Blog #4 — Mother Truant and Echo

As it stands I’ve still only done through Thursday’s reading (up to p.106 and Appendix 2-D and E), so my comprehension for this post will be limited compared to some. I thought that White Noise offered a lot of divergent interpretative possibilities… obviously House of Leaves blows it out of the water and leaves me feeling a little stymied.

I found the mother’s letters to be really compelling, they offered an emotional resonance or intimacy that I felt was otherwise lacking due to the psychological stress placed on the characters in the main text. But beyond that, there were some disturbing echoes (hm, echoes) of Pelafina’s words in Zampano’s text. The most glaring one was briefly mentioned in class: sad news “tore me [Pelafina] to pisces” and Pan “tears [Echo] to pisces” (599 and 41). There are a number of interpretative possibilities here. Obviously, this brings authorship / narrative reliability issues into question in an even stronger way than some previous anomalies (the water heater / heater, etc.). However, I’m more interested in why this correlation appears where it does, in the passage about the mythological nymph, Echo. Certainly, Truant’s mother is a tragic, isolated figure, appearing only via her voice (ok, letters), and prone to loquaciousness. Like Echo and Narcissus , she sees herself as being impossibly separated from Johnny (although we learn that he has visited her several times) . She is also clearly knowledgeable about the classics and has other obscure knowledge (ex. Old English). At one point she refers to herself as “Sibyl of Cumae” (642). According to Wikipedia (most professional of sources), sibyl were legendary female oracles or prophetesses, and the Cumaean Sibyl was an especially significant one. According to legend she arrived unknown to the last king of Rome providing him with books of prophecy. Additionally, in Virgil’s fourth Eclogue she gives voice to what people later came to see as a Messianic prophecy for the coming of Christ. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumaean_Sibyl ]

My reasoning for mentioning all this is that it shows Pelafina’s willingness to embrace her ego and position herself and her son in the classical pantheon (although this may be purely to appease her poetic sensibilities), and in the role of the prophetess, or prophetic voice. This is what makes the inclusion of the offending phrase in Zampano’s text so compelling. House of Leaves, obsessed with semiotics, asks us how we construct meaning in an unreliable framework of hyper-heteroglossia. Truant’s mother becomes conflated with the mythological, the timeless, while simultaneously, and by her own admission, being “hopelessly unreliable” (636).

I’m not sure what I’ve said but I hope you guys got something interesting out of it, something to think about.

By the way, have you guys noticed that the book has an index? Pretty handy.

( Is the cutoff for submission exactly 12:01 a.m. Sunday? If so I’m late by about 15-20 minutes. Apologies.)

A slave to the big picture

At some point the idea needs to sink in that this project, this inquiry 2, does not warrant a visual representation of the preplexity of the novel (which my Esheresque attempts seem to presume) but instead a compilation of some data, something quantifiable.  Whereas I seem focused on how these narratives and perspectives intertwine and compliment each other, the first part of any map-making project is a steady, informed delineation and demarkation.  This novel that is swirling in my head, a multivarious morass to be sure, is currently defying such attempts.  My problem is that, apparantly like Danielewski in his ironic way–but I could be way off–scholarly interpretation and single-minded focus on certain themes or individual characters seems to risk some deadening of the narrative thrust of the work.  (Imagine how much smoother a reading of House of Leaves would be without constantly checking the bottom of the page and rummaging through esoteric, recondite, and sometimes, or most of the time, imaginary sources; but then such a loss would lessen one of Danielewski’s greatest sources of humor; but can that be said to be the point of the actual scholars?).  Empathizing with the freneticism that spawned that last aside might help you understand my problem.  Ahhh, but I digress…

