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)

supernatural and the extra-terrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead (326)." The supermarket in Murray's presentation becomes a temple where sacrificial rituals happen thousands of times every day. The text here gets loaded with philosophical allusions (e.g. the Tibetan spiritual parallel) and conclusions like: "Here we don't die, we shop. But the difference is less marked than you think (38)." This place is like an Egyptian pyramid, where we get a still-framed perception in a 'sealedoff' and 'self-contained' location of death. The notion that these people die as they lived is implied here: they seem to live in complete facelessness and loneliness, being exclusively concerned about everyday banalities. Again, Wilder and another kid, the Asian baby both counterpoint the adults' guilt with their innocence. In my view, throughout the whole chapter Murray tries to get Jack and Babette to visit him at his place and the spouses are powerless and seem to get under his polite controlling intentions. Jack's mental uncertainty and gradual loss of direction is underlined by the returning motif of the inability to comprehend people talking strange languages around him, just like at the beginning of this chapter. Between the Kleenex-view described in the supermarket-section and the Kleenex-view offered by the TV in Chapter 11, the previous chapter forms a thematic link situated mostly in the family home. Chapter 10 starts as if we are given a poster or advertisement about College-on-the-Hill, and then we can look behind and see, what in fact students get for their fourteen thousand dollars: another 'incubator', where they ('in fetal position'!) are hermetically closed up for secret 'overfinement' purposes. Overfinement refers here to the extremely specific education that enables them to speak a professional jargon, an incomprehensible language for Jack. Again the Babel-image appears and shows Jack as an estranged observer of the students and their belljar covered inbreeding place, a further reference to Sylvia Plath's notion of The Bell Jar. Paradoxically teachers like Jack teach these languages to them. However, he is unable to advance in his German, the meta-language of his own field, i.e. Hitler Studies... On the other hand, they get overfined during their college years in the sense that their mind and interests focus on academic fields and they lose touch 194