「全面變態」：重解唐．德里羅《白噪音》中主體與他者的關係

全文

(1)⊕ 國立中山大學. 外國語文學系研究所碩士論文. A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUTE INSTITUTE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE NATIONAL SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY 「全面變態」：重解唐．德里羅《白噪音》中主體與他者的關係 “Pervasive Perversion”: Reconfiguring the Subject’s Relationship with the Other in Don DeLillo’s White Noise 研究生：梁碩恩撰 By: Shuo-en Liang 指導教授：陳福仁博士 Advisor: Dr. Fu-jen Chen 中華民國九十九年二月 February 2010.

(2)

(3) 誌謝感謝主賜給我對祂話語的飢渴，讓我在掙扎著索解、掌握聖經的真義時，也對論文寫作產生許多幫助。不管心靈有多枯乾，靈性有多軟弱，我知道祂的話是我腳前的燈，是我路上的光。謝謝我的指導老師陳福仁教授，謝謝他對我的信心，支持我勉力完成論文。也謝謝他給我很多的自由，讓我可以勇於發掘自己想說的話。謝謝蔡秀枝、黃心雅兩位評審老師，她們就像產婆，提供的幫助終於讓我的論文完全產出。謝謝余幼珊老師，她從前耐心詳細的教導、解惑，讓我體認到在學術的世界裡，凡事都可問。謝謝我的父母，因著他們持續的付出，以及長期的忍耐，讓我在攻讀學位這個耐力賽中，有夠多的時間可以專注學業。謝謝我的岳母，謝謝她展現一位單親媽媽的堅強與樂觀，對我的信任與多方面的照顧。謝謝她教養出一個好女兒，作我的幫補。多虧有怡靜在身邊，彼此鼓勵、督促，分憂解勞，我的論文才得以寫出。這三年多來，有太多的變動與艱難，我何其有幸，能與你同奔賽程，一同承受生命之恩。還要謝謝民雄召會的弟兄姊妹、我的奶奶、羅伯伯、敬元的關心與幫助，讓我們迎接新生命的同時，仍能盡力一搏，完成我們的學業。也要謝謝倩怡、若婷當我的「親友團」，讓我覺得在所上並不孤單，快樂的時候可以分享，難過的時候也有人可以理解。最後，仍是要感謝我主基督，祂是奇妙者、策士、我魂的牧人與監督，因祂所受的鞭傷，我們便得了醫治，祂在十架上的無語，成了我最好的安慰。.

(4) 論文名稱：「全面變態」：重解唐．德里羅《白噪音》中主體與他者的關係校所組別：國立中山大學外國語文學系研究所畢業年度與提要別：九十八學年度第一學期碩士學位論文提要研究生：梁碩恩指導教授：陳福仁. 博士. 論文內容提要：《白噪音》一向以其獨有的詼諧以及對資本主義社會精闢的洞察，擄獲讀者的心。然而，它開放式的結局卻持續地對讀者發出詮釋上的挑戰。最主要的問題在於，讀者必須決定，在同歷主角之生活與恐懼後，是否還能在結局找到救贖的可能。作為敘述者與故事人物，傑克同時表顯了這兩種角色的張力：作為敘述者，他在某種程度上也是作者的代言人，引領讀者一窺資本主義社會之荒誕，另一方面，我們也可以將他當作當代人的原型，在他身上發掘與我們相似或差異的部分，進而反思自身生存的困境與出路。問題在於，當這作者的代言人似乎也不能自外於苟且之因循時，讀者是否仍能從文本裡求索一個替代的選擇，在資本主義全球化的今天，使本身存在的問題獲得解答？本論文第一章便整理出以往評論建構《白噪音》所隱含的希望及其困難，提出以拉崗精神分析的主體理論，來重新探討個人與社會的關係，避免陷入主體完全被大他者構成，因而無法自由的陷阱，合法化文本裡社會批判的地位，卻也同.

(5) 時承認大他者影響的全面性。論文第二章即從困擾主角的身分認同切入，對照出整個社會無法消彌的缺漏；傑克的教授、丈夫與父親身分，讓他與讀者有機會看出人生存基本且必要的幻想，是如何與資本主義掛勾，甚且被利用來產生更多的剩餘價值。當角色們似乎只能被迫不斷地沉溺在痛苦的快感中時，傑克對死亡的恐懼使他暫時地脫離被動享受的惡性循環，他暴力的行為實際上反映資本主義社會保證幸福的失敗。論文第三章接續對死亡的討論，在小說的後半段裡，實化的恐懼讓傑克對往常所習慣的意識型態產生了一點距離，對新世紀宗教所應許的不滅狀態、對大學作為不可動搖的權威、對醫療科技對生命的管理產生了懷疑與不信任。在這一點上，傑克本可體現主體顛覆現存體系的可能。但對傑克蓄意謀殺與結局的記載深入探討後可發現，他實際上又重回到所習慣的享受規律中，甚且越發與被批判的資本主義社會相契合。本章分析了傑克心理的轉折，以及傑克道德淪喪的原因，乃是因為對真相的否認與對所熟悉快感不能分離所致。至此，讀者似已不能將希望置於主角身上。然而，結尾的模糊性和對死亡的定位卻也可以是作者最終的訊息。正如傑克面對的是不可知的超市出口，死亡也將不斷質疑資本主業社會的未來。在這期間，讀者仍須持續生活、面對挑戰。一個開放的結局其實間接突顯了小說的寫實性，也賦予讀者應有的自由，去對自己的生存困境做出最適合的解答。. 關鍵字：《白噪音》、拉崗、紀傑克、慾望、驅力、快感、戀物癖、拒認、變態.

(6) Abstract For the readers of White Noise, the first issue he or she has to deal with is the relationship between the society and the individual. But DeLillo was never straightforward in Jack’s narrative. From time to time, the reader is asked to judge by themselves about the authorial intention and the narrator’s attitude toward the characters’ suffering. As both the narrator and a character, Jack Gladney typifies the tension of locating the hope of resistance in a seemingly hopeless situation. As the narrator, Jack’s attitude toward the corrupting force of the society would seem to vacillate among indifference and affirmation. Yet, his indifference would appear to be sarcastic or even accusatory if one remembers that he or she is reading one of DeLillo’s novels. The interpretive deadlock, then, can be summarized into the following question: if DeLillo intended to posit the possibility of resistance through the process of writing and reading, how can it be realized in the protagonist with whom the reader is invited to identify? Numerous approaches are adopted by the critics, and yet the enigmatic ending of the novel continues to challenge the results of their efforts. With ease, Jack Gladney returns to his normal routine after he nearly kills a man, but it is indicated that he is never the same person as exhibited in the previous chapters. To determine the nature of transformation and its implication for the existence.

(7) of hope, this thesis sets out to dissect the important elements in the last chapter. As the novel ends in Jack’s shopping, the chapter two of this thesis traces the influence of capitalism on the characters. It is found that the characters’ enjoyment of the consumerism is correlative with a fundamental imperfection in their sense of self. In narrating the stories about him, Jack Gladney cannot hide his anxiety for failing to be a good professor, husband and father. From a Lacanian perspective, the disjointedness reveals the failure of the system to provide all his needs. Still, Jack and others are spurred to immerse harder in the ever-revolutionizing mode of enjoyment, endlessly deferring from confronting the void inherent in all their pursuits. Before Jack returns to shop for the last time in the novel, however, he is infected by toxic substance that causes him to eye the capitalist system with suspicion. During the outbreak of the disaster, the New Age belief system, painful enjoyment and environmental crisis are associated with the oppressive force of capitalist development. They all reappear in the end of the novel, yet they are no longer threats for Jack; instead, he finds them enjoyable. In the chapter three of this thesis, my analysis recounts how the characters’ reluctance to depart from their routine of enjoyment contributes to their intentional disavowals of the injuries the system brings to them. In Jack’s case, the biopolitical control that results in the elevation of the status of medical science and enjoyment causes him to resubmit himself more.