If Danielewski can allow for the varying discourses of architecture, aural mathematics, labyrinthine construction, perhaps my long atrophied left-side-of-da-brain might just be able to commit the most heinous act of deconstructing this monster into some cohesive categories.  Just today as I was going over so many aborted three-dimensional drawings of staircases and hallways, I realized that perhaps the dreadfully common bar graph might lend itself to the shape of those staircases.  Throw in another line graph (I’m still sticking with my laminated layer approach) and we’ll have ourselves an entirely different picture, won’t we?  Maybe as perplex as I find the novel itself to be, though I wouldn’t trust anything I think up to actually make it from mind to paper intact or in the shadow of the former really.  The question remains, however: how do I entrap the relative value of Truant’s narrative or story or trajectory to something so simple as a bar or something so terse as a line.  How might I visualize the scope of Navidson’s camera which, as I see it, is far from being stuck in Zampano’s head and instead carrying quite a degree of relevancy and dominance over the lives of the other characters.  At least Navidson appears somewhat honest and forthcoming–something everyone else in the novel owes it to themselves to be.  But wait, I’m not here to judge just overanalyze.

But like the footnote to the Seneca’s quote, in which can be found the quote Pascal telling us, according to the editors, that ‘If one reads too quickly or too slowly, one understands nothing.’  I found Danielewski’s talk about the labyrinthe inspiring.  In the midst of floundering ideas and even worse artistic endeavors, I found myself asking myself why, if Danielewski can represent his characters in the history and concepts of the labyrinthe, why can’t I take those characters and make defined concepts out of them; or, who knows, maybe with my roommates’ help, maybe making a mathematical equation for one or two of the buggers.  As I find myself leaping through the novel, barely taking a breath, I must remember that one mustn’t tire oneself out too quickly, or disparage too soon, when dealing with a maze.  I can’t imagine I’ll be lucky enough to stand back and see my final project and see even an inkling of my original ideas within that mess.  (Such a statement makes me chuckle when reminsicining that Danielewski appropiately notes that only some airborne or celestial diety might view a labryinthe in it’s whole–who can imagine that disappointment, really?).  Hopefully I will be able to entrench myself so deeply in this project so outside my comfort zone that I might at least glean something from the struggle, and have some numbers or data that are as confusing as this novel prides itself in being.

Trifles and Terrors

There were a number of things that I felt that I grasped from the literary analysis that went with the reading this weekend for House of Leaves.  Kind of a relief of sorts as it made me feel a little less dense.  From Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well:

Hence it is that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear. (186)

The idea of making trifles from terrors kind of struck me as applicable to the academic writing and footnotes in House of Leaves.  They come from a multitude of angles but succeed in reducing what really is lurking in the house to something less real.  There is concentration placed on everything but the vastness of the hallway, the darkness, or the creature that growls.  Instead Navy and Tom are compared to Jacob and Esau, or the materials that the hallway is not composed of are listed, or some aspect of some character’s personality is thoroughly analyzed while this larger presence that is a source of terror is skirted around.  The elephant in the room.  To deal with the nature of the house gives it a reality perhaps and so one of the occasions that the properties of the hall has an opportunity to be analyzed, it passes by.  In not looking closer at the hall’s imperviousness toward the cat and dog, the academic criticism and Zampano don’t make much of it, maybe so to ignore a reality or the implication of such a thing if it were indeed real, and move it from a trifle to a terror.  Johnny catches the lack of commentary even from Zampano and his mention further highlights this oddity to the reader.  He claims to give his thoughts on what it means that the cat and dog run into the hallway only to instantly appear in the backyard, but I’ve had a hard time extracting his thoughts on the matter from the story he proceedes to tell.  Maybe it should be inferred from the quote at the beginning of the passage about the consciousness of animals, or maybe it is layered further down.

Week #4 – Parallels between Truant’s footnotes and the Navidson narrative

I keep trying to see if there’s a connection between Johnny’s crazy stories and The Navidson narrative, but often the links are often easy to miss.  Sometimes it’s just a single word or concept like “photograph” or “ghost.”

