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Transgressing the Last Frontier
Media Culture, Consumerism, and Crises of Self-Definition in the
works of Allen Ginsberg, Don DeLillo, and Chuck Palahniuk
Mémoire
Pierre-Luc Beaulieu
Maîtrise en littératures d’expression anglaise
Maître ès arts (M.A.)
Québec, Canada
© Pierre-Luc Beaulieu, 2016
Résumé
Ce mémoire de maîtrise démontre la continuité du mythe de la frontière dans la littérature
américaine produite après la Seconde Guerre mondiale et il identifie le concept
d'hyperréalité de Jean Baudrillard en tant que nouvelle frontière américaine. L’hyperréalité
désigne un monde produit par la simulation et le simulacre que la population perçoit
comme étant réel. J’analyserai les poèmes « Howl » (1955), « A Supermarket in
California » (1955) et « America » (1956) d'Allen Ginsberg ainsi que les romans Mao II de
Don DeLillo (1991) et Survivor (1999) de Chuck Palahniuk afin d’expliquer de quelles
manières chacune de ces œuvres dénonce le climat socio-culturel qui produit l’hyperréalité
et comment, du même coup, celles-ci récupèrent des éléments du mythe de la frontière.
L’organisation chronologique des chapitres me permet d’établir que l’hyperréalité a joué le
rôle de nouvelle frontière dans la psyché américaine à partir des années 50 jusqu’à la fin
des années 90. L’opposition dialectique entre un Ancien Monde corrompu et un Nouveau
Monde utopique, un élément fondamental du mythe de la frontière, est au cœur de chacune
des œuvres étudiées. De plus, dans chacune d'elles, le ou la protagoniste parvient à redéfinir
le sens de sa réalité en traversant la frontière entre l’Ancien et le Nouveau Monde ce qui
évoque la fonction d’autodétermination attachée à la frontière. L’argumentaire de ce
mémoire repose sur la notion que l'hyperréalité correspond à l’Ancien Monde et que celleci voile l’existence possible d’un Nouveau Monde. Dans les œuvres de Ginsberg, DeLillo
et Palahniuk que j’ai choisi d’analyser, la société américaine est assujettie à une
hyperréalité qui est omniprésente. Dans cet Ancien Monde, la population s’identifie et se
définie par rapport à des images et des produits à la fois fabriqués et célébrés par les médias
et la culture de masse. Les protagonistes de ces auteurs s’opposent tous à l’idéologie
conformiste et déshumanisante de la société de consommation. Je définis ce rejet comme
une réactualisation du mythe de la frontière puisqu’il symbolise le passage entre un Vieux
Monde hyperréel et un Nouveau Monde. Dans ce nouveau paradigme, les protagonistes de
Ginsberg, DeLillo et Palahniuk sont en mesure d’affirmer leur individualité.
iii
Abstract
This thesis demonstrates the persistence of frontier mythology in post-WWII American
literature and identifies Jean Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality as the new American
frontier. Hyperreality designates a world fabricated through simulation and simulacra that
people have accepted as real. Through close-reading analyses of Allen Ginsberg’s poems
“Howl” (1955), “A Supermarket in California” (1955), and “America” (1956) as well as
Don DeLillo’s Mao II (1991) and Chuck Palahniuk`s Survivor (1999), I explain how the
critiques of the socio-cultural climate that produces hyperreality present in each of these
works recuperate elements of frontier mythology. My chapter organization allows me to
establish the persistence of hyperreality as the new frontier in American consciousness
from the 1950s to the late 1990s. The dialectical opposition between a corrupt Old World
and a utopian New World, which is fundamental to frontier mythology, is central in each
the studied works. Also, in each of them, crossing the frontier between the Old and the New
World allows the protagonist to re-define the meaning of his/her reality according to his/her
vision, which is evocative of the empowering function the frontier. This thesis is founded
upon the idea that hyperreality corresponds to the Old World and, as such, that it veils the
existence of a possible New World. The American society depicted in Ginsberg’s,
DeLillo’s, and Palahniuk’s chosen works is one where hyperreality is omnipresent; in this
Old World, individuals identify with images and products both fabricated and celebrated
by media and consumer cultures. These authors’ protagonists all oppose the conformist and
dehumanizing ideology such cultures endorse. This thesis conceptualizes their rejection as
a re-actualization of frontier mythology that symbolizes their passage from the hyperreal
Old World to the New World. In this new paradigm, the protagonists can then re-define
themselves and their realities based on their own self-determined visions and ideals rather
than on those disseminated in media and consumer cultures.
v
Table of Contents
Résumé.................................................................................................................................. iii
Abstract ................................................................................................................................... v
Table of Contents ................................................................................................................. vii
Epigraph .................................................................................................................................ix
Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................xi
Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 1
Thesis Topic ........................................................................................................................ 2
Thesis Statement ................................................................................................................. 6
Theoretical Framework ....................................................................................................... 7
Methodology ..................................................................................................................... 10
Chapters’ Description........................................................................................................ 10
Review of the Literature.................................................................................................... 12
Chapter one: Allen Ginsberg’s Prophetic Opposition to Moloch’s Hyperreality ................. 19
Chapter two: Dogmatic and Redemptive Images in Don DeLillo’s Mao II ......................... 37
Chapter three: Palahniuk’s Survivor: Escaping the Hyperreal Garden of Eden ................... 65
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 87
Works Cited .......................................................................................................................... 93
vii
“Well I think that progress is not possible without
deviation. And I think that it’s important that
people be aware of some of the creative ways in
which some of their fellow men are deviating from
the norm, because in some instances they might
find these deviations inspiring and might suggest
further deviations which might cause progress,
you never know.”
-Frank Zappa (1971)
ix
I would like to thank Dr. Jean-Philippe
Marcoux for his help in the completion of
this project as well as for his availability
and invaluable support throughout the years.
Je tiens également à remercier Andréanne,
ma famille et mes amis pour leur soutient
indéfectible. Merci.
xi
Introduction
1
Thesis Topic
The frontier has always been at the centre of American mythology. It has been
present ever since the first immigrants set foot on America and has remained deeply
ingrained in American culture, literature, and consciousness. The frontier myth is the
product of an idealistic American consciousness founded upon the ideology of the second
chance. This myth establishes a dialectical conflict between two realms, each associated
with a particular mindset. The frontier opposes the limiting civilization of the “Old World”
to its antithesis, the emancipating wilderness of the “New World.” In the “New World”
beyond the frontier, a new beginning is possible; there, American pioneers are free to start
all over again because they are not subjected to the bounds of the “Old World” anymore.
The idea of self-realization symbolized by both the frontier and the “New World” is often
actualized through acquisition (lands, goods, etc.)
The Puritan experience is evocative of the connection between American idealism
and the frontier myth. To the 17th-century Puritan settlers, the Atlantic Ocean represented
the frontier they had to conquer to fulfill their divine mission and attain salvation. The
Puritans felt appointed by God to leave the “corrupt” European continent and voyage across
the Atlantic Ocean to take possession of the “new” American Eden. They believed that they
could re-create the Kingdom of Heaven by converting the world beyond the frontier in
accordance with their religious principles. As such, they felt justified to destroy the unelect, that is, those who did not share their vision of the New World (like religious
dissenters and aboriginal cultures) and, thus, stood in their way.
The Puritans’ conviction that the American continent could be transformed into a
new Eden illustrates the symbolic power of the frontier. The existence of a frontier that
represents the separation between what is and what could be was the prerequisite for their
utopian enterprise. The Puritans associated the “New Word” of America with the promise
of a second chance because they considered it both remote and intrinsically different from
the “Old World” of Europe. Ever since the Puritans’ voyage across the Atlantic, America
has stood as a locus both generating idealism and promoting the promise that it is where
one’s dreams could become reality.
2
The frontier myth persisted in subsequent generations of colonists and shaped a
national identity grounded in self-determination and the accumulation of wealth. The
immigrants who came to America in search of a better life during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries consistently pushed the frontier westward following their advance into
the continent. To them, the frontier opposed the “Old World” of colonized areas where life
was tough and jobs were scarce, to the uncharted territories of the “New World.” It
symbolized the opportunity of claiming ownership over their piece of land—their “New
World”—where they could begin anew and be self-sufficient, prosperous, and free from
civilization’s normativity.
In the days of American expansion, the abundance of free lands to be found and
conquered beyond the frontier actually guaranteed the democratic character of the new
republic (Turner 32). In addition, the acquisition of lands became sanctioned as an
inalienable right and a means for Americans to realize themselves. The mindset followed
Enlightenment values, more specifically, the belief in the perfectibility of man, and John
Locke’s concept of the natural rights of man to life, liberty, and property, which would
become defining concepts for the Founding Fathers as they conceptualized the New
Republic. In fact, Thomas Jefferson’s decision to substitute the Lockean right to property
for the pursuit of happiness in his draft of the Declaration of Independence ingrained in
American consciousness the notion that accumulating property leads to both individual and
national progress. The premise that lands were available for everyone beyond the frontier
implied that all Americans had equal chances to become their own masters, to re-create
themselves, and even to find happiness.1 As such, frontier consciousness stimulated the
development of values such as rugged individualism, perseverance, hard work, and
resilience that, in turn, have defined the American spirit of enterprise.
However, Frederick Jackson Turner, the canonical theorist of the frontier, explains
that the end of the geographic expansion in the 1890s led to “a concentration of capital in
the control of fundamental industries as to make a new epoch in the economic development
1
Like the Puritans before them, the colonists’ sense of mission—their Manifest Destiny as John O’Sullivan
termed it in 1845—to expand on the continent and take possession of it caused the destruction of the cultures
and nations who stood in the way of “American progress.”
3
of the United States” (245). As a result, the opportunity to be financially independent
became inaccessible to many. The concentration of wealth in the hands of captains of
industry and the passage from a nation of farmers and artisans to an industrialized state
following the end of the expansion era altered the nature of the frontier myth. It lost its
democratic quality as it moved from the geographic to the economic realm; the quest for a
liberating second chance had to be pursued within a capitalist market controlled by those
who dominated the economic system.
Nevertheless, the belief that Americans can undergo a symbolic rebirth through
constant geographic and economic expansion has been ingrained into the ideology of the
American Dream, which holds that every American can progress through hard work, selfreliance, and the accumulation of property. Frontier consciousness has remained part of the
American way of life and helped shape the American Dream since it encourages the core
American values of individualism, free competition and economic growth that, allegedly,
assure social mobility to all. Even in postmodern America, individuals compete in the
democratic capitalist market in hopes of socio-economic progress and of attaining financial
independence. They still rely on the frontier values of individualism, perseverance, hard
work, and resilience to get their second chance (their American Dream) and realize the
frontier ideals of self-reliance and self-determination. More importantly, they see
possessions as indicators of one’s socio-economic status and values or dreams; the
commodities that one purchases symbolize how much one has progressed, how successful
one is, what one wants to become. However, the symbolic value attached to such objects is
not intrinsic to them; it has been accepted as such because of the omnipresence of the mass
media and consumerism in postmodern societies.
Consequently, I argue that, in postmodern America, the American Dream
corresponds to an ideology that glorifies media and consumer culture. The American
Dream presents the paraphernalia of consumer culture as the driving powers towards selfdefinition, as the means to re-create one’s self, and as indispensable to realize one’s second
chance. Ultimately, this ideology promotes conformity and devotion to the ideals it
endorses, and, as such, negates the ideals of freedom, democracy, and independence that
inhere in frontier spirit. It is my contention that out of these social dynamics appeared a
4
new frontier, one that separates the world of individuality from that of media and consumer
culture. This frontier is hyperreality.
Philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality designates a distorted
experience of reality resulting from the hyper-commodification and mediatisation of
society. Fundamentally, for Baudrillard, hyperreality corresponds to an entirely
aestheticized reality where people cannot distinguish what is genuine from what is
artificial. For him, the world has entered a “phase” in which the image “has no relation to
any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum” (Baudrillard 6). The term
“simulacrum” (and its plural form “simulacra”) refer(s) back to “Plato’s conception of the
‘simulacrum,’ [which defines] the identical copy for which no original has ever existed”
(Jameson 18). According to Baudrillard, hyperreality is established when simulacra—
representations of concepts, events, or people that are themselves fabrications, and thus
inherently fake—compound to form an entire system that denatures and eventually passes
as reality.
In hyperreality, the frontier between reality and simulacrum disappears. Baudrillard
believes that “[t]he rise of the broadcast media, especially television” contributed to the
ascendency of simulacra and the emergence of hyperreality as “the media . . . reproduce
images, signs and codes which in turn come to constitute an autonomous realm of
(hyper)reality” (qtd in Kellner 68). Indeed, the development of large scale media like
television in the 1950s resulted in the daily propagation of simulacra in the form of
“images, signs and codes” that presented fictitious representations of what “real”
Americans are, or should be like, to a national audience. Ever since its development, the
mass media have disseminated “images, signs and codes” that promote particular models,
lifestyles as well as values, and they have invited the public, often explicitly, to define their
identity and their vision of the world according to these simulacra.
My project revolves around two central elements of frontier mythology: the tension
between dialectical worlds and the emancipating potential of the frontier. What makes this
project original is my contention that mass culture produced a new frontier, one that
separates the world of consumerist illusions from that of authenticity, the world of
hyperreality from that of unmediated individuality.
5
As in frontier mythology, one who moves beyond the threshold—the frontier—of
hyperreality has to be self-reliant to create one’s own path—one’s own “contents and
messages”—where none has been established yet. In this New World of potentialities, the
neo-pioneer is free to express the visions and individuality that could only remain silenced
and unrealized in the Old World; he is free to pursue his second chance and define what it
means to him rather than be compelled to adopt the definitions imposed by others. My
parallel between hyperreality and frontier mythology is then valid since both are based on
the existence of dialectical realities and on the possibility of finding new opportunities and
undergoing a symbolic rebirth by escaping a corrupt reality.
Thesis Statement
In this thesis, I will argue that hyperreality is similar to the repressive and
conformist Old World of frontier mythology. It is also the frontier that must be crossed in
order to realize the frontier ideals of freedom, self-reliance, and self-determination since
these cannot be cultivated where one is subjected to external agents. I will contend that
media culture is founded upon an artificial, conformist, and consumerist ideology; as such,
exposing and questioning its artificiality can be viewed as acts of self-affirmation and
resistance to the hyperreality this culture upholds. I believe that the expression of free,
unique, and independent voices in the world of hyperreality corresponds to reactualizations of the frontier myth. These voices suggest the possibility of imagining and
creating a better world than the one that exists, which represents a transgression from the
constrictive and mind-numbing ideology that the hyperreal fosters.
Working toward these goals, I will analyze the poems “Howl,” “America,” and “A
Supermarket in California” by Allen Ginsberg, as well as the novels Mao II by Don
DeLillo and Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk to show the influence of frontier mythology on
American literature and support my main contention that hyperreality is the new American
frontier. I have selected these specific works because, in each of them, the author presents a
superficial and dehumanizing hyperreal society where media and consumerism are
omnipresent. Ginsberg, DeLillo, and Palahniuk all show that media culture imposes
ideologies that repress individuality in favor of homogeneity and conformity. Also, they all
establish dialectical systems opposing corrupt and uncorrupted paradigms with which the
6
poetic personas and the main characters have to negotiate. These personas and characters
find ways to circumvent the dominant ideology of consumerism and its hyperreality. In
turn, this allows them to express their unmediated, or uncorrupted, selves as they break free
from the stifling and illusory constraints of hyperreality. These personas and characters
resist the hyperreal with their artistic visions; their experiences suggest the possibility of a
paradigmatic shift, a symbolic rebirth outside of the hyperreal.
Theoretical Framework
My theorization of frontier mythology is based primarily on Frederick Jackson
Turner’s The Frontier in American History. Turner introduced the concept of “Frontier
Theory” in 1893 to explain the mentality behind American expansion. According to him,
the colonization of America was accomplished through the crossing of frontiers. He writes
that
American social development has been continually beginning over again on the
frontier. This perennial rebirth . . . this expansion westward with its new
opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society,
furnish the forces dominating American character. (2-3)
Indeed, during the colonization period, pioneers had to be self-reliant to adapt to the
wilderness beyond the frontier and transform it into profitable land. There, pioneers
revealed their true potential and the content of their character as they confronted an
environment where they were not restrained by the rules and conventions of civilization.
The availability of lands entailed that everyone could become a proprietor, and then that
colonists were not confined to the socio-economic position they held in Europe. As Turner
argues, “each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from
the bondage of the past” (38). Beyond the frontier, colonists were free from their European
identity; they could re-create their lives and, through land acquisition, even move from
poverty to prosperity. Turner’s definition of the frontier as a “gate[way]” leading to “new
opportunities” and a “rebirth” free from “the bondage of the past” is central to my
theorization of frontier mythology and will be further developed in the thesis especially
with regards to the conflict between the Old World of hyperreality and the opportunities of
the New World that allows the characters and personas of my chosen works to express their
individuality and their freedom.
7
Turner’s conceptualization of the frontier has survived in the collective psyche in
spite of the closing of the geographical frontier in the 1890s. Many recent critics agree with
his views on the importance of frontier mythology in American culture and literature.2 In
“The Frontier Archetype and the Myth of America: Patterns That Shape the American
Dream,” Mogen echoes Turner’s ideas and explains that the Myth of America is
intrinsically linked to frontier mythology as it is founded upon the notion that
[a]s ‘progress’ triumphs, the hero’s destiny resolves or dramatizes conflicts
between the Old World and the New World—triumphantly, ironically,
tragically, or comically—usually through some version of failed or achieved
metamorphosis (either emergence of the American Adam/Eve or integration of
this figure with an apparent opposite). (24)
Like Turner, Mogen associates the frontier with a dialectical system opposing two worlds
and with transformative powers. In essence, both critics agree that the frontier myth is
founded upon the idea that moving between two diametrically opposed realities causes a
paradigm shift and a possible transformation. These ideas of “conflicts” between the
dialectical Old and New Worlds and of “progress” and/or “metamorphosis” that follow the
resolution of these “conflicts” will serve as the framework through which I will analyze and
discuss frontier mythology in the primary works. In each of them, the nature and the results
of the “progress” and/or “metamorphosis” of personas and characters are different even
though these changes all originate in their rejection of the world of hyperreality. Therefore,
these elements of frontier mythology will be fully developed in each chapter. Also, I need
to point out that will only discuss and theorize Mogen’s idea of “the emergence of the
American Adam” in chapter three.3
2
For example, Turner’s theorization of the frontier finds an echo in “Introduction: Frontier Writing as a
‘Great Tradition’ of American Literature,” in which Mark Busby, David Mogen, and Paul Bryant explain that
“the frontier was the gateway through which one might escape from time into space, from bounds to
boundlessness, and from the works of corrupt and corrupting humanity to the works of God and uncorrupted
nature” (6). However, in order to lay the foundations of my theoretical framework as clearly and concisely as
possible, I have chosen only to compare Turner’s ideas with those of Mogen at this point. Nevertheless, I will
reinvest Turner’s arguments conjointly with other critical works on frontier in the following chapters. I will
also revisit both Mogen’s and Busby’s ideas in chapter three.
3
R. W.B. Lewis first identified this archetypal character of American literature in his 1955 book The
American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century. In the book, Lewis writes that
“[t]he New habits to be engendered on the new American scene were suggested by the image of a radically
new personality, the hero of the new adventure: an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of
ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race; an individual standing alone,
8
I will use the writings of Jean Baudrillard as well as critical commentaries on his
ideas to theorize hyperreality and establish it as the new American frontier. For Baudrillard,
“present-day simulators [like the mass media] attempt to make the real, all of the real,
coincide with their models of simulation. . . . It is no longer really the real, because no
imaginary envelops it anymore. It is hyperreal” (2). Hyperreality results from the
supremacy of simulation, that is, of artificiality and simulacra over factuality. In
hyperreality, signs do not have referents in the real world because they are the products of
simulation. In other words, they are simulacra. As such, those who possess the greatest
simulating and disseminating power over signs and simulacra also have the greatest hold on
what is seen as “real.” Yet, Baudrillard’s concept does not entail that reality cannot be more
than a simulation or that transcending the hyperreal leads to the experience of an esoteric
form of “pure reality.” Rather, as Mike Gane clarifies in “Jean Baudrillard: In Radical
Uncertainty,” “Baudrillard’s analysis then does not . . . suggest[s] that the real is
annihilated, or disposed of, in a dramatic expulsion, but that ‘reality . . . is entirely
impregnated by an aesthetic . . . inseparable from its own image’” (41). Therefore, the
concept of hyperreality depends on the existence of its antithesis: authenticity. Also,
whenever the existence of the “aesthetic” that “impregnate[s]” reality is exposed, the
frontier between the real and the hyperreal is revealed, and hyperreality itself can be
subverted. With this realization comes the possibility of change, of a paradigm shift.
Indeed, Baudrillard writes that “it is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate
the fact that there is nothing behind them” (5); he believes that “all ‘subversive
communication’ has to circumvent the codes and models of media communication — and
thus of the mass media themselves, which invariably translate all contents and messages
into their codes” (Kellner 75). Thus, narratives that reject the “codes and models” of “the
mass media” are means to “circumvent” the hegemony of hyperreality and create new or
alternative “contents and messages.” The ramifications of this theoretical framework will
be fully deployed in the following chapters.
self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid of his own unique and
inherent resources. It was not surprising, in a Bible-reading generation, that the new hero (in praise or
disapproval) was most easily identified with Adam before the Fall. Adam was the first, the archetypal, man.
His moral position was prior to experience, and in his very newness he was fundamentally innocent. The
world and history lay all before him. And he was the type of creator, the poet par excellence, creating a
language itself by naming the elements of the scene about him. All this and more were contained in the image
of the American as Adam” (5).
9
Methodology
Although the Ginsberg poems I will examine (1955-1956) were published four
decades before DeLillo’s Mao II (published in 1991, but set in the 1980s) and Palahniuk’s
Survivor (1999), these texts were chosen to demonstrate that the recurrence of the same
themes as well as of the conflict between individuality and hyperreality in each of them is
evocative of the persistence of the new hyperreal frontier in the American literary contexts
from the 1950s to the late 1990s.
To establish this, I will analyze each of them individually through a methodology
combining both close-reading and socio-cultural criticism. My close-reading analysis will
focus primarily on elements of their respective plots, main themes, and characters, as well
as on specific passages that reveal the presence and the influence of hyperreality and
frontier mythology in each work. This approach will allow me to compare the authors’
treatments of both hyperreality and frontier mythology, and, in turn, to make connections
between the works that illustrate the perenniality of these two elements as artistic concerns.
I will use works from fields related to cultural studies, such as history, philosophy,
and sociology, to engage critically with both consumer and media cultures and address their
impact on the socio-cultural climate and national consciousness of postmodern America.
