This is my last transmission. I am low on supplies (of patience, primarily), and the air is very stuffy. I only hope that my discoveries might justify the sacrifice of my life.
I don't know why everyone seems to hate White Noise. I think it's hysterical. Peter Jaros finds too much "wide-eyed '80s post-modernism" in it. I can definitely see what he meant by that, but I think that tone/attitude is limited to a few characters, most notably Murray Siskind, rather than being a feature of the work as a whole. Jack is no postmodernist; far from it, he's an old-school humanist, maintaining his current academic post not by being ahead of the epistemological curve, but by having carved out a specialized niche. Everyone seems to tell Jack "It's obvious," but none of the things he is told are obvious to him. DeLillo connects Jack's ultimate decision to act on Murray's theories (when Jack goes to kill Mink) not necessarily to a postmodernist drive to defeat Jack's own mortality, but to the far more traditional (biological, as Babette would have it) drive to kill the man who cuckolded him. Murray's postmodern Iago doesn't convert Jack's humanist Othello; he merely pries open cracks that were there before. Does that make sense?
Did anyone find it really eerie to read the toxic spill referred to as the "airborne toxic event"? Or to read when Babette read the prediction about the group connected to "Uncle Bob" planning to crash a plane into the White House? I would be surprised if Ashcroft hasn't gotten ahold of DeLillo yet.
Lentricchia's essay in the Viking Critical edition is pretty good. He connects White Noise to Gatsby, citing dreaming as the foundation of capitalism (and tracing that back to the Pilgrims). The dream allows the individual to move from the first to the third person. James Gatz becomes the object Jay Gatsby. This also comes up in Salesman, obviously.
(My favorite line from White Noise, for the image it conjures of my own former professors: "How stupid these people were, coming into my office unarmed" (297).)
Note that the epigraph from Streetcar comes from Hart Crane. I'm not sure what to do with that, but there it is. I couldn't fight the idea that this play is populated with assholes in unfortunate situations. The play revolves around desire and the socially permitted forms thereof. The hetero rapist/adulterer/wife-beater Stan comes out fine. Blanche, turned psycho after the suicide of her gay husband (is he supposed to be a Hart Crane figure?), turns to obsessive promiscuity (including 17-year-old boys) to fill the hole, as it were. Blanche scoffs at desire being strong enough to make Stella stay with the obviously abusive Stan, yet her own desire compels her into much more socially compromising situations. Interesting how feminine desire comes across as the uber-taboo, while male desire is roundly tolerated (including Mitch's whole weird mother-replacement idea). I hear echoes here of Hawthorne and Wharton.
A few other things: how important is Stan's Polish background? New Orleans figures prominently in several of the stage directions, particularly those describing the music. What role does music play in the text? Does it simply set a seedy mood? And what is up with the "Negro Woman" and the "Mexican Woman"? The former allows Williams to talk about what an easy-going and integrated city New Orleans is, but then she promptly drops out of the play without so much as a name. The latter serves as a "fate" figure, I guess. What are these "others" doing in the text?
I liked Salesman much less this time through. Perhaps I was expecting it to be the stirring indictment of the American dream/capitalism that I remember being taught in 11th grade. The "tragedy" here depends upon recognizing the gap between what Willy is and what he imagined he could be, a gap not created by some systemic set of false ideals, but by his own moral lapse. Charley and Bernard serve as my litmus test (another term I last used in 11th grade). They do everything right (in this moral economy), and they end up with Bernard practicing before the Supreme Court and staying with friends who own a tennis court. The kid who studied gets his reward, and the system gets validated, working well as it always has. Why should anyone care about the self-deluded Willy? He lacks the imagination of Gatsby and even the familial attachments (and self-knowledge?) of Silas Lapham. Willy's dream still fits somewhat into Lentricchia's sketch of DeLillo: death turns Willy into a paycheck. It's not personal, but material, objective, third-person. The dream itself, however, is not "phony" as Biff would have it. Within the text, the dream is quite real and relentlessly effective.
The money-making process, as Willy conceives it, is an othering process. Ben, the model of success, went into the jungle at 17 (although whether this jungle is Alaska or Africa is anyone's guess), and came out rich at the age of 21. It's dark, but there's diamonds. The exotic becomes, for Willy, death: a place without his presence, where he's worth more dead than alive.
Despite the focus on fathers and sons, and the lack of any daughters anywhere, the women in the play are the primary plot movers. Willy wants to succeed, as he states so many times, because Linda has worked so hard, and he wants to give her a rest. Yet when he's actually in contact with her, he cuts her off and makes her wait on him. The primal fault Willy commits, guaranteeing his later failures, is a deviation from loyalty to Linda.
Finally, as suggested above, we have another country/city~pastoral vibe going on. Miller privileges (correct me if I'm wrong) "working with one's hands" throughout the play. Biff could get along out in the midwest farms if only he didn't have that nagging sense (from his father) that he was supposed to be something more. Biff remarks (supported by others) that Willy was never more himself than when he was working on physical projects, things you could put your hands on as Ben would say. The apartment buildings constantly crowd around Willy, marking the barrier between his present and his more rural past of unlimited possibility. Willy's earliest memories of his father involve rural travels and manual labor. Witness also the overdone seed metaphor at the end of the play.
