Chapter 1. The Cartesian Picture of the Self
Part 1. The background to Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy.
The notion that there is an inner self, distinct from the outer world, and further that the inner self is somehow non-physical, as well as the essential, or 'true' person, remains a strongly held belief today. This Cartesian picture is radically at odds with contemporary theory, and yet powerfully influential in literature and in popular culture.
When Descartes published his Meditations on the First Philosophy in 1641, his aim was not primarily the elucidation of a theory for describing the self, but rather a methodology for the discovery of principles which could be held as valid and foundational in a larger system, or process of scientific enquiry, and which proved the existence of God.
Descartes' was a theology-dominated era, and for the bulk of academia at the time the guiding principle was Aristotelian, that is, the cause of any given physical phenomena was ascribed to the object in question's natural inclination to become its ideal. A rock falls from the hand because the ideal rock is on the ground, and all rocks will naturally move toward this state. A human will move toward godliness naturally because that is the human's ideal state; any action which hinders this process is a defect, perhaps a devilish interference, which once eradicated will allow the human to continue correctly. This was a clumsy theory, but it upheld an idea of religiosity that suited the powers of the day.
In 1623 Galileo published The Assayer, in which he outlined the concept that all ideas and relations in the natural world could be represented mathematically. Galileo claimed that there was a commonality between all physical object events which differed radically from the Aristotelian convention. Galileo was a well-known and respected 'scientist', even if somewhat infamous from the Church perspective. Problematically, his idea seemed to yield an array of useful answers, descriptions, and thus inventions.
Descartes, at this time primarily interested in lenses and optics, could not help but recognise the value in Galileo's idea, and embarked on Discourse on the Method for Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in Sciences. This was his most famous 'scientific' work and involves elucidating a process for evaluating and solving problems using mathematical principles. Most importantly for this study he claimed that the process would involve breaking a problem into its smallest possible components expressible on paper using known relations, and that by then finding a relation between these smallest possible parts, a mathematical explanation would be produced. As Sorrel states: "Like Galileo he [Descartes] believed that the observed properties of physical objects had causes that were specifiable mathematically, and he was as impatient as Galileo was with the vacuity of more traditional explanations of phenomena put forward by followers of Aristotle" (Sorrel,1997: xvi).
Convinced that his system of mathematical principles was better than the Church's, Descartes was faced with a powerful problem. Unless he could reconcile conflicts between the new system and the Church, he would get nowhere. Let us not doubt though that Descartes was a firm believer in the Christian God also, and that the ramifications of his methodology on contemporary Christian thought would have caused him some personal anxiety. One major problem was his idea that the physical world was explainable in written, mathematical terms. To the Church of the time this was plainly blasphemous. It was too close to calling God a number, or questioning the idea that God is the cause, and the answer.
Descartes sincerely believed that his Meditations were bridging a gap between the necessity, as he saw it, of the new science, and the truth of God. As John Cottingham notes:
Descartes- and there is no good reason to doubt his sincerity here- saw his own philosophy as breaking new ground. The theologians could now be offered a metaphysic in which consciousness was a sui generis phenomena, wholly detached from corporeal events of any kind, and therefore inherently immune to the effects of bodily dissolution. In providing, as he thought he could, a philosophical demonstration of the incorporeality of the mind, Descartes thus explicitly saw himself as fulfilling the edict of the Lateran council, that Christian philosophers should use all the powers of human reason to establish the truth of the soul's immortality (Cottingham, 1992:240).
Part 2. Cartesian dualism in Meditations on the First Philosophy.
The famous dictum 'cogito ergo sum' appears in the second Meditation, and serves firstly as a foil to any position of extreme scepticism. Descartes imagines, or postulates that everything he senses is the work of a demon, bent on deceiving him. Even if this were so, Descartes argues, he can still not doubt the fact that he is the thinking audience of this deception. No matter how ornate and pervasive the demon's guile, it can never deceive Descartes that he is thinking when he is not. So here is a foundational fact: I am thinking.
But this is a simple idea, and Descartes admits as much. The crux of the idea does not lie in the plain statement of fact, but in the assumption within the analogy that there is an 'I' receiver, separate from the sense messages received from the 'outside' and separate world. Descartes reasons that this 'I', as it is not affected in its character by any external physical object or event, must not be a physical thing. Also, it must not be a part of the body itself, but rather distinct from the body. Then, because it is neither physical nor reliant on the body, it can not perish, and therefore must be immortal.
Peter Markie writes:
'In the letter where he [Descartes] says "I think therefore I am" is so obvious it might have come from anyone's pen, he observes that its real value is that it can be used to "establish that this I which is thinking is an immaterial substance with no bodily element". The idea that he can use his initial certainty about his thought and existence and his initial uncertainty about his body, to establish that he is an immortal substance distinct from his body is a continuing theme in Descartes'(Markie, 1992:142).
This is a pervasive conception of the self, built upon a need to reconcile a new way of thinking about the physical world, with a powerful belief system founded on religiosity. Put very simply, the new rationality relied on critical scepticism and evidence, yet the contemporary world-view of the self relied heavily on faith and doctrinal teaching. The Cartesian picture of the self requires a critical reduction, via doubt about senses, and the process to the smallest possible item; and then affirms a very religious concept as the centre, or first concept in the new rationality. That is, I can at least not doubt I have a soul and it is immortal.
It is important to note that the idea of dualism in pictures of the self did not originate with Descartes, but rather his justification for it, and his characterisation of the self, has survived most pervasively into the current day.
Despite comprehensive criticism of the Cartesian picture its durability and simplicity have allowed it to grow so that it still dominates literature and popular culture, and for that reason it remains an important idea. As Terence Penelhum states:
'This view of the soul [or self] has taken deep root in our culture in many popular and sophisticated doctrines . . . in modern times in the Cartesian tradition. We can readily wonder whether all the elements in this view of ourselves are necessarily connected, and whether they are consistent, but they are all powerfully present in popular culture' (Penelhum, 1994: 123).
The idea that every human is made of an inner, essential self and that the rest of existence is outside and separate from this self, is an assumption that still permeates much modern fiction. And though the idea may have been discredited by a long line of philosophers since Descartes, its simplicity and power seems to still hold an appeal. In grunge literature of the early to mid- 1990s, the Cartesian ideal of an inner self remains central, even while many of the characters in the oeuvre at first seem to define themselves as outsiders, outcasts and misfits.
In the next chapter, I explore philosophical and fictional departures from the Cartesian picture of the self by focussing on a twentieth century philosophical critique of Descartes' essentialism (Wittgenstein), and by comparing a modernist depiction of selfhood (Proust, Remembrance of Things Past).