This critical corpus will allow me to flesh out my theoretical framework and show that the
capitalist ideology these cultures endorse produces and celebrates hyperreality. In turn, this
approach will help me to demonstrate how my chosen authors’ depiction of characters and
personas that struggle to assert their freedom, individuality, and independence are reactions
to a socio-cultural context, undergirded by the culture industry, that tries to suppress those
ideals.4
Chapters’ Description
In chapter one, I will establish the correlation between hyperreality, the 1950s ethos,
and Allen Ginsberg’s main themes and aesthetics. I will show how, in his poems “Howl,”
“America,” and “A Supermarket in California,” Ginsberg voices his spiritual and artistic
visions of America as counter-discourses to the stifling and dehumanizing hyperreality—
4
10
For more on the culture industry, see Theodor W. Adorno’s essay “Culture Industry Reconsidered.”
the Old World—that rules the nation.5 In each poem, he evokes frontier mythology as he
strives to bring about a new America—a New World—emancipated from its consumerist
and conformist ideology. I will argue that, in “Howl,” Ginsberg’s persona attempts to
redefine America and to liberate it from the control of Moloch, a theological demon that
symbolizes the country’s subjugation to capitalism and hyperreality, by becoming the voice
of the disillusioned and alienated. Similarly, I contend that, in the poem “America,”
Ginsberg’s persona celebrates his difference from mainstream capitalist America as a
means to conjure visions that can free America from the ideology of mass media and
consumerism that leads citizens to lose their independence of thought and subsequently
their identity. Ginsberg also voices his rejection of hyperreality in “A Supermarket in
California.” I will show how he equates America to a supermarket where simulacra and
commodities have replaced nature and spirituality. I will also demonstrate that, in reaction
to this, Ginsberg follows in Walt Whitman’s footsteps and tries to find nature, spirituality,
and community in this hyperreal capitalist environment.
In chapter two, I will argue that, in Mao II, the pre-eminence of simulacra over facts
leads to the disappearance of the frontier between the real and the hyperreal. In the novel,
Don DeLillo shows how consumer culture is a form of cult that has invaded every sphere of
society and even the minds of people. He also suggests that only artists capable of revealing
consumer culture’s simulations and simulacra, of unveiling the hyperreal, can lead to the
development of significant new ideas and social changes. I contend that Bill Gray, the
protagonist of the novel, is not a self-determined artist but a product, a brand name (Osteen
American Magic 197). Although Bill has lived secluded from the mass media for many
years, and, as such, claims to have remained “uncontaminated” by consumer culture, he
depends on hyperreality and images to strengthen his myth of subversive novelist and to
seduce the public. My analysis of the characters of Scott and Karen will illustrate how the
“brand name” Bill Gray and the myth associated with it confer authority on the “artist.” It
will also help me to explain how mainstream society functions like a cult in the novel. In
5
Fifteen years or so after his death, it seems almost paradoxical to describe Ginsberg as a counter-cultural
writer since his poetry has largely been assimilated into consumer culture as proven by the fact Howl and
Other Poems has sold over one million copies worldwide (Shinder 3), and that Howl was turned into a major
motion picture in 2010. Nonetheless, the Beats were undeniably important to 1950s’ counterculture and while
they relied on mass culture to romanticize their own image, this should not obscure that fact they used it to
criticize American culture from within.
11
the final section of this chapter, I will demonstrate how, unlike Bill, photographer Brita
Nilsson successfully uses her art to expose the artificial nature of media culture. Brita
understands the difference between the real and the hyperreal; she knows that photography
aestheticizes reality, and, as such, that she can create and destroy images/myths, that she
has power over Bill Gray, terrorist Abu Rashid, and society in general.
In chapter three, I will show how, like DeLillo’s Mao II and Ginsberg’s poems,
Palahniuk offers a counter-discourse to a materialistic culture that stifles independence of
mind. I will argue that, throughout Survivor, the protagonist Tender Branson consistently
submits himself to different forms of authority such as the Creedish church, the government
(through his caseworker), and his agent; however, in the end, these are all shown to be
subsidiaries to consumer culture. Therefore, I contend that, whether as a member of the
Creedish church, as an employee in capitalist society, as a part of the government’s
Survivor Retention Program, or as a famous televangelist, Tender remains a product and a
servant of consumer culture. I will illustrate that Tender needs the help of Fertility and
Adam to realize he lives in hyperreality, to escape it, and to succeed in re-claiming control
over his life and his identity by acquiring a narrative voice. I will argue that hijacking
Flight 2039 and then narrating his version of his life story retrospectively to the black box
allows Tender to deconstruct the fabricated image/identity that his agent has propagated
and to reveal the deceptiveness of consumer culture. This act of self-affirmation evokes
frontier mythology because Tender undergoes a symbolic rebirth as he emancipates himself
from his former life/identity.
Review of the Literature
Articles on Ginsberg as well as his correspondence and interviews reveal the
importance of media culture and capitalist ideology in his poetry. In “Allen Ginsberg’s
‘Howl’: A Reading,” Gregory Stephenson stresses that Ginsberg thought it impossible to
voice his “visionary experience” in a society that “maintains a monopoly on reality,
imposing and enforcing a single, materialist-rationalist view” (53). In his article “Poetry,
Violence, and the Trembling Lambs” Ginsberg states that “systems of mass
communication” participate in “a vast conspiracy to impose one level of mechanical
consciousness on mankind” (331). In an interview, Ginsberg presents this particular
12
consciousness as “a vast American hallucination” upheld by the mass media (Spontaneous
Mind 152). These statements suggest that Ginsberg regards the corrupt consciousness
imposed by the mass media as a hegemonic hyperreality.
Frontier imagery and the need to move beyond the hyperreal are also expressed in
many critical works on Ginsberg and the Beats. In his essay “‘The Sordid Hipsters of
America’: Beat Culture and the Fold of Heterogeneity,” Robert Holton contends that the
Beats’ desire to transcend the repressive ethos of 1950s America required “finding some
heterogeneous dimension or space in which to exist, and that space was not readily
available” (15). He further evokes frontier mythology as he equates “[t]he search for a new
and authentic space” of the Beats to a longing “for an experience of freedom, integrity, and
authenticity generally unavailable within conventional culture” (17-18). Also, Manuel Luis
Martinez explains in Countering the Counterculture “that [the Beats’] dissent seeks to
create a ‘free’ space by finding a new frontier” (15). Along the same lines, in The Bop
Apocalypse, John Lardas writes that the Beats presented “a new American frontier and the
heroes who would occupy it” (19); they sought to create an alternative reality or an
“alternative mode of communication” and believed that “personal transformation” and
“personal salvation” could mean “a cultural transformation within America” and preserving
“the spiritual health of the nation” (Lardas 17). Ed D’Angelo supports Lardas’s point in
“Anarchism and the Beats” when he states that the Beats believed “to be religious prophets
of a new form of consciousness” who wanted to reform society through their vision (227).
These critics all agree that Ginsberg sees his poetic/prophetic visions as means to bring
about a new consciousness that can replace the hyperreal and redeem America.
Concerning “Howl,” Tony Trigilio argues in Strange Prophecies Anew that the
character of Moloch “represents an industrial barrier that blocks the production of the
imagination” and that “reconceive[ing] the urban apocalypse of the poem as redemptive”
can defeat Moloch (145). Similarly, in an interview, Ginsberg affirms that “Howl” voices
the need to find “a connection back to nature” (“A Collage of Voices” 97) and spirituality
absent in the postmodern world. Such anxieties are also present in the poem “America.” In
“Letter to Richard Eberhart,” Ginsberg writes that “America” rejects “official dogmas” and
offers his “own private feelings” in opposition to these (218). James Breslin comes to the
13
same conclusion in “Allen Ginsberg’s Howl”; he affirms that “America” shows the survival
of the individual faced with “the deadening pressures of ‘mechanical consciousness’”
(107). I will use these statements to illustrate that Moloch symbolizes hyperreality in
“Howl” and that, in both poems, Ginsberg’s persona needs to free himself from
hyperreality’s control to reconnect with his natural and spiritual self.
Allan Johnston writes in “Consumption, Addiction, Vision, Energy: Political
Economies and Utopian Visions in the Writings of the Beat Generation” that “A
Supermarket in California,” evokes Ginsberg’s “effort to achieve vision through
commodities” as he looks for spirituality and communality in an omnipresent consumer
culture (117); Lardas supports this argument and explains that, in the poem, “Ginsberg
imagines a harmonious solution to the apparent contradiction between body and soul” and
that he “yearns for an America free from the impositions of Civilization and the
concomitant reduction of human experience to the abstract realm of ideas” (211). I will rely
on these critics to support my argument that Ginsberg evokes frontier mythology because
he writes about dialectical realities in the poems and that, in his mind, rejecting the
conformist and superficial ideology of consumer culture can trigger a spiritual rebirth.
Critics David Cowart and Leonard Wilcox have addressed DeLillo’s and
Baudrillard’s similar assessment that America is essentially an imagined narrative, that it is
hyperreal (Cowart “Delphic DeLillo” 10). Indeed, in “Terrorism and Art: Don DeLillo’s
Mao II and Jean Baudrillard’s The Spirit of Terrorism,” Wilcox, argues that “[f]or [Bill]
Gray . . . the grand narratives by which people live are mythic, hyperreal” (91). DeLillo
even referred to hyperreality in an interview in 1992: “Today, I believe, we are at a point
where reality itself is being consumed, used up, and the aura is all we are left with. We are
living in some kind of aura, and reality is disappearing in a curious way. . . . We have
become unable to grasp something unmediated” (“Masses, Power and the Elegance of
Sentences”). Further confirming that DeLillo presents a hyperreal society in Mao II, Jesse
Kavadlo writes in “Beyond Novelists and Terrorists: Mao II” that the novel “seems to
establish all sorts of balances. . . . But the contrasts are all illusions that veil the true
conflict: all merely contribute to capitalism” (95). These statements all highlight the
14
hegemonic presence of capitalist hyperreality in Mao II as well as people’s failure to
recognize its influence on them.
Many critics agree that Bill Gray is incorporated into hyperreality and that he
sustains it. In Plotting Terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction, Margaret
Scanlan contends that Bill’s work shapes and influences those who consume it like Karen,
and this illustrates his contribution to “the dazzling world of simulacra in which we
currently live” (28). Gordon E. Slethaug affirms in Beautiful Chaos: Chaos Theory and
Metachaotics in Recent American Fiction, that “DeLillo’s Bill Gray is . . . an artist who
wishes to mask his failures through the manipulation of the images of creativity” (53). For
David Clippinger, Bill Gray is a simulacrum (149) who has agreed “to become the ‘subject’
of the camera’s gaze,” which supports “the construction and commodification of the self”
(148). Similarly, Kavadlo indicates in Don DeLillo: Balance at the Edge of Belief that
“[w]hat is real is the image—the reproduction, not the original. . . . Fittingly, when Bill
Gray’s body disappears, his aura grows” (80). In addition, Wilcox states that, “ironically,
his seclusion has only intensified his fame” (93), while Bill sees it “as a way of preserving
his aesthetic values in a commodified and media-driven world in which saleable writers
achieve celebrity status” (93). These critics illustrate that DeLillo establishes a dialectical
system opposing simulacra and reality in the novel. They see Bill Gray as a simulacrum
that does not offer new ideas or valid alternatives to challenge hyperreality.
Mark Osteen and Stephanie S. Halldorson both suggest that Brita is the real hero of
Mao II because she creates original art that unveils the illusive nature of hyperreality. They
show that DeLillo investigates the manners in which art can subvert the hyperreal. In
American Magic and Dread, Osteen stresses that the postmodern novelist has to be
“dialogical: to contribute from within the culture a voice that challenges conformity”
(210).6 Osteen’s central claim is that Brita stands both inside and outside media culture and
“recognizes her involvement in the society of spectacle and, rather than hiding from it, uses
it to her own – and perhaps to society’s advantage” (American Magic 212). He presents a
6
Reinforcing the connection between DeLillo, hyperreality, and art, Wilcox writes that “both [Baudrillard
and DeLillo] address the question . . . [h]ow can art be subversive in a hyperreal, simulational world where
the symbolic—and all the functions pertaining to it: representation, critical interrogation, resistance—has
dissolved into commutable, floating, and multiplying signifiers?” (90).