(8) violently to the system. He becomes a killer and enjoys seeing himself as such who seems to contribute to all the subjects in the capitalist society. It is after such sad transformation that the final chapter begins, suddenly deflating the emotional turbulences accumulated throughout the previous chapters. The enigmatic vacuum is still accompanied by signs of Jack’s transformation. However, the omnipresence of death in the chapter seems to weaken the certainty for a pessimistic future of suffering in the capitalist system. Waiting before the checking out point, Jack is in fact facing to the end of vicious circle symbolically. The unfathomable death corresponds with the impossibility the reader encounters when interpreting the text. As the readers cannot determine what will happen after the terminal, they are actually freed from chopping the text for constructing hopes that will be contradicted by the remaining paragraphs at one point or another, while they have to put down the novel and go on living with the similar situations the novel portrays. Herein resides the hope: externalizing the deadlock of life for the reader, the end of White Noise testifies the ongoing procession of human history that cannot be anticipated beforehand.. Keywords: White Noise, Lacan, Žižek, desire, drive, jouissance, fetishism, disavowal, perversion.

(9) Table of Contents. Chapter 1: Introduction .................................................................................................. 1. Chapter 2: The Fluctuation of Subversion ................................................................... 36. Chapter 3: The Reign of Perversion............................................................................. 84. Chapter 4: Conclusion ............................................................................................... 126. Works Cited ............................................................................................................... 142.

(10) Chapter 1: Introduction. In Harold Bloom’s eyes, Don DeLillo is one of the four living American writers whose works deserve constant attentions from literary critics (Bloom, “Dumbing”). In Introducing Don DeLillo, Frank Lentricchia presented DeLillo to the reader as a “Bad Citizen” because of his refusal to write in accordance with the petty and complacent realism of the day. What differentiates DeLillo from other writers is his attempt to “represent their culture totally,” that is, to do a “cultural . . . anatomy” (Lentricchia, “American” 2). In his oeuvre, White Noise remains the most discussed text because of its accessibility and brilliant treatments of various issues in contemporary American culture (Engles and Duvall 5). The novel is taught across various disciplines, including literature, religious study, technology and culture, communication and even medical science (Engles and Duvall 1). Its in-depth exploration of contemporary society attracts the readers for its depiction arguably categorized as postmodern phenomenon. The most important of all, White Noise gives the reader a sense of intimacy with the life portrayed in it. In Jeffrey Ebbesen’s words, the book’s attraction comes from “its reference to the inescapable commercialism of reader’s everyday lives” (10). Thus, studying White Noise privileges one to reflect, with contemporaneity, for the human nature in the living circumstance that is still 1.

(11) undergoing the changes brought by the ongoing evolution of global capitalism. Overall, the novel represents how a middle-class family suffers from a general fear of death so that they seek consolation from consumption and technology besides other futile means. The dominance of media in the protagonists’ lives and consciousness led many critics to focus on the loss of the reality and the rise of a new fascism (Duvall 170). The collective intoxication with consumer stimulations condensed in proliferating images deprives people of their intellectual autonomy and produces a crowd indoctrinated only with capitalist logic. The outbreak of a toxic leakage crystallizes their fear and mobilizes the plot that tends toward an ambiguous ending, troubling most of the critics. One has to decide whether DeLillo celebrates or warns about the postmodern enjoyment culminated throughout the narrative (Millard 126). Interpretations of the ending are divided over the issue whether there is a way out of the predicament depicted in the novel. As critics located the problems with different emphases, the answer varies. One of the most accepted versions of the story is that the spontaneous move to criticize the absurdities from the reader’s part should be attributed to the author’s calculated decision. That is to say, DeLillo’s work requires the reader to actually confront the issues inherent not only within the novel but also within his or her own life. However, to read the novel more closely in light of this, one would find that the ending does more than causing the reader to be aware of 2.

(12) the subjugation in the capitalist system. The ending also depicts how that awareness would lead to more vicious cycle if one treats it lightly. In this thesis, two questions will be answered: firstly, why is the capitalist system so irresistible in White Noise? Secondly, why, even with critical consciousness, does the protagonist fail to realize any potential for subversion? In the beginning of the novel, the domestic living of the Gladneys is unfolded. Jack Gladney, a prominent professor of Hitler study in Blacksmith, enjoys a casual living. He has a wife called Babette, whose optimism and naivety provide Jack a satisfying family life. The children living with them come from different marriages, but they are well united under the same roof. Steffie, the youngest girl, likes to wear a protective mask. Denise, the daughter of Babette, is well read in the medical dictionary even though she is not much older than Steffie. She deems it as her responsibility to protect her mother from anything that might jeopardize her health. Heinrich is a smart adolescent whose knowledge and quick temper often unsettle his parents. Wilder, the youngest child, offers pleasure and sense of security to every member in the family by just being there. Finally, there is Murray Siskind. Even though he is a new comer to the town and college where Jack lives and works, he quickly merges with the family. He flirts with Babette, studies the kids, wins Jack’s confidence. What they all, except Heinrich, share is a love in supermarkets. However, 3.

(13) beneath scattered records of daily living, an undercurrent disrupts the narrative from time to time: Jack Gladney fears death extremely. While unfolding the grotesque postmodern landscape, Jack as the narrator keeps encountering things that remind him of his mortality. On the one hand, he uses those grotesque devices to ignore the death fear—compulsive shopping, academic protection, TV-watching and etc. On the other hand, his emptiness of being is exposed from time to time. His academic achievement is more an appearance than hard-won success. He tries very hard to conceal the fact that he can’t understand German; he has to learn basic German so as to survive a forthcoming Hitler conference. His authority as a father is also challenged a lot by Heinrich in the family. Whenever he is painfully exposed as being impotent of controlling, he resorts to more pleasure. The occurrence of a fatal accident near their house, however, changes his life eternally. The spill of a highly dangerous chemical results in the evacuation of the whole town. There are casualties and other terrifying things. What’s most unacceptable to Jack is that he learns that he has inhaled some measure of the fatal chemical and that there is no means to get rid of the chemical. It is the uncertainty about when the fatality will emerge that pressures Jack the most. In a sense, he won’t be able to indulge in his enjoyment of casual living before. The fear of death haunts him and dominates his consciousness for evermore. While those around him seem to 4.

(14) intensify their enjoyment, which is also an effect of the air bourn toxic event, Jack comes nearer to the brink of breakdown. It is under this circumstance that Babette confesses to him that she has been involved in a secret experiment and extramarital relationship with the manager of that experiment, that is, Willie Mink. The reason lies in her fear of death, which motivates her to test a kind of medicine called Dylar to rid the fear biologically. The relationship between Jack and Babette is injured, yet Jack’s sole purpose of life now hangs on the hope to rid his fear of death by that mysterious medicine. He tries to coax the information out of Babette, but she refuses to tell him where Mink is. Not before long, Jack learns the information he needs from a friend in the chemistry department. With the installment of a pistol and the influence of Murray’s luring speech, Jack determines to kill Willie Mink and takes all the Dylar with him. Jack shoots Willie Mink twice so that Mink passes out. Afterward, Jack places the pistol in Mink’s hand to feign a suicide case. However, Mink suddenly comes by and shoots Jack in the wrist. The accident seems to bring Jack to sense so that he decides to save Mink from dying. In the next chapter, Jack doesn’t mention any consequence of the attempted murder, but presents to the reader three separate descriptions of his life: Firstly, Wilder rides his bicycle through a highway alone. The dangers don’t scare him until he is nearly drowned in a nearby pool. Secondly, Jack and Babette watch the sunset together without any conversation, quite different from 5.

