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The Oscillating Subject in Don Delillo's White Noise

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The Oscillating Subject in Don Delillo's White Noise University of Wollongong Research Online University of Wollongong Thesis Collection 1954-2016 University of Wollongong Thesis Collections 2013 The oscillating subject in Don DeLillo’s White Noise Anne Howell University of Wollongong Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/theses University of Wollongong Copyright Warning You may print or download ONE copy of this document for the purpose of your own research or study. The University does not authorise you to copy, communicate or otherwise make available electronically to any other person any copyright material contained on this site. You are reminded of the following: This work is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part of this work may be reproduced by any process, nor may any other exclusive right be exercised, without the permission of the author. Copyright owners are entitled to take legal action against persons who infringe their copyright. A reproduction of material that is protected by copyright may be a copyright infringement. A court may impose penalties and award damages in relation to offences and infringements relating to copyright material. Higher penalties may apply, and higher damages may be awarded, for offences and infringements involving the conversion of material into digital or electronic form. Unless otherwise indicated, the views expressed in this thesis are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the University of Wollongong. Recommended Citation Howell, Anne, The oscillating subject in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, Doctor of Philosophy thesis, School of Creative Arts, University of Wollongong, 2013. https://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/3912 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library: [email protected] The Oscillating Subject in Don DeLillo’s White Noise A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy from UNIVERSITY OF WOLLONGONG by Anne Howell, B.A (University of Sydney), B.A (University of New South Wales). School of Creative Arts 2013 i Contents Abbreviations iii Abstract iv Introduction 1 Context and Frame: The Scholarship 11 White Noise in Context: History and DeLillo’s Oeuvre 11 Postmodern Interpretations of White Noise 14 Modern or Romantic Interpretations of White Noise 16 Hybrid Readings of White Noise 19 Scholarship on Modernism and Postmodernism 22 Theories of Modernism 22 Theories of Postmodernism 26 Postmodern Challenges to the Subject 32 Postmodern Challenges to the Modernist Subject 35 Gladney’s Modernist Elements 56 Gladney’s Individualised Consciousness 56 Gladney and Modernist Authenticity 59 Gladney and the Search for Transcendent Meaning 63 Gladney and Language 74 Gladney’s Epiphomercial 77 Gladney’s Manoeuvres Towards Postmodernism 83 Gladney’s Consumer Embrace 85 Gladney and Baudrillard’s Simulacrum 87 Gladney’s Simulation Thinking 88 Gladney’s Identity Appropriation 90 Conforming to (Postmodern) Room Behaviour 95 From Conformist to Clone: a Comparative Study of Gladney and Clément 103 Gladney and Clément: Interiority Masking Media-generated Subjectivity 107 Gladney and Clément: The Abject 112 Clément and Gladney: Merging With Consumerism 113 Gladney and Clément: Diminished Transcendence 116 Questions of the Subject: Jack Blight and Jack Gladney 122 Blight, Gladney and the Theory Wars 123 Blight and Gladney: Manoeuvres Towards Postmodernism 124 Thesis Conclusion 128 References 132 ii Abbreviations Frequently cited texts are represented by the following abbreviations. All references are taken from these editions. WN: DeLillo, D, 1985, White Noise, Penguin, New York. P: Joyce, J, 1992, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Seamus Deane (ed.), Penguin Books, London. First edition 1914-15. SH: Joyce, J, 1991, Stephen Hero: Part of the First Draft of A Portrait, Paladin, London. A: Houellebecq, Michel, 1999, Atomised, trans. F Wynne, Vintage, UK. OED: Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press. 