Chapter 2: Post Cartesian Pictures of the Self.
Part 1. An Examination of Wittgenstein's critique of the Cartesian picture.
In this chapter I focus first on Wittgenstein's critique of the Cartesian ideal, although it is important to emphasise that Descartes' dualism has been criticised almost from its inception. Hume, writing not long after Descartes, is probably the most famous pre-19th Century critic of the picture. Hume was particularly interested in the subjugation to reason of emotion and senses in the Cartesian picture, and famously claimed that the passions are the masters of reason.
Hume also delivered the first description of the circularity of the Cartesian picture when he said of the system:
'[M]uch inculcated by Des Cartes as a sovereign preservative against error [is a methodology proceeding] by a chain of reasoning, deduced from some original principle which cannot possibly be fallacious . . . But neither is there any such original principle, which has a prerogative above all others, [nor] if there were, could we advance a step beyond it, but by the use of those very faculties of which we are already supposed to be diffident" (Hume, 1748: 150-151)
This section focuses on Wittgenstein's conceptions of the self as elucidated in the Philosophical Investigations (1958). In philosophical terms, it is not controversial to claim that in order to know that a representation is true or untrue, we need criteria. We apply this criteria, and if the representation corresponds to the rule 'true', we say it equals 'true'; if it does not correspond to the criteria, then it is 'not true'. The idea 'true' is in itself a criteria. In Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein begins his examination of this idea's relationship to the self by imagining that he will make a kind of 'true' for a sensation by keeping a diary. He will make a diary entry for every time that sensation occurs and call it 'S'. To do this he will 'speak, or write the sign down and at the same time concentrate my attention on the sensation - and so, as it were, point to it inwardly' (Wittgenstein, 1958: 258). Then Wittgenstein ponders the purpose of this ritual of looking inward and checking the sign S. He asks what kind of meaning can it establish?
Well,[he answers] that is done precisely by the concentrating of my attention; for in this way I impress on myself the connection between the sign and the sensation. But 'I impress it on myself' can only mean: this process brings it about that I remember the connection right in the future. But in the present case I have no criterion of correctedness. One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that only means that here we can't talk about 'right' (Wittgenstein, 1958: 258).
Wittgenstein's idea here can be summed up in this way: Because I am the only arbiter, and since truth can not be entirely subjective, then inward-looking creations can not be given the moniker 'true'. McGinn has further examined Wittgenstein's notion of 'correctness':
'I have no criterion of correctness' is to be glossed as 'I have no non-circular criterion of correctness', and that is why 'whatever is going to seem right to me is right', and why, therefore, 'it makes no sense to talk about "right"'...S has no meaning because there is no way of fixing that a future use of S is correct. The only remedy for this state of affairs is to provide some form of independent check on the use of S, by linking its use with public criteria of application' (McGinn, 1997:129).
Therefore, according to McGinn, Wittgenstein's argument is meant to destroy the Cartesian ideal that 'the reason I know I exist is that I can not doubt that I exist', by replacing it with the idea that 'because I can not doubt my own existence, I can have no knowledge of it on that basis alone'. Since the pacification of doubt can only be performed in an outer, social sphere, any 'knowledge' about the inner sphere will have to be assessed by outer criteria, therefore negating the claim for some kind of inviolate, self-referring 'self'.
Budd has further explored the notion of 'inner' and 'outer' in relation to the use of language and the creation of the idea of self. Budd writes:
[T]he self ascription of an 'inner process' will be criterionless; and without outward criteria a sign that supposedly stands for the 'inner process' will not be rule-governed . . . I need a criterion of identity for the sensation in order to give content to the concept of a sensation of that kind.
The private language user (believer in the Cartesian ideal) is therefore impaled on the horns of a dilemma: either he intends 'S' (could be 'I') to be a sign for something others can have a real conception of, or he does not. But if he does not, he is condemned to silence: there is nothing he can say that will make clear to others what kind of a sign 'S' ('I') is supposed to be. If, on the other hand, he intends 'S' to be a sign which can be explained to others, either he intends it to be the name of a sensation or he intends it to be some other kind of word' (Budd, 1991.: 61).
Assuming the private language user can not fall back to claiming an unprovable proof, a special word without wordness, Budd says: '[T]he words he uses to explain the nature of 'S' will be words in a common language' ( 62). He will thus be rule-governed by common language rules, 'and this is something he can not do, or can achieve only at the cost of rendering his sign one that is not a word in a private language' ( 62). As its 'self'-ness is a product of the social creation of language, his self can not be Cartesian because it is neither internally nor self-reliant for its existence.
So if Wittgenstein is right, and the language of our selfs is negotiated and created by forces intrinsically social, or 'external' in the Cartesian picture, the idea that the self is an essentially 'inner' phenomena, empirically and factually separate from the 'external' world must be false. It is common for us, when thinking about ourselves, to think of our memories as being 'private' and 'internal'. The fact that I can remember pictures from the past I assume no-one else can, seems to enhance a claim that my self is at least unique and self-reliant in its perspective on past events. Perhaps then the mosaic of my memories, sometimes disordered and elusive though they are, could offer a constitution for my self. Perhaps by examining our memories we could find a way of describing what we are.
Part 2. Remembrance of Things Past
Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927) is a novel about learning to write a novel, about trying to find a perspective from which the narrator Marcel can make sense of his world, and about how memory is the basis of any attempt to do so.
As such, then, it is a very long meditation on how later reconstructions of memories into narratives form the self. It is also a coming of age novel, and argues that individuals learn that they are often mistaken in their comprehension of events as they pass through them, but that with age people learn to create a perspective in which their pasts can be ordered, or reconciled, to their present.
Proust's novel is a first-person account, over eight volumes, of a life spent in the Paris salon culture at the end of the nineteenth and the start of the twentieth century, up to the beginning of the First World War. The main character Marcel negotiates his way through the milieux of bourgeois society on a quasi-quest to become a writer. His problem is how to apprehend a life which is lived internally in some spheres - love, art, music, ennui- and externally in others - the salons, the cliques - and in which those spheres are interlinked, in that who one loves and what kind of art one enjoys is inextricably linked to the external sphere. The novel argues that one can not properly assess this relationship between internal and external spheres at the same time that any important event is occurring, but that one can only wait for remembering to reveal order.