For example, in footnote on page 37, Truant talks about “the picture printed in the newspaper” of his father in a tractor-trailer accident.  On the same page, the Navidson criticism discusses the photograph on Billy Reston’s wall from when he tried to outrun a falling high voltage wire and failed.  Both photographs capture moments of extreme tragedy:  death on one hand and paralysis on the other.  Both images resonate strong emotional value despite being only 2D images of the events.  What comparison is being made by juxtaposing these two photographs?  There’s also the obvious link between photography and Navidson, the Pulitzer-prize winning photojournalist.  On page 22, the criticism explains that Navidson was devoted to photography because “it gave permanence to moments that were often so fleeting.”  I see these connections, yet I can’t really explain why they were put there.

Another example is Truant’s footnote 164, which starts on page 128.  Truant’s footnote was added to a line in the Navidson criticism about Jed’s knocking, which was described as drumbeats using the word “tattoos.”  In his footnote, Truant also describes the difference between the tattoos he draws and the many scars he has on his body.   In that same footnote, Truant also tells a story about when he met a ghost in his boarding school dining hall.  When the Navidson criticism starts up again on page 134, it also mentions ghosts:  “Perhaps here is a good a place as any to consider some of the ghosts haunting The Navidson Record.”  By convention, footnotes are supposed to draw from the text, but it almost seems like Truant’s footnotes actually shape the text.

All of this raises the question:  whose text is this?  Since Truant supposedly compiled this text from the bits and fragments of material he found in Zampano’s apartment, he could have arranged this compilation in whatever way he wanted.  I don’t know if I’d say this is Truant’s text, but he does have a lot of control over it.

disorienting reading

Mapping out a definite way to read House of Leaves has become a seemingly impossible task, and I’ve begun to think that Danielewski meant for it to be this way. For the first hundred or so pages I was find my way around the book just fine, reading from left to right, page to page, stopping at footnotes and flipping back to appendices whenever I was referred to them. However, many of the footnotes run on for whole pages, forcing you to go back and reread/relocate the place in the text where you left out. This going back and forth between footnotes and text, especially between appendices and text, where we are forced to flip all the way to the back of the book and sometimes stay there for near a hundred pages before going back to the text, seems to be a simulation of the constant back and forth, incongruous Explorations in the Navidson Records.

Danielewski creates a way for readers to physically feel disoriented along with the men on the Explorations, swanning our way through the book House of Leaves as they swan their way through the labyrinths in the house of the title. He also creates for readers a sort of spacial perception as we are many times forced to flip the book all the way around itself to read upside-down passages, and for many pages, there are only a couple of words per page amongst a white backdrop, undefined and empty.

I hate to make this comparison, since I hated the movie when it came out and I wouldn’t put myself through watching it again today to confirm my hatred of it, but House of Leaves seems sort of Blair Witch-esque to me. I don’t know it anyone else got that. It is a pretty unsavory piece of cinematic crap, but my comparison is only insofar as both achieving to make their audiences feel as lost and disoriented, probably among other feelings as well, as the characters in their plots.

House of Leaves: It Keeps on Ticking

Thursday’s discussion about the preponderance of literary analyses embedded within House of Leaves offered, for me, a new way of looking at the novel.  As Professor Sample noted, if Danielewski thought of every line of enquiry, one wonders if there are any new secrets to unearth that the author may have hidden, consciously or unconsciously.  Can we sit in an English class and explore this novel in any way that has not already been explored?

I thought about this as I took a second look at the “letters” written to Johnny from his mother (p. 587-644).  They are, on their own, a rich source of debate and discussion. Certainly I think we can experience the pathos of a woman gone mad who inflicted burn injuries on her young son (or did she? See footnote of page 129) and at some point tried to strangle him.  The letters give the reader a “back story” for how a traumatic childhood could inform what we know about the “narrator” of this story. But, as I re-read the letters, I thought they had an inauthentic feel to them.  Like a good novel, they reveal character and plot and motivation and emotion, but in some ways they strike me as too literary.  Did this crazy wife and mother have another life as a brilliant academic (or perhaps just a prodigious autodidact), tossing off lines in Greek and Latin and French and Old English? The letters are stuffed with intertextuality.  We have Mars and Apollo and other characters from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Homer’s Odyssey (hmm, one imagines a entire paper just on the mythological references in Pelafina’s letters).  Then there is a slew of tragic figures, from Shakespeare’s King Lear to Claudius to Ugolino (wait, another paper topic!).  One could analyze the letters to death. And is the “secret” message relating to Zampano (p. 615) supposed to point us to the “real” author of the letters?  Are Pelafina’s letters a red herring, just more unreliable text in a sea of unreliability? Is Danielewski brilliantly layering every possible interpretation, detour, and dead end (like a labyrinth) for us to discover, or is he just messin’ with our heads?