15
similar idea in “DeLillo’s Dedalian artists”: “Brita’s photos . . . reveal a serious artist at
work” (143). For him, Brita “embodies the potential for an art that appropriates the tools of
spectacular authors to contest their attempts to control history and subjectivity. . . . She uses
her craft to create a counternarrative to the dominant ones” (144). Similarly, Halldorson
states in The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction that “Brita, as creative artist and
creative hero, needs to believe in belief. . . . [I]t is Brita’s responsibility as a creator of
heroic narratives to create” (157). For both critics, Brita is a real artist; she expresses her
independence of thought and vision in art that engages critically with the hyperreal. She
imagines new ways of representing it, and, in the process, unveils how reality has been
aestheticized, which can potentially lead her audience to change how it sees media culture.
Many critics have discussed the influence of consumer culture and hyperreality in
Survivor. Simmons and Allen write in “Reading Chuck Palahniuk’s Survivor and Haunted
as a Critique of ‘The Culture Industry’” that Survivor “presents us with a version of
America in which the individual is now a slave to the ‘false needs’ of capitalism” (121) and
that Palahniuk explores “what it means to be an authentic individual or true to oneself” in
hyperreal America (116). McCampbell likewise argues in “‘Paradigms are Dissolving Left
and Right’: Baudrillard’s Anti-Apocalypse and Chuck Palahniuk’s Survivor” that Tender
lives in “a hyperreal society” where he must “find a new paradigm from which to
understand his own life and eventual death” (147). She claims that Tender’s transformation
into a “successful” man represents an “illusion of progress”, “a modern metanarrative in
which ‘progress’, the new religion or ‘salvation’ is defined by external, material factors
such as beauty and wealth” (154). In “Brandy, Shannon, Tender, and the Middle Finger:
Althusser and Foucault in Palahniuk’s Early Novels,” Ron Riekki contends that Survivor is
a “satirical attack” on capitalism (90) that demonstrates that salvation “comes from turning
away from capitalism” (97). He also states that the “effect of a mediacentered world . . .
creates—as Tender Branson explains—a feeling . . . that reality is not nature but rather
nature viewed through camera lens” (93). These critics illustrate that Tender lives in a
hyperreality that he must reject to understand his life and his identity. They refer to a
dialectical system opposing hyperreality to a new reality where Tender can undergo a
symbolic rebirth.
16
Tender is generally viewed as a slave to fallacious ideologies and a hyperreal
commodity who must acquire his own voice to define himself and find authenticity in his
life. In his Master’s thesis, “Survivor”: Creating Identity Through Self-destruction, Sean
O’Brien describes Tender as a fake Messiah, “a third-order simulation” (22) and a
“simulacrum” (23). He addresses the fact that Tender understands his reality based on
dialectical system; according to him, the Creedish church is opposed to “the ‘godless’
consumer world” and Tender’s “sense of morality and duty was created through this
opposition” (16). O’Brien evokes hyperreality when he explains that Tender sees the
Creedish church as the “‘real’ world,” that is, as “a place of definite right and wrong that
define[s] his world and his roles. However, even this ‘reality’ is revealed as a simulation—
a false creation” (16). Echoing O’Brien’s idea about simulation, Ron Riekki points out that
Tender’s makeover into a televangelist exposes “the ability of consumer culture to convert
humans into products” (92). Chris Button in An Anatomy of Celebrity: Representations of
Celebrity in Late Twentieth-Century Fiction claims that “the followers of Tender's celebrity
related doctrines mute their individuality by adopting the lifestyle advice he preaches/sells
to them”; they have access to his lifestyle through “material means,” that is, through “[t]he
consumer products attached to him” (8). This suggests that marketing turns Tender into a
brand name (7) and that “celebrity” reduces him to a commodity (Truffin 80). As a
hyperreal product, Tender is caught in a fabricated world where he does not control his life
and his identity.
Emphasizing the presence of frontier mythology in Palahniuk’s oeuvre, Cynthia
Kuhn and Lance Rubin write in the “Introduction” to Reading Chuck Palahniuk: American
Monsters and Literary Mayhem that the author’s “narratives perpetuate familiar, even
quintessential, patterns: the process of self-construction or self-realization, the aspiration to
transcend prohibitive paradigms, and the search for satisfactory community” (4). Antonio
Casado de Rocha corroborates this view that the novel is about movement in “Disease and
Community in Chuck Palahniuk’s Early Fiction;” he points out that Palahniuk’s first three
novels are about “their narrator’s movement from disease to community” (105). Eduardo
Mendieta argues, in “Surviving American Culture: On Chuck Palahniuk,” that “Palahniuk’s
novels are about surviving American Culture, and about how deviance is the health of the
individual in a sick society” (395). These critics recognize that moving from a corrupt to an
17
uncorrupted world, a key idea of frontier mythology, is necessary for Tender to improve his
life and progress towards contentment.
As it is the case with Ginsberg and DeLillo, artistic expression is the means through
which Tender manages to subvert hyperreality. Button, O’Brien, and Kavadlo agree that
Tender needs to find his narrative voice to take control over his life (Kavadlo, “With Us or
Against Us” 108). In fact, O’Brien explains that Tender uses the black box as “his own
media” (43) to offer a counter-discourse that challenges the hyperreal identity/narrative his
agent has propagated in “mass culture” (44). Similarly, Button argues that the black “box
allows Tender to once again refashion himself to attract public interest” (103) by “ensuring
a spectacular demise and the requisite media attention” (102) in the plane crash. These
ideas echo Palahniuk’s explanation that his protagonists all try “to re-appropriate the real”
and “to learn how to create” (Masson 138).7 These statements support my contention that
Tender metaphorically comes to life when he successfully “re-appropriate[s] the real” and
“learn[s] how to create” it outside of the constraints of hyperreality.
7
My translation. The original runs: “Mes héros essayent de se réapproprier le réel, d’apprendre à construire,
même de manière rudimentaire comme Denny (personnage secondaire de Choke) qui collectionne des pierres
qu’il entasse dans sa chambre.”
18
Chapter one: Allen Ginsberg’s Prophetic
Opposition to Moloch’s Hyperreality
The 1950s were characterized by the considerable rise of mass media, particularly
television, which paralleled the implementation of Cold War policies by the American
government. Popular culture and politics both sought to defeat the communist menace by
elevating democratic capitalism to a national ideology and a defining trait of American
identity. Government propaganda aimed at neutralizing political dissent by creating a
homogeneous American society centred on its economic system. Americans were expected
to contribute to the capitalist economy and help win the war against communism, which
threatened their way of life.
Conjointly, popular culture circulated the belief that patriotism entailed
consumerism, and that an American ought to be resolutely capitalist. In his book American
Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation, critic Jonah
Raskin argues that, while artists like Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, and Robert Lowell
were condemning the path their society had embarked on,
the mass media and the White House promulgated the idea that America was a
near perfect society . . . threatened by evil communism and all its agents. . . . In
the midst of unprecedented prosperity, American culture turned increasingly
commercial, and writers turned increasingly to conformity. (4-5)
Mass culture and government anti-communist policies maintained the illusion of a national
consensus in terms of what American identity was. Those who refused or questioned the
way of life consumer culture promoted were marginalized and labelled un-American.
Out of the post-WWII conformist ethos appeared the Beat Generation, a group of
countercultural writers whose most famous members are Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac,
William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Gary Snyder. The Beats responded to American
culture, which they saw as spiritless and obsessed with capitalism, using writing to reclaim
a holiness they believed to be inherent to humanity, but undermined by consumerism and
orthodoxy. In his article “Anarchism and the Beats,” Ed D’Angelo states that
19
the [B]eats understood themselves to be religious prophets of a new form of
consciousness. . . . The transformation of consciousness sought by the [B]eats
was therefore primarily religious in nature, not political or ideological . . . for
them, political ideology follows consciousness, not the reverse. (227)
The Beats were driven by a philosophical and spiritual impetus to re-define themselves,
relying primarily on their individuality and creativity. They became “prophets” of a new
consciousness because they lived on the fringe of society and embraced philosophies (e.g.
Zen Buddhism) and lifestyles that were in direct opposition to the social norms promoted
by the conservative forces prevailing in 1950s America.
Allen Ginsberg, a leading figure of the Beat Generation, professed that the idea of
the second chance, fundamental to American mythology and encompassed in the American
Dream, should be sought in spiritual transcendence and self-discovery, rather than in the
accumulation of property. For him, independence of thought and action led to spiritual
wealth. To this end, it was paramount to liberate one’s mind from the restraining influence
of hyper-capitalist culture. In his book, The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of
Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs, John Lardas explains that
the Beats did ‘worship’ the qualities of ‘primitivism, instinct, energy, ‘blood,’
but not as forms of antisocial nihilism. On the contrary, their descriptions of
both a new American frontier and the heroes who would occupy it were filled
with the imagery of the interconnectedness and vitality of nature. (18-9)
Ginsberg conceptualized the crossing of this new frontier between the artificial and the
natural worlds as an opportunity to re-create himself and his society. He saw himself as a
prophet, a pioneer leading others on the way to a new and freer America.
His poems “Howl,” “America,” and “A Supermarket in California” challenge the
American capitalist ethos in an attempt to provide the American people with a renewed
spirituality originating from his visionary poetry. These poems are concerned with the
necessity of moving beyond the growing artificiality of American culture generated by
mass media and consumerism. In an interview, Ginsberg deplored that “America was gone
mad with materialism, a police-state America, a sexless and soulless America prepared to
battle the world in defence of a false image of its authority” (“Poetry, Violence, and The
20
Trembling Lamb” 221). This sustenance of a “false image” of America by “materialism”
and the “police-state” echoes Jean Baudrillard’s postmodern concept of hyperreality.
According to Baudrillard, those controlling public discourse in a consumer-driven
society (i.e. the media and the government or “present-day simulators” (2)), “attempt to
make the real, all of the real, coincide with their models of simulation,” that is, with their
conceptualisation of reality (2). He adds that the real “is no longer anything but operational.
In fact, it is no longer really the real, because no imaginary envelops it anymore. It is
hyperreal, produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace
without atmosphere” (2). Baudrillard’s definition of hyperreality might seem as elitist and
complex as the technocracy he criticizes. Yet, it describes a simple concept: a reality
constructed in a purely capitalistic manner where images and discourses are manipulated
and commercialized so as to create needs and encourage consumption. Hyperreality, then,
results from the general acceptance of artificial constructions as truths, as reality. In this
entirely counterfeit reality grounded on rationality, technology, and consumerism, the very
possibility of connecting with the mystical and the sublime become unattainable because
they are also masked by the hyperreal.8
This chapter will demonstrate how Allen Ginsberg re-actualizes American frontier
mythology in his poems “Howl,” “America,” and “A Supermarket in California” by
transcending the limits of hyperreality and producing a creative world where he can
redefine himself freely.9 In these poems, he asserts the importance of forsaking Cold War
culture and capitalist conformity in order to reconnect with the spiritual world and achieve
self-renewal. Ginsberg uses poetry to re-fashion himself and America, and to mythologize
his public persona as well as his environment, thereby partaking in the creation of an
8
In “Allen Ginsberg's ‘Howl’: A Reading,” Gregory Stephenson claims that “the anguish of the visionary
in exile from ultimate reality and desperately seeking reunion with it is intensified by a society which refuses
to recognize the validity of the visionary experience and maintains a monopoly on reality, imposing and
enforcing a single, materialist-rationalist view” (53).