(15) before. Thirdly, Jack continues his habit of shopping in the supermarket. The novel then ends in a serene mood of satisfaction as he approaches the terminal counter in his favorite supermarket to check out. Tom LeClair, writing the first important scholarly discussion of White Noise, maintained that the ending suggests “a modicum of hope” because it resists “a reductionist way of knowing” and thus retains a “natural complexity” (230). For LeClair, it is man’s instrumental reason that stupefies and distorts the natural complexity so that Jack Gladney relies on things varying from media talk to murder plot to escape from the uncontrollable mystery in life (6). DeLillo’s refrain from posing a clear-cut resolution of the conflicts culminated throughout the narrative signifies the victory of the mystery of life. By not adding any comment to Wilder’s adventure, Jack testifies his transformation from a person who would try mastering any phenomenon by posing his “reductionist way of knowing” to one who simply “accepts” things as they are (LeClair 223). Fortunately, the sense of acceptance prevails in Jack’s watching of the sunset; not wanting to make sense of the toxic sunset further elevates the status of “acceptance” (LeClair 223). What’s more, “DeLillo passes to the reader the uncertainty” in the last episode of shopping in the supermarket (LeClair 223). The reader has to decide whether Jack’s last fascination with tabloid is “literal” or an ironic “resistance to the ‘binary’ simplification” (LeClair 6.

(16) 223). In this elevation of “uncertainty,” the novel can’t be more “mysterious.” Several critics, however, had pointed out the connection between the sense of mystery and the mesmerism of the capitalist logic. Though Jack may not place his trust at the “reductionist way of knowing,” such as the medical discourse represented by Jack’s doctor near the end of the novel, “he is more susceptible . . . to the deeply embedded narratives of television, to its identity- and consciousness-shaping social myths” as illustrated by Jack’s appreciation of “Toyota Celica” (Fuller 22). In White Noise, the bombardments of the stimulations in TV and other media to shop led Duvall to conclude that the novel describes how “Americans and their acts of consumption are unconsciously scripted by advertising” (Duvall, “White” 125). The postmodern mystery also prevails in universities, places where enigmas should be solved. Jack, his colleagues and the students all reinforce a certain class division in the society and reproduce similar taste as consumers (Ebbesen 145). The sense of mystery sustained by homogenous reasoning—supported by and supporting capitalist logic—is thus particularly fragile so that “the readers . . . always feel uneasy anticipation while reading” as if something terrible would happen “only on the next page” (Ebbesen 124). In other words, the sense of mystery can be suffocating and anxiety-stirring if it is associated with the capitalist pursuit of interest. Just as the beautiful sunset that is colored by the residue of microorganism in the air is “tinged 7.

(17) with dread” (DeLillo 162), the impenetrability of postmodern landscape always “involves terror” (Frow 418). Following LeCalir, then, John Frow wrote a Marxist critique of White Noise. The proliferating narratives inherent in media shapes people’s living and perception, as illustrated by a group of identical parents showing off their material power and appreciating each other in the beginning of the novel (Frow 419). Frow argued that the “types” that define individual success have actually permeated the consciousness of people in White Noise so that “the type ceaselessly imitates itself” (Frow 420). The result of this proliferation of types is the equalization between human being and commodity (Frow 425). In a speech delivered in the classroom, Murray criticizes the students’ status as independent thinkers as it disqualifies them from being the innocent children who are “targetable by advertisers and mass producers” (DeLillo 50). In other words, they fail to fit into the type that advertisers shape for stimulating shopping and, therefore, the student’s values are diminished as they cannot meet the producers’ demand for contributing to the mass consumption. Though the “propositions are monstrous,” Frow thought that DeLillo didn’t envision a possible solution to the loss of humane value caused by the proliferation of types (426). The only place Jack can face death with courage is in the movie (DeLillo 99). Therefore, it “is . . . only through cultural mediation, that a vision of nonmediation is 8.

(18) possible—and therefore absurd” (Frow 425). In other words, the salvation in White Noise is in such a circularity within the capitalist system that people can only be dragged along in its endless reification. Some critics, however, opposed this pessimistic portrait of consumerism because they detected in it a uniting power for group identity. For Thomas Ferraro, one of the postmodern crises depicted in White Noise is the disintegration of the family structure (18). But Ferraro argued that DeLillo tried to emphasize “how actual families manage nevertheless to sustain themselves” through shopping instead of how the cult of individualism thrives (19). Ferraro interpreted the craziest shopping in the novel as “a balm for the slings and arrows” that inflict Jack’s self-esteem (21). Because of Jack’s urge to shop, the whole family, being otherwise “difficult to recruit under ordinary conditions,” is united for the prospect of accumulating desirable goods (Ferraro22). Shopping allows the father to join the personal interests of his daughters and his daughters to “wait on” him, thus reestablishing “hierarchies and identities within the family” (Ferraro 23). Also, for Cornel Bonca, the white noise that is associated with “media noise, the techno-static of a consumer culture that penetrates our homes and our minds” is what unites human beings in face of the threat of death (463). Media talk actually “encompasses a wide variety of human utterance,” and, in speaking, one is able to “bridge the lonely distances,’ to ‘establish a structure against 9.

(19) the terror of our soul” (Bonca 464). Therefore, when Steffie uttered the brand name, “Toyota Celica,” in her dream, the feeling of transcendence felt by Jack speaks about DeLillo’s hope in the infiltration of advertisement. Under the frightening circumstance, Steffie achieved a connection with the crowd shaped by TV commercials so that her “dread dissolve[s] in the chanting of this media mantra” (Bonca 470). For Frank Lentricchia, the brand name is “a curious human bond, the stuff of community” (Lentricchia, “Tales” 105). Though Jack might resist the leveling down of intellectual sophistication brought by mass culture (Lentricchia, “Tales” 104), the anesthetizing function of “his banal, semi-stupid brand name apprehension of the world” would finally overcome his high modernist impulse to maintain a distance with the mass culture (Lentricchia, “Tales” 108). Stripping all layers apart, Lentricchia found that the “authentic Jack” whose “wittiness,” “attachment to” his family and “devotion” is all “supported by the supermarket . . ., by the shopping mall” (“Tales” 111). However, Lentricchia did show some concern about the future of the society that is united by the power of consumerism. Insane, sitting alone in a hotel, mumbling fragmented and irrelevant sentences before a TV set, Willie Mink is “the compacted image of consumerism in the society of the electronic media” (Lentricchia, “Tales” 113). The dimension of inter-personal relationship is reduced to man’s relationship with TV. Even Ferraro doubted of the bond made of material power as it 10.