Remembrance of Things Past straddles the Cartesian/anti-Cartesian divide, in that on the one hand the novel is overtly concerned with two ideas: first, things are not as they seem and the world is full of games and pretence, and second, that there exists a central self, able to stand outside these games and construct stories which will eventually validate its selfhood. Then again, the novel both realises and dwells on, for literally thousands of pages, the notion that 'selfs' are created by the forces around them and particularly by how they perceive those forces in events, while at the same time propagating the idea that there is, or can be found, a true way of apprehending these events, or rather, a way of apprehending these events which will yield a kind of truth, and which can also be described as internal.
So in Combray, the first part of Remembrance of Things Past, the novel opens with the narrator's childhood and introduces the concerns of the novel. The narrator Marcel addresses the reader in a way that comes close to a voice of reflection. He says:
For even if we have the sensation of being always enveloped in, surrounded by our own soul, still it does not seem a fixed and immovable prison; rather do we seem to be borne away with it, and perpetually struggling to transcend it, to break out into the world, with a perpetual discouragement as we hear endlessly all around us that unvarying sound which is not an echo from without, but the resonance of a vibration from within (Proust, 1981a: 93).
In effect, Marcel is arguing that the soul is both external, something to be 'enveloped' in, and internal, 'the resonance of a vibration within'. Also though, he is acutely aware of the malleability of 'selfs', and of the social construction of them. When speaking of M. de Saint-Loup's pretensions, the narrator sees them not as falsity, but as something created in de Saint-Loup's self by his upbringing:
After I had seen him repeat the same process every time something was introduced to him, I realised that it was simply a social usage peculiar to his branch of the family, to which his mother, who had seen to it that he should be perfectly brought up, had moulded his limbs; he went through those motions without thinking about them any more than he thought about his beautiful clothes or hair; they were a thing devoid of the moral significance which I had at first ascribed them, a thing purely acquired (Proust, 1981b: 786).
Throughout Remembrance of Things Past the conflict for the narrator Marcel is one between what is seen as internal and valuable on the one hand, and which traits of character are external and contrived on the other. The various emotional and social battlegrounds also reflect this duality. The narrator's love affairs are viewed as more internal phenomena but relying on external, social demands. The social events in which the narrator is involved, in the streets, clubs, and private salons are opportunities to investigate the socially constructed self. Every volume in Remembrance of Things Past has its party, and these outward events produce inward reflection on the narrator's part. They are used as moments of realisation for the narrator. In all except the last, the realisation is partly that he doesn't want to be at the party, but the parties are essential to the Parisien life he is both satirising and trying to live through.
So for Marcel the problem of the inner and the outer is essential. Whenever he ponders the outside world he is acutely aware that because there is an 'I' which is doing the perceiving, and that because that 'I' has motivations, the perceptions of the outside world are always subjective. This is a direct parallel with Descartes' demon analogy in that it places the 'I' as a central experiencing entity around which events occur, and in that the events are separate from the 'I', yet reliant on the 'I' perceiving them.
Adele King notes this interdependence, when she states that '[M]emory [in Remembrance of Things Past] is dependant both on the external world for its substance and on the mind for its final form. It combines something perceived and a subjective reaction to this perception' (King, 1968: 33). This duality is a problem for the narrator: it makes him cynical that he can ever know reality, and thus that he can even know that the self exists, for whenever he looks at the self, this act of looking is itself fraught with the problems of looking at the outer world. In other words, if he can not know the truth of the outer world because he is always looking at it subjectively, the same problem may apply when he looks at his inner life. King has noted this process in the narrator in relation to love:
Marcel [the narrator] even calls into doubt the continuity of the self. Normally he experiences only a series of disconnected moments; there seems to be no continuum of perception. He only knows feelings when he is experiencing them. Knowledge of love, for example, is intermittent, since no one love is constantly aware of being in love. Marcel suggests that on awakening from a deep sleep he has no identity; since he does not remember who he is when he wakes up, he is no-one (King, 1968: 32).
The role of memory in experiencing love is important to Remembrance of Things Past both as a springboard for, and as an example of, the role of memory in creating the self. The narrator's description of love in Combray presages not only his attitude to love, but also his view of the self's changeability. The narrator states:
To such an extent does passion manifest itself in us as a temporary and distinct character which not only takes the place of our normal character but obliterates the invariable signs by which it has hitherto been discernible! (Proust, 1981a: 277).
The narrator is talking here of our ability to discern our own selves. So while the narrator is engaged in the same doubts of the outer world, and particularly when dealing with other's emotions, as was Descartes when he described the demon analogy, he is also willing to turn this scepticism 'inward', thus creating the problematic and circular situation whereby he is subjectively looking at himself looking at himself. If 'passion manifest[s] itself' to the extent that it 'obliterate[s] the invariable signs' by which we have previously recognised ourselves, it is impossible to ever be able to discern correctly when it is really ourselves thinking about ourselves and not some momentary passionate character, or some other subjective version of ourselves. But Marcel/Proust does not then discard the Cartesian project. Instead the narrator embarks on what is a very painful and detailed quest of trying to 'know' himself (Terdiman, 1993: 151).
For Marcel, the problem of subjectivity when thinking even about oneself and one's past is finally solved with the idea of 'involuntary memory'. There are three major actions of involuntary memory in Remembrance of Things Past. The first, when Marcel smells a madelaine dipped in a cup of tea while visiting his mother as an adult (Proust, 1981a: 48), evokes memories of childhood in Combray and serves, after the initial forty-eight pages of reflection, as the start of the narrative proper. The second, while tying his shoe, evokes memories of his grandmother dying, and provokes a critical examination of the paucity of social relations and the fleeting nature of love. The third is the great epiphany after a party at the Guerlaines', when the narrator realises the ability of memory to create an order through which he may recognise and describe his life. This act of involuntary memory is the last because it lets him find a way of expressing the character of his self truly, and thus become what he considers a writer, which is the quest of the book. For the narrator these bursts of involuntary memory come to represent proof of the 'true self', because they are not dependant on the subject's current state of mind and emotions, and so transcend the subjective narratives we usually impose on memory, thus revealing a kind of truth. For the narrator memory is the only way to apprehend who he truly is. Therefore, in Cartesian terms involuntary memory is an expression, or in philosophical terms a proof, of 'truth' or 'authenticity' in apprehending the self.
Through the realisation of this, the narrator is able to reinforce the Cartesian ideal. It gives him, finally, an objective perspective through which he can clearly see the way people, and himself, are 'in fact'. This situates the 'I' as privileged by reinstating its ability to uniquely apprehend truth. The importance of the last act of involuntary memory as an epiphany can not be understated. It is the trajectory that Remembrance of Things Past is constantly following, and it serves to justify the inner/outer dichotomy, and placate the narrator's previous doubt. For King, the narrator's use of involuntary memory allows him, 'to formulate a more accurate definition of reality which resolves his dilemma . . . Reality lies neither in brute matter nor in a transcendent realm, but in the world that the mind creates from the pressures of the material universe impinging upon it' (King, 1968: 38).
