Traveller’s
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(group member since Jan 14, 2015)
Traveller’s
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from the On Paths Unknown group.
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DeLillo talks about : I tried to relate it in White Noise to this other sense of transcendence that lies just beyond our touch. This extraordinary wonder of things ... I must admit that he manages to inject a sense of wonder into the mundane every so often in the novel.
Bonitaj wrote: "gosh - not to date myself but I was in California the day Elvis died! Significant in that I am not an American resident but brought me into that "bubble of media attention" I hadn't yet experienced..."Hmm, interesting. Wasn't he old-ish and fat by then and is it true that he got a heart attack while he was err.. in the bathroom struggling with constipation?
Re the Hitler motif, I have something about that in the notes of my copy with notes about the book:
INTERVIEWER: Hitler and the Holocaust have repeatedly been addressed in your books. In Running Dog, a pornographic movie allegedly filmed in Hitler’s bunker determines a good deal of the novel’s plot. In White Noise, university professor Jack Gladney attempts to calm his obsessive fear of death through his work in the Department of Hitler Studies.
DELILLO: In his case, Gladney finds a perverse form of protection. The damage caused by Hitler was so enormous that Gladney feels he can disappear inside it and that his own puny dread will be overwhelmed by the vastness, the monstrosity of Hitler himself. He feels that Hitler is not only bigger than life, as we say of many famous figures, but bigger that death. Our sense of fear—we avoid it because we feel it so deeply, so there is an intense conflict at work. I brought this conflict to the surface in the shape of Jack Gladney. I think it is something we all feel, something we almost never talk about, something that is almost there. I tried to relate it in White Noise to this other sense of transcendence that lies just beyond our touch. This extraordinary wonder of things is somehow related to the extraordinary dread, to the death fear we try to keep beneath the surface of our perceptions.
Jennifer wrote: "The 80's were great. Gen. X all the way! Also, I am trying to remember the details of this book...I can say that I laughed out loud and adored the family. I have always considered a re read and m..."
Yeah, another Gen.Xer here. :) Nice to see you popping up here again, Jennifer! It would be nice if you can make time to do a short story with us in December!
Yup, I also laughed a lot reading this - the humor is often subtle, sometimes less so - but much of it seems to be written tongue-in-cheek. However, parts of it drag a bit, but I'm getting ahead of myself with that...
I read chapters 14 to 18 away from my PC and therefore had to resort to hand-written notes which I've been lazy to transcribe into text. Anyhow, there is a rather important discussion going on when the Gladney family realize their attraction to calamities. The next day at work, at lunch, when Jack joins the table occupied by the New York émigrés, he raises this talking point. Now, I've read some commentary on this by critics that I'm not going to repeat here, because I think they are missing the point by agreeing with Alfonse's point that "consumer culture" is to blame.
Alfonse certainly has a good point there, but there are other, more fundamental reasons why people gape at disasters and calamities, and it's to do with our survival instinct, as well as the complex hormones that are released in the human body when the person realizes that he/she missed or survived great danger.
I'd like to link to an interesting article on this, let's see if GR allows me to: https://www.nbcnews.com/better/health...
So, what we mustn't lose sight of, is that humans have always wanted to glean more information about calamities, this isn't a new thing, and people have always purposely courted danger for the adrenaline rush, and it's not limited to just America. What has changed in the information age, is the way that we are able to consume calamities on a mass scale, and yes, that aspect of it certainly fit in with what Jack and co. are talking about.
At the same discussion at the lunch table, the discussion quickly sinks to a really banal level, and one has to wonder if these "academics" didn't have some alcohol with their lunch. Being a female, for all I know, this is how all men talk once there are no females around....
In any case, it is also in this discussion that I felt the datedness of the novel - I was completely out of my depth with all of the "where were you when's" that was flying around. I don't even know who Joan Crawford was or some of the other people mentioned were, but I guess that's neither here nor there - deLillo - let's see- was born in 1936, and he is 84 now, so that kinda makes sense to me - my mother was an Elvis fan. XD
*Does some quick math* Also, deLillo took a while writing this novel, and he finished it in 1984, so he was around 47, 48 when he was finishing up with it, so that also makes sense in the context of the lunch conversation - I suppose Jack must be a similar-ish age to DeLillo at the time of writing?
