Week 1 – Page 6 – American Postmodernism

“Toyota Celica”

In class we brought up the passage containing the line “Toyota Celica,” and the confusion behind its meaning; however, then and now, I myself can’t get past the thought that this line and others like it are mainly Delillo’s attempt to make us laugh. Lines like this are absurd, and seem to add to the absurdity of everything that is going on in the plot before they occur. “Toyota Celica” is a perfect example of this:

Steffie turned slightly, then muttered something in her sleep. It seemed important that I know what it was. In my current state, bearing the death impression of the Nyodene cloud, I was ready to search anywhere for signs and hints, intimations of odd comfort. I pulled my chair up closer. Her face in pouchy sleep might have been a structure designed solely to protect the eyes, those great, large and apprehensive things, prone to color phases and darting alertness, to a perception of distress in others. I sat there watching her. Moments later she spoke again. Distant syllables this time- but a language not quite of this world. I strruggled to understand. I was convinced she was saying something, fitting together units of stable meaning. I watched her face, waited. Ten minutes passed. She uttered two clearly audible words, familiar and elusive at the same time, world that seemed to have ritual meanings, part of a verbal spell or ecstatic chant.

Toyota Celica.

A long moment passed before I realized this was the name of an automobile. The truth only amazed me more. The utterance was beautiful and mysterious, gold-shot with looming wonder. It was like the name of an ancient power in the sky, tablet-carved in cuneiform. It made me feel that something hovered. But how could this be? A simple brand name, an ordinary car. How could these near-nonsense words, murmured in a child’s restless sleep, make me sense a meaning, a presence? She was only repeating some TV voice…(154-155)

We discussed the possibility of this passage and others being Delillo’s shots at American consumerism. And while maybe he is trying to make a point here, I can’t help but think he’s not as serious as he may sometimes be taken to be. Nothing in the passage leading up to “Toyota Celica,” about Steffie’s sleep-talking was really as mind-blowing and crucial as the passage makes it out to be, as Jack is watching her. For me, the only thing that this passage is really doing is poking fun at the fact that when we all read “Toyota Celica” after a passage like this, we are all going to scratch our heads and wonder what all deep symbols this absurd statement carries in it. “Ten minuted passed,” seems to be making fun of us trying to find deeper meaning as well- ten minutes pass while we struggle in vain to pick out the profundities of this statement. It really just seems like another sardonic statement to me, but I could be wrong. It does stand out, but I’m not sure Delillo meant for readers to look into it as much as they may tend to.

*Also, sorry this is a little late!

just in ontime, sex, drugs, government control

reading the scene during the airborne toxic event where gladney is talking to the realbutsimulation officer i was surprised in how ahead of his time delillo was. maybe he wasn’t far ahead of his time. since orwell writers have explored the idea of government knowledge and personal privacy.

gladney is, to an extent, an everyday citizen who lives in an interpretation of what the world was in 1985, not some hero of a distopia novel, but he worries what extent of his personal information has been examined by the officer in order to determine how threatened by nyodene d he might be. “where was it located exactly?…what else did he know? did he know about my wives, my involvement with hitler, my dreams and fears?” (p.140)

postmodern is based on reference within reference where culture becomes art, not vise-versa. we must then ask whether orwellian paranoia is a reaction to the world and a distrust that developed out of the actions of the government, or if it was the ideas written about in such books as 1984 that became the worries of the common american. did the paranoia about government control of the culture end up in books or did books create the paranoia of the culture?

it may seem like a circular argument but it could be applied to almost any concept of our culture. in sex, drugs, and cocoa puffs, klosterman writes that during the first few seasons of the real world, he saw people on the show that reminded him of people he knew. after a few seasons the opposite became true: he now met people who reminded him of characters on the show. while something was attempting to reflect real life, all it did was create an image of real life and real people for our society to emulate.

the same could be said about novels from orwell to delillo, the reasons behind the postmodern distrust of government could be postmodern in themselves-people becoming the fabricated image of reality they are presented with.

Death / Fear of (Blog Post #2)

(Vague Spoilers for some of you[?], and somewhat tangential.)

It is interesting to look at how the different characters in White Noise react to their own preoccupation with death. (“Death has always been a preoccupation of man” ? Anyways… ) Heinrich’s clinical, detached perspective and fascination with atrocities is offensive to us, in light of Jack’s fate. But Jack himself had a similarly detached perspective earlier in the novel, before the exposure. So Heinrich static character acts as a foil to Jack’s existential pondering, and later Babette’s.