1984 DNTP: 1984 Did Not Take Place, 2013, Novel by Anne Howell, written as part of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree, University of Wollongong. iii Abstract The dossier of work associated with my doctoral research comprises a creative component in the form of a novel, 1984 Did Not Take Place, and this thesis. Both projects address debates about the subject under the influence of postmodern theory, which arose during what Douglas Kellner calls the 1980s “theory wars” (1995, p 23). In this thesis I conduct an investigation into how the protagonist of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, Jack Gladney, is depicted as reacting to the pressures of these ‘wars’ and how his “maneuvering for advantage” leads to his oscillation between subject positions associated with cultural canonical modernism and postmodernism. In order to determine Gladney’s characterisation in relation to modernist and postmodernist notions of the subject, I draw on key properties established by a range of fictional authors and theorists who have written on what typifies artistic modernism and postmodernism. I argue that White Noise depicts 1980s theoretical preoccupation with mass conformist consciousness, Baudrillard’s “precession of simulacra” (1983a), the dominance of mainstream media, consumerism and the decline of the transcendent subject, and that these themes play out within Gladney’s characterisation in challenging the hegemony of modernist preoccupations with authenticity, originality and individual agency in relation to the subject. I coin the term epiphomerical to demonstrate that Gladney represents the subject caught in between these conflicting cultural paradigms. This thesis compares Gladney’s characterisation with the modernist artist-hero Stephen Dedalus from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1992) and with postmodern hedonist-pragmatist Bruno Clément in Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised (1998) to identify a continuum within the cannon of the literary subject in relation to the postmodern challenge to ideas of transcendence. This thesis shows that Gladney occupies a transitional place in this continuum, oscillating between canonical modernist and postmodernist positions. In a final study, I compare Gladney with Jack Blight, the protagonist in my novel 1984 Did Not Take Place, whose role as emerging postmodern artist is represented as a strategic game of survival played in collusion with his peers. Both White Noise and my novel draw thematically on the strong iv influence of Jean Baudrillard in the period and explore his concerns with the impact on the subject of an increasingly media-saturated consumer culture. While there are significant similarities in the treatment of the themes explored in this thesis, it is demonstrated that the key differences between DeLillo’s work and my own are, firstly, that DeLillo does not treat these themes explicitly, and secondly that my own work was penned in what is arguably the aftermath of postmodernism, rather than contemporaneously with the height of the theory wars. Some implications of these differences for the representation of subjectivity are considered. v Introduction Both projects comprising this doctoral research, the novel 1984 Did Not Take Place, and the thesis, address 1980s debates about the subject under the influence of postmodern theory. In this thesis I conduct an investigation of the protagonist of White Noise, Jack Gladney and explore the proposition that he is depicted as an emblematic 1980s character transitionally caught between cultural modern and postmodern subject positions. My argument is that the debates about the subject within what Douglas Kellner has called the 1980s “theory wars” (1995, p 23) of the time are played out in his characterisation. My novel addresses similar matters in a very different way, and I was drawn therefore to study White Noise, within which, I argue, the theory wars are embedded structurally, but especially in Gladney’s portrayal. In contrast, my novel explicitly highlights and names this conflict between what, for convenience’s sake, can be labeled the modernists and the postmodernists in the 1980s. My interest in writing a novel about the 1980s ‘postmodern’ artworld in Australia, and studying White Noise in relation to it, is partly due to my background; firstly as a university student of the Visual Arts, Philosophy and Literature in the mid- 80s, and secondly as a journalist who wrote on the Arts from 1986 to the early 1990s in Sydney magazines and newspapers. In both capacities I observed at firsthand how cultural debates responding to the emergence of postmodern theory played out institutionally. I also came to write about several artists as they emerged in the postmodern Sydney art scene and, in this capacity, to varying degrees operated in the role of what Mike Featherstone calls postmodernism’s “intermediaries”: someone who helps to broker writings about postmodernism from the intelligentsia into the public sphere (Featherstone, 2007, p 40). Another impetus for this study was my interest in the contradictions involved in postmodernism as a movement in terms of its complex relationship with consumerism. Linda Hutcheon says that on an ideological level, postmodern fiction is “both critical of and yet complicitous with the cultural dominants of our time: liberal humanism and mass consumer culture” (Hutcheon in 1988a, p 2). My interest in exploring Gladney as a character in White Noise enabled me to focus
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