The machine without a garden: Technology and characterization in Don DeLillo's contemporary America

• Main Author: Parigi, Frank Sam
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-1999
• Subjects: American literature; DeLillo, Don; Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-1864); Literature; Modern literature; Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich (1899-1977); Pynchon, Thomas
• ISBN: 059933570X; 9780599335707

As elaborated by Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden, technology always has been a shaping influence on the American character. However, the now conditions of post modernism, defined by unrepresentable networks of technology such as broadcast media and the Internet, have transformed this once self-reliant image of technology into a more disturbing form. These tensions appear in Don DeLillo's novels, as they do in the work of other contemporary writers such as Thomas Pynchon. DeLillo's writing of characters emerges as a response to the fragmenting and dehumanizing power of technology and the systems that produce it upon the people existing within these political and economic networks. These features of DeLillo's characterizations become more apparent when we apply the theories of Fredric Jameson to DeLillo's texts. Jameson argues that post modernism itself is a fragmented and incoherent artistic aesthetic reflecting the technology around it, machinery that in turn is a representation of the vast, multinational economic forces that produce it. Through a study of six DeLillo novels (Americana, End Zone, Ratner's Star, Libra, White Noise, and Underworld) we find that the post modern, technological problem/self is a complex and intimidating personality prone to violence not only due to media conditioning, but also because of the Cold War glorification of technological war. It is the product of a society in which the lines between civilian and military have become bluffed. Plagued by social and scientific uncertainty principles, it is still unable to acknowledge any lack of knowledge or certainty. It has the power to engage in political and economic competition on a global level, and it is obsessed with perpetual consumption and immediate gratification. This new problem/self in DeLillo's novels ultimately is constructing no monument but its own destructive waste. Unable to present any clear alternate proposal to this current problem/self, DeLillo presents us only with the idea of mystery, a vague concept that in some ways matches Jameson's ideas of the Utopian.