9
In his book The Frontier in American Fiction: Four Lectures on the Relation of Landscape to Literature,
Howard Mumford Jones states that “the frontier is an effective agent for democratic equalitarianism. Where
society dissolves only to be remade, and inherited folkways are reshaped in new and unexpected patterns.
Individuals, not ranks or classes, count for more, and status and inheritance count for less” (30). He adds that
“on the frontier there tends to be a high valuation placed upon individualism – an individualism that may run
to lawlessness and rebellion, that frequently runs to experimentalism, and that tends to interpret political and
social life in terms of a face-to-face and man-to-man relation of immediacy rather than in terms of status or
pattern” (32).
21
alternative to consumer culture. For that reason, Ginsberg’s poems should not be
understood as anti-American because of their critical messages; what they oppose is not
America itself, but the hegemonic ideology that permeates his society in the 1950s and
produces hyperreality. Critic Peter Knight explains that, starting in the 1950s,
cultural and political commentators began to warn that mass culture was the
thin end of the wedge of totalitarianism and that only the kind of difficult,
individual-centered art heralded by high modernism could save Americans from
becoming the unthinking, zombified masses that bred fascism and communism.
(“DeLillo, Postmodernism, Postmodernity” 27)
Ginsberg participates in this “difficult, individual-centered art” through his attempts to
break free from the hegemonic control of American hyperreality, offering his visionary
reading of America as counter-discourse. As such, his poems are resolutely American as
they celebrate the pioneer creative mind, the frontier ideals of self-reliance and selfdetermination as well as the belief in a New World, a second chance.
Allen Ginsberg’s most famous and widely anthologized poem “Howl” describes the
disruption of the American social fabric and the alienation of a marginalized generation of
which he claims to be part. Ginsberg equates the coercive capitalist system and the politics
of containment in place in 1950s America with the biblical child-devouring demon Moloch.
He writes, “Moloch the incomprehensible prison! . . . Moloch whose buildings are
judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!” (“Howl” 82).
Moloch is thus the embodiment of an oppressive and corrupted society. Ginsberg expresses
the 1950s containment culture10 by evoking the image of an “incomprehensible prison”
whose “buildings”, or institutions, have the power to judge and condemn; its walls, “the
vast stone of war,” imprison a disillusioned youth with the sanction of a government that is
supposed to protect it. In another passage, Ginsberg deplores, “Moloch whose name is the
Mind! . . . / They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios,
tons!” (85, 89). Here, he indicates that Moloch’s demonic influence has invaded the minds
of his compatriots who are, figuratively, left with their backs broken, unable to stand up for
10
In his essay “‘The Sordid Hipsters of America’: Beat Culture and the Fold of Heterogeneity,” Robert
Holton contends that the simultaneous rise of consumerism, wars, and of Senator McCarthy's repression made
it look “impossible ‘to walk away from [containment culture]’—to leave the room or the cage—without also
walking toward something else, without finding some heterogeneous dimension or space in which to exist,
and that space was not readily available” (15).
22
themselves because they choose to venerate him. The glorification of industrialization,
media culture and plenitude, encompassed in the words “Pavements,” “radios,” and “tons,”
has led to their indoctrination and powerlessness.11 In sum, Ginsberg portrays Moloch as a
deceptive god who fools the American population by spreading a fallacious image of the
country.
Moloch can be equated to the hyperreal since its artificial constructions are
perceived as unavoidable truths that blind human beings, thus preventing them from being
in touch with their individuality, creativity, and spirituality. Moloch is the disease afflicting
the “best minds” that Ginsberg describes in Part I of his poem: “I saw the best minds of my
generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical naked” (1). Part I of “Howl” consists
of a listing of alienated individuals who are looking for a new sense of purpose to their
lives; they are longing for an “angry fix” capable of soothing their pain away, that is, a reconnection with the universe and spirituality, with “the ancient heavenly connection to the
starry dynamo in the machinery of night” (2-3).12 However, lines 2 and 3 suggest the
difficulty of finding this spiritual “fix” as Ginsberg’s use of the words “dynamo” and
“machinery” to describe the night sky conveys the idea that the universe is essentially
mechanical. As such, this passage articulates the impossibility for “the best minds” to
satisfy their longing for a glimpse of the sublime because hyperreality reduces human
experience to technology and economics. For Ginsberg, this loss of connection with nature
and spirituality compromises the health of American society. In his article “Poetry,
Violence, and Trembling Lambs,” Ginsberg confesses that
there is a crack in the mass consciousness of America — sudden emergence of
insight into a vast national subconscious netherworld filled with nerve gases,
universal death bombs, malevolent bureaucracies, secret police systems. . . .
Because systems of mass communication can communicate only officially
acceptable levels of reality, no one can know the extent of the secret
unconscious life. . . . America is having a nervous breakdown. Poetry is the
11
In an interview, Ginsberg, referring to the Beats, explained that “we realized that we were in the midst of
a vast American hallucination, that a hallucinatory public consciousness was being constructed in the air
waves and television and newspapers, even in literature” (Spontaneous Mind 152).
12
In an interview, Ginsberg clarified this passage by declaring that “they are looking for a connection back
to nature from a hyper-industrialized urban high-tech slum. . . . I'm not talking about industrialization, but
about hyper-industrialization, I'm not attacking reason but hyper-rationality, Blake's Urizenic exaggerated
rationalism, which is not logic or common sense but rationalization for aggression against nature, excuses,
cover stories as a neurotic or schizophrenic might make up” (“A Collage of Voices” 97).
23
record of individual insights into the secret soul of the individual — land,
because all individuals are One in the eyes of their Creator, into the soul of the
World. The World has a soul. (331-332)
In this passage, Ginsberg’s links America’s “nervous breakdown” and unstable
“subconscious netherworld” to a misunderstanding of reality resulting from the mass media
and government’s domination over public consciousness. He correlates the imposition of
“acceptable levels of reality,” disseminated by those controlling the diffusion of
information to the general public, with the lack of spirituality in American culture.
Therefore, these “acceptable levels of reality,” this hyperreality, is what prevents “the best
minds” of “Howl” from being able to find satisfaction since it has rendered their minds
incapable of finding “the ancient heavenly connection” to the universe (“Howl” 3).
The supremacy of hyperreality over alternative forms of reality, and the
enforcement of a single, overreaching and inescapable ideology, prevent individuality from
being affirmed. A crucial aspect of “Howl” is the disembodiment of the numerous “who”
presented in the poem that emphasizes their alienation and the hyperreal’s hegemony. The
disaffected masses’ predicament is inescapable, as shown in the futility of geographical
movement to those “who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision
or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity” (“Howl” 60). They are left in
eternal questioning and end up in “sanity trials,” on “the granite steps of the madhouse,”
committing “suicide” or “demanding instantaneous lobotomy” (65-66). They are compelled
to accept the capitalist system and the reality of middle-class life as normality. Such
compliance negates their freedom, independence, and agency to define their own identity.
Ginsberg writes: “who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and
were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried”
(55). For Ginsberg, the “whos” are “forced” to participate in capitalism by selling antiques,
which evokes their own obsolescence. Like the objects they sell, they have become
antiquated; they have become remnants of the past because they refused to participate in a
system centred on unrelenting novelty and consumption. Through this example, Ginsberg
illustrates that the social and political realities of America do not give contentment to all its
people since they partake in an economic system, which results in the suffering of many.
24
The failure of American democracy is further highlighted in Ginsberg’s naming of
several American cities whose similarity is the isolation and distress of their citizens.
According to frontier mythology, geographical movement is redemptive and offers
Americans the chance to re-invent themselves by starting anew in another part of the
country and realizing the American Dream. However, “Howl” demonstrates that the
American land cannot fulfill its promise of a second chance: to move is only to carry one’s
problems elsewhere. Manuel Luis Martinez, in Countering the Counterculture: Rereading
Postwar American Dissent from Jack Kerouac to Tomas Rivera, argues that in American
literature “[t]he illusion of personal mobility becomes the illusion of an independence apart
from systemic constraint, an independence which seeks to render the system powerless to
constrain” (13). He adds that the works of Beats like Ginsberg and Burroughs suggest “that
their dissent seeks to create a ‘free’ space by finding a new frontier” (15). Although it is
accurate to affirm that the Beats tried to find solace in their exiles in Latin America and
Tangier, Martinez fails to recognize the importance of the frontier as a state of mind.
“Howl” is primarily a poem about a spiritual voyage through which Ginsberg transcends
the hyperreal and attains self-acceptance by bringing to life his alternative reality. Indeed,
the passage “who lined it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who
were visionary indian angels” (“Howl” 25) suggests that the alienated masses must first
recognize their own individual power—that they are divine beings—to be able to pierce
through and reject the illusions that make them impotent, and, in turn, reform their society.
Ginsberg stresses the necessity of reforming Americans’ minds by presenting them with an
empowering alternative to Moloch’s hyperreal machinery, Ginsberg’s construct for Cold
War culture.
By subverting the hyperreal in “Howl,” Ginsberg provides a glimpse of his personal
vision in order to defeat the force that holds back individual freedom and imagination. He
first reveals that Moloch’s reality is a construct imposed upon people, and then confronts it
with his own. In Strange Prophecies Anew: Rereading Apocalypse in Blake, H.D., and
Ginsberg, Tony Trigilio maintains that
[t]o solve the riddle of Moloch would be to reconceive the urban apocalypse of
the poem as redemptive. Moloch consumes the prophetic imagination, casting it
25
as unnatural and deviant. . . . Moloch represents an industrial barrier that blocks
the production of the imagination. (145)
Thus, Moloch is fundamentally a mental condition, a way of envisioning the world. A
reform of one's frame of mind is then necessary to be liberated from its chimera. The
alienated masses’ failure to reject Moloch and re-connect with their natural, or unmediated
selves, results in violence and destruction:
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze
of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunists pamphlets in Union Square weeping and
undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and
wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
……………………………………………………………………………………
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for
committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and
intoxication. (“Howl” 31-32, 34)
Ginsberg shows that capitalism and state power support the artificial reality that alienates
the “whos” and keeps them from expressing their individuality and their freedom. The
state’s refusal to accept political and sexual difference leads to repression and suffering, to
“weeping” and “wailing.” As the “whos” cannot be themselves or even protest against the
system and hope for reform, they resort to substance abuse, violence against their own
bodies— “burn[ing] cigarette holes in their arms”—or against agents of the state-like
“detectives.” In these passages, Ginsberg foreshadows the demands of the New Left.
“Howl” represents a prophetic journey from alienation to self-discovery through
which Ginsberg’s persona understands that his reality is fabricated and upheld by Moloch's
machinery. By doing so, he also provides the disaffiliated American youth—especially the
students who will form the New Left—with a path to salvation. In fact, “The Footnote to
Howl” stresses that “[e]verything is holy ! [and] everybody’s holy !” (3), and this universal
holiness constitutes a manifesto that should unite all the alienated “whos” around his
vision. His poem seeks to create a new community, a New Left, that rejects Moloch’s
illusions in order to eliminate the dichotomy between the real and the metaphysical, the
26
rational and the poetic, and reunite all Americans in a single balanced nation. Lardas writes
that
the Beats worked within a subversive tradition and harbored a utopian desire to
construct an alternative mode of communication that would serve as a
transformative catalyst for the rest of American society. . . . [T]hey were
concerned with both personal salvation and the spiritual health of the nation.
