“I’ll tell you a true story right out of one of the country’s most distinguished scientific journals. They pulled an experiment on these two monkeys. They gave them electric shocks every sixty seconds. Now the first monkey had a button and all he had to do was press it and he wouldn’t get any shock. The second monkey also had a button but it was completely useless. Eventually monkey-A caught on to the gimmick and started pressing the button like mad to avoid that juice. Whereas monkey-B realized his button wasn’t worth shit and he just squatted in the corner, scratching himself and getting jolted every minute. So what happens? The first monkey gets stomach ulcers and kicks off in two weeks. The second monkey, who had resigned himself to the shocks, lives happily ever after. That little experiment is a moral for our time. It shows the price you have to pay for working yourself up to a decision-making post. I’ll have to show you around the office sometime. You’lll see sixty-five executive monkeys weeping into their telephones and pissing blood. That’s the kind of business your old man is in. But don’t worry about me, kid. I’ve got cast iron in my guy and I’m an odds-on favorite to pull through. In my heart I’m deeply conservative. I come from a long line of secret Presbyterian drinkers. My father was a blacksmith in Sag Harbor. What was the point I was trying to make?” 1
This, ladies and gentlemen, is why I plan everything (though sometimes – like now – I wish I was better at sticking to said plans). It is also why I like academia. Or academia through a naive rose-colored lens.
Yesterday I went to The Desert. (My mom asked, “What desert?” I said, “The Desert. Like if you drive far enough west and you hit sand.”) I had never seen the desert before, so I figured yesterday was a good time to do it. I needed to sort some things out in my head, so I hastily packed a bag late Friday afternoon and headed west. I made it to the very southwestern corner of Fort Worth around 10:30 before crashing in a hotel. It’s not exactly like I was roughing it. I got up reasonably early yesterday morning and drove from there to Abilene and Odessa, then to Monahans Sandhills State Park, on the edge of the desert. And I took lots of pictures.
I’m trying to spin it as a sort-of thesis research instead of the Jesus-Christ-I-need-to-get-out-of-town last-minute trip that it was, though I’m sure I’m not convincing anyone. Here’s my pitch: DeLillo loves deserts, right? Part of his first novel is set there, and his second novel is set at a college right on its edge. Then there’s Underworld and Point Omega (in its entirety) and so on. And whenever his novels aren’t set in the desert, they at least mention it. I love this part of Americana:
This too, then, moon and painted ponies, seemed the coming and going of time set free from whatever binds it. Literature is what we passed and left behind, that more than men and cactus. For years I had been held fast by the great unwinding mystery of this deep sink of land, the thick paragraphs and imposing photos, the gallop of panting adjectives, prairie truth and the clean kills of eagles, the desert shawled in Navaho paints, images of surreal cinema, of ventricles tied to pumps, Chaco masonry and the slung guitar, of church organ lungs and the slate of empires, of coral in this strange place, suggesting a reliquary sea, and of the blessed semblance of God on the faces of superstitious mountains. Whether the novels and songs usurped the land, or took something true from it, is not so much the issue as this: that what I was engaged in was merely a literary venture, an attempt to find pattern and motive, to make of something wild a squeamish thesis on the essence of the nation’s soul. To formulate. To seek links. But the wind burned across the creekbeds, barely moving the soil, and there was nothing to announce to myself in the way of historic revelation. Even now, writing this, I can impart little of what I saw. The Cadillac averaged close to ninety and its windows were tinted bottle green for the benefit of Clevenger’s sunbaked eyes. (349)
There’s also a big chunk of End Zone I’d like to post, but I know photos are more interesting, so I’ll get to them quickly. All I’m sayin’ is that DeLillo’s characters tend to go to the desert to think, to find some kind of purity, and so on. Which is what I did, and I was pretty successful. It was beautiful and totally worth going, even if most of the thinking I did happened during the twenty-plus hours I spent driving there and back.
Just west of Abilene. I realize this isn't the desert.
Odessa
A cactus!
The sky was perfect.
The Desert!
A huge wind farm near Loraine. I saw hundreds of windmills.
Bonus: Here’s a video of these windmills. They make a quiet hissing sound, and they totally creep me out.