Bonitaj wrote: "Then the question of WHY HITLER? / WHY ELVIS?Just to throw in my sixpence, although I'm in total agreement as to some of your thoughts. I stumbled on a quotation by Ivan Ilyin the other day that I've had difficulty shaking off, so perhaps I'm over shooting the mark but think of this.
"In a consumer society, we are all prisoners of either addiction or envy"
Both of these men were larger than life, had enormous following and absurd levels of power. Did they not warrant the kind of homage that this quote refers to? i.e in a post modern world, a world where we are forced to consume - what better examples than these two?-Individual, gargantuan, caricatures - symbols of excess in every way.."
Agreed, though I wouldn't say that Elvis had power in the same way that Hitler had, but indeed, they both had immense charisma and had maidens weeping at their feet - as we also mentioned in the initial part of this thread. ...and people turned up in droves to experience that charisma first-hand.
I did want to mention at some point, though it's later on in the novel, that the novel shows it's age by the fact that all of the lecturers at the college on the hill were at least in their teens or older when James Dean died, (I mean, James Dean died in 1955 already - far ahead of my time) so I'm sure people reading his novel at the time it was published, must have been around when Elvis was still around, who died in 1977. (Which would make sense, since the novel was published in 1985.)
To my generation and beyond, Elvis doesn't mean much - just a name from the past, but at the time that the novel was published, he must have still been fresh in people's minds, and hence the "Elvis" choice must have made much more sense then.
Hi Bpnitaj! How lovely to find you contributing!Bonitaj wrote: How often haven't we all stood outside a famous icon, a place, a work of art and thought "Is that all there is?" I know it happened to me on seeing the Eiffel tower years back and that very same "tourist reaction" is what is so perfectly captured here: "We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. This literally colours our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism..."
...exactly. That is exactly what I wanted to convey in my many words, and is exactly what I suspect theorists like Baudrillard and Eco mean by "hyperreality". I see it perhaps a bit more prosaically than "a religious experience", and would be inclined to cynically call it "hype", but Murray hit a nail there, actually - it IS a form of religious experience when it becomes something "must-see" simply because so many others made the pilgrimage to go and see it and photograph it - just like the Eiffel tower, the leaning tower of Pisa, the Sistine Chapel etc, just like the pilgrimage to Mecca. It doesn't really matter that it's just a barn, because now it has become something more, an icon of rural America and has gathered weight by the fact that so many others before have made their little pilgrimage there.
Members are encouraged to continue posting comments for chapter 1-10 in this current thread, and the discussion continues here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/.... for chapters 10 - 20.
Just a few loose comments on this section: It’s interesting how DeLillo uses Heinrich as a springboard to discuss ideas from.
Isn’t Murray just silly – with his strange elaborate little theories about empty fluff?
I like how DeLillo juxtaposes Babette’s remark about wishing her life would last forever, with the signs of Fall and the falling leaves, and the wind baring the trees. Falling leaves blown away by the wind during Fall (Autumn is actually such a much nicer word), to me signals impermanence and endings.
I wonder if Heinrich was named after Heinrich Himmler….
Somewhere in the notes of the edition I'm reading, someone mentioned that they feel that DeLillo is looking at the modern world through "religious" eyes, and that jogs my memory of pop songs being sung about a "new religion"; I'm also sure that somewhere amongst the critics of the postmodern condition, there were things said about consumerism being "The New Religion", and that's kinda true, isn't it? Somewhere in the first half of the book Jack's family goes on a shopping spree and he's like a drug addict, drunk on all the dopamine and endorphins that all his shopping acquisitions are triggering.
Chapter 18:
Oh boy, I literally laughed out loud again at the part where people come in at the airport after 3 engines had lost power, because what was supposedly said over the intercom will only ever happen in a fantasy novel, never in real life, and I do happen to know that pilots ARE trained to handle the most extreme possibility that could possibly happen when they do simulator training. They also have to keep up to date with training and undergo a test in the simulator at least once a year.
So once again, the novel is just being silly. It’s so silly that I feel as if I’m reading a magical realism piece of literature. It is entertaining, at least...
Yes, a plane descending at a steep angle like that would of course be harrowing in itself to passengers and crew, but cockpit crew would NEVER say things like that over the public intercom.
