Post-postmodernist American Fiction

Post-postmodernist American Fiction

Don DeLillo

(born November 20, 1936)

White Noise

Stories of characters who face life in a post-modern, post-industrial, televisual culture.

DeLillo's America, especially in White Noise: aspects of post-modernism noted by Lyotard and Baudrillard.

DeLillo's characters pathetically struggle in a world of indecipherable, de-centered systems. There is no one system that is universally accessible. In DeLillo's America, to paraphrase Yeats; things have fallen apart, the center could not hold, and mere anarchy has been loosed upon the world. In DeLillo's America: things have fallen apart, the center could not hold, and mere anarchy has been loosed upon the world (The Second Coming, 1920; William Butler Yeats [1865 1939] Irish poet and dramatist). Yeats was writing about the apparent decline of Europe's ruling class, and his occult belief that Western civilization, if not the whole world, was nearing the terminal point of a 2000-year historical cycle.

While DeLillo and Lyotard would agree that the age of the metanarratives has ended, DeLillo sees more of the loss, more of the cultural vacuity in our age, when there is no objective truth, no metaphysical court of appeals for humanity. What DeLillo recognizes, perhaps more than Lyotard, is that there is something very human in the belief that there must be an underlying logic to human events, that there must be a reason for everything that occurs, and that it must fit into some grand, if imperceivable, plan. In a world in which rational patterns are hard to find, DeLillo has said that offering some reasons is a part the writer's job: 'I think fiction rescues history from its confusions. It can do this in the somewhat superficial way of filling in blank spaces. But it also can operate in a deeper way: providing the balance and rhythm we don't experience in our daily lives, in our real lives' (Decurtis 56). The world of a novel, then, has an advantage over the 'real' world -- in the novel, real order can be achieved. The novelist can provide patterns that contemporary life cannot provide.

DeLillo is obsessed with systems. He recognizes that individuals have a symbiotic/parasitic love/hate relationship with systems. Systems are loops that people get caught up in, but systems, be they belief systems, institutional, mystical, work, or personal systems, are things that people cling to in times of trouble, because if something is part of a system, it has a reason -- it is within human control. In White Noise, we see the retreat to systems, and to metanarratives, over and over again. Jack Gladney, chair of the Hitler Studies (image/media fill in identity gap) department at College-on-the-Hill, tries to find solace for his existential angst in a whole series of narratives, each of which might have been potential metanarratives. Consumerism, science, and religion all seem to offer potentialities which, when exposed to the brutal light of reality, are insufficient.

One could say that if there has been a metanarrative of the Twentieth Century, is has been that of consumerism. There is a belief, propagated and disseminated by television advertising, that you can buy your way out of any personal trauma. In buying things at the mall, you may define an identity, an idea of who you are. When Jack Gladney goes to the mall: 'I shopped for its own sake, looking and touching, inspecting merchandise I had no intention of buying, then buying it. . . . I began to grow in value and self-regard. I filled myself out, found new aspects of myself, located a person I'd forgotten existed' (84). Although shopping may offer a kind of existential relief for Gladney, a sense of control over his destiny and his identity.

Another metanarrative, that of science. Science becomes in many ways a kind of physic refuge, a bastion of rationality; a realm in which problems can be quantified, measured, renamed, and made to go away. As network executive cum film-maker David Bellnotes in DeLillo's first novel, Americana (1971): 'America, then as later, was a sanitarium for every kind of statistic. . . . Numbers were important because whatever fears we might have had concerning the shattering of our minds were largely dispelled by the satisfaction of knowing precisely how we were being driven mad, at what decibel rating, what mach-ratio, what force of aerodynamic drag' (159). If something can be measured, it can be explained. If it can be explained, it can be controlled. When the radio reports upgrade the gas leak from 'feathery plume' to 'black billowing cloud,' Jack Gladney tells his son that it's good, because, 'It means they're looking the thing more or less squarely in the eye. They're on top of the situation' (105). Although the authorities weren't apparently preventing the disaster from occurring, they were developing a jargon, an empirical method in which Jack could take comfort.

