American postmodernist “chaosmos’: Don DeLillo’s White Noise

The most distinguishing characteristic of twentieth-century literature is probably its rebellion against nineteenth-century realism. The modernists of the first half of this century concentrated on evoking internal realities of individual consciousness instead of the external reality of material objects and social orders, representation of which was the primary goal of bourgeois realism of the previous century. However, many of the best contemporary writers seem to go beyond the boundary of realism. Indeed, various modes of non-realism, which were the hallmark of inferior literature in past centuries, seem to have become the prevalent literary genres of many of our most gifted writers.

The elements of black humor and postmodernism in the works by John Barth, Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut.

Lecture 7

Black humo(u)r in literature, drama, and film is a grotesque or morbid humor used to express the absurdity, insensitivity, paradox, and cruelty of the modern world. Ordinary characters or situations are usually exaggerated far beyond the limits of normal satire or irony. Black humor uses devices often associated with tragedy and is sometimes equated with tragic farce. The novels of such writers as Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Joseph Heller, and Philip Roth contain elements of black humor.

John Barth is one of the most outstanding proponents of such a new literary stance, which he calls "irrealism" after Jorge Luis Borges's definition of a literary domain, where the real and the unreal are indistinguishably intertwined. At the same time, he is one of the most prominent comic writers in America today. Indeed, his being a comic writer seems inseparable from his being an "irrealist." Humor, which seems to thrive most rigorously in a delicate equilibrium between the real and the unreal, is the most effective textual device to create the irreal world of John Barth. In fact, humor even has a tendency to produce an adverse effect on the sense of reality which a realistic fiction strives for. This is why Barth's earlier two "realistic" fictions, The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, which were saturated with comic overtones, did not quite strike us as realistic. This is also why Barth's latest two "irrealistic" fictions, Letters and Sabbatical, which were less humorous than his other works, impressed us with some sense of reality.

John Simmons Barth (born May 27, 1930) is an American novelist and short-story writer, known for the postmodernist and metafictive quality of his work.

John Barth was born in Cambridge, Maryland, and briefly studied "Elementary Theory and Advanced Orchestration" at Juilliard before attending Johns Hopkins University, receiving a B.A. in 1951 and an M.A. in 1952 (for which he wrote a thesis novel, The Shirt of Nessus).

He was a professor at Penn State University (1953-1965), University at Buffalo (1965-1973), Boston University (visiting professor, 1972-1973), and Johns Hopkins University (1973-1995) before he retired in 1995.

Barth began his career with The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, two short novels that dealt wittily with controversial topics, suicide and abortion respectively. They were straightforward tales; as Barth later remarked, with gentle condescension, they "didn't know they were novels".

The Sot-Weed Factor was an unprecedented leap in literature, an 800-page mock epic of the colonization of Maryland based on an actual poet, Ebenezer Cook, who wrote a poem of that name. The Sot-Weed Factor was what Northrop Frye called an anatomy — a large, loosely structured work, with digressions, distractions, stories within stories, and lists (such as a lengthy exchange of insulting terms by two prostitutes). The fictional Ebenezer Cooke (repeatedly described as "poet and virgin") is a Candide-like innocent who sets out to write a heroic epic and is disillusioned enough that the final poem is a biting satire.

Barth's next book, Giles Goat-Boy, of comparable size, was a speculative fiction based on the conceit of the university as universe. It could be described as a fictional gospel about a half-man half-goat who discovers his humanity and becomes a savior in a university that allegorically represents the universe, presented as a computer tape given to John Barth, who denies that it is his work. In the course of the book, Giles carries out all the tasks prescribed by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Barth kept a list of the tasks taped to his wall while he was writing the book.

The short story collection Lost in the Funhouse and the novella collection Chimera were even more metafictional than their two predecessors, foregrounding the writing process and presenting achievements such as seven nested quotations. LETTERS was yet another tour de force, in which Barth and the characters of his first six books interacted.

While writing those books, Barth was also pondering and discussing the theoretical problems of fiction writing, most notably in an essay, "The Literature of Exhaustion" (first printed in the Atlantic, 1967), that was widely considered to be a statement of "the death of the novel" (Compare with Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author"). Barth has since insisted that he was merely making clear that a particular stage in history was passing, and pointing to possible directions from there. He later (1979) wrote a follow-up essay, "The Literature of Replenishment", to clarify the point.

His fiction continues to maintain a precarious balance between postmodern self-consciousness and wordplay on the one hand, and the sympathetic characterisation and "page-turning" plotting commonly ascribed to more traditional genres and subgenres of classic and contemporary storytelling.