Bonitaj wrote: "J haven't quite finished White Noise and time is of the essence this pre - festive season. count me in on the later and most definitely, Chess Story! so excited to be attempting Stefan Zweig. My husband is German, so he's equally chuffed! .."Hi Bonitaj, I was hoping you'd join in for the White Noise discussion! It doesn't look as if anyone else is interested, so I might not post as much on the second and subsequent threads, though I've posted tons on the first thread. (Possibly TOO much... )
Regarding Rashomon - I think the main story is available online, so why don't you have a look first before you invest money? I'll open a thread soon and see if GR will allow me to post links.
Ok, so since nobody has clocked in for this discussion, I'm not going to wait, and am going to post my notes in quick succession:From chapters 4 -10, some observations and comments:
When times are bad, people feel compelled to overeat. OMG, they had things so good in the 80’s! If only Delillo could see into the future…
We’ve already commented on, how, thirty years into the future, we find their pre-smartphone attitudes towards TV rather strange.
But how strange is this: “It was my own formal custom on Fridays, after an evening in front of the TV set, to read deeply in Hitler well into the night.” (Ch. 4.) What the…? I wonder what DeLillo was trying to achieve with the Hitler thing? I looked it up and DeLillo seems to have some kind of fascination with Hitler – the monster was also included in one of his earlier stories, Running Dog.
How cynical is this? “The chancellor warned against what he called my tendency to make a feeble presentation of self. He strongly suggested I gain weight. He wanted me to “grow out” into Hitler.” Ironic humor, since Hitler was by all accounts a small man.
The narrator says: “I am the false character that follows the name around.”, which reminds me yet again of Simulation and Simulacra.
The brief comments that the narrator makes on death, actually screams at you with how out of place it is next to the triviality and surface fluffiness of everything else he offers.
Even in his epistological/phenemonolical/relativistic conversation that he has with Heinrich in the car, the narrator is shown up to be a bit of an ass, and how he presents his “course on Nazism shows him to be a proper jackass. Firstly, who makes such a big fuss out of Nazism, and then presents it only in the form that its propaganda took, with zero intellectual insight or anything to offer regarding the reasons for its rise and the consequences it wrought?
This sounds very British to me: XD ““I want to make you happy, Jack.” “I’m happy when I’m pleasing you.” “I just want to do what you want to do.” “I want to do whatever’s best for you.” “But you please me by letting me please you,” she said. “As the male partner I think it’s my responsibility to please.”
How old is Wilder? Some sources say 2, some say 3 and some say 6. But he does seem to be younger than 6, and yet nobody ever seems to look after him. I never left my children unattended until at least around 7 or so, and never at home alone, only partly unattended, so I feel a bit uncomfortable at how Wilder seems like a little ghost floating around in much of the novel.
Wow, and : ” “People who can fix things are usually bigots.” isn’t a bigoted statement? DeLillo’s wry irony pops up all the time.
I must say that I’m enjoying the prose and writing style. It has a nice descriptive flow to it.
Btw, Heinrich is wrong when he says we can’t control what’s going on in our brains – to a large extent, we can.
Hmm, if I'm going to be the only one on this discussion, I'm not going to bother too much, then, I'll only post the notes I've already made. Our threads always remain open, so if anybody else does want to comment, please feel free to do so, one of us will reply!Ok, back to the barn:
Here is the text from White Noise:
Firstly re the signs: "Soon the signs started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site.
DeLillo is talking about literal signs here, but in cognitive linguistics and semiotics, a "sign" can mean many things. "Signs" are everywhere - they are what conveys meaning.
The study of signs, is called 'semiotcs' and I'm going to take bits out of my review on a book about semiotics here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... where you can read more on the subject if you're interested.
Basically, we can apply semiotics to almost anything, from linguistics, to psychology to the arts-- even to music. We can even look at signs in nature-- the signs and body-language animals make; although this is not the usual field of study of semiotics--it is most often applied in studying human culture and cognition; in studying the various ways in which humans make sense of the world.