Perhaps, as John Barth suggests, the exhaustion of the novel itself is a new and rich source of discussion and artistic expression, and that maybe we fret too much about our propensity to analyze and discover “the hidden meaning.”  House of Leaves certainly has challenged me to think about what a novel is and why this literary form continues to appeal. I can only think of something a little more clichéd: storytelling, whether it is highly literate or folksy, gets to a part of our intellect that craves an imaginative life, that “takes us out of ourselves.” Given that online forums, YouTube and Facebook references to this novel abound and thrive (even this blog entry and more to come from our class), it would appear that no one has yet exhausted the themes suggested by this novel. House of Leaves just keeps on going and going.

This brings me also back to Barth’s essay—and a digression (which should be allowed, I think, especially since I refrained from making this a footnote). For some reason it reminded me of another piece of work, by Shakespeare scholar and Yale professor Harold Bloom, who is just about at the other end of the literary criticism spectrum, I would think (he dismisses historicist/Marxist/feminist criticism as “The School of Resentment,” for starters).  Bloom, who wrote The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), explains in his preface why the Great Writers pushed the envelope of their day by what he called “strangeness”; their works were astonishingly revolutionary and original in their time. He includes Dante, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton and more (he also includes Jorge Luis Borges in his canon, incidentally, and quotes him extensively). “One mark of an originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is a strangeness that we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncrasies,” writes Bloom (5).

What particularly struck me about Bloom’s argument and Barth’s essay is what Bloom refers to as the “anxiety of influence” among writers. “There can be no strong canonical writing without the process of literary influence,” writes Bloom. “Any strong literary work creatively misreads and misinterprets a precursor text or texts.  An authentic canonical writer may or may not internalize her or his work’s anxiety, but that scarcely matters: the strongly achieved work is the anxiety” (8). For Bloom, this originality is everything; Barth perhaps would not disagree, but he seems to suggest there is plenty of room for the imitators, and the imitators of the imitators, presumably if they are, well, original about it. —Trish

incomplete

both the navidson and reston interviews are missing. much of the other information zampano wished to include is also missing. to get the full story of johnny truant we have to read letters from far before the story began. later in the book, entire pages or passages are missing–truant tells us they are either burnt or blotched out. what is danielewski trying to say?

in fiction, one never gets the whole story, no matter how omnipotent the narrator is. one doesn’t know every detail of each character’s life that made them that way and no matter how much detail the author gives us, we are never fully able to understand the world they’ve created as they see it in their head.

danielewski toys with this idea in many ways. first, instead of truant telling us about his mother and father, he only alludes to it. some authors would just leave it at this, others would have him tell the audience or the editors why he is like the way he is. instead, danielewski includes the letters his mom has sent him so we can experience directly his experience and, in a way, closes the gap between narrator and reader.

i’d lie if i said i wasn’t disappointed when i turned to the back and found both the navidson and the reston interviews missing. i wanted to know what they said. i wanted to know the opinion of two imaginary characters from an imaginary movie in an imaginary book written by an imaginary man discovered by another imaginary man. in doing this, danielewski is pointing out that we cannot always know the thoughts of the characters. he could have just as easily never given us the idea that there were interviews with these characters and we may not have known the difference but the fact that he does leaves us yearning for more and paying even closer attention to how the characters act in hopes of finding the person lying under the action.

