Страница 2 из 76
Despite its undeniable originality, White Noise also reprises the themes and strategies of DeLillo's earlier works. Like his first three novels, it features a first-person narrator who maintains an uneasy relationship with mass culture. David Bell, the protagonist of DeLillo's first novel, Americana (1971), drops out of his job at a television network to make an autobiographical film scrutinizing Americans' worship of televised and advertised images. In one scene (reprinted here on page 335), a character in Bell 's film calls television "an electronic form of packaging," a phrase that White Noise retransmits in its recurrent litanies of brand names and broadcast voices.
The glut of images and glamour of celebrity displayed in White Noise's tabloids take center stage in Great Jones Street (1973) and Mao II. Like Gladney, both Bucky Wunderlick, the earlier novel's rock-star protagonist, and Mao II's novelist Bill Gray seek what Wunderlick calls a "moral form to master commerce"-a means of discovering authenticity in a world crowded with images and commodities (Great Jones Street, 70). Like Bell, these characters withdraw into cocoons where they script private narratives or pursue semisacred quests, only to find their efforts transformed into just another spectacle or consumer item.
Another theme that White Noise shares with DeLillo's earlier novels is the social impact of technology, particularly its most devastating products-atomic weapons and poisonous waste. Gary Harkness, the narrator of End Zone (1972), discovers a disturbing fascination with the language and "theology" of nuclear war. End Zone foreshadows White Noise both in its parody of disaster novels and in its protagonist's ambivalence about technology and its consequences. Similarly, Ratner's Star (1976) blends mathematics and Menippean satire to mount a scathing critique of scientific authority, exposing it as an elaborate form of magic that neither consoles nor contains the fear of mortality it conceals. In these earlier novels, as in White Noise, science engenders a deep and dangerous alienation from nature. DeLillo has returned to these themes in his most recent novel, Underworld (1997), which meditates on the intertwined relationship between waste and weapons.
DeLillo's next three novels, Players (1977), Ru
The works that followed White Noise have shown DeLillo continuing to experiment with form and subject. In 1986, The Day Room, a play, was first produced. It meditates on the relationship between madness and inspiration and features a straitjacketed actor playing a television set (which, as in White Noise, provides absurdly apposite comments). DeLillo's subsequent novels have equalled the critical and commercial triumph of White Noise. Libra (1988), brilliantly synthesizing a fictional biography of Lee Harvey Oswald with a plausible account of a conspiracy to kill President John Ke
Underworld, a monumental chronicle of America since 1951, unfolding mostly in reverse, is DeLillo's most universally acclaimed and best-selling work so far. While most of DeLillo's works have been compact, even terse, Underworld covers a vast canvas with dozens of characters. One of its protagonists, the haunted "waste analyst" Nick Shay, recalls Gladney in his obsession with the detritus of consumer culture and his attraction to violence and the demonic. Although Underworld is at once broader and more personal than DeLillo's earlier novels-drawing for the first time upon his background as an Italian American reared in the Bronx-it expands again on the relationship between "American magic and dread," analyzing the myriad theologies through which Americans seek to reclaim transcendence in a world of fearsome technologies and fulsome messages.
White Noise thus brings together many of DeLillo's obsessions: the deleterious effects of capitalism, the power of electronic images, the tyra
The first critical analysis of White Noise appeared only two years after its publication, in Tom LeClair's influential book, In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. LeClair places DeLillo in the canon of other American "systems novelists" (such as Thomas Pynchon), who analyze the effects of institutions on the individual. LeClair's chapter on White Noise (reprinted here on pages 387-411) presents the Gladneys' trash compactor as a self-reflexive image of both the novel itself and of postmodern America; he goes on to argue that DeLillo finds in that rubbish a source of transcendence that enables Jack to glean a more satisfactory relationship with nature, his body, and death.
Frank Lentricchia's 1989 essay in Raritan (see page 412), together with the two essay collections he subsequently edited, helped attract academic attention to DeLillo's work. Lentricchia discusses the "most photographed barn in America " as one of DeLillo's-and our own- "primal scenes," finding in it a perfect instance of how images have supplanted events in contemporary America.
Both LeClair and Lentricchia discuss DeLillo's language, but they emphasize most his authority as a cultural critic. Their emphasis has been shared by many critics, as White Noise has gone on to become one of the most frequently taught and analyzed contemporary novels. With the rise of cultural studies in the academy, many literary critics diverted their attention to the very arenas-TV, advertising, pop culture-depicted in White Noise, applying theories such as those propounded by French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard. In his highly influential book Simulations, Baudrillard argues that original ideas and events have now been replaced by simulacra-an infinite regress of reproductions without origins; in turn, the "real" has given way to what he calls the "hyperreal" (Baudrillard 1988, 166). John Frow was the first to elucidate the co