By using an 'inner' state phenomena such as memory, the narrator attempts to resolve the circularity of the demon analogy by appealing to an essentialist notion of the inner self. But he also raises the problem of getting a perspective on the inner self, and because Remembrance of Things Past is the story of a man's development, it focuses necessarily on the 'inner life' of the narrator. However, within this very Cartesian solution there arise various strikingly anti-Cartesian concerns, in addition to the previous dilemma.
One of the preoccupations of the novel is with names and naming. At the outset we are introduced to Swann's Way and Guermantes' Way. These are the different routes to two different eponymous households. They are also symbols for two kinds of lives to be lived, although this is only because the child Marcel sees them as such. As Marcel grows he becomes disillusioned with the division he first apprehends between the 'real' old money symbolised by Guermantes' Way, and 'fake' artistry and the petty bourgeoisie symbolised by Swann's Way. He swaps sides in the end, but realises that both are basically the same in their snobbery and gossip. The unity of the two Ways is symbolised by the marriage of Saint Loup and Gilberte, Marcel's first 'love'.
Another key pre-occupation with naming in Remembrance of Things Past concerns the way we use a name to gather a group of feelings together and describe that collection as one entity. As Marcel grows he falls in love three times. Each affair ends in failure, though it is the one with Albertine that comes closest to success, and which is meant as the most 'real'. Through his experiences with love, Marcel becomes aware of his ability to project perspectives on his surroundings and thus create feelings. This hints at an anti-Cartesian perspective by suggesting the relationship between inner and outer states is not one separated by the impervious relation of sender and receiver. But when falling for Albertine, it is the inability of the narrator to control his feelings of jealousy and suspicion (when she stands him up) that make him decide he must love her. He realises that '[w]e give the name "love", for example, to a series of feelings which in fact has no such unity while we are experiencing it. Cohesion only belongs to creations of the mind' (King, 1968: 30). Marcel has been quite cynical previously toward the drama of love. When commenting on Swann's ability to manipulate his [Swann's] own feelings of love, Marcel says:
Recognising one of its symptoms [love] we remember and recreate the rest. Since we know its song, which is engraved on our hearts in its entirety, there is no need for a woman to repeat the opening strains . . . and if she begins in the middle . . . we are well enough attuned to that music to be able to take it up and follow our partner without hesitation at the appropriate passage (Proust, 1918a: 214).
But these feelings, nevertheless, are seen as innate and non-constructed essential elements of a self. These emotions are given a primacy, even above perception, something the narrator comes to consider, via involuntary memory, a thing outside himself and separate from emotion. He realises also though, that the duality between emotion and perception is not merely a rational inference, which should be taken correctly from the latter to the former.
Alain De Botton argues that one of Proust's aims in writing Remembrance of Things Past was to reflect an essentially human conundrum. De Botton argues that Proust was very much aware of the way reading helps us become people, but that Proust's perspective was that literature is much more important when it helps us discover who we already are:
In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity (De Botton, 1997: 25).
So Proust, through Marcel, confronts a central dilemma in the Cartesian project, but invents a new defence of it. The circular nature of the Cartesian project is dealt with by appealing to involuntary memory, and by constructing involuntary memory as the one impartial lens through which one may apprehend one's self objectively. It does not then challenge the Cartesian project fundamentally, but becomes a reinforcement of the principle of a central defining self.
Chapter 3. Postmodernism and the Self.
Part 1. Postmodernist Perspectives of the Self.
In The Inhuman, when Jean Lyotard is writing about what it is to be human, he states: "[This] faculty of being able to change levels referentially derives solely from the symbolic and recursive power of language' (Lyotard, 1991:13). This demonstrates the centrality of language to the way contemporary philosophers think about the self, and is a direct link between Wittgenstein and contemporary thinking, as it (Lyotard's statement) largely concerns the idea that the self is constructed via language games. In this regard, Richard Rorty states:
The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it can not propose a language for us to speak (Rorty,1989: 2).
The term 'I', then, is not a recognition of a physically, pre-language, apparent being. It is a shorthand signifier for a set of linguistic rules that enable the user to participate in language games. Neither does it exist empirically, as say 'rock' (the meaning of which can at least partly be said to be constituted by the visible, feelable thing). 'I' has no such empirical advantage. And even to attempt ostensible definition actually destroys 'I' in the grammar game. For then it's 'me'. But still we seek criteria for discerning the character of the self. Catherine Belsey has argued that the urge to centralise the idea of the self is a defining force in classical realism, and that the wish to do so can be seen as ideologically driven. She writes:
It is in the interests of this ideology [liberal humanism] above all to suppress the role of language in the construction of the subject, and its own role in the interpellation of the subject, and to present the individual as a free, unified, autonomous subjectivity (Belsey, 1980:67)
This picture of the self as a separate, self-defining entity, an arbiter of truth and meaning, is problematic to most contemporary philosophers, even if it remains a dominant force on contemporary popular culture. But Rorty sees a way forward, when he writes:
But if we could ever become reconciled to the idea that most of reality is indifferent to our descriptions of it, and that the self is created by the use of a vocabulary rather than being adequately or inadequately expressed in a vocabulary, then we should at last have assimilated what was true in the Romantic idea that truth is made rather than found. What is true about this claim is just that languages are made rather than found, and that truth is a property of linguistic entities, of sentences (Rorty, 1989:174)
Indeed the role of language in our knowledge of others has a history in Western literature. One example of this awareness of the power of language can be seen at the beginning of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, when Pip reads the inscriptions on his parents' tombstones and makes personalities from the letters. Bennet and Royle look at this passage in the light of contemporary theory, and claim:
The text implies that our knowledge of people is determined by writing. Although he is 'unreasonable' in taking the shape of the letters to denote character, Pip is not simply mistaken in recognising that our sense of self and other people is determined by language. For as this passage indicates, we construct ourselves through and in stories (Bennet & Royle, 1995: 1).
In much contemporary fiction the narrative drive is provided by the process: self, threat to self, solution to threat, triumph of self. The sanctity of the self may be threatened, it may even be made malleable, but what remains is a belief portrayed repeatedly that being 'true to one's self' is both admirable and necessary if one is to negotiate the slings and arrows. Catherine Belsey has noted this phenomena in relation particularly to classical realism, and the ideological construction of this point of view when she writes: "[T]he ideology of liberal humanism assumes a world of non-contradictory (and therefore fundamentally unalterable) individuals whose unfettered consciousness is the origin of meaning, knowledge and action" Belsey, 1980:67).
