Don DeLillo, White Noise Lecture II

Ramon Saldivar

Stanford University

04/19/23 DeLillo White Noise 2

“Everything is concealed in symbolism.” Murray Jay Suskind

WN 37 Supermarket as revelation

WN 38 Supermarket as renewal

WN 34 “Pockets of rapport” “magic act . . . of adults and children,

sharing unaccountable things.”

04/19/23 DeLillo White Noise 3

Epiphanies Classical and Modern

Epiphany In Hellenistic times an epiphany (from the Greek

epiphania, "manifestation"), was an appearance of divine power in a person or event

The New Testament uses the word to denote the final appearing of Christ at the end of time; but in 2 Timothy 1:10 it refers to his coming as Saviour on earth.

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 171 Transformation of the material world by the

imagination

04/19/23 DeLillo White Noise 4

Postmodern Epiphanies

WN 148-49 “a moment of splendid

transcendence” Manifestation of transcendence in

shopping Sublime boundary between the

classical, the modern, and the postmodern

04/19/23 DeLillo White Noise 5

Postmodern Sunsets

WN 216 “Another postmodern sunset, rich

in romantic imagery.” “Why try to describe it?”

04/19/23 DeLillo White Noise 6

Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863)

Modernity defined: “Modernity is the transient, the

fleeting, the contingent; “It is the one half of art, the other

being the eternal and the immutable.”

04/19/23 DeLillo White Noise 7

The End of Modernity and the Post-modern Condition

WN 61 “modern sunset” What constitutes the “ominous”

of this sunset? What would the end of

modernity mean?

04/19/23 DeLillo White Noise 8

Post-industrial Aesthetics WN 162

“the sunsets had become almost unbearably beautiful”

Conjunction of The beautiful and the toxic: “ruddled visionary skyscapes” and “effluents, pollutants,

contaminants, and deliriants”

04/19/23 DeLillo White Noise 9

Romantic Sublime Shelley, Wordsworth

Nature’s awesome beauty Wonder and fear

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgement Sublime

The unspeakable power of nature Inspires awe, terror, dread The limits of the imagination

04/19/23 DeLillo White Noise 10

Romantic Sublime

04/19/23 DeLillo White Noise 11

Kant, On the Sublime “Bold, overhanging, and, as it were, threatening

rocks; clouds piled up in the sky, moving with lightening flashes and thunder peals; volcanoes in all their violence of destruction; hurricanes with their track of devastation; the boundless ocean in a state of tumult; the lofty waterfall of a mighty river -- these exhibit our faculty of resistance as insignificantly small in comparison with their might. . . We call these object sublime because they raise the energies of the soul above accustomed height and discover in us a faculty of resistance . . . which gives courage to measure ourselves against the almightiness of nature.”

Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, B. XXVIII

04/19/23 DeLillo White Noise 12

Boticelli, Birth of Venus

04/19/23 DeLillo White Noise 13

Andy WarholBirth of Venus (after Boticelli)

04/19/23 DeLillo White Noise 14

Modern Postmodern

Irony Form (closed) Purpose Design Hierarchy Creation Synthesis Centering Selection Genital Transcendence

Pastiche Antiform (open) Play Chance Anarchy Deconstruction Antithesis Dispersal Combination Androgynous Immanence

04/19/23 DeLillo White Noise 15

Postmodern Sublime

A realm full of “content, feeling, an exalted narrative life” WN 308-9

What is the cause of this Postmodern Sublime? NOT nihilism The necessity of belief

04/19/23 DeLillo White Noise 16

Postmodern Technology

Technology Commodification of dreams,

desires, and the unconscious

"Technology is our fate, our truth," the novelist Don DeLillo writes in the December 2001 issue of Harper's magazine. "We don't have to depend on God or the prophets or other astonishments. The miracle is what we ourselves produce."