(20) turns the family into a group integrated for mercenary purpose (Ferraro 24). Though the family structure seems to be upheld throughout the course of shopping, it disintegrates with each member “wishing to be alone” after shopping (DeLillo 84). Thus, some critics reject to regard mass culture with its deteriorating power as the final answer to the dilemma posed in the novel and would rather place their belief in an autonomous self vis-à-vis the penetrating influence of society. They strive to locate an authentic self that somehow survives the homogenization brought by the social corruption. Theron Britt explained that it is easy to read White Noise along this line with American novels categorized under realism, naturalism and modernism (Britt 103). “Many of these novels,” according to Britt, “turn on notions of autonomous identity, usually pitting the individual against a constraining society and valorizing . . . that individual as a corrective to social ills” (Britt 103). Hence, Paul Maltby, one of the critics who first opposed the pessimism of the readings based on literary theories, argued that DeLillo retained a vision of redemption in Jack’s imaginary moment such as the intrusion of brand names in his consciousness (Maltby 274). It denotes “an autonomous realm of experience and to provide a standard by which to judge the spiritually atrophied culture of late capitalism” (Maltby 274). That is to say, Jack’s sometimes outlandish associations are sites in which critique and freedom are possible. Jack’s fascination with “children . . . 11.

(21) and the sublime” speaks about “an affirmation that the near-global culture of late capitalism cannot exhaust the possibilities of human experience” (Maltby 275). For Joseph Dewey, White Noise exemplifies how Jack Gladney makes use of and is used by “the crowd” inherent in his family, career, TV and scientific discourse, and how he finally learns to live alone without them (80). The monstrosity of death leads Jack finally to give up “any illusion of community” so that the three instances in the last chapter “confirm Gladney’s isolation and apartness” (Dewey 90). In other words, DeLillo demonstrated how one can face death only on his own and it is only in this way that human dignity can be maintained (Dewey 90). The end of the novel thus shows a Gladney with an “unsuspected strength,” elevating the autonomy of a character that is long portrayed as a weak person (Dewey 91). Stacey Olster also reinforced this portrait of Jack by representing him as a free agent who refuses to comply with social pressure. Near the end of the novel, Jack claims that he would not pay another visit to his doctor after being terrorized by those who know how to analyze his condition (DeLillo 309). It is a protest against the inhuman treatment from the doctors, and, in refusing to deal with his condition, Jack rejects one device—that is, technology—that he constantly utilizes to evade death. For Olster, DeLillo’s attribution of “that small amount of volition” to Jack testifies “DeLillo’s own authorial triumph” (92). 12.

(22) Still, that is not the very end of the story. In the last episode of the last chapter, Jack describes how the customers are trying to maintain their dignified appearance while bewildering at the new arrangement in the supermarket (DeLillo 309-10). Jack’s ironic tone in portraying the pathetic customers cannot hide his participation in the activity that sustains the whole disorienting business. In the end, DeLillo seems to indicate that Jack resigns to the capitalist system because he looks to the “holographic scanners” that are able to “decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly” (DeLillo 310). However confusing the world is, Jack seems to say, there are always devices to measure the price and thus, determine the significance of everything. One doesn’t have to be bothered by the postmodern mystery, for some others will always reduce it to understandable forms, such as the amount of money that indicates how much more he has to earn or pay. In this way, money is still the pillar of authority that stabilizes Jack’s mood and the decoder that enables him to indulge in the mysterious but retarding realm of postmodern spirituality represented by the tabloids at the terminal counter (DeLillo 310). Thus, to search for a self-reliant Jack who resists the capitalist system proves to be a futile task; the hope or salvation in White Noise cannot be located in the person of Jack. Instead, many critics accepted the permeation of capitalist logic in Jack and attributed the higher consciousness to the implied reader and author. They argued that 13.

(23) a claustrophobic ending was designed to arouse in the readers an awareness of the subjugation they are suffering from. The readers should read past the humors that cause them to easily dismiss the indication that they are also “thoroughly implicated . . . in the ideology of consumerism” (Eaton 151) and to identify with the protagonist to see how difficult, and thus, urgent, it is to change not just the environment but also themselves (Kavadlo 39). Ted Billy expressed a similar sentiment when he stated that the greatest “challenge of teaching the ending of the novel is . . . to have students internalize DeLillo’s message so that they fundamentally change in relation to our society” (134). In this account, White Noise “reveals a belief that fictional narrative can provide critical distance from and a critical perspective on the process it depicts” (Wilcox 363). The novel is not born out of theories about postmodernity, but is “simply a brilliant interrogation of the conditions of postmodernity” (Millard 131). In trying to make sense of the ambiguity exhibited in Jack’s encounters, the readers would “become . . . interpreters as opposed to unreflective producers and consumers of white noise” (Fuller 26). White Noise “invites readers to contemplate their own behaviors and motives,” “to interrogate and critique contemporary social life” so that “’new meanings’ as well as ‘new relationship’ to the status quo” shall arise from the reading (Ebbesen 160). Douglass Keesey evoked the lovely children in the novel as “a motive for constructive action” 14.

(24) (149). Thus, the message of the novel surpasses mere warning for the readers in that it urges the reader to engage. This shifting of the burden of salvation from Jack to the reader, however, cannot answer the question: from where can the reader criticize the infiltrating trend depicted in White Noise? Britt perceived that this is a common challenge for both DeLillo and the reader: For [DeLillo] and his readers the troubling question has become how the individual,. if socially constructed, can be a source from which to critique the culture of which it. is a part. In other words, given the postmodern undermining of absolutes and loss of. norms, especially the norm of the self-reliant individual, how can any work situated. in such a horizon generate a ground from which to offer a critique? (110). If Jack is caught in the celebration of postmodern enjoyment and the repulsion at the demise of intellectual autonomy, the reader is torn between them, too. Peter Knight summarized the bleak view of “an all-pervasive system of social and economic forces that are impossible to escape” as “paranoid” (37). Still, all contrary views seem pale in face of Jack’s abandonment to the “holographic canners” in the end of the novel (DeLillo 310). Therefore, there needs to be a reformulation of the relationship between the individual and society when reading White Noise so as to pin down fundamentally the significance of the novel to the reader and the critics. 15.

(25) The Lacanian theory of subject as real and the Other comes at hand. Paul Newman accounted how the Foucauldian position of a socially constructed subject is embarrassed by a similar impossibility and proposed to supplement the theory with Lacanian perspective. The question is: “if power has already colonized subjectivity and truth-knowledge, then are we not robbed of any point, epistemological or ontological, from which relations of power may be criticized and resisted?” (Newman 53) For Lacan, the answer lies in the failure of the Other to constitute the subject completely however the subject is “spoken through and through by the external structures of language and the symbolic” (Newman 59). For Lacan, language is a total “Other” that “can be seen as an insidious, uninvited intruder that unceremoniously and unpropitiously transforms our wishes” (Fink, Subject 6). As the infant learns to articulate his needs to the mother through language, he is also forced to adopt the Other’s point of view in formulating his own needs. Thus, the subject is socially constructed by language in the very beginning of life. However, it is in such a subject that the potential of resistance can be found because the Other can never fully symbolize the person (Starvrakakis 42). Since the infant is born, a certain set of symbols, that is, a name, is used to designate a place for the infant in the social network (Fink, Subject 5). Yet, there is an irremediable gap between the meaning of the symbols and the real identity of the infant. Such a gap is introduced from the dawn 16.

