White noise
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Kronick, Joseph. "Libra and the Assassination of JFK: A Textbook Operation." Arizona Quarterly 50.1 (Spring 1994): 109-32. Michael, Magali Cornier. "The Political Paradox within Don DeLillo's Libra." Critique 35 (1994): 146-56. Millard, Bill. "The Fable of the Ants: Myopic Interactions in DeLillo's Libra." Postmodern Culture 4.2 (January 1994): n.p. Mott, Christopher M. "Libra and the Subject of History." Critique 35 (1994): 131-45. Thomas, Glen. "History, Biography, and Narrative in Don DeLillo's Libra." Twentieth Century Literature 43.1 (Spring 1997): 107-24. Wacker, Norman. "Mass Culture/Mass Novel: The Representational Politics of Don DeLillo's Libra." Works and Days 8 (Spring 1990): 67-87.
Baker, Peter. "The Terrorist as Interpreter: Mao II in Postmodern Context." Postmodern Culture 4.2 (January 1994): n.p. Bizzini, Silvia Caporale. "Can the intellectual still speak? The example of Don DeLillo's Mao II." Critical Quarterly 37.2 (Summer 1995): 104-17. Hughes, Simon. "Don DeLillo: Mao II and the Writer as Actor." Scripsi 7.2 (1991): 105-12. Scanlan, Margaret. "Writers Among the Terrorists: Don DeLillo's Mao II and the Rushdie Affair." Modern Fiction Studies 40 (1994): 229-52. PAFKO AT THE WALL Duvall, John N. "Baseball as Aesthetic Ideology: Cold War History, Race, and DeLillo's 'Pafko at the Wall.' " Modern Fiction Studies 41 (1995): 285-313. OTHER CRITICISM BOOK SECTIONS Aldridge, John. The American Novel and the Way We Live Now. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983: 53-59. Discusses Players. Atwill, William D. Fire and Power: The American Space Program as Postmodern Narrative. Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, 1994: 139-56. Discusses Ratner's Star. Berman, Neil David. Playful Fictions and Fictional Players: Game, Sport, and Survival in Contemporary American Fiction. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1981 [47-71]. Discusses End Zone. Brooker, Peter. New York Fictions: Modernity, Postmodernism, and the New Modem. London and New York: Longman, 1996 [229-36]. Discusses Mao II. Chénetier, Marc. Beyond Suspicion: New American Fiction Since I960. Translated by Elizabeth A. Houlding. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. Passim. Civello, Paul. American Literary Naturalism and Its Twentieth-Century Transformations: Frank Norrís, Ernest Hemingway, Don DeLillo. Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, 1994 [112-61]. Discusses End Zone and Libra. Day, Frank. "Don DeLillo." Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Novelists Since WWII. Vol. 6. 2nd series. Edited by James E. Kibler, Jr. Detroit: Gale Research, 1980 [74-78], Frow, John. Marxism and Literary History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986 [139-47]. Discusses Running Dog. Gardaphé, Fred L. "Don DeLillo's American Masquerade: Italianità in a Minor Key." Italian Signs, American Streets. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996. 172-92. Only substantial discussion of early story "Take the 'A' Train"; also treats "Spaghetti and Meatballs," Americana. Ickstadt, Heinz. "Loose Ends and Patterns of Coincidence in Don DeLillo's Libra." Historiographic Metafiction in Modern American and Canadian Literature. Edited by Bernd Engler and Kurt Müller. Paderborn, Germany: Ferdinand Schðningh, 1994 [299-312]. Johnson, Diane. "Terrorists as Moralists: Don DeLillo." Terrorists and Novelists. New York: Knopf, 1982 [105-110], Discusses Players. McClure, John A. "Systems and Secrets: Don DeLillo's Postmodern Thrillers." Late Imperial Romance. London: Verso, 1994 [118-51]. Discusses Players, Running Dog, The Names, Libra, Mao II. Mullen, Bill. "No There There: Cultural Criticism as Lost Object in Don DeLillo's Players and Running Dog." Powerless Fictions? Ethics, Cultural Critique and American Fiction in the Age of Postmodernism. Edited by Ricard Miguel Alfonso. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996 [113-39], Nadeau, Robert. Readings from the New Book on Nature: Physics and Metaphysics in the Modern Novel. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981 [161-81]. Discusses DeLillo's novels through Running Dog. Oriard, Michael. "Don DeLillo." Postmodern Fiction: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide. Edited by Larry McCaffrey. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986 [323-36]. Discusses the novels through White Noise. ——. Dreaming of Heroes: American Sports Fiction, 1868-1980. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1982 [241-50], Discusses End Zone. Incorporates Oriard, cited on page 533. Saltzman, Arthur M. Designs of Darkness in Contemporary American Fiction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990 [45-51]. Discusses The Names. ——. The Novel in the Balance. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993 [83-96], Discusses Ratner's Star. Storoff, Gary. "The Failure of Games in Don DeLillo's End Zone." American Sport Culture: The Humanistic Dimensions. Edited by Wiley Lee Umphlett. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1985 [235-45]. Tabbi, Joseph. Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from
Weinstein, Arnold. Nobody's Home: Speech, Self and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993 [288-315]. 1NOTES ON CLOSING THE LOOP: WHITE NOISE Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Penguin Books, 1986; The Viking Critical Library, 1998), 60. 2 Don DeLillo, The Names (New York: Vintage, 1989), 313. 3 Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star (New York: Vintage, 1989), 4. 4 Don DeLillo, Americana (New York: Pocket, 1973), 198. 5 Robert R. Hams, "A Talk with Don DeLillo," New York Times Book Review (Oct. 10, 1982): 26. 6 In a letter to me, dated Nov. 8, 1985. 8 Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature (New York: Bantam, 1980). 9 Don DeLillo, "American Blood," Rolling Stone (Dec. 8, 1983): 27. 10 . Cleo Birdwell, Amazons (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980). 11 . Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). 12 . Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World (New York: Bantam, 1984), 128-29. 13 . Caryn James, " 'I Never Set Out to Write an Apocalyptic Novel.' " See page 333 of this volume. 14 . Anthony Wilden, System and Structure, 2nd ed. (London: Tavistock, 1980), 400, 410. 15 Michel Serres, "The Origin of Language: Biology, Information Theory, and Thermodynamics," in Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, ed. Josue V. Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 81. 16 NOTES ON THE (SUPER)MARKETPLACE OF IMAGES: TELEVISION AS UNMEDIATED MEDIATION IN DeLILLO'S WHITE NOISE Paul Cantor also wishes to show how DeLillo in White Noise "is concerned with showing parallels between German fascism and contemporary American culture" ("Adolf," 51). He has a brief but interesting discussion of DeLillo's repeated use of Hitler in his fiction prior to White Noise ("Adolf," 40-41). 17 For Neumann, "monopolistic system profits cannot be made and retained without totalitarian power, and that is the distinctive feature of National Socialism" (Behemoth, 354). Neumann's belief that democracy would destabilize monopoly capitalism, however, does not anticipate the totalizing power of multinational capital. 18 Eugene Goodheart suggestively links these spheres of consumption when he notes that "the two main sites of experience and dialogue are the supermarket and the TV screen" and that the supermarket is "a trope for all sites of consumption" in the novel ("DeLillo," 121-22). Thomas J. Ferraro asserts that Don DeLillo's fiction "lies at the cutting edge of mass-culture theory because he struggles to imagine how television as a medium functions within the home as the foremost site for what sociologists call our 'primary' social relations" ("Whole Families," 24). Ferraro's sense of the ways in which television "reconstructs the nature of reality itself" ("Whole Families," 26) aligns his reading with the postmodernism of both Jean Baudrillard and Frederic Jameson. 19 Michael Valdez Moses, who reads White Noise against Heidegger, argues that "the technological media . . . alienate the individual from personal death" by "imposing an increasingly automatic and involuntary identification with the camera eye," which creates the illusion "that the witnessing consciousness of the individual television viewer, like the media themselves, is a permanent fixture possessing a transcendental perspective" ("Lust," 73). 20 Cantor, meditating on this course description, argues that DeLillo wants to suggest "that the spiritual void that made Hitler's rise possible is still with us, perhaps exacerbated by the forces at work in postmodern culture" ("Adolf," 49). 