In this way of thinking the self is a pure arbiter of truth, and it is privileged over other possible arbiters by the very fact that it is seen as a central, essential blueprint for acting righteously. Armed with a broad apprehension of the character of a true self, writers can create character models that conform to more or lesser degrees to that model, and make value judgements on the actions of people or characters by measuring their conformity to the agreed rules. This is not a simple case of discrimination along generally agreed and recognised moral lines, but the result of thinking in a way that demands adherence to a central tenet, that of the centrality of the self, which in turn relies on the model of truth that there is a central fact from which all other deductions may rationally flow. Lyotard describes the phenomena in this way:
The temptation to look for criteria is a species of the more general temptation to think of the world, or the human self, as possessing an intrinsic nature, an essence. That is, it is the result of the temptation to privelege some one among the many languages in which we habitually describe the world or ourselves. As long as we think that there is some relation called 'fitting-the-world' or 'expressing the real nature of the self' which can be possessed or lacked by vocabularies-as-wholes, we shall continue the traditional philosophical search for a criterion to tell us which vocabularies have this desirable feature. (Lyotard, 1992:174).
This search is doomed because the 'self' just isn't as the Cartesian picture describes.
It is not that contemporary literature doesn't participate in the process of constructing selfs, both as characters in the narrative and as beings via the reader's reflecting on the narrative, but rather that it does, and that when it does, it often uses the Cartesian picture. This gives great power to the Cartesian picture, and perpetuates its dominance in popular culture, for, as Bennet and Royle state:
To identify with a person in a novel or play is to identify oneself, to produce an identity for oneself. It is to give oneself a world of fictional people, to start to let one's own identity merge with that of fiction. It is finally, also to create a character for oneself, to create one's very identity in fiction (Bennet and Royle, 1995:56)
The idea that one would be able to produce an identity for one's self is not the same as the Cartesian idea that the self is an inner, inviolable, unchangeable metaphysical entity.
Jonathan Culler has suggested that "even the idea of personal identity emerges through the discourse of a culture: the "I" is not something given but comes to exist as that which is addressed by and relates to others" (Culler,1981:246). Also, this malleability of the self has been assumed when thinking about the reader. Bennet and Royle claim of the fictional characters: "Through the power of identification, through sympathy and antipathy, they can become part of how we conceive ourselves, a part of who we are" (Bennet and Royle, 1995:55). This would seem to suggest the self is not an inviolate, essential entity, but one that can and does change according to the experiences of the individual. In other words, a reader's self can change, can be constructed, by their interaction with literary characters, and whatever picture of the self is presented in any novel, it will engage the reader in some way with their own 'selves'. I am thinking here of people who read purely for 'entertainment', and who do not 'reflect' on what they have read. One could say that their self is engaged with the text, but not in a reflective way. Since language plays a central role in the creation of selfs, and a book is a lot of language, that language itself can be central to the way we view the characters, and thus ourselves and those around us.
Catherine Belsey has reflected on the power inherent in dominating this discourse when writing about the pervasive power of classic realism, an idea she describes as liberal humanist, and one which is readily identifiable as Cartesian:
Classic realism, still the dominant popular mode in literature, film and television drama, roughly coincides chronologically with the epoch of industrial capitalism. It performs, I wish to suggest, the work of ideology, not only in its representation of a world of consistent subjects who are the origin of meaning, knowledge and action, but also in offering the reader, as the position from which the text is most readily intelligible, the position of subject as the origin both of understanding and of action in accordance with that understanding (Belsey, 1980:67)
In a postmodern world, the disintegration of master narratives and the proliferation of narratives derived from global capitalism and consumerism has seen the emergence of new ways of conceiving the contemporary self. Bereft now of the previously pervasive ideals such as God, King and Empire, individuals find themselves in a world of shifting and malleable narratives, and this has been reflected in literature. Anthony Elliot has speculated on the presumptions of contemporary literature in a postmodern world, and writes:
Firstly, there is an emphasis upon fragmentation. The postmodernist critique suggests that the contemporary self is so fragmented, multiple and dispersed that the symbolic consistency and narrative texture of experience disintegrates. In a world invaded by new technologies and saturated with flashy commodities the self loses its consistency and becomes brittle, broken or shattered (Elliot, 2001: 136).
But this does not mean that the meaningfulness of narratives that do constitute this kind of self are any less valid. The argument that the master narratives break down in a postmodern world and are replaced by a complex shifting series of images does not mean necessarily that the inherent hierarchical structure seen in the Cartesian ideal is replaced by a pluralist model involving several equal yet competing narratives. Rather it could follow that the place in the narrative of self previously occupied by say, 'Religion', could now be occupied by say, body image as received from popular culture.
When Elliot notes the Baudrillardian idea of the self mirroring consumerism's representations, they often adequately describe the menagerie of narratives available for self constructing:
[t]he flickering media surfaces of postmodern culture are . . . mirrored internally, so that a narcissistic preoccupation with appearance, image and style dominates the regulation of the self. This is a world that puts a premium on appearance, a world of spin doctors, public relations experts and self help guides (Elliot, 2001:136)
Yet Elliot remains resolutely convinced that this kind of self-creating is somehow less valid: "[t]he self, in this context, can easily lose its anchorage, becoming self-absorbed and cut off from wider social ties" (Elliot, 2001:136).
The point is that these shifting and dazzling images of the postmodern world are not separate from the self, but constitutive of the self. These new narratives, while exchangeable and malleable are not necessarily less meaningful than the old master narratives, but rather replace them in their power to influence the way individuals see themselves. Elliot writes a good description of the postmodern Baudrillardian world:
It is a world where images become more powerful than reality, where everything is a copy of something else, and where the distinction between representation and what is being represented is done away with. At the same time, core distinctions between self and object, inside and outside, surface and depth, also vanish. . . fantasyscapes such as MTV, Disneyland and McDonalds become more vivid, more intense, and more real than that which we typically think of as reality (Elliot, 2001: 240).
