Invisible Visions: Word and Image in the Novels of Don DeLillo

摘要

This thesis explores the work of American novelist Don DeLillo as a fictional engagement with the emergent spaces of information technology, considering his novels as a critical delineation of a bureaucracy irradiated discourse increasingly immune to representation. The study argues that DeLillo's early novels portray language as a colonizing agent within consciousness, precluding direct cognizance of the real and moulding thought into dictatorial arrangements. DeLillo's characters seek an aphasic escape from words, exploring film, physicality, sound, and pure mathematics as concrete modes of 'being-in-the-world' absolved from linguistic corruption. Thus the thesis explores philosophical notions of an outside to language in order to limn the frontier between words and reality, but concludes that such regressive metaphysics are themselves symptomatic of the erasure of familiar terms by a nascent, alien terminology. The study thus suggests that DeLillo increasingly foregrounds the fragility and vulnerability of language rather than its perceived domination of the individual subject, portraying electronic images as luminous fissures within the cultural alphabet. The central section of the thesis examines how DeLillo's subsequent novels impersonate generic or institutionalised forms in order to map their disintegration within the flux of signals, breaking up into grammatical static. The very terms which define identity, memory or thought are erased within a cognitive vacuum whose semiotic cancer infects the novel's texts themselves. Thus this thesis situates structuralist ideas of language within the context of a study of the state of contemporary discourse, and examines the relationship between DeLillo's modernist assertion of linguistic autonomy and the text's own assimilation within postmodern modes of lexical organization. The thesis concludes that paradoxically DeLillo refutes his own prognosis of linguistic collapse and technological dyslexia via a stress upon the imaginative and critical properties of the very prose which articulates such dystopian fantasies, and argues that his novels' expression of an imagistic evacuation of linguistic meaning shifts from an attempt to evade language to an assertion of the primacy and necessity of a critical representation of contemporary discourse and the position of the individual subject within it.