"How the dead speak to the living": Intertextuality and the Postmodern Sublime in White Noise
2001; Indiana University Press; Volume: 25; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/jml.2003.0001
ISSN1529-1464
Autores Tópico(s)Modern American Literature Studies
ResumoThe simulacrum, "a copy without an original," 1 is the most salient metaphor of White Noise, a novel in which simulations exploit real catastrophes, and in which tourists visit the "most photographed barn in America" not to see the barn but to see photographs of the barn. Further emphasizing the distance between experience and expression is the novel's emphasis on the ineluctably representative nature of language. The disconnection between signifier and signified, pointedly demonstrated in conversations between the narrator, Jack Gladney, and his son, Heinrich, and the collapse of etymologically sound meaning (such as the absence of Germans in Germantown) suggest that words, too, are copies without originals. Déjà vu, one of the many shifting symptoms of contamination from the airborne toxic event, renders memory itself suspect, suggesting that the earlier experiences upon which recollections seem to depend may not exist. The lack of originating moments results in a persistent conversation with the past, an overwhelming nostalgia for a more stable moment in history. Academics and housewives routinely seek distraction in news of James Dean and Marilyn Monroe because, as Murray Siskind, a visiting lecturer on Elvis Presley, aptly notes, "'[h]elpless and fearful people are drawn to magical figures, mythic figures'"; and the narrator, Jack Gladney, fashions his world around a dead fascist in the interest of self-preservation. 2 But it is not just individual characters who are in conversation with the past: DeLillo's entire narrative is a dialogue with older literary works, including sacred texts, Puritan sermons, westerns, and Modernist and Postmodernist fiction.
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