Keep in mind that I shot all the pictures and the video with my sparkly new iPhone 4. Most of them look as good as they would have with my fancy Nikon, which I didn’t even bring on my trip.
So I’ve had a hard time starting my thesis. It’s one thing to sit around and read a bunch of stuff about DeLillo, Postmodernism, Existentialism, etc, etc, and a whole other thing to start writing. I’m starting today, and that’s that. At the very least, I’m getting an outline done. I guess I also need to talk a little about the DeLillo Binge.
I know you’ve been anxiously awaiting the next DeLillo Binge post on (what was it?) Great Jones Street, which, I will note, is fantastic. So fantastic, in fact, that it’s one of the three novels I’ll talk about most in my thesis. The other two are Americana and Mao II, both of which I can fit securely into Postmodernism not only subject-wise, but time-wise, making things much easier for me. Oh, and now I think I can Officially Announce the Topic of My Thesis:
(drumroll, please…)
Construction of Identity in Don DeLillo’s Novels (and maybe a few short stories)
That topic should be broad enough that I can talk about whatever I want, including the first chapter I’m working on,
Renouncing the media while passively allowing it to construct identity
I’ll come up with suitable titles later. In this chapter, I’ll talk about how the protagonists of Americana, Great Jones Street, and Mao II purposely run away from the media while still allowing it to define them. I should be able to get ten or fifteen pages out of that pretty easily.
And finally, about the DeLillo Binge. I’m putting it on indefinite hold because I have so much to do. Not only do I have my thesis to worry about: I’ll be taking the GRE Lit Test around October and the general test around November, and I MUST do well on them if I’m going to get into a decent grad school. So, instead of enjoying DeLillo, I’ll be studying, especially since I’m TERRIFIED of the Lit Test because I did pretty badly on it back in 2003, just after I finished my English degree. I specialized far too early (Shakespeare!) and was stupid enough to go into it not having studied. It was terrible. But now I’ve totally learned my lesson, and I’m starting with the Romantics. I’d forgotten how much I love Wordsworth. So, sadly, I don’t have time for DeLillo unless it’s explicitly for my thesis. I imagine I’ll get back to the Binge once all this is over in January.
The thing that sucks about increasingly long, more…academic(?) posts is that I’m beginning to have to psych myself up to write them. So this one’s gonna be short since I’m almost done with the next book in my DeLillo Binge, and I’ve been putting this one off.
I just finished End Zone a few days ago. I liked it more than I thought I would. This was my first impression:
I ended up liking it more than I thought I would. There is, though, a really long description of a football game, which almost bored me to tears, except that in introducing it, DeLillo made it just a bit more palatable:
(The spectator, at this point, is certain to wonder whether he must now endure a football game in print – the author’s way of adding his own neat quarter-notch to the scarred bluesteel of combat writing. The game, after all, is known for its assault-technology motif, and numberous commentators have been willing to risk death by analogy in their public discussions of the resemblance between football and war. But this sort of thing is of little interest to the exemplary spectator. As Alan Zapalac says later on: ‘I reject the notion of football as warfare. Warfare is warfare. We don’t need substitutes because we’ve got the real thing.’ The exemplary spectator is the person who understands the sport as a benign illusion, the illusion that order is possible.) (111-112)
And he goes on and on. I like that he self-consciously acknowledges the reader. While I was reading the ridiculously long account of the game, I kept thinking of this little interlude-of-sorts, and it made me feel better. (Okay, so it’s not that long, but that thirty pages seems to take forever.)
This novel is really interesting in that it goes back and forth between vast, detailed descriptions of football and postmodern theory. After practice, the players sit around and have “real” discussions about not-football, like this conversation about a course one of the team members is taking:
“People keep bringing up that course you’re taking. The untellable. I keep hearing about that course. Nobody talks about it but I keep hearing.”
“So do I,” Ted Joost said.
“There’s not much I can say about it,” Billy said.
“You can tell us what goes on.”
“We delve into the untellable.”
“How deep?” Bobby Iselin said.
“It’s hard to tell. I don’t think anybody knows how deep the untellable is. We’ve done a certain amount of delving. We plan to delve some more. That’s about all I can tell you.”