(17)
Ginsberg’s countercultural poetry, or “alternative mode of communication” as Lardas
phrases it, not only articulates his own vision of reality—one resolutely spiritual—but also
invites other disaffiliated Americans to express theirs, thereby creating a community of
independent individuals—for the New Left, the personal is always political—seeking
fulfillment in self-expression rather than in mass conformity. His lyrical depiction of a
nation emancipated from Moloch evokes Baudrillard’s claim that “[i]t is always a question
of proving the real through the imaginary, proving truth through scandal, proving the law
through transgression . . . the proof of art through anti-art” (19). Similarly, for Ginsberg, the
affirmation of his spiritual reality can expose the existence of a soulless hyperreality. There
is not one absolute reality, but a multitude of equally valid individual visions which should
all have the opportunity to be expressed. For him, their importance lies in the fact that they
emanate from the self rather than from a consumerist culture he believes to be driven by
greed.
Like “Howl,” Ginsberg’s poem “America” responds to the American government and
the mass media’s control over the general public’s understanding of their reality. Ginsberg
denounces anti-Soviet propaganda, and the demonization of communists based on
stereotypes disseminated by the mass media. He writes,
America it’s them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
……………………………………………………………………………………
27
That no good. . . . Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking at the television set.
(“America” 63-5, 67-9)
Ginsberg exaggerates the Soviet threat to unveil television’s perverse capacity to simplify,
denature, and polarize American politics and social life. He uses ungrammatical sentences
to mock the Soviet Union and render unequivocal the inferiority and dissemblance from the
educated and powerful America. More importantly, he expresses the fear that the
communists will change the American way of life by taking their possessions—their cars—
and obliging them to “work sixteen hours a day.” Ginsberg’s mockery is evident in this
passage as, historically, it is the great captains of industry, and not the communists, who
required their American employees to work tireless hours. Furthermore, his mention of
Americans’ fear of losing their cars evokes their obsession with commodities as well as
with the attainment of an ideal of success associated with their accumulation. Indeed,
working relentlessly in order to acquire coveted objects for their symbolic value and
conform to the image of a prosperous capitalist both constitute a form of servitude to
consumer culture. Hence, the real enemy is not necessarily a foreigner, but the Americans’
acceptance of the consumerist discourse diffused mainly by television as an agent of
hyperreal propaganda.
The power of the mass media to favour or undermine specific ideas and discourses
is illustrated in Ginsberg’s denunciation of televised coverage that exaggerates the
communist threat by overemphasizing its seriousness. “America” expresses his desire to
liberate American culture from the mass media’s influence by attacking the definition of
seriousness upheld by capitalist leaders. In an interview, Ginsberg explains that
“[s]tylistically the humor of ‘America’ is a Dadaist approach to the hypocritical seriousness
of Time magazine and the C.I.A. party line” (“A Collage of Voices” 104). Indeed, the
defiant tone that Ginsberg uses in the poem exemplifies the nonconformist attitude that
characterizes the Dadaist movement. In the poem, he addresses America directly and asks,
“Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine? / I’m obsessed by
Time Magazine” (“America” 39-40). He then adds, “It’s always telling me about
28
responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious
to me” (44). Here, Ginsberg links mass entertainment and media culture to illustrate how
both are complicit in controlling the public discourse, and in defining what is meaningful
and what is not; he shows that both promote an ideology that endorses their fabricated
versions of reality and negates others. Thus, people, events, or ideas have to be integrated
into media and consumer culture in order to be considered socially meaningful.
Ginsberg feels isolated because he refuses to become “serious” and participate in
consumerism, which results in America’s disregard vis-à-vis his poetic voice. It is
important to point out that Ginsberg suffered from mental instability during most of his life
and was even diagnosed with schizophrenia. In the poem, he presents his schizophrenia as a
consequence of the alienating conformity of the American way of life that silences personal
opinions. Specific lines of the poem exemplify his predicament: “America I’ve given you
all and now I’m nothing. . . . I can’t stand my own mind” (1-3), and later, “It occurs to me
that I am America. I am talking to myself again” (44). Again, Ginsberg blames American
culture for the nation’s failure to nurture independence of mind as well as for his exclusion
from public discourse. The country does not produce other original minds with whom he
can exchange and, as a consequence of this, he is alienated from his own consciousness and
feels “sick” because of his lack of meaningful connection with other human beings. His
attack is eloquently expressed in a 1954 preliminary draft of “America,” in which he writes,
“witness the downfall and roar of daily life, / in riches and despair amid great machinery, /
lacking miracle of heart” (“America 1954” 13-15). In a different draft of “America,”
Ginsberg writes: “America when will you stop destroying humans souls? Your soul my
soul?” (“America Draft” 11). These passages encompass Ginsberg’s belief that conformity
dehumanizes Americans. He expresses the nonsensical reality that the nation founded upon
the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is actually violating these rights,
which, in turn, destroys the souls of its citizens and that of America.
As in “Howl,” Ginsberg’s prophetic vision also becomes a means to attain salvation
in this poem. It is only by embracing idiosyncratic imagination that he enables himself to
go beyond the hyperreal and connect with his own redemptive creativity. In the 1954
version of “America” Ginsberg writes:
29
let the unknown,
unknowable, shapeless and foreboded future be once
limned clearly, particularized in thought and set
down solid for the eye to wonder and receive, so I can
salvage some remnant of the truth
of all society out of my solitary craze—’
Dark America! Toward whom I close my eyes for prophecy,
and bend my speaking heart!
Betrayed! Betrayed! (“America 1954” 19-27)
Ginsberg refuses Moloch’s heartless machinery, here under the guise of “Dark America,”
and he instead relies on his heart, on his inner truth to re-connect with the sublime. As a
self-reliant prophet, Ginsberg seeks in himself a universal element that can connect him to
all other human beings, that “remnant of the truth / of all society out of my solitary craze”
(23-24). He closes his eyes to reject the illusions of hyperreal America and chooses to
follow his “speaking heart,” his unmediated poetic vision, and, subsequently, re-define
himself and his country through prophetic poetry. Jonah Raskin argues that with the poem
“America,” Ginsberg reached a point where “madness was a condition to be cultivated.
Now, he was convinced that out of his own individual insanity he might discover larger
truths about the insanity of America” (119-120). His mental anxiety provides him with a
response to the hypocrisy of mass culture that produces a soulless and chimerical America.
In the poem, he refuses “to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories” (156)
and he rejects the war effort, preferring to counter Moloch’s influence and contribute to
peace through the expression of his personal truth. He concludes “America” with the line
“America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel” (156). Contrary to some critics’
claims,13 Ginsberg’s use of the word “queer” should not be interpreted only as a reference
13
In his article “Allen Ginsberg's ‘Howl’: Sexuality and Popular Heroism in 50s America,” Nick Selby
contends that “America” is a poem that “deals explicitly with this notion of America as confessor. It is
constructed as a series of troubled confessions which lead Ginsberg to a realisation of his assimilation by
America; he is consumed by it just as he is its product. . . . To see Ginsberg, therefore, as an ‘oppositional
sign’ to the dominant ideology of America in the 50s is to miss the point. The final line of ‘America’, an
30
to his homosexuality or his subjugation to a restrictive gender identity; it stresses his
uniqueness which he perceives as an asset in his enterprise to offset the homogeneity of
mass culture. Ultimately, Ginsberg is not assimilated by mainstream America because he
chooses to declare and celebrate his queerness as a means of affirmation and empowerment.
Ginsberg’s poem “A Supermarket in California” further demonstrates his belief that
individuality, self-knowledge, creativity, and inner spirituality are crucial to survive when
confronted by the alienating power of consumer culture. His decision to set this poem in the
state of California intimates a critique of the promise for a second chance traditionally
associated with the “Golden State.” Historically, moving west, and crossing the frontier
between civilization and the wilderness, entailed an opportunity to re-make one’s life in a
fresh environment unlimited by conventions. Commenting on the closing of the frontier
after it reached the Pacific Ocean in 1890, Frederick Jackson Turner states that “the frontier
has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history” (38). In “A
Supermarket in California,” Ginsberg shows that California—America’s definitive
geographical western frontier state—does not offer a chance to achieve self-renewal
through self-reliance and personal ingenuity, because the entire country has been fully
industrialized and consumed by capitalism.
In the poem, Ginsberg contrasts natural and capitalist imagery to show America’s
artificiality. In the opening lines of the poem, Ginsberg declares that he is thinking of the
poet Walt Whitman14 while walking “down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache
self-conscious looking at the full moon. / In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I
went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!” (“Supermarket” 12). Ginsberg’s persona first wanders in an urban environment in which nature remains
visible in the form of trees and the moon. However, he becomes disinterested in the moon’s
ironic nod to Emerson, demonstrates the contingency of discourses of sexuality and of American identity”
(68).
14
Through poetic enumerations, Walt Whitman sought to create a bond between the individual and the
whole of society. In his famous poem “One’s-Self I Sing,” Whitman writes “I sing, a simple separate person, /
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse. / Of physiology from top to toe sing” (1-3). For Ginsberg,
democracy needs to recognize the individuality of each American or “separate person” as an important and
equal part of the American body, the “En-Masse”. He wrote about individuals from every social class,
implying that those at the top are equal to those at the bottom. The mapping of his utopian America was not
arbitrary; Whitman included all the members of the American landscape, natural or human, without any
distinction.
31
light and shifts his attention to the supermarket’s neon sign. To him, the artificial light is
more appealing than natural light as it successfully lures him into the store—into the
hyperreal capitalist environment—away from nature, which belongs outside. His entrance
into the supermarket while daydreaming and led by “hungry fatigue,” evokes a correlation
between his desire to consume and emotional emptiness. In addition, the phrase “shopping
for images” suggests that Ginsberg’s entrance in the supermarket represents his coming to a
reality fabricated by advertising companies and capitalist businessmen. It symbolizes his
passage into hyperreality, this “new type of social order in which it is signs and codes that
constitute ‘the real’” (Kellner 63). Kellner explains that, for Baudrillard, “commodity signs,
for instance, refer to and gain their significance in relation to other commodity signs within
the code of a ‘structural law of value,’ rather than to any external referents or ground of
value” (63). Likewise, in the supermarket as in consumer culture, images and objects have
a symbolic value that derives from their aura, attractiveness, or prestige, rather than from
their usefulness.
The supermarket acts as a microcosmic representation of hyperreal America; it is a
metonym for consumer culture, but also the antithesis to Whitman’s lyrical and
nomenclatural depiction of the country.15 The supermarket is filled with images, signs,
brand names, and goods, which are all created, packaged or transformed by man. Its
existence confirms the disruption of the consumers’ link with the natural world as most
Americans no longer work the land and cultivate its resources and are mostly dependent on
the market to provide them with natural products like food. This evokes Whitman’s
questions that Ginsberg imagines: “Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are
you my Angel?” (“Supermarket” 5). The supermarket’s plenitude is diametrically opposed
to Whitman’s poetic enumerations of the natural elements that constitute the American land
and its identity. Indeed, this line shows that the divine world that Whitman associated with
nature has been transformed, or processed, by commodity culture and its hyperreal
15
Justin Quinn’s explanation of Robert Wilson’s conceptualization of the American Sublime is quite
helpful to understand Ginsberg’s depiction of Whitman in the poem. Quinn writes that “Robert Wilson
discusses the development of such ecstatic revelation in the American context. The first source in American
literature was the wilderness, and indeed the width, of the American continent. Nature thus figured is later
nationalised (viz., Whitman’s representations of America), and going further, he shows how it was
commercialised: images of solitary figures confronting the rugged vistas of the continent have trickled down
into the figure of the Marlboro cowboy of today’s advertising campaigns” (16).
32
simulacra.16 Hyperreality and consumerism have taken religious dimensions and
transformed the nature of America. This explains why the fictional Whitman cannot
recognize the “Angel,” the divinity he always thought intrinsic to the American
environment.