Wilder.

Almost everyone in White Noise speaks with the same diction regardless of age, or background – something that we’ve already discussed in class.  Their voices are indistinguishable from one another from word to word, but their thoughts give them away in the who’s who game.  Wilder is the only character who is not given direct dialogue.  He has the ablility of some amount of speech, and there was the seven hour scream, but by and large he is silent.  If the characters are a part of a larger commentary on the post-modern form and thoughts, then how does Wilder fit in?  We touched briefly on his character at the end of class on Thursday, but it reminded me of the questions I have about his character.

He’s treated delicately and with some degree of ambiguity.  Is Wilder mentally impaired, or disabled in some way?  The reader isn’t given the answer explicitly.  Jack says early on in the novel, “It occurred to me that he was too old and too big to be sitting in supermarket cars.  I also wondered why his vocabulary seemed to be stalled at twenty-five words” (36).  With this in mind, it can be inferred that something isn’t altogether right, but consider the source.  Jack is not a realiable narrator and he briefly glides over occurances, just giving scant information, and then quickly moving onto the next thought, next activity.  His narration lies in the shallows, and I think that lends some strength to the argument that the book is largely plotless.  But I digress.

Much like  the kitchen and the bedroom are power haunts for Jack and Babette, it seems that Wilder could be lumped into that idea.  He is in many ways a “source” for Jack and Babette.  In their dealing with their overwhelming fear of death, Wilder is their source of comfort:

I think it’s being with Wilder that picks me up.

I know what you mean.  I always feel good when I’m with Wilder (209).

There are repeated references to Babette being with Wilder as he becomes her source of comfort.  As he is probably dependent upon her, or because he is “selfish in a totally unbounded and natural way” (209), there is something about Wilder that his presence brings simplicity, or maybe a return to something more organic. (Hence the name Wilder.)  But he allows characters to share in his wonderment of the world around him (watching boiling water in a sauce pan) and serves as a counter within the  Gladney mish-mashed family.

Week #3 – Fragmented realities in The House of Leaves

Even though I’ve only read what amounts to 4% of the book (I’m on page 31), I feel like I already have a ton of concepts to work with-and a ton of things I don’t quite understand.

First, the “reality” (or maybe “realities”) of the book is hard to pinpoint because it’s mediated through so many different elements.  From what I’ve read so far, I think what we’re supposed to think of as the “true” reality of the novel includes Johnny Truant’s life (as laid out in the introduction and his courier font notes) and the lives of those around him (Lude, dead Zampanò, the tattoo parlor employees, Thumper, etc.).  Inside that frame is Zampanò’s mess of notes and scribbles, which Truant compiles into the book (which I think we’re supposed to consider fiction?).  Inside the book, is what sounds like academic criticism of The Navidson Record, complete with footnotes by the author and suspiciously tangential notes by Truant.  The Navidson Record is a documentary filmed by photographer Will Navidson.  In the documentary, Will Navidson records his family’s move to a new house, including the strange transformations the house underwent while the family went away for a wedding-but there’s controversy over whether any of that is real.  Framing this entire crazy structure is the fact that the author on the cover is Mark Danielewski, even though the title lists Zampanò.

The effect of all these layers of mediated storytelling is a feeling of discomfort that reminds me of the Heidegger passage on page 25 about the uncanny.  The uncanny is the feeling of “not-being-at-home,” where “everyday familiarity collapses.”  This novel messes with the way people usually read novels.  There is no clear, linear narrative.  Instead we’re forced to jump from body text to footnote to try to piece something together out of the fragmented text.  Because the text forces us to switch gears so much between narratives, the fictional realities often seem indistinguishable from the “true” reality.

The most immediate narrator-the one we’re supposed to trust the most since he inhabits the “true” reality-is notorious for wild, skillful, storytelling and there he is something clearly wrong with him psychologically.  The book is really haunting him, making him paranoid and affecting his breathing.  He’s unreliable, in other words.