But the important point, is not that 'images become more powerful than reality', rather that they come to constitute reality. Not that 'McDonalds becomes more vivid . . . more real than that which we typically think of as reality', but that McDonalds is reality. In the mediated postmodern world, self-identities for those in the West are exchangeable, buyable commodities, but that does not make them any less real than a self-identity based on traditional master narratives. As Elliot notes in his introduction:
The self is not simply 'influenced' by the external world, since the self can not be set apart from the social, cultural, political and historical contexts in which it is embedded. Social processes in part constitute, and so in a sense are internal to, the self. Neither internal nor external frames of reference should be privileged; all forms of identity are astonishingly imaginative fabrications of the private and public, personal and political, individual and historical (Elliot, 2001: 6).
The next section of the thesis looks at the work of the American novelist Don DeLillo. In DeLillo's novels we see repeatedly a character who maintains a kind of Cartesian inner life while the world around the character is a myriad of crumbling certainties; the character's attempts to negotiate aims within this uncertainty is a primary trajectory for DeLillo's work.
Part 3. Praise, Loaded, The River Ophelia: Cartesian Representations of the Self in Australian Grunge Fiction
The genre of 'grunge' fiction emerged in Australian publishing in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Written by authors in their twenties and thirties, grunge novels swamped the 'youth' publishing market at this time and were seen as literary embodiments of alienation and disenchantment with the economic and social system of late capitalism, and as groundbreaking manifestos of 'Generation X'. This sub-section focuses on key works by three grunge authors: Andrew McGahan's Praise (1992), Christos Tsiolkas' Loaded (1995), and Justine Ettler's The River Ophelia (1995).
Each of these works plays with the notion of identity in that they attempt to usurp 'mainstream' ideas of traditional constructions of the self, yet they do not fundamentally question the Cartesian picture of the self. Instead, they reinforce the Cartesian ideal by merely replacing the notion of a spiritual soul being at the centre of the self, with the idea that a sexual identity is the essential character of the self.
To establish their credentials, each of the three grunge novels above needs to distance itself from what it considers traditional and middle class values, or self-creating narratives. In Loaded, the protagonist Ari plainly hates workers. He sees them as boring: 'Working people always think you'll be interested in what they do. None that I know do any thing interesting'(Tsiolkas,1995:8). Working people are conformist cowards: 'The faces of all the workers and all married people I see carry the strain of living a life of rules and regulations. . . Coward, I whisper'(11). And: 'I love my parents but I don't think they have much guts. Always complaining about how hard life is and not having enough money. And they do shit to change any of it'(11). Working people are fragmented, as when Ari speaks of the West of Melbourne as a mass of fighting ethnic cliques (142). Working people are the remainders: 'The West is a dumping ground; a sewer of refugees, the migrants, the poor, the insane, the unskilled and the uneducated' (143).
Ari also hates the middle classes: 'I detest the East. The whole fucking mass of it: the highways, the suburbs, the hills, the rich cunts' (42). They are seen as boring people also, whose lives are ruled by dull media: 'In the East, in the new world of suburbia there is no dialogue, no conversation, no places to go out: for there is no need, there is television' (43) Basically anything to do with work or the suburbs is seen as boring conformist drivel, and something that is covering up the more worthy pursuit of having sex: 'Hard work bores me, I'm ruled by my cock' (150). Ari's gay identity is a central element of the book and it is taken for granted that this is seen as a subversion of middle-class values in so far as middle-class values are seen to promote heterosexuality, monogomy, and marriage.
In Praise, the protagonist Gordon is very much a part of the Brisbane underclass. Having just discarded his job at a bottle shop, he does not seek any more work. He emphasises his distance from the world of work in myriad ways: 'I'd never worked four days straight in my life' (McGahan, 1992:1). Or, '[i]t was beyond my conception, the importance of Friday night to those who worked a five-day week' (17) And as with Loaded, workers are seen as Others, suspected of conformism and stupidity: 'University graduates. Doctors. The gainfully employed. I wasn't sure what I thought of them. I'd almost gone that way myself. I'd believed in things. Dedication. Diligence. Direction. I'd even finished school in the top one per cent of the state. It was a cruel and meaningless system, still, there I was at the top of it. But things had changed since then. I was ashamed of it all now' (17)
Both Ari and Gordon are positioned outside this workaday world, which is meant to give them a critical distance. 'I'm content to hang around the edge of the circle, listening in' (Tsiolkas, 1995:15).
In The River Ophelia the protagonist Justine is not disdainful of working people, yet she is also a character who does nothing in the sense of work, Justine lives on a scholarship, but doesn't actually do any of her thesis: '"I'm writing an honours thesis", I said, "or I'm supposed to be writing one. I'm not really doing anything though"' (Ettler, 1995:5). Justine does not have the same hatred for the supposed conformity of the middle class, yet she does contrive distance from suburbia: 'Meanwhile all around us suburbia laboured on, quiet tree-lined streets, rows of dark terrace houses, people watching videos and drinking beer into the night' (5). Most of the action of The River Ophelia takes place in the inner city, and Justine's friends are all mid-level professionals: Sade a writer, Juliette a psychiatrist, Bataille an academic, Hamlet a film-maker. These are consciously not tropes of middle-class suburbia.
Overall, the distance from the world of work evinced by all the main characters in Praise, Loaded and The River Ophelia, is meant to give them a critical perspective on mainstream, working class/middle-class life. From this distance the characters play out narratives with entirely sexual bases. In Praise the sexual issues are to do with belonging, loss, and love, and the relationship between these ideas and sexual acts. Gordon's relationship with Cynthia is initially one where Gordon is the receiver of Cynthia's advances. She is a nymphomaniac, and Gordon's lacklustre attitude toward sex is seen from her perspective as a lack of self. Gordon tries to live up to Cynthia's needs, but can't. In the process he is forced to seek explanations for the way he is, in light of his inability to perform sexually. In this novel the performance of sex acts is seen as central to the idea of self and one's life is seen as equal to the history of one's sex acts. When Gordon answers a series of questions from a doctor about his sexual history, he reflects: 'And there it was. My life' (McGahan,1992:221).
In effect, Praise is a long meditation on the relationship between love, sex and self, in which sex is the driving force, the one true element of a self, above other narratives which are seen as malleable and therefore open to doubt. Gordon is fearful of calling his relationship with Cynthia 'love':
"Look, I like her. I might even love her."
"Love, Gordon? Love?"