And then the Dylar is introduced. Obviously, the drug starts off as an object of foreboding, becoming a tiny counterpart to the Nyodene D threat. The cloud is an overwhelming phenomenon, opaque and oppressive, confronting the community as a whole with their fears (although noticeably not forging any real sense of community in the process, either overall or within the family). The Dylar, in contrast, is insidious, encapsulating (ambivalent on that pun) the paranoia / hypochondria of the modern consumer. Both, however, render their effects in unseen, uncertain ways. Unnatural death for people in developed countries is no longer an external issue in the way that we think of it as spectacle in developing countries (fires, tsunamis, etc.). Instead it is a delayed, lifelong process – anxieties about plastic leaching into drinking water, unexplainable, gradual neurological malfunctions, and so on. It seems that, in general, the paralyzing fear of, or obsession with, non-immediate health problems is a luxury of the developed world. It is difficult, however, to determine the main cause of these anxieties. Information saturation (“white noise”) seems to be the largest component, but we are also living in a society where medications and (really) health problems are marketed directly to the consumer. “Instant gratification” culture does not engender a psychological acceptance of the possibility of ongoing, debilitating health problems.

Failure

(If you haven’t finished the book, I’d skip my post for the time being. I don’t want to ruin the end for you.)

If “all plots tend to move deathward” (26), but nobody dies, then is the plot complete? I don’t believe the absoluteness of this statement, that all plots move in this direction, but the phrase and its failure to come to fruition in the novel called my attention to the multiple instances that failed in the novel.

There are parallels to be found in the attempt of Orest to set his record of time spend in a space with venemous snakes and with Gladney’s way of dealing with Willie Mink. Gladney mentions his plan several times to “swivel my head to look into rooms, put him at his ease, wait for an unguarded moment, blast him in the gut three times for maximum efficiency of pain, take his Dylar, ger off at the river road, shut the garage door, walk home in the fair and the fog” (293). But neither of these events is realized in quite the way they had envisioned. Orest is forced underground, the humane society is against him and his attempt, four snakes are provided instead of twenty-seven and his is bitten within minutes. So despite the exhaustive preparation, his moment of glory only results in him being a “jerk” as Heinrich put it. Gladney’s revenge follows a similar pattern. He doesn’t put in the effort Orest does, but his revenge, his quest for Dylar, encounters results that are much the same. He doesn’t kill Willie Mink; he is himself shot and on top of it all, he discovers nuns don’t believe in heaven and angels either (not immediately relevant, but an interesting conversation).

The two events were both ways of challenging death, to stare it in the face (cliche, I know) or to absorb somehow the life of another by becoming a killer and not a “dier”. So what’s the conclusion about death then? If plots move deathward, but nobody dies and attempts to challenge death or gain life from death fail, then is it more about failure than death? Because it isn’t just Orest and Gladney who are failures (their’s just concern death), but there are additional things in the story: Dylar did not work, the town did not evacuate due to a strange smell, despite the extensive practice drills, and the supermarket fails to provide the comfort after re-arranging its shelves. Do all these failures tie in with the critique of consumerism and mass culture perhaps? I don’t know yet.

The Political Antecedents

Jean Baudrillard does quite the number on liberal ideology in his piece, ‘The Precession of Simulacra’. The great work of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein is very much a symbol of hope for our modern day journalists, that there are perhaps those who will not sit by abated by the scandals of the White House filling their articles and instead set out to inspire someone out there to take notice and put an end to them. Does Jon Stewart and Bill Maher really want Bush to leave, or to pass on the punching bag McCain would very well become? They are liberal talking heads, and yet they fight the forces which make their shows so powerful, painful, and awfully damn funny with 99% of their talking points. To say that Woodward and Bernstein were mere pawns, or even concious manipulators, in the turnover of power, even the destruction of true political morality, strikes of grand apostasy. Furthermore, to denounce the great social contract which allows us liberals to constantly hold our government accountable to a higher standard as flim-flam, that power has never and will never reciprocate that contract outside of political conventions, and that to fight with whatever tools we have to get what’s always been acknowledged as ours (social justice) merely aids in the procession of next wave of corrupt politicians…well, needless to say, our friendly Frenchman invited quite an amount of rancour on my part.