My description of searching for a “true” reality seems pointless anyway, since I think the point Danielewski is trying to make is that we can’t find it because it doesn’t exist.  Or at least, we can’t really prove that it exists?  The realities in the book are simulacra.

One obvious question is:  Why is the word “house” always in blue?  Clearly, this is an important concept in the book (something related to the uncanny, perhaps, and the fact that the Navidson’s house is the main thematic focus), but I don’t think I understand how yet, being only 31 pages in.

Random connection I discovered recently (though maybe everyone knows this):  the musician Poe is Mark Danielewski’s sister.  Her album “Haunted” contains lots of songs that relate to her brother’s book.  He even reads a part of the book on one of her tracks.  There’s a song called something like “Five and a half minute hallway,” which relates to something that happens later on the book (I couldn’t tell you exactly what).

Blog #3 — Murray – Postmodern Man

John Duvall’s reading of Murray as “the true villain of White Noise” definitely seems heavy handed. First, why the word “villain,” instead of “antagonist”? The novel seems to be essentially amoral, leaving little capacity for a morally loaded figure like a villain. Regardless, as Susanna said in class on Thursday, there is something vaguely sinister about Murray. I think a more interesting path to take in analyzing Murray is asking why the reader feels this way about him, as opposed to trying to superimpose on him the character of Iago / arch-manipulator. He doesn’t seem to be sinister because of any literal antagonism. Instead, he is sinister because of how totally aware he is, his passivity, and how unemotional he is. When he interacts with other people in the novel, he does so either in the interest of collecting more “data” or of voicing one of his theories. As was brought up in class, he solicits a prostitute at one point, but he wants to do the Heimlich maneuver on her (this is also at the height of the toxic disaster). This kind of eccentricity highlights (albeit comically) the sheer “Otherness” of Murray Jay Siskind, and this is a large part of why he is threatening. Not only is he strange in his eccentricities, but also, his ability to recognize trends in the “white noise” and examine violent spectacle (movie car crashes) as symbols of “American optimism” (218). The latter highlights Murray’s capacity to bypass typical emotional responses and look at phenomenon in a strictly intellectual light. His sheer intelligence and intellectualized detachment strike me as something kind of alien. It’s almost as if he represents the next level of human awareness, an observer and analyst of the postmodern, contrasted sharply with Jack’s frequent cluelessness and intellectual affectation. Murray is the genuine article, whatever that article may be.

Week 3: Frow, the Gilmore Girls, and Apocolyptic Media

“White Noise is obsessed with one of the classical aims of the realist novel: the construction of typicality…Social typicality precedes the literary type–which is to say that the type is laid down in the social world; it is prior and to and has a different kind of reality from the secondary representations of it. First there is life, and then there is art. In White Noise, however, it’s the other way round…” (John Frow, p. 409)

I have found, during the course of the past few weeks, with all this pontificating over postmodernism and such, that two things keep cropping up in my mind. The first is the TV show Gilmore Girls. The second is the nagging doubt that much of what, so far, seems to constitute the postmodern dilemma/framework/philosophy/what-have-you is anything particularly new, groundbreaking, or unique to its time.

As to the Gilmore Girls, several discussions have brought them to mind; however, none so applicably, I believe as John Frow’s critical essay on White Noise. Frow spends a great deal of time discussing the way in which the media and simulated experience/cultural fictions script reality and our understanding of what is typical. This sort of reversed typicality, which he most concisely describes in the above quote, plays out frequently in DeLillo’s novel, where commercials and television often become metaphors or explanations for the things Jack experiences and observes. If DeLillo does this frequently, the Gilmore Girls do this to the point of near absurdity (I recommend viewing the short videos linked here which help clarify my example). All the characters often call upon fictional scenarios or roles to explain their feelings and situations and describe their reality. What is interesting to me is that for those who love the show (myself included), its frequent and often over-the-top pop-culture and media references are much of what we love about it. They represent to us a kind of ideal or aspiration. If only we could really talk like that in real life.

