Don DeLillo, White Noise Lecture II

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Don DeLillo, White Noise Lecture II

• Ramon Saldivar
• Stanford University

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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.

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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 110 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

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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

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Postmodern Sunsets

• WN 216
• Another postmodern sunset, rich in romantic
  imagery.
• Why try to describe it?

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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.

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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?

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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

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Romantic Sublime

• Shelley, Wordsworth
• Natures 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

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Romantic Sublime
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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

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Boticelli, Birth of Venus
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Andy WarholBirth of Venus (after Boticelli)
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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

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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

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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."