At first, Ginsberg seems unable to relate to Whitman’s poetic and heavenly
America. The supermarket is more real to him, more natural, than the world created by
Whitman. Ginsberg’s admission that thinking of Whitman gives him a headache suggests
his disaffection from the ideals of creativity, independence, and self-reliance that the old
poet embodies (“Supermarket” 1). In his article, “The Political Meaning of Popular
Symbolic Activity,” James Combs defines the mall as “a major representational symbol of
popular meaning, a multiple, expansive, and dramatic world of valid consumption” (32).
His definition can also be applied to the supermarket since it equally symbolizes capitalist
plenitude, over-consumption, commodification, and the importance of brands. Combs
explains that
[t]he mall exists as the representational symbol of a consumer culture, offering
us the opulent setting for the enactment of a ritual drama of individual selfenhancement that validates not only individual self-worth but also one’s
participation in the collective faith of the American Dream. . . . A shopping
mall is after all a spiritual place, wherein the individual is linked to the mythic
values that are the ‘property’ of the larger community. (32)
Ginsberg, however, demonstrates that the supermarket, and de facto consumerism, do not
offer a pathway to spiritual or personal fulfillment; they only support the hyperreal. Like in
“Howl,” Ginsberg shows that America’s “best minds” are left wondering where to go,
unsure whether movement will ever lead them to solace. He questions Whitman: “Where
are we going Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point
tonight?” (8). He pessimistically concludes that “we’ll both be lonely” (10). The American
Dream is nowhere to be found because America is obsessed with consumerism as
16
Whitman was deeply influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writings on the relationship between the
divine, man, and nature. In his seminal essay entitled “The Poet,” Emerson writes “The Universe is the
externisation of the soul. . . . [T]he world is a temple, whose walls are covered with emblems, pictures, and
commandments of the Deity, in this, that there is no fact in nature which does not carry the whole sense of
nature” (554-555). In the same line of thought, Whitman writes in “I Sing the Body Electric” “As I see my
soul reflected in Nature, /As I see through a mist, One with inexpressible completeness, sanity, beauty” (7273).
33
expressed in the line: “Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue
automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?” (11). As an echo of “America,”
Ginsberg uses the automobile to represent the conformist dream of suburban success,
upward mobility, and comfort. He shows that the consumerist ideals propagated in popular
culture have rendered Whitman’s utopian vision of an “America of love” antiquated.
The individualism inherent to a capitalist-driven society negates Whitman’s
idealistic America, which sought to include every American and unite them in fraternal
love. As a result, Ginsberg describes him as a “childless, lonely old grubber” who seems
lost and roams through the supermarket (4).17 Interestingly, the first three lines of this
strophe begin with the pronoun “I.” In an ironic twist on the Whitmanian tradition,
Ginsberg reduces the all-encompassing “I” back to the expression of a single individual to
represent the distance between the two men. Ginsberg writes: “I saw you” (4) “I heard you”
(5), and “I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you” (6). In the last
line of the strophe he declares: “We strove down the open corridors together” (7),
intimating Ginsberg’s re-connection with Whitman, which results in both poets refusing to
buy goods and participate in capitalism. He adds, “in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes,
possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier” (7). While in lines 4 and 5
the two personal pronouns and the personas they designate are separated, they become
united in line 7 as Ginsberg’s use of plural personal pronouns implies. The “our” indicates
that both poets share the same solitude and the same impulse, or fancy. This sharing of
emotion brings the two poets together and sets them apart from the world of consumption
surrounding them. In line 7, they take what they want from the aisles; they “possess,” yet
they refuse to acquire and become consumers. They refuse to sacralise the supermarket as a
place simply for consumption. Instead, they interact with produce without regarding it as
consumer goods.
Ginsberg evokes the impossibility of changing the system without first reforming
himself and his vision of the world. In his article “Consumption, Addiction, Vision,
Energy: Political Economies and Utopian Visions in the Writings of the Beat Generation,”
17
Ironically, in chapter 5 of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, Jack Gladney, his wife Babette, and their friend
Murray find spiritual fulfillment in the act of purchasing goods at the supermarket.
34
Allan Johnston affirms that “A Supermarket in California” reflects how Ginsberg’s
“consciousness teeters between a desire for spiritual realization and a sense of entrapment
in a world dominated by a seductive consumerist ethos” (117). Indeed, in “America,”
Ginsberg ironically asks “When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my
good looks?” (15). He answers his own question when he finally decides to call Whitman
“dear father” and “lonely old courage-teacher” in “A Supermarket in America” (12). By
identifying with Whitman, he accepts to carry on his crusade and take the role of national
bard. These lines illustrate that there might still be hope for Whitman’s dream of an
America based on love rather than on artificiality and greed; this glimmer of hope lies in
Ginsberg’s prophetic vision and its power to subvert hyperreality. Ginsberg transforms the
meaning of the supermarket by divorcing it from its capitalist and hyperreal function. He
turns the supermarket into a spiritual and natural locus where he and Whitman can finally
bond and communicate with one another.
In “Howl,” “America,” and “A Supermarket in California” Ginsberg’s persona
succeeds in reconnecting with the innate spirituality and creativity he first thought that
Moloch’s machinery—the hyperreal—had destroyed. He manages to present his true self to
the world because he chooses to trust and rely on his own individual voice, and to reject the
ideals promoted by Cold War capitalist society. Through his own example, Ginsberg
demonstrates that spirituality, self-realization, and self-definition are available to all
Americans if they create their own standards rather than imitate the models propagated in
popular culture. In doing so, he re-actualizes frontier mythology by setting himself as a
spiritual pioneer who crosses a new frontier and opens a new path for Americans, paving
the way for them to also reject hyperreality and consumer culture conventionally presented
as the right or true reality. He shows that stepping out of this paradigm and finding his own
vision, one that is available to all, gives him the opportunity for re-birth. As such, he
demonstrates that, although its parameters have changed, the myth of the frontier is still
present in American ideology. In turn, his poetry engages with the American myth despite
being branded as countercultural.
35
Chapter two: Dogmatic and Redemptive Images in
Don DeLillo’s Mao II
In the previous chapter, I established the parallel between Cold War policies, the
emergence of the mass media and of hyperreality in the 1950s. I explained how Ginsberg’s
opposition against the world of hyperreality constitutes a re-actualization of frontier
mythology. Ginsberg created his persona to promote his new America, and because of the
resonance of his oeuvre, he even became seen as a guru-like figure in the following
decades. Depicting the repressive and conservative society of the 1980s, DeLillo, evoking
Ginsberg, shows the extent to which subversive artists have been incorporated into mass
culture, making it extremely difficult for them to create alternatives to the ideology of
media and consumer cultures. In the age of democratized media, they have lost control over
their own image and discourse; the hyperreal has expanded and is even more elusive in late
20th-century American literature. Recuperating the idea of the Beats as a brand, DeLillo
critiques the commodification and co-optation of the counterculture for consumerist
purposes.
Don DeLillo’s tenth novel, Mao II, questions the function of art, and especially of
the novel, in the hyperreal age. In Mao II, DeLillo suggests that the overarching presence of
media culture in capitalist societies contributes to the transformation of individuals into a
homogeneous and like-minded mass as evoked in the novel’s seminal line, “[t]he future
belongs to crowds” (DeLillo 16).18 In the novel, DeLillo shows that images and narratives,
whether they are artistic, religious or revolutionary, depend on media attention to be
publicly recognized, disseminated, and popularized. For DeLillo, such cultural productions,
and the ideas or models they promote, are not impervious to capitalist influence; they all
become reproducible and consumable goods once media culture incorporates them.
Therefore, those who identify with narratives or images aimed at a mass audience also
become products of consumer society. They replicate the models that the capitalist elite
endorse and provide.
18
DeLillo also engages with this issue in his novel White Noise, in which he writes: “[t]o become a crowd
is to keep out death. To break off from the crowd is to risk death as an individual, to face dying alone. Crowds
came for this reason above all others” (73).
37
In Mao II, DeLillo reveals his interest in the capacity of mediatized images and
narratives to shape mass consciousness and participate in the construction and the
aestheticization of reality.19 He illustrates that the control media culture wields over the
transmission of images and narratives in society allows it to regulate the flow of “available”
information, thereby defining what the masses accept as reality. I discussed this situation in
my analysis of Ginsberg’s poems and of the “officially acceptable levels of reality”
propagated through “systems of mass communication” (“Poetry, Violence, and The
Trembling Lambs” 331). While television emerged as an important tool for socialization in
the 1950s, in the 1980s, it became an intricate part of American culture. Mao II was first
published in 1991, when virtually every American family owned a television, and the
medium itself was already established as the chief source of popular entertainment (Heath
274). According to Stephen Heath in “Representing Television,” television plays a central
part in the creation of “mass culture,” since its consumption is “an obligatory requirement
for full membership of the modern capitalist state” (274). At the same time, it also
decisively alters our experience of mass culture. . . . What is at stake here is the
dominance of television as medium and culture. . . . This is precisely the
realization of the saturation of signs and messages, of representations,
mediating everything, everyone in a general spread of culture that operates the
displacement of representation from political to economic terms and is the
result of a determining cultural-economic organization of the social. (274)
Heath’s observation finds echo in DeLillo’s representation of the permeating influence of
consumer culture on the subjectivity of the characters of Mao II, in particular Bill, Scott
and Karen. These characters do not see that the narrative—the ideology—they endorse, no
19
In an interview with Vince Passaro for The New York Times, DeLillo explains that pictures played a
central role in the creation of Mao II: “‘Long before he had written anything,’ says Nan Graham, his present
editor at Viking, ‘Don told me he had two folders -- one marked ‘art’ and the other marked ‘terror.’
Eventually the two folders became one. ‘I saw a photograph of a wedding conducted by Reverend Moon of
the Unification Church,’ DeLillo says, ‘and it was just lying around for months . . . a wedding in Seoul in a
soft-drink warehouse, about 13,000 people. And when I looked at it again, I realized I wanted to understand
this event, and the only way to understand it was to write about it. For me, writing is a concentrated form of
thinking. And I had another photograph -- it was a picture that appeared on the front page of The New York
Post, in the summer, I think, of 1988, and it was a photograph of J. D. Salinger. They sent two photographers
to New Hampshire, to stalk him. It took them six days, but they found him. And they took his picture. He saw
them and they saw him. When they took his picture he came at them. His face is an emblem of shock and
rage. It's a frightening photograph. I didn't know it at the time, but these two pictures would represent the
polar extremes of ‘Mao II,’ the arch individualist and the mass mind, from the mind of the terrorist to the
mind of the mass organization. In both cases, it's the death of the individual that has to be accomplished
before their aims can be realized’” (“Dangerous Don DeLillo”). There are no page numbers in the internet
version.
38
matter how subversive it appears, irrevocably loses its revolutionary potential once media
culture accepts it; it falls under the control of capitalist media and, as such, becomes a
marketing tool used to sustain the capitalist system. Hence, Bill, Scott and Karen are
products of capitalist society because they ground their identity in narratives that circulate
in media culture. Their actions and political stances cannot be divorced from economics as
they unconsciously endorse the capitalist dynamics they originally sought to reject. Their
predicament confirms that they are prisoners of hyperreality.