“But what do you talk about?” Howard said. “There are ten of you in there and there’s some kind of instructor or professor. You must say things to each other.”
“We shout in German a lot. There are different language exercises we take turns doing. We may go on a field trip next week. I don’t know where to.”
“But you don’t know German. I know damn well you don’t. I’m your damn roommate. I know things about you.”
“Unfortunately I’ve picked up a few words. I guess that’s one of the hazards in a course like this. You pick up things you’re better off without. The course is pretty experimental. It’s given by a man who may or may not have spent three and a half years in one of the camps. He doesn’t think there’ll be a final exam.”
“Why things in German?” Ted Joost said.
“I think the theory is if any words exist beyond speech, they’re probably German words, or pretty close.” (181).
There are lots of conversations like this one in End Zone, which is why I think I like it so much. It’s definitely Thesis Material. So far, if I can get my act together, I’ll probably use White Noise, Americana, and End Zone. Using five novels would probably be easiest since I can write a chapter on each, but I think it might be overkill, and when I get to the revision phase and people are actually reading it, I might find my thesis expanding exponentially, which I really don’t want to happen.
Since this is supposed to be a short post, I’ll stop now. I’m almost finished with Great Jones Street, and I’m pretty sure I won’t have much at all to say about it, though it’s not too bad. At least it’s not about Lee Harvey Oswald.
In the middle of all of this DeLillo-reading, I’ve started trying to figure out what in the hell postmodernism actually is. (Someone asked about it yesterday, in fact. A freshman.) My responses invariably begin with “Well…,” followed by a long, rather awkward pause and end with a long explanation that virtually skirts the whole question. So I’ve been reading a lot about it – I’ve spent more time doing that, in fact, than I’ve been reading DeLillo over the past week or two. And I still don’t have a good explanation, though at this point I think I might be able to address at least parts of it directly.
But! I’ve found an explanation of the difference between modernism and postmodernism that actually makes sense. At least to me. And I can even kind of wrap my head around the whole idea. It comes from Jean-Francois Lyotard, who, according to various sources including published ones (which I will fail to cite here), wrote the “bible of postmodernism,” The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. 1 Actually, this quote doesn’t come from that work itself, but an essay at the end of it (also by Lyotard) called “Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?” Here’s his explanation:
[M]odern aesthetics is an aesthetic of [Kant's] sublime [which involves a combination of pleasure and pain and happens "when the imagination fails to present an object which might, if only in principle, come to match a concept"], though a nostalgic one. It allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents; but the form, because of its recognizable consistency, continues to offer to the reader or viewer matter for solace and pleasure…
The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable. A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by preestablished rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgment, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work. Those rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for. The artist and the writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done. (81)
So. There you have it. The best explanation I’ve found happens to be on the penultimate page of an essay that’s apparently secondary to the text itself. That is all.
And my DeLillo Binge continues. The 7 in the title takes into account White Noise and The Body Artist, a couple of DeLillo’s books that I’d already read. I’ll probably reread White Noise when I get down to it, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t like The Body Artist since I remember nothing about it. Maybe that means I should read it again.
This time it’s Americana, DeLillo’s first novel. After Libra, I kind of shifted into an I-want-to-study-DeLillo mode, so I figured it was best to start at the beginning. So here I am. I really liked Americana. DeLillo’s style didn’t change between this one and, say, White Noise, like I’d assume it would: my last post included lists (he loves his lists!) from both novels that had lots in common. I can, though, see marked differences between Americana and Point Omega. But I’ll talk about that later. For now, here’s another list in Americana that definitely brings White Noise to mind:
I visualized my apartment then, empty and dark and quiet, furniture from John Widdicomb, suits from F.R. Tripler and J. Press, art books from Rizzoli, rugs from W&J Sloane, fireplace accessories from Wm. H. Jackson, cutlery from Bonniers, crystal by Steuben, shoes by Banister, gin by House of Lords, shirts by Gant and Hathaway, component stereo system by Garrard, Stanton and Fisher, ties by Countess Mara, towels by Fieldcrest, an odd and end from Takashimaya. (353)
The narrator, David Bell, says all this as he’s hitchhiking along the edge of the desert, having left his apartment, his job, and all this stuff behind in New York City. DeLillo addresses consumerism in some form in all his novels.