Major works: The Floating Opera (1957); The End of the Road (1958); The Sot-Weed Factor (1960); Giles Goat-Boy, or, The Revised New Syllabus (1966); Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice (stories) (1968); Chimera (three linked novellas) (1972); LETTERS: A Novel (1979); Sabbatical: A Romance (1982)

Joseph Heller (1923 –1999) was an American satirist author. He wrote the influential Catch-22 about American servicemen during World War II. It was this work that was the origination for the expression, 'catch 22', used commonly to express absurdity in choice.

Heller is widely regarded as one of the best post-World War satirists. Although he is remembered mostly by his landmark Catch 22, his works, centered on the lives of various members of the middle-classes, remain exceptional exemplars of modern satire.

Joseph Heller was born in Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York, the son of poor Jewish parents. After graduating from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1941, Heller joined the Twelfth Air Force at age 19. He was stationed in Corsica, where he flew 60 combat missions as a B-25 bombardier. It was these experiences that later became the inspiration for his first novel, Catch-22. After the war, he studied English at the University of Southern California and NYU. In 1949, Heller received his M.A. from Columbia University. From 1949-1950, he was a Fulbright scholar at Oxford University.

Catch-22 is a satirical, historical fiction novel. The novel, set during the latter stages of the Second World War from 1943 onwards, is frequently cited as one of the great literary works of the Twentieth Century.

The novel follows Captain John Yossarian, a U.S. Army Air Forces B-25 bombardier, and a number of other characters. Most events occur while the airmen of the Fighting 256th (or "two to the fighting eighth power") Squadron are based on the island of Pianosa, west of Italy. Many events in the book are repeatedly described from differing points of view, so the reader learns more about the event from each iteration. Furthermore, the events are referred to as if the reader already knows all about them. The pacing of Catch-22 is frenetic, its tenor intellectual, and its humor largely absurd, but interspersed with grisly moments of realism.

Among other things, Catch-22 is a general critique of bureaucratic operation and reasoning. Resulting from its specific use in the book, the phrase "Catch-22" is common idiomatic usage meaning "a no-win situation" or "a double bind" of any type. Within the book, "Catch-22" is a military rule, the self-contradictory circular logic of which, for example, prevents anyone from avoiding combat missions.

Much of Heller's prose in Catch-22 is circular and repetitive, exemplifying in its form the structure of a Catch-22. Heller revels in paradox, for example: The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likeable. In three days no one could stand him, and The case against Clevinger was open and shut. The only thing missing was something to charge him with. This constantly undermines the reader's understanding of the characters' milieu, and is key to understanding the book, which in itself seems like a paradox. An atmosphere of logical irrationality pervades the entire description of Yossarian's life in the armed forces, and, indeed, the entire book.

The motif of bureaucratic absurdity is further explored in 1994's Closing Time, Heller's sequel to Catch-22. This darker, slower-paced, apocalyptic novel explores the pre- and post-war lives of some of the major characters in Catch-22, with particular emphasis on the relationship between Yossarian and tailgunner Sammy Singer.

The book sets out the absurdity of living by the rules of others, be they friends, family, governments, systems, religions or philosophies. Heller suggests that rules left unchecked will take on a life of their own, forming a bureaucracy in which important matters (eg those affecting life and death) are trivialized and trivial matters (eg clerical errors) assume enormous importance. He concludes that the only way to survive such an insane system is to be insane oneself.

Another theme is the folly of patriotism and honour, which leads most of the airmen to accept Catch-22 and the abusive lies of bureaucrats, but which Yossarian never accepts as a legitimate answer to his complaints.

While the (official) enemy are the Germans, no German ever actually appears in the story as an enemy combatant. As the narrative progresses, Yossarian comes to fear American bureaucrats more than he fears the Germans attempting to shoot down his bomber. This ironic situation is epitomized in the single appearance of German personnel in the novel, who act as pilots employed by a private entrepreneur working within the US military. This predicament indicates a tension between traditional motives for violence and the modern economic machine, which seems to generate violence simply as another means to profit, quite independent of geographical or ideological constraints.

Major works: Catch 22 (1961); Something Happened (1974); Good as Gold (1979); God Knows (1984); Picture This (1988); Closing Time (1994).

Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. (born May 8, 1937) is an American novelist. Pynchon is noted for his imagination and wild sense of humor. He is often grouped with authors of black humor (such as Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller), who have turned from realism to fantasy to depict 20th-century American life.

Thomas Pynchon was born in Glen Cove, Long Island, New York. Hailing from Long Island, Pynchon spent two years in the United States Navy and earned an English degree from Cornell University. After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he began composing the novels for which he is best known today: V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity's Rainbow (1973), Vineland (1990), Mason & Dixon (1997), and Against the Day (2006).