"I know, it's a terrible thing to say . . ."(106)
As Gordon's affair with Cynthia dissipates into infidelity and drug-taking he begins to come closer to an ex-girlfriend, Rachel, whom he has never slept with. This fact serves to render Rachel enticing, in that in Gordon's mind sexual relations are a game where the winner is the participant who can have sexual relations without being burdened by emotional difficulties. When he does sleep with Rachel he agrees that he can offer nothing to her outside sex (258), but the very fact of sleeping with her is to him a victory (245). The idea that sex is the essential defining element of a self, an unresistable, undeniable, template of the self is the central element of Praise. After sex with Rachel, Gordon says:
Rachel didn't appreciate just how sex and self-indulgence could completely take over. Even I understood that. Sex appalled me, disappointed me, depressed me, but I knew it had power over me, all the same. Only heroin seemed capable of engrossing me more, and heroin was sex anyway. But the urge to fuck was the one thing for which I could pardon anyone, anytime, for anything. Maybe that's what I was after with Rachel. Maybe I needed to prove to myself that she wasn't any different from the rest of us. To prove that her cunt would over-ride her reason. I wanted to see what lay underneath all that self control, (246).
Gordon equates true selfs with sex acts, and believes anything else is a false construct given to us by society. While giving Rachel oral sex he says: 'This was her. My mouth was wrapped around the straw that led to her soul'(247).
In Loaded a similar schema is at work. Much cynicism is levelled at traditional narratives such as the suburbanite existence mentioned above, but particularly toward labels of race and ethnicity. Ari is able to on the one hand dismiss ethnic names as they apply to him - he rejects being called 'white'(Tsiolkas,1995:5), or others seeing him as a 'wog'(142, 39)- and he is keenly aware of the ways others use racial names as shorthand for vilification (34). Yet Ari is quite able to apply these terms to others; however when he does so, it is usually based on a sexually related prejudice. He does not want his sister to be in a relationship with a muslim because 'I know that the muslim boys treat Christian girls like shit' (51). Australians are unromantic (57), Lebanese are violent toward their wives (35). Even differences within Australo-Hellenic cultures are suspect: 'Betty is a wog who wants to be black'(43), Ari says just before a sexual encounter with her.
The difference between when Ari is taunted and when he taunts others is that Ari uses name-calling to represent sexual malfunction (from his point of view), and for Ari sexual actions represent the true self. At one point Ari reflects:' I'm ruled by my cock . . . I'm not Australian, I'm not Greek, I'm not anything' (149). This is putting him outside the normal narratives. He then says:'What I am is a runner. Running away from a thousand and one things people say you have to be or should want to be. They'll tell you God is dead but, man, they still want you to have a purpose' (149). He then lists his perception of what these purposes are and how they are illusory and those who live by them are fools. Finally, he finds meaning:
I'm going to have sex, listen to music, and watch films for the rest of my life. I am here, living my life. I'm not going to fall in love, I'm not going to change a thing . . . My epitaph; he slept, he ate, he fucked, he pissed, he shat (150).
The idea that if one is able to strip away all the 'false' narratives produced by society one will be left with sexuality is a constant theme in Loaded. Sex acts in this novel are loveless and meaningless in so far as they are disconnected from other narratives in society, and it is this disconnectedness that serves as a proof for their meaningfulness. They are in this way like Descartes' cogito ergo sum, except here they are copulum ergo sum. As Ari says: 'That's what I like about casual sex with men; there's no responsibility towards the person you fuck with'(74). This attitude is repeatedly portrayed as liberating because it is an essentialist act in defiance of social norms. When Ari goes to St. Kilda, he reflects:
In latrines and underneath piers I have enjoyed pleasures that are made sweeter by the contempt I know they bestow on me in the eyes of the respectable world I abhor. To be free, for me as a Greek, is to be a whore. To resist the path of marriage and convention, I must make myself an object of derision and contempt' (132).
As in Praise, a person's history of sex acts is seen as equating to their meaningful history. Ari sees his past life as: 'Fucking in bedrooms, toilets, cars, under railway bridges, on the beach . . . Coming home, late from school, Mama asks Where you been? You answer, out with friends' (108).
So while Loaded plays at challenging and deconstructing such social norms as constructed sexualities, classes and races, it actually reinforces the story at the centre of these narratives, that is, that there is a central defining element of the self, and that being 'true' to it equates with being a good person. Loaded places sex acts as this centre, and then operates much as any other social norm, by making value judgements based on its own perspective, and privileging itself as authentic and other narratives as false.
The River Ophelia also privileges sex acts as the primary defining element of a self. Justine's long and tortuous relationship with Sade is one from which she can not escape because her sexual urges dominate any other mitigating force in her personality. The pendulum swings between hating Sade and wanting to be rid of him, which is seen as a mental activity, and wanting him and needing to have sex with him, which is portrayed as an undeniable force, a reflection of her true self. Her jealousy toward Sade is intense, and his infidelities are betrayals because by having sex with Justine he has taken on the burden of her self and yet won't accept it. This is portrayed as a contradiction in Sade's behaviour. Yet Justine engages in infidelities and these are seen as justified because they are expressions of her true self. This is not a contradiction in the 'moral' of the book because the continuous theme is Justine's sexuality, not Sade's.
Whether Justine is having sex with Sade, Hamlet, Bataille, or engaging in threesomes with Simone and Sade, the theme is not the interplay of a number of personalities, but that of Justine's self and the outside world. For Justine, sex acts are the self crystalised, a true expression and a remedy for all existential difficulties (Ettler, 1995:225). Indeed, sex as existential panacea is a common theme to all three grunge novels.
Part 2. Don DeLillo and the Postmodern World.
In his writing, the contemporary American writer Don DeLillo presents us with a portrait of the postmodern world and the way humans move through it. He does not provide solutions, but he does not see that as his role. His concern is with presenting the way people can come to see themselves and their world when, as Lyotard states 'the grand narrative has lost its credibility, regardless of what mode of unification it uses, regardless of whether it is a speculative narrative or a narrative of emancipation' (Lyotard, 1984:37). Yet DeLillo remains a kind of humanist in that his characters possess the very human characteristic of wishing to construct systems through which the world can be made intelligible. Indeed his characters overwhelmingly see it as essential for humans to be able to explain their world to themselves in systemic ways. But the characters also realise these systems are flawed narratives, and that as they integrate them into their selfs, they suffer and do not find any solutions. DeLillo is a postmodern writer, whose view of the self is evident in the view his work gathers of the world-at-large. His characters remain humanist, classic realist, but his world resonates with the plurality of postmodernity.
The characters in DeLillo's work are fully engaged with the postmodern world of the mediated and the artificial. There is no delineation between real and false in their views of the world other than those set up by popular culture. Of White Noise (1985), Michael Moses notes:
DeLillo's most astute commentators are in general agreement that the America of White Noise is a fully postmodern one. For DeLillo's characters, contemporary American 'reality' has become completely mediated and artificial; theirs is a culture of comprehensive and seemingly total representation (Moses, 1991: 110).
