Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)

Studies - Judit Ágnes Kádár: 'Kleenex-View' and Cultural Devaluation: Merchandise as Ontology in Don DeLillo's White Noise (1985)

JUDIT ÁGNES KÁDÁR 'KLEENEX-VIEW' AND CULTURAL DEVALUATION: MERCHANDISE AS ONTOLOGY IN DON DELILLO'S WHITE NOISE (1985) An exciting perspective of Don DeLillo's White Noise is the one indicated in the above title. My paper is to focus on three chapters of the novel, with special emphasis on the social concerns the text presents. DeLillo's interest in externals as an effect provoking problems can be seen as an attempt to write about society following the iconoclastic tradition of the American novel. He creates a multilevel text that explores the consciousness of today's American Everyman intellectual, his perception of reality and human reactions providing a pathway to the so-called 'hard-core' of contemporaria through the dimensions of psychology, philosophy, sociology, culture and language. In many respects White Noise presents a blend of modernist and postmodernist tendencies. A major critic of DeLillo's texts, Frank Letricchia highlights the postmodernist features of the novel when investigating such notions as the loss of energy and values, the criticism of reason and technological modernization in Habermas's sense, and last but not least the codes and rituals or 'entropic dystopia'. However, some other characteristic features of the novel, such as the quest for understanding conceptualizing the deconstructive and chaotic world and the truly satirical voice, condition us to interpret it more readily in terms of modernism. This novel is a science fiction like vision, a distopia of contemporary culture, moreover the philosophical ideas the novel focuses on are of epistemological nature. The narrator, Jack Gladney seems to be aware 187