(26) of an infant’s life and will persist throughout his course of socialization. Every set of signifiers assigned to represent a person would ultimately fall short at some point, and, it is in this failure to fully describe the person that the subject emerges (Newman 57). A Lacanian rendition of a subject is thus not produced as a result of “successful interpellation” as implicated by the Foucauldian notion of discursive formation, but of “a failed interpellation” (Newman 57). There is no such thing as an autonomous subject that is in itself free and sufficient because the sense of an autonomous self is due to “the ego’s constitutive misrecognition” (Lacan, Écrits 80). This failed interpellation might induce a sense of “dislocation” and “undecidability” in the subject, a title under which there is only void (Newman 57). Correspondently, this failed interpellation in subjectivity reflects a “radical indeterminacy . . . in the structures that determines” the subject (Newman 59). It points to the fact that the Other always lacks a signifier by which a person can be fully represented (Fink, Subject 29). A subversive reading of the power structure becomes possible because it suggests that “there must be something beyond power which it cannot entirely grasp” (Newman 60). The realm beyond power is the Lacanian real. Real, as opposed to reality, is “that which resists symbolization absolutely” (Lacan, Seminar I 66). The dimension of symbolic and imaginary constitute the normal reality the subject is familiar with, 17.

(27) while the real “is impossible to imagine, impossible to integrate into symbolic order, and impossible to attain in any way” (Evans 160). Thus, the occurrence of real always entails traumatic effects, unacceptably shocking and painful as the happening of 9/11 (Levine xvi). At the dawn of the formation of consciousness, the real as trauma is found in the infant’s discovery of the lack of maternal phallus (Kay 95). The conscious responds with repressing the thought of the lack through the help of symbolic construction (Kay 95). The real and symbolic are then in a constant conflict as the normal order of consciousness has to guard itself from the “return of the repressed” for continuous functioning (Žižek, Looking 23). However, the real is also an “answer” for the incomplete symbolic because it forces the subjects to construct a better symbolization (Žižek, Looking 29). The real actually exists in the fissure of the symbolic because the real is generated by the process of symbolization (Fink, Subject 27). In other words, the real shares an “extimate” nature with symbolic: it is both inside and outside of the symbolic (Lacan, Seminar VII 118). For example, the real resembles the blankness on the page. It doesn’t exist in the reading process unless one retroactively assumes it, but is necessary for the production of meaning (Levine xvi). That “something beyond power which it cannot entirely grasp” is the imminent yet intrusive death in White Noise. Death seems to be anywhere in Jack’s consciousness, but it is also in somewhere else that Jack has to shield himself from. 18.

(28) Jack’s failed identities as professor and husband are underlain by death. Death motivates his investment in Hitler study; it shapes his career, but also terrifies him all the time. Death threatens his marriage, but it also sustains their relationship in that they both want to find consolation in each other because of the threat of death. In Lacan’s delineation, death is located in the dimension of the real because it is “the beyond of pleasure, the inaccessible, the forbidden—the ultimate limit that cannot be overcome” (Homer 90). However the capitalist machine strains human psyche in a vicious cycle, it cannot recycle people’s fear of death. As the characters’ fear accumulates throughout the narrative, death becomes the catalyst for the resolution of the conflicts in Jack’s life. Life in the community, though lively in its material accumulations, is always underlain by a silence that threatens to swallow it and last forever (DeLillo 4). But the traumatic effect death brings to or threatens them with handicaps every device invented within the capitalist system for ensuring their enjoyment. It negates the mesmerism enacted throughout the absurd postmodern landscape. After airborne toxic event, death even resembles a “character” in that it is able to mutate, seep through and stay within the subject for a long time (Kavadlo 27). Jack, being “entered” by death, is thus a bearer of the technological predicament of the age (DeLillo 137). In the case of Jack’s attempted murder, Jack, as a subject with failed identity and security, externalizes the structural impossibility to integrate death 19.

(29) by letting the death in him explodes. In this respect, the failure of the structure speaks through the failure of the structure. Jack’s violence may not be redemptive for himself because of his inconsideration of his legal and moral responsibility. But, in a collective scale, the attempted murder stands for a repetitious return to a horrifying impossibility that signals something really went wrong in this society. The vicious cycle within the capitalist world begins with Jack’s failure to achieve a complete identity. This issue is dealt with in the chapter two of this thesis. Since the Other’s lack is expressed in the subject’s lack, to study the lack in the subject provides the chance to lay bare the lack in the Other. Jack is hurt to find out his failure to be a professor and a reliable spouse. As the first and foremost Hitler scholar in the world, Jack tries very hard to conceal the fact that he doesn’t possess the basic competency required by the profession. That is, he doesn’t understand German. As a result, he can’t stand his image of an accomplished scholar being challenged. When he is exposed as an ordinary person, he loses his control until he finds consolation in material possession. His failure as professor, thus, reveals the social fantasy that defines a person according to status and economic power. As a husband, he fails to live up to his expectation to protect his wife from fear and harm. Babette cheats on him by sleeping with another man, destroying the relationship he uses to sustain his self image. In the process of the deterioration of their marriage, 20.

(30) Babette’s manifested selfishness is to be seen as a common predicament in the society that elevates solipsistic enjoyment. Babette justifies her behavior through resorting to her right to be free from fear of death. But, she rejects the right for Jack to be angry and fails to be unafraid of death once the drug loses its efficacy. The usage of drug, in the end, hinders their communication and destroys their relationship in her pursuit of personal happiness. Dealing with his precocious children, however, panics Jack most since they force him to confront the impossibility of self-definition through desire. Bee’s talk touches on Jack’s mid-life anxiety over the question about what he wants most in life. Also, one of Heinrich’s speeches undermines Jack’s certainty about his desire as Heinrich demonstrates its contingency. “Desire,” for Lacan, “is the essence of man” (Lacan, Seminar XI 275). To find that one doesn’t really know one’s own desire is equal to finding out that one never exists. The realization would evoke the castration process in which the subject discovers his lack of being (Žižek, How 42). Since one cannot know his/her own desire, the realization also entails that “[m]an’s desire is always the desire of the Other” (Lacan, Seminar XI 235). What one desires always originates from the Other as the subject is infiltrated by language. Capitalism exploits this fact in the case of Foster and Mercator. Due to the lack of identity, they try to “prove themselves” through extreme behaviors. To become famous, Foster murders 21.

(31) six people and Mercator plans to break the record of sitting in a cage with vipers. In the end, it turns out that the capitalist society encourages the happenings through kinds of commoditization of their behaviors. Both of them find their models in the media. Foster expects to receive great amount of media attention after he learns from books, TV, and news about the information of the former random killers. Mercator’s plan is supported by New Age teachers, pet-shop owners and tabloid narratives. According to Žižek, there are two dimensions in which capitalism relates to human psyche: desire and drive (Parallax 60). It is easier to determine the importance of desire in relation to capitalism: At the immediate level of addressing individuals, capitalism, of course, interpellates. them as consumers, as subjects of desire, soliciting in them ever new perverse and. excessive desires (for which it offers products to satisfy them); furthermore, it. obviously also manipulates the “desire to desire,” celebrating the very desire to desire. ever new objects and modes of pleasure. (Žižek, Parallax 61). Foster and Mercator’s cases exemplify how their desire is shaped and radicalized by the market. Another realm of perversity lies in the characters’ sexual desire. Jack and Babette utilize erotic literature so as to carry out their sexual intercourse. Even people as old as Mr. Treadwell demand their weekly dosage of porno stories. Murray investigates new ways of stimulating sexual desire, flirts with his friend’s wife, 22.