This however, brings me to my second pontification. Is this concept of the simulated or fictitious norm creating expectations for reality really anything that new or unique. Granted, we have a much deeper pool of mediated experiences to draw on. Still, haven’t people been doing this for a good long time? I’m taking a class in which we’re comparing Jane Austen to her Gothic novelist predecessors. Both Austen and Gothic novelists created fictitious types which, particularly in the case of teenaged girls both then and now, persist in acting as a basis for our expectations of romance, heroism, adventure, and the like. Gothic literature in particular was a far cry from realistic. Austen pokes fun at certain impressionable readers of such novels through her own heroine–an avid novel-reader herself–who interprets how the events of her life should play out based upon what she has gleaned from the fictions she has immersed herself in. This was two hundred years ago. Or consider the term “quixotic.” This adjective was preceded by a fiction which established a typicality upon which we draw every time we use this word to describe the real social world. So really, apart from the abundance of simulations from which we now can draw, what’s the difference? I echo Frow’s final words: “Television is about everything. It is about the ordinary, the banal, information for living our lives. It is rarely the voice of the apocalypse” (p. 431)

communal sunsets and shopping sprees

I see a parallel in the way in which the sunsets and shopping sprees in White Noise seem to bring people/families together temporarily, absorbing whoever is watching/consuming, distracting them from their fears of death and freeing them from their everyday worries. People gather in crowds on the overpass to watch the sunsets, just as they do at the mall to go shopping. Jack describes the purpose of crowds as people wanting to gather to “keep out death…to break off from the crowd is to risk death as an individual” (73).

An excerpt from Ch.40 :

“We go to the overpass all the time. Babette, Wilder and I. We take a thermos of iced tea, park the car, watch the setting sun. We find little to say to each other. More cars arrive…People walk up the incline and onto the overpass, carrying fruit and nuts, cool drinks, mainly the middle-aged, the elderly…but younger couples also, arm in arm at the rail…Some people are scared by the sunsets, some determined to be elated, but most of us don’t know how to feel, are ready to go either way…The sunsets linger and so do we…There are people walking dogs, there are kids on bikes, a man with a camera and long lens, waiting for his moment. It is not until some time after dark has fallen, the insects screaming in the heat, that we slowly begin to disperse, shyly, politely, car after car, restored to our separate and defensible selves” (325).

People gather to watch the sunsets together, an ominous and sublime event. While they are there watching, the people seem unified within their families and even as a town, but as soon as the sunset is over, they all leave alone as “separate and defensible selves.” It seems as if the people come to watch the sunsets together because they feel safe from dying and from dying alone, but the sunsets can only provide temporary relief which is why they keep going back.

An excerpt from Ch.17:

“A band played live Muzak. Voices rose ten stories from the gardens and promenades, a roar that echoed and swirled through the vast gallery, mixing with the noises from the tiers, with shuffling feet and chiming bells, the hum of escalators, the sound of people eating, the human buzz of some vivid and happy transaction.

We drove home in silence. We went to our respective rooms wishing to be alone” (84).

This is Jack’s description of the mall as he is leaving after his family’s shopping spree. The mall seems ominous as well, almost supernatural with a life of its own. During the Gladney family shopping spree, there exists the illusion of the family being unified, shopping together, but when it’s all over, the Gladneys leave and return to their normal lives not as a family but as separate individuals, not even speaking to each other, wishing to be alone. But it seems like shopping provides everyone a temporary relief or diversion from the constant fear of death they all suffer from…as long as they stay together, shopping amongst the crowd of people in the mall, they feel protected from their fear of dying alone.

post 3

duvall writes that “jack’s failure to recognize proto-fascist urges in an aestheticized american consumer culture is all the more striking since he emphasizes in his course hitler’s manipulation of mass cultural aesthetics” and in fact, this is one of the only things jack discusses involving hilter–the only other topic being his mother.  he argues the irony is in the fact that jack doesn’t recognize the fascism of his own culture. in jack’s world, there is no mass control or ideology, and people are presented with what seems like a freedom of choice. in order to understand what he means, we must first look at a definition of fascism and since this is the internet, wikipedia is probably the easiest though not best place to check saying: “a totalitarian nationalist political ideology and mass movement that is concerned with notions of cultural decline or decadence, and which seeks to achieve a millenarian national rebirth by exalting the nation or race, as well as promoting cults of unity, strength and purity.”

