relationship with the outer reality through the images. Our own image is the core 
of being and its perception, it is a certain form of an interface towards the world (Bergson in 
Wegenstein 2006, 29). On the other hand, Bergson’s image de corps points out that the body is 

87 LITERATURE
a creation which facilitates the perception of the world around us.
3
 Both of the related aspects 
of corporeality are re+ected in the performance “Body Time” – Lauren’s body is simultaneously 
the mirror and the screen onto which the images from the outside are projected, and the center 
of perception, a shape created in the center of perception, although it is constantly changing, 
becoming a Bergson’s body, a +exible boundary between future and the past (ibid.). 
Me, my body, are rather a set of molecules and atoms which are constantly renewed. It is 
a state of matter too hot for one to be able to distinguish solid bodies in it. It is a world of 
universal variation, of universal undulation, universal rippling: there are neither axes, nor 
centre, nor left, nor right, nor high nor low. (Deleuze 2005, 58)
Much like the moholean universe in Ratner’s Star, shattering the “conventional” one to pieces, 
here too, in a process of destruction, “Body Time” will preserve Lauren’s most vital structures, 
allowing her creativity to complete the Moebius strip, blurring the boundaries of the inside 
and the outside. Lauren’s time, measured with her body has completed a cycle. "e texture of 
her world, though, does not become lighter nor does it become any clearer. Here DeLillo is 
challenging his reader as much as he is doing so with the structure of the universe in Ratner’s 
Star – time we culturally perceive as linear, as it is projected in our language through tenses, as it 
is presented as a sequence of more or less related events in history. In Body Artist, DeLillo seems 
to be telling us that the time of the online clock Lauren is watching on her computer screen, is a 
dimension outside her reality. It is perhaps outside the reality of any human life; only subjective 
time exists observed as a cycle, twisting its inside on the outside at the moment it reaches its own 
completion – a Moebius strip, in!nity.
5. Conclusion
Structures of life in DeLillo’s novels, although almost never explicitly presented, seem to be as 
much a projection of his characters’ mindsets as a consequence of social interactions and beliefs 
accepted in contemporary cultures. "e time-space continuum in his !ctional worlds re+ects 
the transformation of technologically enhanced environment of the post-industrial, postmodern 
world, not unlike the one described by Manuel Castells (2000a) in his seminal work !e 
Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture – “!e rise of networked society.” Castells suggests 
networks as a new social morphology of our societies. Ratner’s Star and Body Artist initiate a 
reconstruction of the system of belief, challenging the old, creating open space for the new, 
therefore allowing the change to take place, even though in the novels themselves the suggested 
course of change is far too abstract and, if you like, in the case of Ratner’s Star, plain wrong from 
today’s perspective. Perhaps that is also a reason why the greatest value of these not so popular 
novels often remains hidden behind the rather di<cult reading cluttered with abstractions. Yet, 
if we focus on the key points – space, time, and technology, it requires little e*ort to imagine 
the world presented by Castells as one of the possible realities of DeLillo’s !ctional universes. 
"e dynamics of the social structures de!nes space, according to Castells – it is therefore not 
readymade, but rather generated by the actions taking place at particular moments. 
3
 There is one reality, at least, which we all seize from within, by intuition and not by simple analysis. It is our own personality in its 
flowing through time – our self which endures (9). Our intelligence can place itself within this mobile reality, and adopt its ceaselessly 
changing direction; in short, can grasp by means of that intellectual sympathy which we call intuition (69). Bergson 1949.  

88 Mirna Radin Sabadoš Zero-oneness of the world: geometries of space and time between subtext and surface 
Geometries of space and time in Ratner’s Star and Body Artist in their textures suggest future 
clusters, spaces of +ows and fully generated networks which re+ect contemporary universes of 
DeLillo’s worlds in the novels Cosmopolis and !e Falling Man, con!rming once again that, 
however we choose to see our space-time, models of it remain !rmly rooted in science, technology 
and mathematics, even if most of us remain unaware of it. "is levels out their vitality and 
potentials against the magnitude of the processes of de(con)struction they are able to endure.
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