After learning through advanced technological imaging techniques that he has a large growth in his guts and that he will positively die, Gladney is shut out of scientific metanarrative and needs to search for another. Murray, as a purely cynical therapeutic method, suggests religion:

''Millions of people have believed for thousands of years. Throw in with them. Belief in a second birth, a second life, is practically universal. This must mean something.'

'But these gorgeous systems are all so different.'

'Pick one you like'' (286).

It doesn't particularly matter which religious system Gladney chooses, Murray's reasoning follows, as long as it provides the necessary relief.

In White Noise, we clearly see that the metanarratives fail. Jack Gladney, in his appeals to various systems, finds that none of them are the true grand narrative. In this respect, DeLillo demonstrates the reality of the contemporary period and is in concordance with Lyotard. However, for Lyotard, the dissensus of the individual narratives is not necessarily a bad, but in fact a creative process. In White Noise, the effect of all the systems being autonomous and not tied into one grand meta-system is disorienting, discomforting, and disastrous. When all the systems are equal, when all the narratives bear the same weight, and none has recourse to any kind of metaphysical reality; individual subjects are left to fend for themselves amid the frightening, dangerous babble of the narratives. DeLillo's America may be a postmodern one, but DeLillo is no fan of the consequences of postmodernism on our culture.

One of the recurrent themes in DeLillo's fiction is that the substance of our society is in fact not substantial, but composed of images of things, of ideas of things, and of false things: 'DeLillo's most astute commentators are in general agreement that the America of White Noise is a fully postmodern one. For DeLillo's characters, contemporary American 'reality' has become completely mediated and artificial; theirs is a culture of comprehensive and seemingly total representation' (Moses 64). In DeLillo's view; our relation to simulacra is not a simple one. We do not merely disdainfully live in a world of false things; we embrace the simulacra and thrive on them. Simulacra are a part, perhaps the predominant element, of our life-world.

In White Noise, simulation is not just a fact of contemporary existence, it is a comfort. In a world where there is very little metaphysical belief to cling to, the simulacra become something that people can define themselves, and their sense of reality, against. The simulacra, the television images, the radio reports, the medical imaging devices: are considered more real the immediate personal perceptions of the characters. When 'the airborne toxic event' has begun, Jack's wife Babette urges him to turn the radio off:

'So the girls can't hear. They haven't gotten beyond the deja vu. I want to keep it that way.'

'What if the symptoms are real?'

'How could they be real?'

'Why couldn't they be real?'

'They only get them only when they're broadcast,'' (133).

Ramas p. 9 file DELILLO_AMERSIMULACRA

Works Consulted

Novels by Don DeLillo

Americana. New York: Penguin, 1971, 1989.

Libra. New York:Viking, 1988.

Mao II. New York: Penguin, 1991.

Running Dog. New York: Knopf, 1978.

White Noise. New York: Viking, 1984.

Postmodernist Texts

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: U of Mn P, 1984.

Secondary Sources

American Simulacra: Don DeLillo 's Fiction in Light of Some Aspects of Postmodernism, Scott Rettberg, Undercurrent #7 (Spring 1999).

Cantor, Paul A. 'Adolf, We Hardly Knew You.' New Essays on White Noise. Ed. Frank Lentricchia. New York: Cambridge UP, 1991. 39-62.

Decurtis, Anthony. 'An Outsider in This Society: An Interview with Don DeLillo.' Introducing Don DeLillo. Ed. Frank Lentricchia. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. 43- 66.

Foucault, Michel. 'Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations: An Interview.' By Paul Rabinow. Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon, 1984.

Frow, John. 'Notes on White Noise.' Introducing Don DeLillo. Ed. Frank Lentricchia. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. 176-91.

Keesy, Douglas. Don DeLillo. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993.

LeClair, Tom. In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. Urbana: U of IL P, 1987.

Lentricchia, Frank. 'Libra as Postmodern Critique.' Introducing Don DeLillo. Ed. Frank Lentricchia. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. 193-215.