Pynchon is regarded by many readers and critics as one of the finest contemporary authors. He is a MacArthur Fellow and a recipient of the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Both his fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, styles and themes, including (but not limited to) the fields of history, science and mathematics. Pynchon is also known for his avoidance of personal publicity: very few photographs of him have ever been published, and rumors about his location and identity have been circulated since the 1960s.

Along with its emphasis on loftier themes such as racism, imperialism and religion, and its cognizance and appropriation of many elements of traditional high culture and literary form, Pynchon's work also demonstrates a strong affinity with the practitioners and artifacts of low culture, including comic books and cartoons, pulp fiction, popular films, television programs, cookery, urban myths, conspiracy theories, and folk art. This blurring of the conventional boundary between "High" and "low" culture, sometimes interpreted as a "deconstruction", is seen as one of the defining characteristics of postmodernism.

In particular, Pynchon has revealed himself in his fiction and non-fiction as an aficionado of popular music. Song lyrics and mock musical numbers appear in each of his novels, and, in his autobiographical introduction to the Slow Learner collection of early stories, he reveals a fondness for both jazz and rock and roll.

Investigations and digressions into the realms of human sexuality, psychology, sociology, mathematics, science, and technology recur throughout Pynchon's works. One of his earliest short stories, "Low-lands" (1960), features a meditation on Heisenberg's uncertainty principle as a metaphor for telling stories about one's own experiences. His next published work, "Entropy" (1960), introduced the concept which was to become synonymous with Pynchon's name (though Pynchon later admitted the "shallowness of [his] understanding" of the subject, and noted that choosing an abstract concept first and trying to construct a narrative around it was "a lousy way to go about writing a story"). Another early story, "Under the Rose" (1961), includes amongst its cast of characters a cyborg set anachronistically in Victorian-era Egypt (a type of writing now called steampunk). This story, significantly reworked by Pynchon, appears as Chapter 3 of V. "The Secret Integration" (1964), Pynchon's last published short story, is a sensitively-handled coming-of-age tale in which a group of young boys face the consequences of the American policy of racial integration. At one point in the story, the boys attempt to understand the new policy by way of the mathematical operation, the only sense of the word with which they are familiar.

The Crying of Lot 49 also alludes to entropy and communication theory, and contains scenes and descriptions which parody or appropriate calculus, Zeno's paradoxes, and the thought experiment known as Maxwell's demon. At the same time, the novel also investigates homosexuality, celibacy and both medically-sanctioned and illicit psychedelic drug use. Gravity's Rainbow describes many varieties of sexual fetishism (including sado-masochism, coprophilia and a borderline case of tentacle rape), and features numerous episodes of drug use, most notably marijuana but also cocaine, naturally occurring hallucinogens, and the mushroom Amanita muscaria. Gravity's Rainbow also derives much from Pynchon's background in mathematics: at one point, the geometry of garter belts is compared with that of cathedral spires, both described as mathematical singularities. Mason & Dixon, explores the scientific, theological, and sociocultural foundations of the Age of Reason whilst also depicting the relationships between actual historical figures and fictional characters in intricate detail and, like Gravity's Rainbow, is an archetypal example of the genre of historiographic metafiction.

Major works: V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity's Rainbow (1973), Vineland (1990), Mason & Dixon (1997), Against the Day (2006).

Philip Milton Roth (born March 19, 1933, Newark, New Jersey) is an American novelist. He is perhaps best known for his 1959 collection Goodbye, Columbus, his 1969 novel Portnoy's Complaint, and for his late-'90s trilogy comprising the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000).

Roth grew up in the Weequahic neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey, as the second child of first-generation American parents, Jews of Galician descent. After graduating from Weequahic High School in 1950, Roth went on to attend Bucknell University, where he earned a degree in English. He then pursued graduate studies at the University of Chicago, receiving an M.A. in English literature and then working briefly as an instructor in the university's writing program. Roth went on to teach creative writing at the University of Iowa and Princeton University. He continued his teaching career at the University of Pennsylvania where he taught comparative literature before finally retiring from teaching altogether in 1992.

It was during his Chicago stay that Roth met the novelist Saul Bellow, and Margaret Martinson, who eventually became his first wife. Though the two would separate in 1963, and Martinson would die in a car crash in 1968, Roth's dysfunctional marriage to her left an important mark on his literary output.

Between the end of his studies and the publication of his first book in 1959, Roth served two years in the army and then wrote short fiction and criticism for various magazines, including movie reviews for The New Republic. His first book, Goodbye, Columbus, a novella and five short stories, won the prestigious National Book Award in 1960, and afterward he published two long, bleak novels, Letting Go and When She Was Good; it was not until the publication of his third novel, Portnoy's Complaint, in 1969 that Roth enjoyed widespread commercial and critical success.