21 Frow's assertion is part of a larger claim about White Noise and DeLillo's relation to the postmodern. Frow sees DeLillo representing the postmodern sublime, a sublime in which our terror derives from "the sense of the inadequacy of representation . . . not because of the transcendental or uncanny nature of the object but because of the multiplicity of prior representations" (see page 418 of this volume). Frow convincingly argues that DeLillo is sensitive to the intensely mediated nature of contemporary experience. 22 Frederic Jameson, in opposing the postmodern sublime to that of Edmund Burke and Kant, suggests that "the other of our society is ... no longer Nature at all, as it was in precapitalist societies, but something else which we must now identify" (Postmodernism, 34). And though Jameson resists simply substituting technology for Nature as the horizon of aesthetic representation, he does see such reproductive technologies as the computer and television as "a distorted figuration ... of the whole world system of present-day multinational capitalism" (Postmodernism, 37). 23 Michael W. Messmer, using Baudrillard's and Eco's articulation of the hyper-real, argues that the blurring of boundaries between the real and the simulation creates "a distancing which is conducive to the fascination which DeLillo's characters experience as they witness disasters through the medium of television" ("Thinking It Through," 404). More pointedly, Goodheart notes: "We repeatedly witness the assassination of Kennedy, the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, the disintegration of the Challenger space shuttle in the sky. Repetition wears away the pain. It also perfects the image of our experience of it. By isolating the event and repeating it, its content, its horror evaporates. . . . The event becomes aesthetic and the effect upon us anaesthetic" ("Don DeLillo," 122). 24 Jack later repeats exactly Heinrich's line when he picks up his daughter at the airport. Moments before, terrorized passengers deplane from a flight that had experienced a four-mile drop. Jack's daughter wonders where the television crews are, but Jack tells her, "There is no media in Iron City." Her response, though inflected as a question, is actually a statement, one that repeats the lesson of Heinrich's mass murderer and the tv man's outrage: "They went through all that for nothing?" (92). Once again White Noise reminds us that the medium of television has been so internalized in contemporary consciousness that experience can no longer be perceived as immediate without the electronic representation. 25 . Of such moments Lentricchia wittily notes: "Jacques Lacan said the unconscious is structured like a language. He forgot to add the words 'of Madison Avenue' " ("Tales," 102). 26 . Ferraro says of this scene that "Jack's urge to shop" is largely motivated by "a sense of disappointment in the supposed 'community' of the university" ("Whole Families," 22). Such a reading seems to psychologize Jack and shift the focus away from the productive forces that created Jack as a consumer. 27 . DeLillo's Mid-Village Mall seems to come straight out of Baudrillard, who sees in such spaces "the sublimation of real life, of objective social life, where not only work and money are abolished, but all the seasons as well—the distant vestige of a cycle finally domesticated! Work, leisure, nature, culture, all previously dispersed, separate, and more or less irreducible activities that produced anxiety and complexity in our real life, and in our 'anarchic and archaic' cities, have finally become mixed, massaged, climate controlled, and domesticated into the simple activity of perpetual shopping" ("Consumer," 34). Because Jack shops in the corporate space of the mall, it does not matter what he buys, only that he buys: "Consumers are mutually implicated, despite themselves, in a general system of exchange and in the production of coded values" ("Consumer," 46). 