Well, I must say that I can’t completely disagree with him. Take the 9/11 Truth movement, for instance. Regardless of my stance on the subject, I saw in his discussion of Watergate an eerie simularity. As much as O’Reilly and the rest would love to point to liberal freak-shows as the main purveyors of what surely is one of the greatest calumnies of our American government, the fact remains neither Barack nor Hillary nor the ever loquacious Biden have even mentioned this atrocity. However, John Buchanan (Republican presidential contender in 2004, fighting for the Truth movement) and Chuck Baldwin (Constitutional Party presidental nominee this year, a ‘right-wing fringe group) are perhaps the most vocal advocates, seemingly out to inundate their own party for the death of thousands of innocent Americans. In Baudrillard’s view, these men are either out for the selfish reasons of getting Bush and Cheney and the old Republican guard out of the picture or are out for their eponymous Truth. Can Baudrillard, as with Watergate, claim the only way to maintain any political justice is to forget about the alleged conspiracy, and instead blame these candidates for pretending any justice could possibly exist in Washington?

I believe that this small example shows the issue one might have with Baudrillard on the much larger issue of who to vote for this election. With both parties, especially the incumbant party, calling for change, are we all simply duped into believing this to be a possibility? Or, must we just be amazingly ‘naive to see an embittered good conscience at work here’ (100). Does either candidate really mean to change the business of Washington? I think Baudrillard would say we’re helplessly fighting the ‘precession of simulacra’. Obama’s appeal relies on his appearance of change–as he says, ‘he doesn’t look like those presidents on dollar bills.’ He’s channeling JFK, most strikingly Jimmy Carter, even Mr. Lincoln, with the idea of adding historical precedent to an otherwise ahistorical candidate. He is the change of the past and the face of the future, all in one earnest and appealing package. McCain–he relies on his former position as a maverick to call for change, but also to warn us that the wrong change will throw us into a communist, god-hating, valueless USSA. These bottled packages and ideas and rechanneled fears and hopes–what is real? This is politics, but surely what we feel, those ecstatic tingles we feel when a phrase or policy strikes the timbre and heartstrings we assume have laid dormant these past eight years: those are certainly very real for me. Yet Baudrillard, in his way of viewing things, sees all this as a farce, as the ever-shifting tango of corrupt power, all to the beat of the never-changing capitalist drums. Let us hope he is wrong. Obviously I have enlarged and politicized a small component of his argument, but that is how things reach my perception in this most political of years, where Baudrillard seems to attack everything I’m fighting for with my one frail vote.

Week #2 – The reluctance of characters in White Noise to say what they really mean

DeLillo goes into detail to describe the conversations Jack Gladney has with family and friends. The conversations that stick out to me most include the bedroom conversation between Babette and Jack in Chapter 7 in which they argue for almost two pages about who should be pleasing whom. Jack says about the interaction, “I get the feeling a burden is being shifted back and forth. The burden of being the one who is pleased” (28). Both are reluctant to spell out what they want and instead act ridiculously polite.

Though the interaction was supposed to be arousing (it’s about sex), the conversation is not sexy at all. I got the feeling that neither wanted to be pleased, and that perhaps neither wanted to do the pleasing. Babette doesn’t necessarily enjoy reading “sexy stuff” to Jack, though she seems to do it regularly-just like she reads the supermarket tabloids to Old Man Treadwell even though she thinks the reading material is trashy. Why does she do this?

Another conversation that stuck out to me was one that Jack and Babette had with Murray Siskind in Chapter 9. Murray invites Jack and Babette to dinner, but is inordinately polite about it to the point that it sounds self-deprecating and silly. He says:

I don’t want to feel like I’m holding you to something. Don’t feel you’ve made an ironclad commitment. You’ll show up or you won’t. I have to eat anyway, so there’s no major catastrophe if something comes up and you have to cancel. I just want you to know I’ll be there if you decide to drop by, with or without the kids. We have till next May or June to do this thing so there’s no special mystique about a week from Saturday. (40)

He seems desperate to make sure they know he isn’t trying to force them into “an ironclad commitment,” giving them several ways to back out of his invitation to dinner. He never says, “I really want you to come to dinner.”