1 Comments:
PRF-111678
This is my last transmission. I am low on supplies (of patience, primarily), and the air is very stuffy. I only hope that my discoveries might justify the sacrifice of my life.
I don't know why everyone seems to hate White Noise. I think it's hysterical. Peter Jaros finds too much "wide-eyed '80s post-modernism" in it. I can definitely see what he meant by that, but I think that tone/attitude is limited to a few characters, most notably Murray Siskind, rather than being a feature of the work as a whole. Jack is no postmodernist; far from it, he's an old-school humanist, maintaining his current academic post not by being ahead of the epistemological curve, but by having carved out a specialized niche. Everyone seems to tell Jack "It's obvious," but none of the things he is told are obvious to him. DeLillo connects Jack's ultimate decision to act on Murray's theories (when Jack goes to kill Mink) not necessarily to a postmodernist drive to defeat Jack's own mortality, but to the far more traditional (biological, as Babette would have it) drive to kill the man who cuckolded him. Murray's postmodern Iago doesn't convert Jack's humanist Othello; he merely pries open cracks that were there before. Does that make sense?
Did anyone find it really eerie to read the toxic spill referred to as the "airborne toxic event"? Or to read when Babette read the prediction about the group connected to "Uncle Bob" planning to crash a plane into the White House? I would be surprised if Ashcroft hasn't gotten ahold of DeLillo yet.
Lentricchia's essay in the Viking Critical edition is pretty good. He connects White Noise to Gatsby, citing dreaming as the foundation of capitalism (and tracing that back to the Pilgrims). The dream allows the individual to move from the first to the third person. James Gatz becomes the object Jay Gatsby. This also comes up in Salesman, obviously.
(My favorite line from White Noise, for the image it conjures of my own former professors: "How stupid these people were, coming into my office unarmed" (297).)
Note that the epigraph from Streetcar comes from Hart Crane. I'm not sure what to do with that, but there it is. I couldn't fight the idea that this play is populated with assholes in unfortunate situations. The play revolves around desire and the socially permitted forms thereof. The hetero rapist/adulterer/wife-beater Stan comes out fine. Blanche, turned psycho after the suicide of her gay husband (is he supposed to be a Hart Crane figure?), turns to obsessive promiscuity (including 17-year-old boys) to fill the hole, as it were. Blanche scoffs at desire being strong enough to make Stella stay with the obviously abusive Stan, yet her own desire compels her into much more socially compromising situations. Interesting how feminine desire comes across as the uber-taboo, while male desire is roundly tolerated (including Mitch's whole weird mother-replacement idea). I hear echoes here of Hawthorne and Wharton.
A few other things: how important is Stan's Polish background? New Orleans figures prominently in several of the stage directions, particularly those describing the music. What role does music play in the text? Does it simply set a seedy mood? And what is up with the "Negro Woman" and the "Mexican Woman"? The former allows Williams to talk about what an easy-going and integrated city New Orleans is, but then she promptly drops out of the play without so much as a name. The latter serves as a "fate" figure, I guess. What are these "others" doing in the text?
I liked Salesman much less this time through. Perhaps I was expecting it to be the stirring indictment of the American dream/capitalism that I remember being taught in 11th grade. The "tragedy" here depends upon recognizing the gap between what Willy is and what he imagined he could be, a gap not created by some systemic set of false ideals, but by his own moral lapse. Charley and Bernard serve as my litmus test (another term I last used in 11th grade). They do everything right (in this moral economy), and they end up with Bernard practicing before the Supreme Court and staying with friends who own a tennis court. The kid who studied gets his reward, and the system gets validated, working well as it always has. Why should anyone care about the self-deluded Willy? He lacks the imagination of Gatsby and even the familial attachments (and self-knowledge?) of Silas Lapham. Willy's dream still fits somewhat into Lentricchia's sketch of DeLillo: death turns Willy into a paycheck. It's not personal, but material, objective, third-person. The dream itself, however, is not "phony" as Biff would have it. Within the text, the dream is quite real and relentlessly effective.
The money-making process, as Willy conceives it, is an othering process. Ben, the model of success, went into the jungle at 17 (although whether this jungle is Alaska or Africa is anyone's guess), and came out rich at the age of 21. It's dark, but there's diamonds. The exotic becomes, for Willy, death: a place without his presence, where he's worth more dead than alive.
Despite the focus on fathers and sons, and the lack of any daughters anywhere, the women in the play are the primary plot movers. Willy wants to succeed, as he states so many times, because Linda has worked so hard, and he wants to give her a rest. Yet when he's actually in contact with her, he cuts her off and makes her wait on him. The primal fault Willy commits, guaranteeing his later failures, is a deviation from loyalty to Linda.
Finally, as suggested above, we have another country/city~pastoral vibe going on. Miller privileges (correct me if I'm wrong) "working with one's hands" throughout the play. Biff could get along out in the midwest farms if only he didn't have that nagging sense (from his father) that he was supposed to be something more. Biff remarks (supported by others) that Willy was never more himself than when he was working on physical projects, things you could put your hands on as Ben would say. The apartment buildings constantly crowd around Willy, marking the barrier between his present and his more rural past of unlimited possibility. Willy's earliest memories of his father involve rural travels and manual labor. Witness also the overdone seed metaphor at the end of the play.
Signing off -- I am, as ever
Concert Marimbist
James Robert McTweedpants
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