28 . This catalogue of consumption does not find its completion until Jack, raking through the grotesque and equally detailed catalogue of garbage compressed by the family trash compactor, confronts "the dark underside of consumer consciousness" (259). This confrontation occurs because the immediacy of the nebulous mass in Jack's body, the result of his exposure to the toxic cloud, overwhelms the aestheticizing power of shopping and television to repress death; he seeks in the trash the stronger anti-depressant Dylar. Jack the ironist is ironized for he sees in the garbage only an "ironic modernist sculpture," noting with formalist pleasure "a complex relationship between the sizes of the loops, the degree of the knots (single or double) and the intervals between knots with loops and freestanding knots" (259). By this aestheticizing, Jack misses the more relevant loop of production, consumption, and pollution that have created the very chemical spill that may cause the death he seeks to block from his thoughts. As is so often the case, Jack's sense of life's mystery is actually a mystification. 29 . In his reading of the barn, Lentricchia argues that "the real subject is the electronic medium of the image as the active context of contemporary existence in America" ("Tales," 88); the scene opens up the question, "What strange new form of human collectivity is born in the postmodern moment of the aura, and at what price?" ("Tales," 92). For a parallel but differently articulated reading of the barn, see Lentricchia's discussion in "Libra as Postmodern Critique" (195-97). 30 . See Cantor ("Adolf," 51-53) for a detailed comparison of the way Jack's Hitler and Murray's Elvis are paralleled. 31 . My reading of Murray in part grows out of Tom LeClair's comments. LeClair registers the significance of Jack and Murray's final conversation, noting that "Siskind's advice promotes a profoundly immoral act" (see page 401 of this volume). 32 . Since White Noise was published, the moment of the generic food product has passed, but not before it was thoroughly reified and corn-modified; the familiar white background with black letters used to sell everything from shirts to coffee mugs and even English basic courses (Robert Scholes, et al., Textbook). 33 For Lentricchia, "Willy [sic] Mink is a compacted image of the consumerism in the society of the electronic media, a figure of madness . . ." ("Tales" 113). 34 NOTES ON DON DeLILLO'S WHITE NOISE: THE NATURAL LANGUAGE OF THE SPECIES Baudrillard's essay was first published in Hal Foster's The Anti-Aesthetic and later expanded into a monograph with the same name; Jameson's essay appeared first in The New Left Review and was later made the introductory chapter to his massive Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism; Lyotard's essay was appended to his highly influential book, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. It was these texts, rather than the brilliant and innovative work of Ihab Hassan during the seventies and early eighties, that really broke down academic resistance to postmodernism. 35 Cf. Fredric Jameson's essay, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," 63, 58, and 85. In the book of the same name, the page references are 14, 6, and 46, respectively, though Jameson alters the language slightly in the first case. 36 Surely the most persuasive and helpful chapter in LeClair's In the Loop—a book which runs DeLillo's novels through a host of theoretical paradigms which often wrench the life right out of them—is the one in which he looks at End Zone in terms of Derrida's critique of logo-centrism. In that chapter, the fit between novel and paradigm is true. 37 Cf. Dennis A. Foster's "Alphabetic Pleasure: The Names" in Lentricchia's Introducing Don DeLillo, 157-173, particularly 159-160, for an evocative though all too brief exploration of DeLillo's interest in pre-linguistic utterance, using Julia Kristeva's ideas of the semiotic, the symbolic, and the chora as markers in his theoretical grid. 38 Any explication of what DeLillo means by "mystery" and the "swarming life just outside the range of human apprehension" threatens to become portentous, swollen by metaphysical—and yes, German—rhetoric. I'm afraid this is unavoidable. DeLillo's tightest philosophical connections are not with Baudrillard or Lyotard, but with Heidegger. Consider the similarities in their outlooks: their shared conviction that it is the "familiar" or the "at-hand" that yields the deepest meaning: their shared fascination with etymology; Heidegger's explicit belief, and DeLillo's performative one, that the world must be viewed from a stance of "radical astonishment": the closeness of the statements "language is the deepest being" (DeLillo) and "Language is the House of Being" (Heidegger); their concepts of immanence—Being for Heidegger, intimations of "presence" or "something hovering" in DeLillo; their metaphors of "illumination" or "unconcealment" in epiphany; and finally, their preoccupation with death. This essay will not offer a Heideggerian reading; however, while Heidegger begins his philosophical system with a conviction about Being's presence, DeLillo is never less than racked with ontological doubt. The "presences" that hover occasionally in DeLillo's fiction appear as fleeting visitations which leave nothing behind but an awed sense of wonder in those who witness them. Still, Heidegger's ghost exerts a powerful presence in DeLillo's work; he hovers over it all, or under it all—a fitfully locatable roar. 39 In the Paris Review interview, DeLillo says "with this book I tried to find a deeper level of seriousness as well. The Names is the book that marks the beginning of a new dedication" (Paris Review, 284). 40 We must tread carefully here. The Names is a dense and complicated book that is almost entirely about language, and I will delineate in this essay mainly what I consider DeLillo's breakthrough affirmation of human utterance. Yet, as Michael J. Morris has pointed out, the novel also engages the idea that language is profoundly dangerous, that in its zeal to name and denote, it "subdues and codifies" all that it touches (The Names, HO). Morris argues that in The Names, language, like international corporatism or the names cult itself, is repressive and murderous. Morris makes a fine case for this reading, but in the end he cannot explain the patently affirmative tone of the book's ending. As I'll try to show here, when DeLillo and his characters finally stop listening to language as denotation and listen to it as utterance instead—when at last language "evades the responsibilities of content"—what is immanent in language emerges, and the novel's powerful affirmation of language becomes possible. 41 James is really a changed man upon his return. He is able to quit his job immediately upon realizing he's been a CIA dupe, and he realizes that his own "blind involvement" in the CIA constitutes a "failure to concentrate, to occupy a serious center—it had the effect of justifying everything Kathryn had ever said about me. Every dissatisfaction, mild complaint, bitter grievance. They were all retroactively correct. It was that kind of error, unlimited in connection and extent, shining a second light on anything and everything. In the way I sometimes had of looking at things as she might look at them, I saw myself as the object of her compassion and remnant love" (The Names, 317). Finally, in quitting his risk analyst position, he's able to sit down and write the book we're reading: "These are among the people I've tried to know twice, the second time in memory and language. Through them, myself. They are what I've become, in ways I don't understand but which I believe will accrue to a rounded truth, a second life for me as well as them" (The Names, 329). James's reflections here are all life- and language-affirming, a far cry from his earlier cynicism and desperation. Owen is the immediate cause. 42 LeClair, see page 393 of this volume. DeLillo made this confirmation in personal correspondence to Le Clair. 43 . Becker, 15. Becker makes the primary argument about children and the fear of death on pages 13-23, but I can summarize by saying that for Becker "the child . . . lives with an inner sense of chaos" whose root is the organismic "fear of annihilation." This fear, Becker goes on, quoting Gregory Zilboorg, "undergoes most complex elaborations and manifests itself in many indirect ways." The death fear becomes in fact "a complex symbol and not any particular, sharply defined thing to the child." Thus, children's "recurrent nightmares, their universal fear of insects and dogs"—these and other fears have at their base the terror of death. Becker takes pains not "to make the child's world seem more lurid than it is most of the time"—Becker is an enviably quiet and balanced thinker—but he does insist that phenomenologically, having an infant's consciousness "is too much for any animal to take, but the child has to take it, and so he wakes up screaming with almost punctual regularity during the period when his weak ego is in the process of consolidating things" (Becker, 19-20). Yüklə 2,4 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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