(32) explores transvestism. John Duval even argued that he has slept with Babette by the end of the novel (184). The younger generation has also been accustomed to kinds of “liberation.” For Heinrich, incest is natural because animals do it “all the time” (DeLillo 36). However, with all freedom to enjoy, Jack and Babette still fail to have sex. The infinite possibilities to enjoy simply suffocate the subjects’ desire for perversity. Still, the celebration of “desire to desire” sustains their desire because desire “eternally extend[s] toward the desire for something else” (Lacan, Écrits 431). The most dangerous aspect of capitalism, however, lies in its dimension of drive, “the impersonal compulsion to engage in the endless circular movement of expanded self-reproduction” (Žižek, Parallax 61). Drive is the remainder of the biological instinct after socialization through symbolization (Kay 162). It does not force the subject into self-annihilation, but compels the subject in an unyielding manner (Kay 162). However, “the real purpose of the drive is not some mythical goal of full satisfaction, but the return to its circular path, and the real source of enjoyment is the repetitive movement of this closed unit” (Evans 46-7). Žižek maintained that it is the “circulation of capital” that ushers capitalism into the dimension of drive (Parallax 61). The circulation of money has been dissociated from any purpose for satisfying personal needs, but establishes itself as its own purpose (Žižek, Parallax 60). 23.

(33) This “in-itself” raison d’être of circulation of capital corresponds with the pursuit of surplus value in capitalism in that its accumulation does not aim at any purpose but the accumulation itself (Žižek, Sublime 52). Value appears worthwhile for pursuit only as “surplus.” The world of White Noise is full of perverse enjoyments because the capitalists are pursuing surplus value. Even because of the air borne toxic event, the excess of industrial development in the novel, a corporation attracting new investment is established. SIMUVAC is just a rehearsal team before the event, but it becomes “a private consulting firm that conceives and operates simulated evacuations” after the event (DeLillo 195). The irony that the exposure of problems with capitalism only produces more business entities demonstrates how the pursuit of surplus value drives capitalism itself to “resolve again and again . . . its own fundamental imbalance” (Žižek, Sublime 52). Yet, more radically, it is this endless dealing with its own impossibility that sustains its monstrous liveliness (Žižek, Sublime 52). For example, it is common that an organization deals with its internal problems through expanding its business. As such, capitalism brings its constitutive sickness to everywhere it expands. As a result, the subjects in the capitalist society can but enjoy what the producers offer. In a Lacanian vein, their enjoyment is naturally mixed with pain and suffering. Jouissance, compromisingly translated as enjoyment, denotes “the 24.

(34) dissatisfaction that we experience with the failure of our desire” (Homer 94). Even though subjects cannot find the ultimate satisfaction in the endless pursuits, surplus enjoyment compensates the subject’s loss and disappointment (Žižek, Fragile 23). This is typified in Murray’s enjoyment in the repetitious awash in the slogans of Coke Cola. Other instances include Alfonse’s pleasure in watching people suffer on TV and Babette’s relationship with yogurt. They all suggest the agency of superego, which turns the subject’s enjoyment into compulsory exercise and allows the subject to remain in enjoyment (Žižek, How 104). When carried to the extremity, the injunction to “joui” familiarizes the subject with pain and suffering so that they are accustomed to be “victims.” Duvall had mentioned an instance of the townspeople’s “masochistic desire to be exploited” by media (173). During the air borne toxic event, a man holding a TV set makes a speech, complaining the absence of media to portray their fear and suffering. The speech is met with whole-hearted applause and encouragement by the townspeople. The instance reveals how they lose the ability to improve their lives and are bound to suffering in this society. In addition, the townspeople in Blacksmith flock to play dead bodies and the injured in the following evacuation. They are dedicated to act out the pain and suffering in a unified spirit. Even children are among them. Thus, the over-enjoyment brought by capitalist development is revealed to be very torturous. 25.

(35) It is in this straining situation that death emerges as the real that shatters the consolidated mechanism of enjoyment. Death rules out unfit choices so that life can be possible, according to Winnie Richard, a brain expert in the novel (DeLillo 217). But, Jack resists such reasoning because he thinks that death deprives him of a wholeness of enjoyment he could have possessed (DeLillo 272). He blames the concept of death for preventing him from enjoying his life to the fullest (DeLillo 270). Jack’s attitude then suggests an obsessional resistance against the castration that deprives one of a nonexistent fullness of being (Fink, Clinical 34). Obsessional neurotic reacts to the castration by repressing the thought, but the repressed always returns (Fink, Clinical 114). But the ontological perfection evidenced by that jouissance never exists since “the assumed full jouissance and the desire to acquire it are both the products of language” (Žižek, Tarrying 116). Thus, death haunts Jack’s consciousness from the beginning to the end of the novel. As death seems to oppress from every direction, Jack avoids making decisions for his life so as to pertain the illusive sense of wholeness. But, motivated by personal tragedies and the implant of death embodied by Nyodene D, Jack is able to make plans and carry them out in trying to murder Willie Mink. The stagnancy in his life temporarily shrinks and clatters as Jack ignores the restrictions the society imposes on him and carries his plot to murder Mink out (DeLillo 288). Death, therefore, creates a positive condition for 26.

(36) Jack to confront his rage and selfishness in its immediacy, just as castration promises “the emergence of desire” (Stavrakakis 42). In Mark Osteen’s words, “Jack’s plot becomes for him an anchor for floating anxiety, a thread to guide him through the labyrinth that his life has become” (186). After Jack leaves the wounded Mink with German nuns, he parks the stolen car in front of his neighbor’s house and returns to his home to sleep. One would marvel at Jack’s unmindful disposal of the car and his restfulness. It seems that he leaves everything behind without too much consideration, not worrying that the police might come to him. His psychological equilibrium is hard won, and yet this peaceful state of mind seems to be overbearing in a second thought. In the next chapter, which is also the final chapter in the novel, he doesn’t even mention any consequence following the attempted murder. It is this disconnection that unnerves the reader, indicating a change of character on Jack’s part. In terms of this transformation, it’s not a change for the better, as LeClair indicated (222), but an alteration of his fundamental perception of the world, adjusting him more comfortably to the fast accelerating world of enjoyment. In this respect, Jack finally becomes a Lacanian pervert despite his potential of subverting the big Other. Perversion, for Lacan, stands for the “ultimate ethical failure” for a subject who is aware of the inconsistency of the system but then chooses to support it with transgression (Kotsko 61). In the chapter 27.

(37) three of this thesis, it is demonstrated how Jack returns to his comfortable routine after he becomes aware of the paralysis the villagers of Blacksmith willingly submit themselves to. Perversion denotes a psychic structure that entails the disavowal of the threat of castration, that is, yielding one’s particular form of jouissance on account of the prohibition from the big Other (Fink, Clinical 169). Since the symbolic is found on the premise of accepting the “No” from the father (Fink, Clinical 81), the pervert’s disavowal masks his refusal “to give up his pleasure—that is, the masturbatory pleasure . . . in his fantasies” (Fink, Clinical 172). Here, the masturbatory pleasure does not necessarily denote to the pleasure experienced in masturbation. It stands for the “autistic jouissance” that is sustained only in one’s particular mode of fundamental perception of the world (Žižek, Parallax 311). It is thus fragile and difficult to maintain if exposed to the realm of the real Other. Thus, the dominance of perversion entails a conformity to the Other that is illusive and based on the sustenance of one’s particular enjoyment. In Lacan’s delineation, the psychic structure of most people can be categorized as obsessional or hysteric neurotics. Yet, because of the fast development of capitalism, the mechanism constructed for instant gratification shatters the rigid categorization of psychic structure, turning many from neurotics into perverts (Kotsko 28.