In both conversations, there’s a noticeable reluctance to state clearly what one wants, how one truly feels. People in the novel seem to use others as a gauge for how they should feel. I think that’s why the family watched Wilder “with something like awe” after his marathon crying session. Jack describes Wilder as coming back from “a place where things are said,” emphasizing how people don’t really say what they mean (79). Wilder’s crying was a true, intense expression of personal feeling, something that his family regards as a feat “of the most sublime and difficult dimensions” (79).

Wilder doesn’t seem like a “normal” child. Jack mentions that he thinks Wilder is too big to sit in the supermarket shopping cart, yet it is his childlike behavior that endears him so much to Babette. Does Wilder have a mental disorder? It hasn’t been explicitly mentioned.

Inquiry Debriefing

Bear with me here; I am tired.

The part of the essay I found most difficult was finding a way to generalize and correlate distinct components of the mysticism that DeLillo grants his settings. Fortunately, he seems to use characters throughout the novel to present various hypotheses about how meaning is constructed in consumerist society, and once remembering and locating these, the going got a lot easier. I also had difficulty at times telling if I was being hyperbolic, as the characters occasional fall into reveries which can be difficult to categorize as either valid within the meanings of the text as a whole or merely as products of individual characters.

I was interested to notice how much depth there are to character’s own preoccupations, in spite of the “shallowness” of consumerist culture, and how fundamental some of the issues are in a philosophical sense

The most difficult/surprising thing about the power haunt

The most difficult thing about the power haunt inquiry was trying to reign in all the ways that the single power haunt (in my case, the ATM) related to million other themes in the novel. The novel is so dense that a single paragraph can allude to millions of different ideas. It was also difficult to pin down exactly how the place was a “power haunt” or a “source.” Even Gladney himself didn’t really understand why certain things and places had a mystical, spiritual element to them. Trying to talk about all of these themes within a coherent argument with a logical structure was tough. Themes branch out and connect in non-linear ways.

In writing this inquiry, I ended up thinking about themes in the novel I hadn’t expected to discuss or even find in the passage I was analyzing. For example, I discussed a seemingly random line about the deranged man being escorted out of the bank within the paragraph in which Gladney discussed his ATM transaction. That led me to compare the state-mandated insanity of the crazies in the insane asylum and the zany citizens of Blacksmith who are allowed to roam free.

Inquiry #1

I found that the amount of sensory detail woven through the accounts of the Gladney’s shopping spree at the Mid-Village Mall was so large that it was hard to glean every bit of information to put into my paper on how the mall is a sort of mystical source of comfort, practically breathing a life of its own, supernaturally. There were so many different sites and sounds to take into account….

inquiry 1

the hardest part about the first paper was trying to find an argument to make. i could come up with arguments for each specific quote and tie one to another so that slowly the argument would change, but i found myself arguing different–though not conflicting–themes throughout the paper. another part i found difficult was deciding which passages would best support my point and which seemed like they would help but were really just ‘white noise.’ hahahahaha not funny. but really, there wasn’t conflicting information but an overwhelming amount of it.

the length of the paper surprised me. i felt like i was going to have touble even writing three pages but almost up to four pages there were still many passages i could have used to develope each theme further and even argue new ones. i was alsosurprised how the same information–such as the white packaging or the supermarket being sealed–could be used to argue different ideas and the layers that could e found within the text.

new post

How do you classify any one place as more important, more powerful, more haunting than another, especially in the case of White Noise? Everything seems to compound and condense itself so that the demarcations of where television ends and the character’s thoughts begin, or where one influence ends and another begins seem impossibly gray and vague. While writing my paper, I was forced to choose, and what with my inclination to assume no place more powerful than another, my answer remained frustratingly unsatisfactory. It did of course reiterate a point of DeLillo’s–that of separate mediums entangling themselves–but it didn’t help my case of specifically noting a place of paticular prescience. The suprise of all this, though after four years of such surprises one would assume I’d become immune, was how easily I’ll b.s.ed by way into believing my paper made a strong argument with valid points. In such postmodern cases as this (a blatant misuse of the term) I think I may have to enjoy the overwhelming ambivalence and ambiguity (and let’s not forget irrationality) of my theses. PEACE

Inquiry #1

I guess I was suprised by all the little details I noticed, and how they fit together so well (the lists of threes happen much more often than I first thought), and the fact that I noticed them after walking away from the paper for a while.

The thing I found most difficult was trying to keep it concise and limited. The little things in a particular passage were applicable to so many other ideas found throughout the novel.