Speaking of consumerism and other Postmodern issues, I’ve begun studying DeLillo in earnest. I’m even seriously considering changing my entire thesis from Shakespeare (i’m totally burnt out on him) to DeLillo. So I figured it’d be good if I learn something about Postmodernism since I only had vague ideas about it. I ordered Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge and The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, and, in the meantime, I discovered that I owned Butler’s A Very Short Introduction to Postmodernism, which I read while I was waiting for Amazon to send the first two. Once I started to get a better idea about what Postmodernism really is, the types passages I found myself marking in Americana changed: they went from “I like this passage” to “Oh! I can probably use this in a paper!” You can see from this photo about where it hit me:
DeLillo is ridiculously postmodern. Ridiculously. Here’s another list that directly addresses consumerism. It’s a dialogue between David and another character, Glenn Yost:
“We begin, simply enough, with a man watching television. Quite possibly he is being driven mad, slowly, in stages, program by program, interruption by interruption. Still, he watches. What is there in that box? Why is he watching?”
“The TV set is a package and it’s full of products. Inside are detergents, automobiles, cameras, breakfast cereal, other television sets. Programs are not interrupted by commercials; exactly the reverse is true. A television set is an electronic form of packaging. It’s a simple as that. Without the products there’s nothing. Educational television’s a joke. Who in America would want to watch TV without commercials?”
“How does a successful television commercial affect the viewer?”
“It makes him want to change the way he lives.”
“In what way? I said.
“It moves him from first person consciousness to third person. In this country there is a universal third person, the man we all want to be. Advertising has discovered this man. It uses him to express the possibilities open to the consumer. To consume in America is not to buy; it is to dream. Advertising is the suggestion that the dream of entering the third person singular might possibly be fulfilled.” (270)
So maybe I should talk about consumerism, but that’s another post. This one is getting too long already. Here’s one more quote (then I’ll stop!). At one point, David is filming a sort of autobiography, and he films an actor who is playing him (David). This section not only involves consumerism but what I’m pretty sure is self-conscious reflexivity, which I really don’t understand but am better able to identify now. This dialogue is scripted, and they’ve just begun filming.
I sighted on Austin against the wall and then started shooting, my voice a cheerful machine designed for the interrogation of the confused and the dislocated.
“Marital status.”
“Divorced.”
“Children.”
“None.”
“Appendix.”
“Excised.”
“What do you think of the war?” I said. [The novel is set in the 1960s.]
“I’ve seen it on television. It’s sponsored by instant coffee among other things. The commercials are very tasteful in keeping with the serious theme of the program’s content. Some of the commercials are racially integrated. Since I worked for seven years as an employee of the network responsible for the warcasts, I am in a position to point out that the network and the agency joined forces in order to convince the sponsor that integrated commercials were desirable. Their argument was that the war itself is integrated. Balanced programming has always been one of the network’s chief aims.” (283-284)
The interview continues, and has Austin address the camera rather than himself: “Can you tell the camera why you didn’t have children?” and later, “The camera dislikes evasiveness,” and so on.
I’ll stop talking now.
Up next is End Zone, DeLillo’s second novel, which is about football. I’m slowing down because it’s the end of the semester (papers!), and I’ve added all those books about Postmodernism to the list.
Now that I’ve read a few DeLillo novels, I’m continuing my binge from the beginning. Right now I’m reading Americana, DeLillo’s first novel. I’ll talk more about it later, but I just can’t help posting this passage:
What we really want to do, he said, deep in the secret recesses of our heart, all of us, is to destroy the forests, white saltbox barns, colonial inns, riverboats, whaling villages, cider mills, waterwheels, antebellum mansions, log cabins, lovely old churches and snug little railroad depots. All of us secretly favor this destruction, even conservationists, even those embattled individuals who make a career out of picketing graceful and historic old buildings to protest their demolition. It’s what we are. Straight lines and right angles. We feel a private thrill, admit it, at the sight of beauty in flames. We wish to blast all the fine old things to oblivion and replace them with tasteless identical structures. Boxes of cancer cells. Neat gray chambers for medication and the reading of advertisements. Imagine the fantastic prairie motels we could build if only we could give in completely to the demons of our true nature; imagine the automobiles that might take us from motel to motel; imagine the monolithic fifty-story machines for disposing of the victims of automobile accidents without the bother of funerals and the waste of tombstones or sepulchres. Let the police run wild. Let the mad leaders of our nation destroy whomever they choose. That’s what they really want, Black Knife told me. We want to be totally engulfed by all the so-called worst elements of our national life and character. We want to wallow in the terrible gleaming mudcunt of Mother America…We want to come to terms with the false anger we so often display at the increasing signs of sterility and violence in our culture. Kill the old brownstones and ornate railroad terminals. Kill the rotten stinking smalltown courthouses. Blow up the Brooklyn Bridge. Blow up Nantucket. Blow up the Blue Ridge Parkway. We must realize we are living in Megamerica. Neon, fiber glass, Plexiglass, polyurethane, Mylar, Acrylite.