(38) 84). As a result, the subjects in the capitalist society have learned to ignore the irritating nuances of this Other and indulge in their pursuit of solipsistic enjoyment. As the airborne toxic event stands for the symptom of the over-development of capitalism, the characters react to it in ways that demonstrates their perversion. During and after the air borne toxic event, Jack and other adults, over and over again, suppress the inconvenient truth in order to sustain the appearance of normality. It turns out that they are protecting their treasured lifestyles that provide for them a great amount of masturbatory enjoyment. Jack cannot accept any breach in his sense of security sustained by the family’s gathering, while the townspeople can’t but increase their shopping intensity. As it is shown later, their perversion is reinforced by University Discourse that nourishes their habit of compromising to the sick system. Lacan devised the diagrams of four discourses to map out the historical shift of structural determination of subjectivity (Žižek, Iraq 131). Among them, University Discourse speaks about the new subjection in contemporary society under the reign of experts (Fink, Subject 132). Its diagram is as follows: S2 . a. S1 . $. The upper left position, which is occupied by S2, stands for the speaking agent in the hegemony represented by the discourse. As S2 stands for the chain of signifiers, the speaking agent denotes the possessor of knowledge; to be more specific, they are 29.

(39) kinds of experts certificated by educational institutions, most notably the modern universities. The upper arrow is directed toward the receiver addressed by the speaking agent. The a, that is, the object petit a, in the position of receiver renders the addresses either desirable in a distorted light or intrusively stimulating. In the former case, they are treated according to the measure with which the speaking agent defines them, such as the students striving to assimilate and become the embodiment of the learning they receive or customers bombarded by advices from kinds of “market expert” (Bracher 56; Žižek, “Lacan’s” 88). In the later case, the modern subjects who are liable to various sorts of harassment emerge (Žižek, “Lacan’s” 92). However, the production of the infiltration from the experts is not subjects who are totally constituted by the knowledge but those who have difficulties to “fit in.” The lower right position of the diagram is occupied by the symbol of barred subject, $, which suggests the impossibility for the subjects to identify with any kind of symbolic identity in the hegemony. This failure to produce self-same subjects conforming to the status quo undermines the working objectives inherent in the truth position in the diagram, that is, the lower left position (Bracher 54). Thus, the lower arrow suggests a servitude that is not completely successful. The truth position is occupied by S1, the symbol of Master Signifier. As the Master Signifier in capitalist society becomes the superego injunction to enjoy (Žižek, “Lacan’s” 96), Jack and Murray’s students are 30.

(40) wired to identify with the vulnerable parts of heroes cherished by the popular taste that is fostered by entertainment industry. As the implicit truth of the agent, the Master Signifier also stands for a power relation that is “not integrated into a comprehensive symbolic arrangement” (Dean 98). A tyrannical impulse for nonnegotiable regulation is concealed under the agent. As medical institution stands for another form of University Discourse, Jack and Babette experience terrorizations from the bureaucratic experts of medical science. The secret of the success of University Discourse lies in its cooperation with the capitalism so that people’s fetishistic needs for remaining in their routine are fulfilled (Žižek, Parallax 297). According to Žižek, the commodity fetishism in contemporary society would cause the subjects to follow the logic of “I know well . . ., but nevertheless . . .” (Žižek, How 94). The fetishism, then, joins in the perverse atmosphere with its disavowal of anything that might jeopardize subjects’ enjoyment. In the case of SIMUVAC, people participate in a sequence of drills, but no one carries out the practiced evacuation when a real toxic leakage happens. The participation, then, suggests a form of ritual that excuses a pervert from confronting the threat of castration (Fink, Clinical 170). Fortunately, according to the diagram, University Discourse produces failed subjects that embody the potential subversion of the symbolic (Dean 83). Battered by the ideological interpellations, Jack protests against 31.

(41) Mercator’s attempt to forge his own identity based on “the tabloid aspiration” (DeLillo 255). The. last. trace. of. biopolitical. domination—a. form. of. University. Discourse—left on Jack, however, drives him to the ultimate perversion in the end of novel. Biopolitical control results in the denial of any higher purpose in life and instead elevating life itself as the highest purpose so that death must be eradicated at any cost (Žižek, Iraq 149). The use of drug that promises to exterminate one’s fear of death precisely marks the way of the pervert who pursues “autistic jouissance,” fearing any violation of the routine they can’t part with (Žižek, Parallax 190). However, not until Jack undergoes a psychoanalytic session with Murray is he liberated to pursue his own enjoyment. Murray resembles a psychoanalyst who disentangles the analysand from the realm of the Other and ushers him to the pursuit of satisfaction (Fink, Clinical 208). He exposes Jack’s contradictory relationship with Hitler to him and encourages him to unleash his “reservoir of violence in male psychic” (DeLillo 279). However, in Lacanian psychoanalysis, one psychic structure requires the corresponding form of treatment; otherwise, it might lead to disastrous consequence on subjects (Fink, Clinical 75). Murray’s form of dealing suits more with the neurotics, who are troubled with severe internalized prohibitions. As a result, it reinforces Jack’s pervert structure. Jack becomes the most dangerous pervert who 32.

(42) finds out the weakness of the Other and would rather sustain it with his particular form of jouissance (Fink, Clinical 192). He questions the existence of the law on his way to shoot Willie Mink and then finds out the necessity of doing evil to the social structure. That is why there is not only an absence of anxiety or anger in the last chapter, but also a serene happiness in his shopping and usage of tabloids at the counter. The message brought by Jack’s perversion is bleak. However the subject is enlightened to possess critical consciousness concerning the influence of global capitalism, the difficult task is to understand how to handle one’s particular mode of satisfaction. For the reader, the temptation lies in constructing a well-rounded criticism and leaves it behind. Thomas Rickert did complain the hardship for the students in composition class to change their lifestyle even though they might produce brilliant analysis and critique of cultural phenomenon in well-informed theoretical language (2). In this respect, the very act of criticism is suspect of contributing to the regulation of the system that it criticizes. “[I]n their active manipulation of . . . categories,” said Bracher, “[critics] accommodate much more thoroughly [to the system of knowledge] than when they are mere passive recipients” (57). Its ring especially resonates for the critics of White Noise, a novel that seems to be lost in the “aura” produced by a great deal of academic discussion (Knight 39). Just as people in Blacksmith treasures their supermarket, 33.

(43) generating criticisms of White Noise may produce a considerable amount of jouissance in critics. However, to borrow Bracher’s project, in order to initiate social change, one has to firstly recognize “how difficult it is to achieve” (57). With the understanding that subjects are not mere product of social construction, the instructor should realize that it is not enough to indoctrinate the students with subversive theorization (Rickert 4). A pervert doesn’t need re-imposition of law; his life enacts the castration from the Other already (Fink, Clinical 192). Instead, the contemporary readers tinged with perversion need to problematize the source of their jouissance (Fink, Clinical 186). They need to come to terms with the real dimension of the jouissance that is not anchored to their knowledge of the Other. As “the satisfaction of a drive,” jouissance doesn’t aim at satisfaction for pleasure but infinite circulation around the impossibility (Lacan, Seminar VII 209; Žižek, Parallax 60-1). It acquires a “positivity” in that it “press[es] forward” despite the fact that it can never achieve any goal (Braunstein 104-5). In fact, due to its transgression of pleasure principle, the trajectory of jouissance intertwines with the ongoing reformulation of history (Braunstein 104). The implication for White Noise is that Jack’s perversion indicates a realm beyond comfortable routines, calling the readers to persist even in disappointment so as to see the reconstitution of the Other. In this respect, engagements with White Noise are encouraged. Just as DeLillo 34.

(44) continues to write, the continuous discussion of the text as can be expected provides the chance to lay bare and get in touch with one’s jouissance.. 35.