Moses, Michael Valdez. 'Lust Removed From Nature.' Ed. Frank Lentricchia. New Essays on White Noise. New York: Cambridge UP, 1991.

Raymond Carver

(May 25, 1938 August 2, 1988)

Cathedral

Considered to be the major influence in popularizing this kind of fiction. He write about people who seem to be perpetually on the edge of disaster. People lacking special talents, without ambitions,or prospects, drifting aimlessly, burdened by alcohol, divorce, and a depression of spirit that can not be expressed in an explicit manner. Carver gained much of his special quality from what he did not say, what he left out of his account of their characters and situations. He along with writers like Joan Didion, Ann Beattie, and Donald and Frederick Bartheleme are the contemporary progenitors of the minimalist method in which what is barely stated about a person or an experience is given a kind of subaqueous luminiscence as well as a certain air of menacing fatality by the materials that are left out, but the presence of which is nevertheless hauntingly there, lurking just behind the venetian blinds of the shuttered prose. The ghostly presence of the eliminated is absolutely vital to the successful minimalist effect. But it is essential to know whether there is material that has been eliminated or material that is simply absent. The distinction is crucial and is best illustrated by the example of Hemingway, the minimalist father of this generation.

His characters are well suited by temperament and experience to be compatible with the stylistic premises of the minimalist method. They are all men whose traumatic histories have rendered them incapable of responding to a wider range of sensory impressions than the Hemingway prose is able to record. They can not afford to be placed in situations that might threaten to rush their sensations or cause them to experience a dangerous excess of feeling that might lead to the collapse of sanity into violent disorder or madness. Decorous behaviour is essential to their survival and the prose in which they are presented is the precise verbal equivalent of their extremely fragile relationship to reality.

Gertrude Stein said about Hemingway that he should write the real story about himself, confessions about the real Hemingway, which he never did. The ral story could not be written propbably. It would have been too disturbing to tell. But the remarkable fact is that in telling as little as he did, Hemingway managed through his minimalist artistry to use words in such a way that we are allowed to see past them and to glimpse the outlines of the mysterious and tragic adventure that the words were not quite able to describe but were not able to conceal either.

In Raymond Carvers fiction the real story appears to be what is on the page, and there is no evidence that more might have been said than the minimalist language implies but refuses to say. Carvers people show no evidence of suffering from the fragility typical of Hemingways characters. They appear not to have emotions. Since they are so thinly drawn as characters, there is no effective way of distinguishing their point of view from Carvers. Their failure of response becomes his own. In Gazebo man and wife, recently become managers of a hotel and their marriage as well as their promising business are doomed to failure because, without any apparent reason the husband had an impussive sexual affait with a Mexican maid. Contingency seems to be the only motive in Carvers fiction.

One infers from the responses of many younger readers of Carver that one source of his appeal for them is the seeming ease with which he achieves his effects. But what appears to be an effortless mastery is frequently revealed to be the result of an extremely modest intention. Carver is very careful not to try what he believes he cannot easily achieve. The thinness of conception is often concealed by the apparently effortless grace of the writing. There is also an air of bleakness about these stories that appears to be the result not only of a darkly negative vision of life but also of a certain poverty of imagination. On the other hand his prose might be the verbal index of some deeply lodged visceral conviction that there is very little of any worth to be said about the sorry state of human existence.

Carver may also be the product of a social situation that is extremely limited in dramatic potential and in which the resources for the display of depth and complexity, whether of character or relationship, are greatly diminished. This may be a significant reason why the short story has become the dominant fictional form of the present time. We now inhibit a society in which human relations have become increasingly ephemeral and superficial. The short story records not relationships but fleeting and sometimes meaningless encounters among people.

Russell Banks

(B.1940)

Grew up in the working-class (most of his characters) environs of the Northeast.

Since 1982 at Princeton University, where he is a tenured full professor.

