Part One

I love this section of the book. The first time I read it, I was really enamoured with the Klara Sax chapter and the condom store chapter. After Brandon mentioned Benjamin in response to my last post, mechanical reproduction, art and its aura, and reification in general were really on my mind during this reading. The idea of reification is really important in White Noise as well, and as I read this section of the book by the pool in Las Vegas (trust me, the irony does not escape me), I was really keenly aware of DeLillo's obsession with artificiality and distance. What is strange, however, is that I'm not sure that the spetacularly mechanized world that DeLillo writes about is necessarily a negative world. I'm sure that it is much more complicated than the simple qualification of postive/negative, but the characters seem to take pleasure in the mechanical (the scene where Nick is watching television with his mother for instance). One of the most interesting moments for me is when Klara is talking about seeing a picture of herself at one of Truman Capote's parties. She says, "What is it about this picture that makes it so hard for me to remember myself? I though, I don't know who that person is," (79) and so on. I think that there is an interesting intersection here with the fact that I really think that this book is ABOUT h(H)istory (history v. History, how history becomes History or more than History). There is also the scene where the kid in Cotter's class eats his history book, which is fabulous as well. That is the part that really seemed to satirize the idea that the facts in that book are a more valid form of history than the game, which for Cotter is still small "h" personal history, but will become an important moment in American History: "He reads a few pages ahead in his world history book. They made history by the minute in those days. Every sentence there's another war or tremendous downfall. Memorize the dates. The downfall of the empire and the emergence of detergents."

This all comes back to the idea of mechanical reproduction and reproduction of an idea of self and personal history as well. For Klara Sax, the image in the picture is not her, but her artwork is. Nick Shay sees himself in the moment that his team loses the game, he only plays the role of a waste mangement official, his role. Idenity is wrapped up in this novel with how the characters see themselves as players in their own personal histories, but those histories are mediated by objects and language. Hmmm....To be continued.