(45) Chapter 2: The Fluctuation of Subversion. Generally speaking, the characters’ lives in White Noise are structured around the effort to shield themselves in an artificial paradise of shopping and other entertainment. Though the Lacanian notion of the real entails that there will be disruptions of such living, capitalism threatens to eradicate any potential subversion by becoming identical with drive (Žižek, Parallax 61). As drive is located nearly in the dimension of the real, as opposed to desire, which is enthralled in the dimension of symbolic, it regulates according to all the monstrous properties of the real (Kay 162). It follows that capitalism becomes the greatest subversion that overthrows and then homogenizes other subversions that are less focused and amassed. Instead of dawning on him about the lack in the Other, Jack’s failures to become a successful father, husband and even professor only cause him to turn more thoroughly to the exchanges of money and goods. Though the air borne toxic event seems to shatter the false security enjoyed by the townspeople, the business world depicted by DeLillo is even capable of turning the crisis as a surplus of its development into chances for further development. With such liveliness, the capitalist machines intensify the cycle to shop and enjoy for townspeople. Under the circumstance, only fear of death reminds them of the limit of their enjoyment. The “modern death” possesses Jack Gladney so that he finally breaks out of the impasse ushered by the capitalist 36.

(46) infiltration (DeLillo 144). Death thus plays the role of real that shatters the existing social order despite some reservations for Jack’s morality. For Lacan, the identity of the subject can never be complete because the Other is always lacking in providing a scenario that can fully explain the subject’s existence. Thus, Paul Newman says: For Lacan, . . . the identity of the subject is always incomplete. The symbolization of. the subject—its self-recognition in the symbolic order—ultimately fails, and. therefore, there is always a structural gap between the subject and the signifier that is. supposed to represent him. (Newman 57). When the subject finds out what he is is not quite matched with the position the system offers, the result is a traumatic feeling (Žižek, How 42). Jack is aware all the time that his identity as the founder of Hitler study is but a constructed myth. On the one hand, he derives a certain amount of sense of security in absorbing a powerful figure and constructing an image of a prominent academic. On the other hand, he is aware that he is, in his own words, “the false character that follows the name around” (DeLillo 17). In the beginning of the novel, Jack accounts for how he becomes the renowned scholar back to 1968. But the success is mostly opportunistic (DeLillo 4). Jack is fortunate enough to have a trusting dean that accepts his advice to establish the reputation of College on the Hill on an innovative subject of study (DeLillo 4). The 37.

(47) idea works and Jack is esteemed as the first scholar between the Atlantic renown for the cultural study of Hitler phenomenon (DeLillo 4). The most scandalous fact concerning Jack’s eminent position is that he doesn’t understand German, let alone reading and writing in German (DeLillo 30). Jack has been living for many years, so to speak, “on the edge of a landscape of vast shame,” that is, in the fear that his unsound scholarship would someday be exposed (DeLillo 30). Besides, Jack reveals to Babette how they rely on appearance shaping for winning others’ recognition. Simply named as “Jack Gladney” would not be “taken seriously as a Hitler innovator” (DeLillo 16). The chancellor and Jack conclude that some “extra initial” should be inserted between his first name and last name (DeLillo 16). Following that, the chancellor urges Jack to obtain more “bulk” (DeLillo 17). The “bulk” that Jack finds reassuring in Babette is now used for creating “an air of unhealthy excess, of padding and exaggeration, hulking massiveness” in his appearance (DeLillo 17). The point is that, by appearing intimidating, Jack is able to “‘grow out’ into Hitler,” that is, conforming to the public expectation of an authoritative figure studying another powerful, evil and deadly figure (DeLillo 16). In order to further enhance the fascination Jack might entice from the public, he constantly wears dark glasses (DeLillo 32). But Jack is not very sure about the destination he is heading toward. Most efforts, for Jack, are “tentative” (DeLillo 17). They are used to form a career and, 38.

(48) most importantly, a public image that might stabilize his sense of self. Hitler is just a thing for Jack “to grow into and develop toward” (DeLillo 17). While it does become an instant success and Babette assures Jack that the initials “J. A. K.” does lend “dignity, significance and prestige” to him, Jack is all the while troubled by a keen sense of alienation to the public image that he so painstakingly constructed (DeLillo 17). When one of Jack’s colleagues remarks that he doesn’t look formidable without the medieval cloak and dark glass, the sense that he is but an ordinary guy drives him to shop in a desperate way. When the Gladneys arrive at the Mid-Village Mall for shopping, Jack runs into a faculty of College on the Hill named Eric Massingale, who remarks that Jack looks “so harmless” without his dark glasses and medieval cloak (DeLillo 83). In the previous chapters, Jack reveals how he relies on his dark glasses and gown to form a scholar image. For the students, his gown represents his status as the dean of the department and contributes to his confidence in lecturing (DeLillo 9 and 26). His dark glass is selected to add a formidable air to himself, replacing the “bushy beards” that his “wife of the period” dislikes (DeLillo 17). Overall, Jack’s gown and glasses are indispensible for constructing a powerful figure in the others’ eyes. But, the intended effect means a lot more to himself than to others. Being discovered as just a “big, harmless, aging, indistinct sort of guy,” Jack 39.

(49) begins to shop “with reckless abandon” (DeLillo 83) Massingale’s remarks “put [Jack] in the mood to shop” because shopping remedies his feeling of shame (DeLillo 83). It is too painful to be recognized as another ordinary guy, his feigning being rendered futile. Not only does Jack fail to live up to the position of professor, his status as a husband and a father are not consolidate. As a husband, Jack prides himself for being able to maintain the relationship via sincerity and communication before he finds out Dylar (DeLillo 29). They develop a habit to tell each other things that have happened to them down to the smallest detail (DeLillo 30). According to Jack, it “helps us develop an identity secure enough to allow itself to be placed in another’s care and protection” (DeLillo 29). In other words, through being open to each other, Jack establishes with his spouse a firm relationship that is used to define himself. This identity will disintegrate if one of them dies before the other because it suggests the end of the “two views of the same person” (DeLillo 99). Between the end of the identity and the present, Jack is content to perceive that their job is to protect each other from any harm. Thus, Babette observes that it is Jack’s nature “to shelter loved ones from the truth” after Jack defends Babette for her compulsive shopping (DeLillo 8). However, after he learns that Babette ever sleeps with another man in exchange for the drugs to eliminate her fear of death, he realizes that their sincerity is only a fake. It 40.

(50) is vital that they talk to each other about everything but leave their fear of death out (DeLillo 29-30). Though Jack and Babette discuss about who should die first, they never really confront the abyss of fear together. In their striving for the priority to die in order to leave the loneliness to the other, both try to conceal the fact that they don’t want to die at all (DeLillo 101, 188). Once the fear is found to be simply “too big” to be contained in Babette’s confession, Jack is devastated (DeLillo 188). Most importantly, the revelation strikes especially hard when it destroys Jack’s self image that is constructed as a protector. Jack always conceives of himself as “the doomed fool” who is brooded alone by his fear of death; he is the one who is supposed to take the suffering in silently and to “protect you from worry,” “to keep you animated, vital and happy” (DeLillo 188). Playing a tragic hero, he is able to mesmerize himself with the “simple pleasures” Babette’s daily routines bring to him (DeLillo 189). Death can be kept at bay with this imaginary gesture of sacrifice. Now that Babette not only is found to fear death excessively but also bypasses Jack’s assumed identity of protector, Jack’s self perception in relation to Babette is seriously shattered. Therefore, Jack’s identity as a husband is also evanescent. As a father, he is panicked by his grown up children also because of this tension between position and substance. When his precocious daughter Bee visits the Gladneys, Jack is greatly panicked by her gaze, which seems to indicate how 41.