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Ann Aibor, MI 48106 LANGUAGE AND SELF IN THE NOVELS OF DON DELILLO DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Curtis Alan Yehnert, B.A., M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 1993 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Lee K. Abbott Walter Davis Anthony Libby in*. jhuTi Advi sor Barbara Rigney Department of English Copyright by urtis Alan Yehnert 1993 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my son Jordan for his unselfishness in allowing me to work uninterrupted many hours at a time, and my wife Heather, not only for her patience and encouragement but also for her interest in my work, and for her sound critical judgment. In addition, I am grateful to my advisory committee, to Drs. Tony Libby and Barbara Rigney, whose careful reading and thoughtful questions made this a better work, to Mac Davis, whose courage and integrity as a scholar and a professor inspired me, and especially to Lee K. Abbott, for his wisdom, his insight, and his generous encouragement, which sustained me through difficult times. VITA December 12, 19 58 Born - Akron, Ohio 1981 B.A., Ohio University Athens, Ohio 1983 M.A., Ohio University Athens, Ohio 1992-Present Associate Professor Sinte Gleska University Mission, South Dakota PUBLICATIONS "The Town That Had Everything." Ohio Magazine. Nov. 1983. "Cinnamon Cake." The Ohio Review. No. 34 Winter 1985. "The Good Boy." Capitol Magazine. December 25, 1988. "Lazarus Ball." The Journal. Fall/Winter, 1989. "Squirrels in the Attic." Ohio State Alumni Magazine. July/August 1991. "A Trick for Travelling." Ohio State Alumni Magazine. July/August 1992. "The Twenties" and "The Great Depression." History of a Free People. 3rd ed. New York: Merrill/McGraw-Hill, 1992. FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: English TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS i i VITA..................................................iii CHAPTER PAGE I. INTRODUCTION................................. 1 II. AMERICANA AND GREAT JONES STREET: MADE IN THE LIKENESS OF THE IMAGE 24 III. END ZONE AND RATNER 'S STAR: THE GAME OF LANGUAGE......................58 IV. PLAYERS AND RUNNING DOG: THE GAME OF IDENTITY.....................114 V. THE NAMES AND MAO IJE: THE "LOST GAME" OF SELF.................155 VI. WHITE NOISE AND LIBRA: SIGNS OF THE TIMES....................... 205 VII. CONCLUSION................................ 272 BIBLIOGRAPHY....................................... 291 i V CHAPTER I Introduction There seems to be a characteristic duality about our understanding of ourselves in this age. On one hand we experience ourselves as embodied creatures, inhabiting time and space, defined for the most part by our biological, cultural, and historical inheritance. On the other hand we often sense something indeterminate and indeterminable in ourselves, so that clarity of self never comes, or if it does, never stays. In a traditional understanding, the world consists of independently existing objects, capable of precise objective observation and classification. The self is also a fixed entity with pre-ordained traits, a constancy. And in this view, language is an aggregate of words which stand in a one-to-one correspondence with things; each word has a distinct meaning attached to it. Objects, self, and language are related to the extent that all three have a basis in grounded, objective reality. 1 2 This traditional view underlies Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions (1718). He intends to write a "portrait" of himself premised on his ability to be wholly honest with himself and his reader. "I know my own heart," he writes, "and understand my fellow man" (17). His account is an interesting attempt to reveal his life, as he says, "in all situations, good and bad," as if by revealing the bad he is guaranteeing the truth. At the end, he writes, "I have told the truth. If anyone knows anything contrary to what I have here recorded, though he prove it a thousand times, his knowledge is a lie and an imposture." If anyone can read his account and still believe him to be "a dishonourable man," he writes, that man "deserves to be stifled" (606). In order to preserve the appearance of a transparent self, language too must' be transparent--and any contradiction to the single truth must be a lie, and the man who speaks it must be shut up. If a person can be all one thing, and language can be found to put that entirety into words, it follows that the story of one's life also can be entirely true, valid even if a contrary interpretation is proved "a thousand times." Not everyone shared Rousseau's assumptions about our ability to know ourselves and our world. Rousseau's contemporary, Scottish philosopher David Hume, held that it is impossible to grasp or "know" the world in direct, unmediated form. His "philosophical scepticism" influenced 3 generations of thinkers, including Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who saw that the relationships between words and things were strictly arbitrary, that there were no "natural" links between language and the world. What this means, among other things, is that our knowledge of the world is inextricably shaped and conditioned by the language that represents it. Words don't stand for things in a one-to-one correspondence; rather, according to Saussure, meanings are bound up in a system of relationship and difference. Our knowledge of things is almost imperceptibly structured by the systems of code and convention which alone enable us to make sense of the chaotic flow of experience. Contemporary French philosopher Jean Baudri11ard's work shows the influence of Saussure and others who stress the importance of representation, signs, and systems of signs in social and domestic life. In his early work, Baudrillard asserts that objects as well as words are interpreted as signs. He sees commodities as part of a system of objects correlated with a system of needs. These needs are not spontaneous, but are generated by the media, particularly by advertising. He attempts to describe the system of objects and to indicate how they condition and structure needs, fantasies and behaviour. But he argues against the idea that these manufactured needs are inferior to other needs: critics of the "false" or 4 artificial needs generally presuppose something like true human needs. But, as Baudrillard argues, there is no way to distinguish between true and false needs. In Baudri11ard's concept of the "consumer society," consumption has replaced production as the primary social behaviour, becoming the new mode of being, of gaining an identity, and finding meaning, in our society. In the early eighties Baudrillard articulated his theory of a new, postmodern society based on a new realm of experience, provided by the media, simulations, and cybernetic models. Simulations and simulacra, media and information, science and technology together produce what Baudrillard calls an "implosion" of the boundary between representation and reality, so that, as a result, the experience of the real disappears. For Baudrillard, the postmodern society is the site of an implosion of all boundaries, not only between appearance and reality but nearly every other binary opposition as well. This implosion is effected primarily by the media. Whereas previously the media were believed to mirror, reflect, or represent reality, now they are shown to constitute a (hyper)rea1ity, a new media reality, more real than real, where the real is subordinate to representation. In Don DeLillo's vision of America, too, the primary shaping forces of the self are not family, class, tradition or status but the environment of the image, whose major effect, writes Frank Lentricchia, is to realign radically all social agents (from top to bottom) as first person agents of desire seeking self-annhilation and fulfillment in the magical third" (Introducing 198). People in the age of the image conform to the images provided for them--the clothes, talk, manners and attitudes generated by the commercial interests that invent the images--and we come to think of this borrowed conglomeration as our identity. David Bell, the protagonist of DeLillo's first novel, Americana, believes conceptions of self are nothing more than projections of identity supplied by TV.