Signs, according to semiotic theory, represent all our thoughts. Our thoughts are signs (or in semiotic language, a subdivision of a sign, called the signified), because in our minds, we represent reality with thoughts--what we see and think and hear, are not the real things, but a representation of real things. So thoughts or words or images (in our minds) of a dog are the signified, the word made up of the letters D-O-G is the signifier, and that which is being represented (the dog itself) is the referent. And signifier and signified together (the thought and the word) make up a sign - in this case, the sign for a 'dog'. Of course, a picture of a dog also constitutes a signifier for a dog, and will also conjure the idea of a dog in our minds.
Okay, so as you can see, this can be applied to a lot of areas: texts, photographs, visual art, film, language, and so on, and each area of application has its own set of signs and codes and terminology applying to those signs and codes, for instance when analyzing a photograph, we'd be looking at color, tone, lighting, 'vectors' (lines in the photograph) depth of field, and so forth.
In the specific context of this scenario in White Noise, the "signs" are of course, literal signs, but the photographs are also signs, - they're signifiers but on top of that, they also become referents in the sense that they're photographs of the most photographed barn. The photographs are also simulations.
Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book. “No one sees the barn,” he said finally. A long silence followed. “Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.” He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced at once by others. “We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.” There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides. “Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. This literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.” Another silence ensued. “They are taking pictures of taking pictures,” he said. He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of levers that advanced the film. “What was the barn like before it was photographed?” he said. “What did it look like, how was it different from other barns, how was it similar to other barns? We can’t answer these questions because we’ve read the. signs, seen the people snapping the pictures. We can’t get outside the aura. We’re part of the aura. We’re here, we’re now.” He seemed immensely pleased by this.
It's almost as if Murray is saying that the barn has become part of hyperreality as both a sign and a simulacrum (remember what Baudrillard said about a simulation eventually becoming a simulacrum in modern culture?).
There's a discourse going on about the barn that is more than just the barn. If the barn wasn't the "MOST-PHOTOGRAPHED" barn in America, people wouldn't be this interested in it. ... but it's become a tourist attraction purely based on the fact that it is a celebrity barn, and it's a celebrity barn based purely on the fact that it is most photographed, and in that sense, the barn itself has become a sign - it's become the posterbarn for all barns in America - it's become THE barn in America- a barn that you simply HAVE to photograph darling, because it's - you know, the most "in" barn on the planet.
See what happened there? DeLillo is quite cleverly commenting on yet another aspect of consumer culture in a very postmodern fashion. :)
Amy (Other Amy) wrote: "What a ThoughtI don't have a lot to say about this one, other than I loved it. It's almost a genderswap of "The Honeymoon of Mrs. Smith.".."
Good observation, I like that thought! (view spoiler)
Amy (Other Amy) wrote: "
The Bus
Still reeling from this one. Very sad and hellish..."
(view spoiler)
Linda Abhors the New GR Design wrote: "Oh, I just finished "All She Said Was Yes". I absolutely loooved this one!"Yes, the "get what you deserve" sort of satisfaction was for me close to the satisfaction re Miss Strangeworth. (view spoiler)
Jonfaith wrote: "Count me in for both, both appear to be a good fit for a bleak month. ..."
That will be great! Looking forward, Jonfaith, especially knowing the high quality of your usual reading!
In our previous comments, we asked "Why Hitler?" I saw something about it that De Lillo said in an interview : "Only Hitler is large enough and terrible enough to absorb and neutralize Jack Gladney’s obsessive fear of dying—a very common fear, but one that’s rarely talked about. Jack uses Hitler as a protective device; he wants to grasp anything he can.” Now, I found that pretty interesting in what it also says about the characters of Jack Gladney and that of Murray J. Siskind.
Jack and Murray are both "fakes" but in different ways. You might have noticed how Murray waxes lyrical about, well, basically what are the emptiest aspects of consumer culture. He is always saying things that sound profound, but that's actually nonsensical fluff if you look at it more closely. So, Murray is 'fake' in the sense of that he focuses on shallow, empty things, and this also shows in his choice of academic focus : "Elvis Presley". (Apologies to my mom and all other Elvis fans out there! )
Jack chose Hitler and Murray chose Elvis. Jack chose death and Murray chose a purveyor of relatively shallow popular consumer culture.
I don't want to go too far with this train of thought in case I go past chapter 10, but I want you to also notice, at this early stage of the novel already, how De Lillo often uses beautiful language to describe the mundane, profound language to describe the inane, and so on.
Ugh, now I got distracted from the photographed barn again. More on the barn soon.