White Noise is the story of Jack Gladney's search for a meaningful narrative that will become a centre for his life. This idea of the need to find a meaningful centre is obviously not a postmodern one and is much more readily equated with the classic realist model of the self. But it is important to note that by meaningful, Jack means 'useful', for that is the real test of the efficacy of any narrative, he believes. This attitude leads to a number of ridiculous situations. Jack is chair of the Hitler Studies department at his university. He seeks refuge from his fear of death in chronicling the minutiae of Hitler's life - the chilling reality of Hitler's reign is irrelevant. Gladney needs Hitler Studies to salve his fear of death. DeLillo himself says:
In his case, Gladney finds a perverse form of protection. The damage caused by Hitler was so enormous that Gladney feels he can disappear inside it . . . He feels that Hitler is not only bigger than life . . . but bigger than death. Our sense of fear . . . I brought this conflict to the surface in the shape of Jack Gladney" (DeCurtis, 1987 in DeLillo, 1985:331).
But DeLillo's vision is also humorously ironic. As Paul Cantor states: 'In White Noise, Hitler does not seem to evoke the moral indignation. . . that have become our standard cultural response . . . In fact, the whole idea of Hitler Studies becomes quickly comic in DeLillo's portrayal, especially when he links it to the study of . . . Elvis Presley' (Cantor, 1991:40). This ironic juxtaposition, and the humour in it, is a very postmodern convention, and invokes Umberto Eco's claim for Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, that it 'initiates the postmodern discourse: it demands, in order to be understood, not the negation of the already said [that is, Grand Narratives], but its ironic rethinking' (Eco, U, 1996: 87).
So while Gladney's seeking to find a meaningful centre for himself can be seen as evidence of him having a classically realist or modernist or humanist ideal of his self, the fact that he is quite happy to conduct his quest within the morally appalling history of Nazism, and to wax lyrical comparing Hitler to Elvis, shows a very postmodern inclination to not privilege narratives along classically humanist moral lines. As well, Gladney's salvation foes not lie in subsuming himself into the systemic horror of Hitler.
Everywhere throughout White Noise the same problem is repeated. That is, when Jack finds the system around him inadequate, he seeks another, which is just as inadequate because all systems he encounters are mediations of events. When the airborne toxic event happens, Jack takes refuge in the news when the radio says the cloud has gone from a 'feathery plume' to a 'black billowing cloud'. He tells his son: '"It means they're looking the thing more or less squarely in the eye. They're on top of the situation"' (DeLillo, 1985:105). The gadgetry of media-reproduction are considered more real than a person's physical state. Similarly Jack's wife Babette tells him to turn the radio off during the airborne toxic event:
'So the girls can't hear. They haven't gotten beyond the déjà vu. I want to keep it that way.'
'What if the symptoms are real?'
'How could they be real?'
'Why couldn't they be real?'
'They only get them when they're broadcast' (133).
Towards the end of the book, Jack only believes he is going to die when the machine tells him, not when any human does. His experience of the world is inextricably linked to mediated experience.
This is not surprising in the postmodern world of White Noise, a world where events and beliefs are mirrored in the popular culture of global capitalism, destablising traditional notions of self-identity. As Elliot states: '[T]ransposed to the realm of the self and self-identity, the disorientating effects of the new capitalism means there is little stable ground for an individual to lodge an anchor' (Elliot, 2001:129). For Jack Gladney and the characters around him, there is still very much an impulse to 'lodge an anchor' in their world and know where they stand. The bewildering nature of modern society is disturbing for them because it robs them of a certainty they think should exist, but which remains forever elusive in the inherently uncertain postmodern world. They are caught in a postmodern bind, as articulated her by Elliot:
The image of postmodernism . . . with its shimmering media surfaces, its cult of hi-tech, and its pervasive globalization – resonates with a state of mind split between the enticing excitement of casino capitalism and the terrifying spectre of nuclear catastrophe' (136).
The three main characters of DeLillo's more recent novel Underworld (1997) -
Nick Shay, Matt Shay, and Klara Sax - are embodiments of what DeLillo sees as the struggle in the postmodern world between isolation and participation, conformity and rebellion, production and destruction. Nick Shay is a waste disposal expert. He tries to find places to hide nuclear and biological waste. Matt Shay helps design weapons of mass destruction. Klara Sax has taken over a massive field of decommissioned B-52 bombers and is painting them as a giant work of art. All three protagonists work largely in the desert, but their histories take place in the city, namely, New York. Nick had an affair with Klara when he was seventeen and she around thirty; it was the same year he shot a man and was sent to prison, and eight years since his father walked out on Matt and him.
Nick is separate from his surrounding world, yet constantly drawn into it. He 'has that paradoxical gift for being separate and alone, and yet intimately connected, mind-wired to distant things'(DeLillo, 1997:89). And much of the time this paradox is played out through Nick's uncertainty in living in the world when so many conflicting stories surround him. There are a multitude of paranoias in Underworld. From vignettes of a few pages, such as the story of the missing freighter, packed with radio-active waste - or is it heroin? Or guns? - to the broad and ever-present question of whether Nick's father left of his own free will, or was taken.
The book is largely a story about stories. It asks: what makes a story believable? How should we gauge importance? Is it, for instance, more important that the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb, or that the Giants won the pennant? Then, how does the finder of the ball that won the pennant prove its provenance when the finder is a suspicious-looking black man from Harlem? These stories clash continually throughout the novel, and Nick is always sceptical about what to believe. He searches repeatedly for new ways of looking at his world.
Nick then is unsuited to the changing world around him in that he can not find a certainty, or a rule, by which he can judge the truth or veracity of the events that play upon him. His own sense of self is impeded because he can not be sure of what is going on, even in his own personal history. Anthony Elliot constructs what could be considered a good bridge between DeLillo's writing and the postmodern world when he writes: '[I]n contemporary social conditions durable selfhood is replaced by a kind of supermarket identity – an assemblage of scraps, random desires, chance encounters, the accidental and the fleeting' (Elliot, 2001: 131).
Like White Noise, Underworld describes a very postmodern milieu. From the town being built around an emporium for coloured condoms, to a holiday on a firing range, to the hotel booked concurrently by the waste managers group and the swingers group - there is always a humorous juxtaposition of images and ideas. But Underworld is a much bigger book than White Noise, and it deals with United States society from the Cold War of the 1950s to the global capitalism of the 1990s.
The picture of the postmodern world DeLillo's novels describe, and the theories about the self discussed earlier served to inform my writing, as the juxtaposition of these ideas seemed fertile ground for writing new work.
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