Comments on Inquiry 1

The most difficult aspect of doing the inquiry was deciding what details to focus on to support my main points. There was so much richness to the text; everything had the potential to have “meaning” and to suggest multiple themes. So I guess narrowing things down to categories of detail (I chose objects, events and dialogue) was one challenge; the next was deciding what details to select within those categories.

The most suprising aspect of this exercise is that the closer I read, the more interconnected I felt the text was within the scene that I chose (supermarket). The events, the objects, the dialogue were, in my mind, more deliberately and carefully chosen by DeLillo than I had at first thought; in other words, there as a “method” to his randomness.–Trish

DeLillo and White Noise: Is there a method to his meandering?

One aspect of Don DeLillo’s White Noise that intrigues me is the novel’s narrative style and structure. The author certainly opens his novel in a traditional way: he sets the scene of a college campus and the circumstances of the narrator and his wife and family. And certainly DeLillo’s telegraphic sentences, almost Hemingway-like, are straightforward and factual. He’s sparing in his use of adverbs and adjectives and generous with his nouns and verbs. But there is so much that is unexpected about this narrative style, which must have seemed astonishingly fresh, if not puzzling, to readers in 1985. DeLillo effortlessly moves back and forth between the present tense and past tense. Much of his narration consists of sentence fragments. He includes seemingly irrelevant sentences or sentence fragments in seemingly random areas of the text (“The Airport Marriott, the Downtown Travelodges, the Sheraton Inn and Conference Center” [15]; “We believed something lived in the basement” [27]; “We had two closet doors that opened by themselves” [64]; “MasterCard, Visa, American Express” [100]).

Along the same lines, interspersed throughout the narrative are references to disembodied bits of television broadcasts, often begun with the phrase, “The TV said” (95, 96). This narrative style, I am certain, is carefully constructed to reaffirm the ubiquitous presence of advertising (billboards and elsewhere) and of television and to point to the fragmentary nature of our modern-day, media-soaked experience. It’s just a little, well, disconcerting, because it seems like an odd overlay to the story unfolding before us. But perhaps, as I suspect, that’s the whole point.

Further, there is quite a bit of dialogue to consider in looking at the narrative style, which often gives us our only glimpse of emotions and feelings of the characters, but often the dialogue veers “off topic” and peters out without coming to a conclusion (hmm, sort of like my conversations with my 20-year-old). There are also seemingly random events and scenes to wonder about. The mysterious crying jag of Babette’s son Wilder (75-79), for example, seemed bizarre and unrelated to the story. This narrative style strikes me as “deliberately randomized” to achieve effect.

Is DeLillo toying with readers, asking us analyze and connect these odd scenes and sentences and get to a “deeper” meaning? Having read only to page 105, I don’t know, but I’m guessing it will continue in the same vein and that he will make us work hard to peel back the layers of this intriguing novel.

While slow soaking my tomatoes…

As I sat on my small porch that has been taken over by my tomatoes, herbs, lettuce and broccoli (my attempt at a gardening in an apartment), I was slow soaking my tomatoes (the best way to water them), and reading White Noise (while underlining and making notes in what I forgot was a library book). I finished Chapter Six and remember thinking – that it was probably the most post-modern thing I’ve come across. But then I had to think about why. And here’s what I’ve come up with…

In the conversation about rain between Heinrich and Jack, Heinrich continually response with questions to the questions that his father puts forth. “What truth does he want? What good is my truth? Is there such a thing as now? How do I know that what you call rain is really rain? What is rain anyway?” It is a constant challenge to the power of language, symbolism, and the weight of an idea if looked at as a subjective thought and not a concrete reality. But I don’t think that captures all of it. I think it is part of understanding that the not knowing, the “only guessing” is postmodern in and of itself. It is in part why Huyssen took a “different route” in his essay “Mapping the Postmodern” and did “not attempt here to define what postmodern is,” and instead decided to discuss the characteristics of the phases of postmoderism because of the limitations of language. He concluded that it is moving beyond the binaries and into the tension between them (much like we discussed in class), that there is a breakdown in what is what. Or maybe the conversation is more easily linked to the discussion of Plato’s “simulacrum” in the Jameson essay as an example of a “culture of the simulacrum (that) comes to life in a society where exchange value has been generalized to the point at which the very memory of use value is effaced.” Heinrich voices this idea in a way that captures some what I’ve come in the last week to think of as post-modern. A kind of blurred feeling out of gray areas, and an expression of only guessing.