Hi everyone! A quick heads-up: Since Chess Story got the majority of votes (6) and Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories came second with 4 votes, we may as well do two or three of the most outstanding stories in the Rashomon collection as well.In order to make space, I hope you don't mind if we then start Chess Story on Dec. 7, and Rashomon on the 14th or 15th.
Also, a reminder that our re-read of White Noise is starting today. Please go to the link here, https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/... , from which the rest of the threads are linked. Enjoy!
Hi everyone! Since Chess Story got the majority of votes (6) and Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories came second with 4 votes, we may as well do two or three of the most outstanding stories in the Rashomon collection as well.In order to make space, I hope you don't mind if we then start Chess Story on Dec. 7, and Rashomon on the 14th or 15th.
Also, a reminder that our re-read of White Noise is starting today. Please go to the link here, https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/... , from which the rest of the threads are linked. Enjoy!
UPDATE: November 11 2021.Hi everyone, after re-reading both this thread and the first bunch of chapters in the book, I noticed that I felt a bit differently about some of the things, and that I had also not said things then that I wanted to say now, so I'll start with the very first few chapters, and make more posts over the next day or two.
Anybody reading for the first time, or re-reading, please join in!
The station wagons in the first line caught my attention since all the middle class moms and dads are driving high carbon-emitting 4x4’s these days…
I think White Noise was first published in Jan 1985. I find it saddening to look at the America of those days, and what America has become now; where he says: ”This assembly of station wagons, as much as anything they might do in the course of the year, more than formal liturgies or laws, tells the parents they are a collection of the like-minded and the spiritually akin, a people, a nation.”
Hitler studies - symbol of how everything lurid and sensational is turned into fodder for exploitation; making money, or gaining acclaim, reputation or celebrity from it... well, despite this novel starting to show its age, that part certainly hasn't changed!
LOL, I had to smirk at the cynical observation: “ (Babette is) …unlike my former wives, who had a tendency to feel estranged from the objective world—a self-absorbed and high-strung bunch, with ties to the intelligence community...” He sounds like a veritable sheik complete with harem.
We commented previously on the “heat in cities” observations in Chapter 3, and I must say now that climate change has become a much more pressing thing than when we initially read it and far, far more than when he’d written it, there’s a kind of prescience in what he says, but also a kind of innocent ignorance of the correct terminologies. He’s simply lumping carbon-emissions in with “heat”, and of course, it does contribute to warming.
Along the same lines, I was also wondering a bit about the huge size of their families – I mean, each person (and I mean person, not couple- each couple seems to have about 5 or 6 between them) seems to have about 3 or 4 children, and DeLillo seems oblivious to the harm that increased population growth does, and that it is population density that adds to the cities’s “heat”.
There’s so much humor in the novel, sometimes I even have to laugh out loud… like when I read this: “There is no Hitler building as such.” So silly. There’s a lot of silliness, DFW-type postmodern silly. (DFW = David Foster Wallace).
Here’s more: “I understand the music, I understand the movies, I even see how comic books can tell us things. But there are full professors in this place who read nothing but cereal boxes.” “It’s the only avant-garde we’ve got.”
This is obviously satire, but it's done with a type of silly playfulness that was quite characteristic of postmodern novels written around this time.
This reminds me of what one of the most famous postmodern critics of modern "consumer culture", Jean Baudrillard, had said about modern mass culture: "It should comment on and criticize itself and so upset the ceremony of mass culture." Baudrillard was a bit of a firebrand who liked to make waves.
Why I was also thinking about Jean Baudrillard, was because of his comments on signs, simulations and simulacra with reference to the "Most Photographed Barn" mentioned in White Noise at the end of chapter 3. I can’t believe that we never commented on the "most photographed" barn in our previous discussion – there’s a wealth on semiotics (theory of “the sign”), as well as “simulation” in there!
I'll check around to see if I can find more material on the much-photographed barn, and come back to it in my next post. In the meantime, you might find my review of Simulacra and Simulation useful, here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Amy (Other Amy) wrote: "Don't worry, I won't forget! I think we crossposted there. I will definitely try to get Louisa reread this weekend!"Oops, yes, I was still typing when you posted - ok, gotcha! :)
EDIT : Also, snap on what we posted in our crossposts! :D