During the 1970s Roth experimented in various modes, from the political satire Our Gang to the Kafkaesque fantasy The Breast. By the end of the decade, though, Roth had created his Nathan Zuckerman alter-ego. In a series of highly self-referential novels and novellas that followed between 1979-1986, Zuckerman appeared as either the main character or as an interlocutor.

Many critics regard Roth's golden period as commencing with Operation Shylock and continuing to the present day. In Sabbath's Theater (1995), Roth presented his most lecherous protagonist yet in Mickey Sabbath, a disgraced aging former puppeteer. In complete contrast, the first volume of Roth's second Zuckerman trilogy, 1997's American Pastoral, focuses on the life of virtuous Newark athletics star Swede Levov and the tragedy that befalls him when his teenage daughter transforms into a domestic terrorist during the late 1960s. I Married a Communist (1998) focuses on the McCarthy era; The Human Stain examines identity politics in 1990s America. The Dying Animal (2001) is a short novel on the subject of eros and death that revisits literary professor David Kepesh, protagonist of two 1970s works.

Major works: Zuckerman novels (1979-2007); Kepesh novels (1971-2001);Goodbye, Columbus (1959); Letting Go (1962); When She Was Good (1967); Portnoy's Complaint (1969).

Kurt Vonnegut (look Lecture 5).

Humor is an almost physiological response to fear. Kurt Vonnegut, A Man without a Country.

Don DeLillo (born November 20, 1936) is an American author best known for his novels, which paint detailed portraits of American life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He currently lives in New York City.

DeLillo was born Nov. 20, 1936 in the Bronx in New York City a child of Italian immigrants and attended Fordham University, from which he received a bachelor's degree in 1958. His family name was apparently partially anglicized, as the correct Italian spelling of it would be "De Lillo."

As a teenager, DeLillo wasn't interested in writing until taking a summer job as a parking attendant, when spending hours waiting and watching over vehicles led to a reading habit. After graduating from Fordham, DeLillo took a job in advertising because he couldn't get one in publishing. He worked for five years as a copywriter." I did some short stories at that time, but very infrequently. I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore."

DeLillo's first novel, Americana was published in 1971, and he wrote five additional novels in the seventies. Starting in the late seventies he spent several years living in Greece, where he wrote The Names. While lauded by critics, his novels did not achieve noticeable success until the publication of the National Book Award winning White Noise in 1985. White Noise is significant for its use of academic satire and postmodern themes of rampant consumerism, media saturation, novelty intellectualism, underground conspiracies, the disintegration and re-integration of the family, and the promise of rebirth through violence, some of which were further developed in DeLillo's later novels.

DeLillo is widely considered by modern critics to be one of the central figures of literary postmodernism. Many younger English-language authors such as Bret Easton Ellis, Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace cite DeLillo as an influence.

Literary critic Harold Bloom named him as one of the four major American novelists of his time, along with Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, and Cormac McCarthy, though he figured prominently in B. R. Myers' screed against recent American fiction, A Reader's Manifesto. DeLillo was awarded the 1999 Jerusalem Prize. His papers were acquired in 2004 by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

Underworld was the runner-up on the New York Times' best work of American fiction of the last 25 years, announced in May of 2006. White Noise and Libra also were recognized. His next work, Falling Man, is scheduled to be released May 15th, 2007.

Major works: Americana (1971); End Zone (1972); The Names (1982); White Noise (1985); Underworld (1997); Cosmopolis (2003).

His plays The Day Room (first production 1986); Valparaiso (first production 1999); Love-Lies-Bleeding (first production 2006) have been produced by the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and other venues. DeLillo has also published a number of essays and short stories.

Love-Lies-Bleeding was first heard as a staged reading directed by the author at Boise Contemporary Theater in Boise, Idaho in May 2005. The World Premiere Production was presented at Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, Illinois in June 2006

White Noise is the eighth novel by Don DeLillo, and is an example of postmodern literature. Widely considered his "breakout" work, the book won the National Book Award in 1985 and brought him to the attention of a much larger audience.

Set at a bucolic midwestern college, White Noise follows a year in the life of Jack Gladney, a professor who has made his name by pioneering the field of Hitler Studies (though he doesn't speak German). He's been married four times and has a brood of children and step-children with his wife, Babette. In its first half called "Waves and Radiation", White Noise is a chronicle of absurdist family life combined with academic satire.

In the second half, a chemical spill from a railcar releases an "Airborne Toxic Event" over Jack's home region, prompting an evacuation. Frightened by his exposure to the toxin, Gladney is forced to confront his mortality. Soon the novel becomes a meditation on modern society's fear of death and its obsession with chemical cures as Gladney seeks to obtain a black market drug called Dylar, which is said to allay the fear of death.

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