Doesn’t it sound like White Noise? DeLillo published this novel almost fifteen years before White Noise. It’s really funny that he has such an identifiable style even from the beginning. For comparison, here’s the very first paragraph of White Noise:
The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus. In single file they eased around the orange I-beam sculpture and moved toward the dormitories. The roofs of the station wagons were loaded down with carefully secured suitcases full of light and heavy clothing; with boxes of blankets, boots and shoes, stationery and books, sheets, pillows, quilts; with rolled-up rugs and sleeping bags; with bicycles, skis, rucksacks, English and Western saddles, inflated rafts. As cars slowed to a crawl and stopped, students sprang out and raced to the rear doors to begin removing the objects inside; the stereo sets, radios, personal computers; small refrigerators and table ranges; the cartons of phonograph records and cassettes; the hairdryers and styling irons; the tennis rackets, soccer balls, hockey and lacrosse sticks, bows and arrows, the controlled substances, the birth control pills and devices; the junk food still in shopping bags–onion-and-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut creme patties, Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints.
DeLillo loves him some lists. They are, of course, about different things, and the second is more of a list in the strictest sense of the word. Something about them rolls off the tongue when spoken aloud like a super-postmodern poem of sorts. I think I could probably get a whole dissertation out of these things: they’re everywhere!
I finished the second of my three term papers yesterday, a day ahead of schedule, so I declared today a Mental Health Day and spent a good chunk of the day at Starbucks finishing Libra, the fourth novel of my Don DeLillo Binge. I had a hard time getting through this one because it’s a historical novel, and I don’t like historical novels. It’s about Lee Harvey Oswald and conspiracy theories and things (as Jacob says, SPOILER ALERT: he dies at the end). Lots of FBI and CIA people lurking about. It’s not exactly my kind of novel.
DeLillo is a brilliant novelist, though, and even though I wasn’t interested at all in the subject matter, his writing is fantastic, and that makes up for a lot. Here are a couple of snippets I particularly liked:
Spy planes, drone aircraft, satellites with cameras that can see from three hundred miles what you can see from a hundred feet. They see and they hear. Like ancient monks, you know, who recorded knowledge, wrote it painstakingly down. These systems collect and process. All the secret knowledge of the world…I’ll tell you what it means, these orbiting sensors that can hearus in our beds. It means the end of loyalty. The more complex the systems, the less conviction in people. Conviction will be drained out of us. Devices will drain us, make us vague and pliant.
Well, that’s about it. Libra definitely isn’t White Noise. But he did call Bossier City “a place where you could get a social disease leaning on a lamppost” (!) and Dallas “the city that proves God is really dead.” Those were the best two parts of the whole damn novel. And there’s the disturbing description of Jackie Kennedy crawling over the back of the car in which her husband has just been shot trying to recover a piece of his skull. Every time I mention that description, someone tells me it really happened. I know.
And that’s about all I have to say about Libra. It’s not bad or anything – I just didn’t like it. I think it’s better-written than Falling Man. Next up is Americana, DeLillo’s first (published?) novel. I have no idea what it’s about, and that makes me happy. I’m going to do my best not to read the blurb on the back. I’ve decided to tackle the rest of the novels in the order they were published, though if I get too close to the end of the summer before I get to Underworld, I’ll skip to that one because it’s so damn long.