the supermarket is a place of rebirth throughout the book–after the airborne toxic event, after jack has nearly killed someone. it is rebirth under the ideologies of capitalism, collectivism, consumerism, and materialism. purchasing name brands help people like the gladney’s feel “fullness of being” (p.20) while people like murray offer resistance to this “proto-fascism” by attributing to the “spiritual consensus” (p.18) of the generic.

the television is there to tell them what to buy and as a result it tells them what to think. this can be seen by the intrusion of brand names into the narrative or jack’s daughter mouthing car names in her sleep. this fascism isn’t achieved by violence or thought-control but with the illusion of choice and comfort given to them from the only source of information they have: television.

Is Experience Always ‘Mediated’?

Although in many respects I’m ready to leave White Noise behind me, there are still so many nooks and crannies of this novel that still invite exploration, especially after reading the essays this week by John Drow and John Duvall. One thing we did not talk about in our Thursday discussion, although it was definitely related to the themes we touched on, is how both of these essayists focused on the “most photographed barn” in the country in the novel.  Both DeLillo’s novel and the two essayists (on pages 422 and 444, respectively) explored how the obsessive public recording of the image of the barn demonstrated that the “representation” had become the substitute for the experience itself. In White Noise, we are told that Jack and Murray take a road trip to see the barn and discover that “All the people had cameras” (12). “No one sees the barn,” Murray tells Jack (not unlike the image of the crowds in front of the Mona Lisa that we looked at earlier in the semester).  In other words, no one was there to see it or to experience it; they were there simply to mediate it.

I have so often had that uneasy feeling when I am in a place that is photographed frequently that I and the people around me are not really “in the moment” or genuinely experiencing the scene, artifact, building, etc. Are we just having a quick look and then spending the rest of our time framing the photo opportunity?  Do a little experiment: Watch how long it takes for someone to “take in” a scene before he or she lifts up the camera and starts to snap away. Maybe five seconds? It’s a little scary.  Sometimes I deliberately will not bring a camera to an event or a family outing for precisely that reason; I don’t want to focus my energies on recording the experience; I simply want to experience the experience (duh). 

And yet…the camera or the camcorder is not the enemy, either. A photograph from the perfect day with my husband and his brother and wife in the South of France way back in the 1980s, the hiking trip to the Lake District of England, the day my daughter won a gold medal in the collegiate rowing championships (and yes, I photographed them, here and here), is only a slice of the experience.  The photographic image, or even a video, is a memory of the event; it evokes a wave of feelings and its own narrative.  But, I would argue, it is never the substitute for the event or the experience. Thus, I would push back a little on Baudrillard’s notion that the representation becomes a stand-in for the real (“The Precession of Simulacrum,” Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel, 95).  Our memories of an event or a defining moment in our lives (I think of the birth of my two children, for example), the feelings of immense love and joy and satisfaction, are NOT a copy of a copy or a download of a “script”; they are inside our heads and are at the core of our being, imprinted in a fundamental way that requires no mediation.

Indeed, my best memories of birthdays and holidays and countless school concerts, wrestling matches, track meets, rowing regattas, and family vacations are rarely the stuff we accumulated or the photos and videos we took; they are of the indefinable and inexpressible emotions generated by a real experience that are hard-wired into my psyche. There may be plenty of Hollywood interpretations and TV dramatizations of exactly these kinds of events, but those mediations nevertheless remain to me largely irrelevant. Perhaps Baudrillard’s essay expresses well what it is to be a consumer, especially an unthinking and manipulated one, in our advertising- and media-driven society, but, I would argue, it falls short of what it is to be human.