Readers and critics were often perplexed by his experimental novels, which frequently put historical characters in contemporary contexts and employed a rococo style, freely shifting points of view and breaking all narrative conventions. Interspersed were books with the social realism and naturalistic language for which Banks would become famous--melancholy stories set in New Hampshire and the tropics, exploring the pain and loneliness of the poor; the polarities of good and evil; class struggles in which the disenfranchised become both perpetrators and victims of violence. Even today, after three more or less traditional novels in a row (Continental Drift [1985], Affliction [1989], and The Sweet Hereafter[ ), Banks does not dismiss the possibility of returning to more metafictional projects. 'Looking back, I can see I wrote that kind of fiction--formalistic, allegorical, sometimes satirical--when I was most angry and disoriented. I reached for high artifice in times of disarray, and I turned to more conventionally realistic fiction when I was most affectionate toward the world, and felt anchored and solid in my life

'I don't think we're facing an apocalypse,' he says, 'but I'm beginning to fear that we are facing the death of our culture, and the atomization of human beings in it. And I think one of the quests of my own work is to identify the possibilities of resistance to that atomization.'

Paul Auster

(B. 1947)

After producing poetry, criticism and a large number of translations of French literature, Auster, considered one of the foremost American novelists now writing, made his reputation with a series of three novels, collectively known as The New York Trilogy (1987). These are anti-detective fictions influenced by Beckett, French post-war experimental fiction and postmodern theory. All three have as their plot some kind of writer in pursuit of another (my note: the postmodernist self-targeted, egocentric literature) , and in the second and third books, Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1986), another who is an eerie double of the protagonist. The first, City of Glass (1985) alludes to Poe and Walter Benjamin in its figuring of a fragmenting self in the city. The city of glass suggests the detective's mastery of the complexity of signs, but presents us with the abysmal possibility that, rather than reading the city, it is a mirror-glass that merely reflects Quinn's own concerns back at him (self-reflexiveness: fiction does not REPRESENT reality but itself: the fictionality of fiction is thus pointed out). The novels seem to be psychological studies but the fragmentation at the end of City of Glass, for instance, is not psychological (as it would be in many modernist novels) but textual : Quinn disappears when his notebook finishes.

Ghosts is the most formal of the trilogy; Blue is employed by White to follow Black. Taking notes, Blue sits in his room and watches Black writing in the building across the road. Black may be writing about him. (self-reflexivity) Black may in fact be White. Again we have a tale of someone who drops out of routine (186) existence and lets social ties fall away in pursuit of an obsession. The Locked Room is the most fleshed-out of the early novels and escapes the main criticism made of these works; while admiring the stylistic control, and plenitude of stories within stories, some have found these novels finally exercises in postmodern style, though getting to that 'finally' is gripping.

Auster left the self-confessed influence of Beckett, and after his dystopian In the Country of Last Things (1987) he published in some ways his most remarkable novel, Moon Palace, which, in the story of Marco Stanley Fogg, continues in the quest theme of his first work. The Music of Chance (1990) begins as a road novel and ends as a parable about free will and, as in all his fiction, it is saturated with references to American and European literature which are part of a literary technique that teases away at the surface realism of these later novels. Leviathan (1992) is concerned with the political implications of public writing, and echoes some of the themes of Don DeLillo's Mao II (1990). Mr Vertigo (1994) uses the old American form of the tall tale to narrate the story of a boy who can fly. The novels after The New York Trilogy maintain Auster's admirable desire to avoid repeating himself, while exemplifying his continuing theme of fluid selves held together (or not) by the ability to narrate (self exists only in the literary text, constructed and deconstructed by the immanent God-like writer), to textualize their lives. (187)

There are, as we shall see, various factors that may help to explain the peculiar position that Auster occupies in American letters. His fiction is hard to classify, as it borrows from different traditions and participates in, without belonging to, various schools of writing. His work combines metafictive elements with a clearly articulated interest in, and engagement with, the contemporary world. Overt references to the act and the nature of writing and self-conscious subversions of traditional notions of story-telling are never divorced from questions pertaining to urban living, Western history, capitalism, the tyranny of money, and the role of the author in society. Especially in the novels that follow The New York Trilogy, a delicate balance is maintained between what can be broadly termed realism and experimentation, between an enquiry into the world and an exploration of the nature of the self as it appears in language. (2)

