Popular Culture Review Vol. 8, No. 2, August 1997 | Page 11

Expecting the Barbarians

and all return to their homes, so deep in thought?
Because night is here but the barbarians have not come.
Some people arrived from the frontiers,
and they said that there are no longer any barbarians.
And now what shall become of us without any
barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.^
As Kenneth Clark has written of Cavafy's barbarian invasion which
never comes, "It would have been better than nothing."® Of course,
Clark was applying Cavafy's cultural psychology to the gradual
decline of Greco-Roman civilization.
Indeed, Cavafy's idiosyncratic scenario might seem far
removed from contemporary American life, were it not for the fact
that Don DeLillo, one of the ablest fictional chroniclers of popular
culture since the sixties, critiques our own situation in strikingly
sim ilar terms.^ In the following scene from White Noise,
"barbarians" have left their grisly calling cards in a nearby town:
That night on TV I saw newsfilm of policemen
carrying a body bag out of someone's backyard in
Bakersville. The reporter said two bodies had been
found, more were believed buried in the same yard.
Perhaps many more. Perhaps twenty bodies, thirty
bodies—no one knew for sure....
A few nights afterward, however, no more bodies have been found in
Bakersville. The chilling similarity of the narrator's reaction to
that of the citizens of C.P. Cavafy's antique town requires no comment
from me:
The reporter seemed at first apologetic. But as he
continued to discuss the absence of mass graves, he
grew increasingly forlorn, gesturing at the diggers,
shaking his head, almost ready to plead with us for
sympathy and understanding.
I tried not to feel disappointed.^®