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GRAFFITI: CONTESTING VISUAL NARRATIVES OF WASTE IN DON DELILLO’S AMERICA ____________ A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of California State University, Chico ____________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in English ____________ by Rebecca Crescenti Spring 2015 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my thesis advisor, Matt Brown, for your enthusiasm and support on this thesis. You sat through hours of discussion with me, which helped define my research question. You offered layers of critique, which helped refine my work as a teaching assistant as well as my work as a graduate student. I would also like to thank my committee members, Peter Kittle and Ed Pluth for keeping me on task with structure and clarification on weighted subjects, such as graffiti in literature and aesthetics. I would not have been able to complete this work without you all! I would also like to thank Robert O’Brien for your guidance and encouragement during this long, laborious undertaking that thesis work requires. You listened while I argued the benefits of postmodern literature and scholarship to the academy. You asked questions and disagreed, as academics do, so thank you for treating me like a colleague! I am very grateful that you asked me to work as a teaching assistant with you. I am forever grateful for all that you taught me. Thank you for believing in me! Rob Davidson, thank you for your hours of service as our department’s graduate coordinator. Your enthusiasm, professionalism, and commitment is one of the reasons I stuck with it! Finally, I would like to thank my family for their patience, time, and understanding during my years as a student right through to the thesis writing, editing, and defense stages. Steve, Chris, Audrey, and David, and my extended family, thank you iii for believing in me. My journey through the last eight years of school would not have been possible without you. For that, I am truly grateful! iv TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE Acknowledgements .................................................................................................... iii Abstract ...................................................................................................................... vi CHAPTER I. Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 II. Graffiti History............................................................................................ 6 Graffiti as Crime ................................................................................ 8 III. Graffiti and Aesthetics ................................................................................ 14 Graffiti and Hybridizations ................................................................ 17 Graffiti Exploited in Advertising ....................................................... 22 IV. The Academy and Graffiti .......................................................................... 25 Element of Felt Life Amid the Rubble .............................................. 29 Classifications .................................................................................... 34 Graffiti in Literature ........................................................................... 39 V. Delillo as Graffiti Writer ............................................................................. 46 Comparisons Between Moonman 157 and Klara Sax ....................... 49 Bent and Distorted ............................................................................. 55 VI. Conclusion .................................................................................................. 68 Works Cited ............................................................................................................... 72 v ABSTRACT GRAFFITI: CONTESTING VISUAL NARRATIVES OF WASTE IN DON DELILLO’S AMERICA by Rebecca Crescenti Master of Arts in English California State University, Chico Spring 2015 What I would like to challenge is this notion that graffiti has to be eradicated because it causes damage and that it is nothing more than vandalism, waste, and destruction. Rather, I claim that graffiti is a representation of an alternative visual narrative to the dominant forces of the city, and as such, contests what it means to live in the urban environment. I argue that all graffiti acts are personal accounts, though, not all are politically motivated. I employ the use of fictional characters from Don Delillo’s Underworld, Moonman 157 and Klara Sax, in order to illustrate graffiti as a visual narrative (Delillo 1997). These characters felt an intense drive to tell the world about their experiences with people, places, and things that had passed through the world unnoticed, which is described as the urge to write graffiti. Their passion and natural propensity for writing untold narratives, in untraditional ways, is what drove them. I vi claim that the graffiti instinct contests the urge to give in to accepted norms, which are often heavily dictated through media as well as the ordered urban environment. Thus, the graffiti instinct, I claim, is the missing element in current academic scholarship on graffiti as a visual narrative. I will be using narrative theory in order to argue that graffiti, as a visual narrative, has the ability to make positive contributions to scholarship. I will begin with a brief summation of graffiti’s background and history, as well as its criminal reputation in the United States. I will then give examples as to how Delillo’s novel illustrates the use of narrative theory and its impact on how history is recorded and perceptions of graffiti, as a problem, and how this has been perpetuated in the media. In other words, I will show how his words seek to disrupt order, much like the graffiti writer who seeks to both disrupt and create. By using this methodology, it is my hope to bring new perspectives into the complex, provocative, and controversial world of graffiti as a worthy subject of study that continues to thrive and evolve well into the twenty-first century. vii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Graffiti: Contesting Visual Narratives of Waste in Don Delillo’s America There is no doubt graffiti has a history. In the United States, I argue that its history has changed the way we look at the word itself. Once considered a primitive method of communication in the ancient world, it now carries a significant amount of cultural and political baggage in any city around the world. Often confused by civic leaders as gang tags, its baggage is plentiful and often undeserved. To some in densely populated urban areas, graffiti is a celebration of truth as subversion – juxtaposition against the fictional world of advertising. To many, though, graffiti is vandalism without merit and deserves severe criminal punishment. It is something that should be erased; it is waste and destruction. What I would like to challenge is this notion that graffiti has to be eradicated because it causes damage and that it is nothing more than vandalism, waste, and destruction. Rather, I claim that graffiti is a representation of an alternative visual narrative to the dominant forces of the city, and as such, contests what it means to live in the urban environment. This narrative is not so much a heroic maneuver as it is an instinctual drive that materializes in the form of colorful lettering, illustrations, or even memorials. These depictions tell stories of identity, experience, strife, joy, frustration, and anger for the 1 2 writer: how he sees the world around him. I argue that all graffiti acts are personal accounts, though, not all are politically motivated. I will be examining Don Delillo’s Underworld in order to bring into focus the urge to make graffiti as the, “graffiti instinct,” which materializes as the desire to “find an element of felt life” as seen through the eyes of his characters, Ismael Munoz, or, Moonman 157, and Klara Sax (Delillo 77). Moonman 157 is a graffiti writer from the South Bronx who lives with his graffiti crew in a burned out tenement building, and Klara Sax is an avant-garde artist who develops the graffiti instinct. The graffiti instinct inspires both characters to paint trains, planes, walls, and junk, with colorful words and illustrations, in order to tell a story that is not seen in history books. Like many graffiti writers from the boroughs, a mid-thirty year old Moonman 157 painted trains for fame and acknowledgment, as well as empathy, for most of his life. This was his way of feeling connected, benevolent. For Klara, graffiti was a refuge she found later in her life. Timothy L. Parrish refers to Klara as a, “junk artist,” who employs “available technologies in order to write narratives that express their particular sensibilities” (Parrish 91). For her, working with junk meant splashing retired B-52 bombers in the desert with color in order to bring recognition to the men who flew the planes, and who were supposed to drop the bomb during World War II, as well as the nose painters. In addition, Moonman 157 painted memorials for his adopted family of orphans as a way to acknowledge them, in both life and death, those who had been abandoned by their parents and society. Klara, who, “had been marked at times by her methods of transforming and absorbing junk” took, “junk and saved it for art,” which became the precursor for her graffiti work in the desert (Delillo 102, 393). She developed 3 the instinct for working with color, after having been inspired by the unwritten history