Auster's autobiographical piece Hand to Mouth provides some insight into his interest in the relationship between the world and the word. Recalling his years at Columbia (196569), the author remembers them as being chiefly about two things, books and the war in Vietnam. By 1967, when he went to Paris with Columbia's Junior Year Abroad Program, he had spent two years living in a delirium of books; whole new worlds had been poured into my head, life-altering transfusions had reconstituted my blood. Nearly everything that is still important to me in the way of literature and philosophy I first encountered during those two years (HM 29). In Paris, he found that he had to take language lessons instead of the courses he had been dreaming of (Roland Barthes at the Collge de France, for example), and his disappointment was such that he decided to quit university altogether. He knew that meant he would be drafted into the army, but he had made up his mind to refuse and go to jail: That was a categorical decision an absolute, unbudgeable stance (HM 31) (illustration of combative, reality engaged writers postmodernist attitude). Much like his fictional character Benjamin Sachs in Leviathan, Auster's interest in books is what prompts him to take a political stance, so that the public and private spheres are seen to exist in a new, unexpected relationship. (2)

Intertextuality: Throughout his fiction he willingly enters into dialogue with other texts. These are usually the writings of the American Renaissance, or the works of European writers such as Kafka, Beckett or Hamsun. (3)

The formative years he spent in France from 1971 to 1974, his translations of French poetry, and his editorial work on the Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry go some way towards explaining the common perception of his body of work as one that displays a European, or more specifically French, sensibility, but just as the course of French literature was significantly altered by Baudelaire's active interest in Edgar Allan Poe's work, so Auster's own supposedly French qualities may be attributed to his abiding interest in nineteenth century American writing.

His work may deal with abstract notions, and the emphasis may appear to be on form and style, but many of his chosen themes and tropes are borrowed from the American tradition. He writes about baseball, the Statue of Liberty, the Depression; about the American West and the anonymity of the great city. However, his references to American culture are often subordinated to a larger project of a more philosophical quality. Auster bemoans the loss of a philosophical dimension from recent American writing (a paradoxical feature with a Postmodernist writer); he sees it in Melville, Hawthorne, Poe and Thoreau, but finds that it has all but disappeared from contemporary fiction in his country:

The fact is that the American novel changed. The novels of Melville and Hawthorne, the stories of Poe and the writings of Thoreau for example, all of whom I am passionately interested in, were not about sociology, which is what the novel has come to concern itself [with] in the United States. It's something else. They had a metaphysical dimension, a philosophical dimension to them which I think has been forgotten and ignored. (From an unpublished interview with Professor Christopher Bigsby, University of East Anglia, quoted with Paul Auster's kind permission. Subsequent references will be to Interview by Christopher Bigsby., Varvogli, 4)

The New York Trilogy is a good example of how Auster reconciles realism with experiment, and sociology with writing that has a metaphysical dimension. The book has been described as a postmodern detective story; like Umberto Eco, Thomas Pynchon or Borges before him, Auster borrows some elements from detective fiction and uses his own writing to explore the nature and expose the limitations of the genre, and to ask questions of a more philosophical nature concerning perception, interpretation, and the availability of truth, or meaning. Michael Holquist has claimed that this practice may be identified as a major trend in postmodern fiction: what the structural and philosophical presuppositions of myth were to modernism the detective story is to postmodernism (The World That Is the Book: Paul Auster's Fiction Aliki Varvogli; Liverpool University Press, 2001, 4)

The New York Trilogy also belongs to the tradition of metafictional writing by virtue of its self-conscious nature. Auster not only violates traditional conventions of time, place, causality and unity of action, he also crosses ontological boundaries by creating a character named Paul Auster in City of Glass, (ibid.) and by an authorial intrusion in The Locked Room, where the reader is addressed by the author who explains that the three stories are finally the same story, but each one represents a different stage in my awareness of what it is about (The Locked Room. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 294).