This chapter will demonstrate that the depiction of society DeLillo offers in Mao II
corresponds to Jean Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality. DeLillo shows that media culture
assimilates and defines Bill, Scott, Karen, and even terrorist Abu Rashid. They are
oblivious to the fact that their entire world is hyperreal. They all believe in ideological
absolutes that falsely appear to be revolutionary, while they actually support the hyperreal
and, as such, erode their sense of identity. It also prevents them from understanding their
subjugation to the capitalist system, and exposes their incapacity to realize the pioneer
ideals of self-reliance and self-determination central to frontier mythology. Only forwardthinking artists like photographer Brita Nilsson are capable of turning media culture against
itself to reveal its inherent artificiality and lead to significant social changes. While Brita
shares traits with Ginsberg, the socio-cultural context in which they navigate is also quite
different. Ginsberg understood that ideology and mass media could alter reality, yet the
extent to which media culture American consciousness was not as developed in the 1950s
as in the 1980s. In Mao II, even counter-culture becomes an agent of hyperreality. Brita has
to question her reality, but she also has to be aware that her art can be incorporated.
Ginsberg did not have to face this problem as his poems set him apart from mass culture.
However, the fact that he became a guru-like celebrity expresses the evolution of such
problem.
As a photographer aware of her impact on society, Brita personifies what Marshall
McLuhan defines as “the serious artist” because, unlike Bill Gray, she understands her
position within media culture.20 She acknowledges that her medium of photography turns
Marshall McLuhan explains in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man that, “[t]he effects of
technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perceptions
20
39
human subjects into objects. She knows that she contributes to the aestheticization of the
real, and this self-consciousness allows her to challenge the hyperreal. Peter Knight claims,
in “Mao II and the New World Order,” that
[i]n common with the rest of DeLillo’s work, there is a recurrent fascination
with the possibility of finding transcendence not in the traditional modernist
refuges of art, nature, or the unconscious, but within the seemingly inescapable
iron cage of postmodernity. (46, Knight’s emphasis)
Brita represents “the possibility of finding transcendence” in hyperreal culture because she
seeks to infuse her pictures with her own subjectivity and, in turn, ensure they retain a
subversive connotation, rather than being mass-produced aesthetic products defined by the
media. The importance she gives to the artistic process over the product itself imbues her
pictures with a unique artistic vision—an alternative meaning—that resists the orthodoxy of
Bill Gray, media culture, and Abu Rashid’s terrorist enterprise. Through her art, she
opposes her vision of reality to hyperreality. She also affirms the necessity of gaining
critical distance from all forms of ideology in order to question one’s self and culture,
which, in turn, can lead to progress. Brita uses photography to re-create, or shape, both
identity and reality, and, more importantly, to counter the hyperreal’s hegemony. Like
Ginsberg, she re-enacts the frontier myth of self-redefinition by showing that her
independent frame of mind allows her to transcend this stifling paradigm, imagine
alternatives to it, and, metaphorically, enter a new reality: the artistic mindset.
Unlike Brita, Bill Gray is a failed and incorporated artist. He is a nostalgic artist
who clings to a past in which the written word exerted considerable influence over social
movements and could trigger revolutions. Bill longs for a time when novelists were as
dangerous as terrorists because they were not integrated into consumer culture and, as such,
reduced to mass entertainers. In “Terrorism and Art: Don DeLillo’s Mao II and Jean
Baudrillard’s The Spirit of Terrorism,” Leonard Wilcox claims that
Gray lives in a state of mourning for the passing of modernism, which he
equates with the death of the novel and the passing of an aesthetic order in
which it thrived. . . . Gray broods about the uniqueness and subversive potential
of art being threatened by commercial values and saleable items of print. . . .
steadily and without any resistance. The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with
impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception” (18).
40
Gray’s reclusive state figures his own refusal to capitulate to postmodernity’s
rampant flow of images and signs. . . . Gray stubbornly upholds the notion of
artistic integrity . . . and the idea that the creative process involves resistance—
whether to capitalist commodification or totalitarian oppression. (92)
Bill refuses to adapt to postmodern hyperreal America and reverts to isolation from the rest
of society in the hope of shielding himself from its alienating effect on individuality. He
believes in a frontier between his righteous world, which corresponds to his romanticized
vision of novelists and himself, and a ruined hyperreal world. Bill is persuaded that “[t]he
image world is corrupt” (DeLillo 36); in other words, he is convinced that hyperreality has
entirely aestheticized the real, causing art to lose its potential to offer unconventional
representations susceptible of undermining consumerist ideals.21 For Bill, media culture
reduces art to its capacity to generate profits; therefore, meaningful art must be protected
from its corruptive influence. He points out that “[a] person who becomes inaccessible has
a grace and a wholeness the rest of [people] envy” (36), adding, “[i]n a mosque, no images.
In our world we sleep and eat the image and pray to it and wear it too. The writer who
won’t show his face is encroaching on holy turf. He’s playing God’s own trick” (37). These
examples highlight the fact that Bill views his disappearance from the public eye as
honourable because he is convinced that hyperreality governs society, and that only
stepping away from it can secure his integrity. Nevertheless, Bill is aware that his
invisibility in a culture obsessed with images adds symbolic value to his work. He admits
that inaccessibility puts an artist in an enviable position in which the masses seek his
“grace” and “wholeness” (36); he becomes an important voice for those disenchanted with
postmodern consumer culture because he is not seen in the media.
While he opts for seclusion to retain authority over his public status of independentminded artist, Bill nonetheless benefits from media culture. His myth increases the market
value attached to his name and maintains sufficient public interest to support his reclusive
21
Gerhard Hoffmann indicates in From Modernism to Postmodernism: Concepts and Strategies of
Postmodern American Fiction that “[w]hile the aesthetics of art contracts in a field of uncertainty, cultural
aesthetics expands to such an extraordinary extent that we come to experience the world through secondary
images. In fact, the aesthetic coverage or rather transformation of the world inundates the ‘real’ in such a
totalizing way by the sheer volume of the omnipresent, media-transmitted images, formulas, and decorative
forms that they not only enrich and decorate the world but also hamper our direct, sensory apprehension of
‘reality’, whatever that may be” (49).
41
and unproductive lifestyle.22 In fact, Bill’s self-appointed assistant Scott Martineau informs
photographer Brita Nilsson that
Bill is at the height of his fame. Ask me why. Because he hasn’t published in
years and years and years. When his books first came out, and people forget
this or never knew it, they made a slight sort of curio impression. . . . It’s the
years since that made him big. Bill gained celebrity by doing nothing. The
world caught up. Reprint after reprint. We make a nice steady income. (52)
Scott recognizes the influence media culture has over Bill’s popularity; his disappearance
only became significant because “[t]he world caught up” (52), thereby implying that Bill
became famous after his story caught the attention of the media. It is not Bill’s works that
interest the general public, but the myth associated with his persona. Indeed, the more
popular he becomes, the more books he sells, and the more books he sells, the more he is in
demand. His commercial success confirms his social importance in a market-driven, mediaobsessed culture. Bill is not renowned for who he is as an artist, but for the “Bill Gray”
simulacrum that popular culture fabricated.
The fame and success of Bill Gray should then be interpreted as symbolizing the
media’s appropriation of his public identity. DeLillo exposes how media culture objectifies
Bill, so that what is offered to his readers, and the general population, is only a simulacrum,
a counterfeit image. In “‘Only Half There’: Don DeLillo’s Image of the Writer in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction,” David Clippinger posits that in Mao II, “the producer of the
artwork is duplicated, marketed, and consumed—all of which ‘empties’ the author of
signification and imposes upon the writer the simulacrum of subjectivity” (139). Thus,
Bill’s confinement represents an empty gesture since he remains subjected to the
hyperreal’s influence, although it was initially motivated by his desire to escape the
hyperreal. As Jeremy Green contends in Late Postmodernism: American Fiction at the
Millennium, “[s]tepping out of the commodified world of media images and massidentification proves ultimately to confirm its predominance” (169). There is no sanctuary,
22
Similarly, Jeremy Green contends that “Bill Gray’s self-imposed isolation has guaranteed that his fame,
rather than diminishing in the years since his last publication, has grown precisely because of the mystique of
his reclusive anonymity. Yet, all of this provides Bill gray with confounding evidence of the writer’s loss of
cultural authority. Bill’s fame had its beginning in his writing. But in the last decade of the century, it derives
from his refusal to participate in the media culture he considers entirely dominant. . . . His cultural recognition
is in inverse proportion to his visibility.” (163)
42
or frontier, capable of sheltering Bill Gray from the image world. Leaving “the
commodified world” does not make him a pioneer artist who incarnates frontier
consciousness because his public persona is already part of the market.
Bill’s withdrawal from the public eye also paradoxically protects his reputation. It
obscures the fact he has become a failed writer unable to finish his latest novel. While Bill
holds that writers should work in the margins of society to change it, his disappearance
renders him useless to society for he no longer proposes new ideas (DeLillo 97). His
passage into invisibility, more than symbolizing his romantic rebellion against the image
world, also implies the end of his contribution to both art and society. Bill is not the
rebellious, self-reliant writer—the artistic frontiersman—he thinks he is, but only the
egotistical simulacrum of a subversive writer. His former publisher Charlie Everson tells
him: “You’re not the hermit, the woodman-writer, you’re not the crank with a native vision.
You’re the hunted man. You don’t write political novels or books steeped in history but
you still feel the clamor at your back. This is the conflict, Bill” (DeLillo 102). He has
assimilated a vision of art that celebrates frontier ideals, yet he does not live up to these.
Bill’s aura is as corrupt as the media culture he criticizes because it projects the image of an
artist he is not. He defends the novel as “a democratic shout”; more significantly, he
maintains that “when the novelist loses his talent, he dies democratically, there it is for
everyone to see, wide open to the world, the shitpile of hopeless prose” (159). Yet, Bill still
refuses to publish his new book because of the shortcomings of his work, which could
affect his fabricated aura.
In lieu of relying on his creativity to redefine himself publicly, Bill prefers to remain
in hiding and hires Brita to take and release his picture. In other words, he invites her to
objectify him with her camera; he surrenders to the artificiality of the visual media he
supposedly despises. Bill’s dependence on both Brita and the medium of photography
evoke his lack of agency as well as his failure to re-define his identity through his own
means. DeLillo writes that
Bill had his picture taken not because he wanted to come out of hiding but
because he wanted to hide more deeply, he wanted to revise the terms of his
seclusion, he needed the crisis of exposure to give him a powerful reason to
intensify his concealment. . . .
43
The picture would be a means of transformation. It would show him how
he looked to the world and give him a fixed point from which to depart. (140-1)
Bill is right in saying that “[t]he picture would be a means of transformation,” but it is one
over which he has no control (141). In fact, this passage underscores his lack of influence
over both media culture and the definition of his public identity. The picture divests him of
his individuality as a subject, and confines him to the status of object. Bill tells Brita:
I’ve become someone’s material. Yours, Brita. There’s the life and there’s the
consumer event. Everything around us tends to channel our lives towards some
final reality in print or on film. . . . Nothing happens until it’s consumed. Or put
it this way. Nature has given way to aura. . . . Here I am in your lens. Already I
see myself differently. Twice over or once removed. (43-4)
Not only does crossing the frontier to the image world not give him authority over his selfdefinition, but it also further increases media’s power over it. According to frontier
mythology, such movement between two worlds—a limiting Old World and a free New
World—should be redemptive and provide Bill with the opportunity to re-define himself
and affirm his individuality. However, it only confirms his lack of agency as well as his
failure to live up to the ideals of self-reliance and self-determination he believes he
represents.
As much as he once needed the media to acknowledge his disappearance, he now
needs it to recognize his re-appearance for it to be noteworthy. To become significant in a
world governed by images, he has to become an image himself; he has to be hyperreal, or
real in a Baudrillardian sense. In fact, Rex Butler et al. maintain, in “On Commentaries on
Jean Baudrillard’s ‘On disappearance,’” that “Baudrillard is concerned practically, then, as
well as theoretically with (symbolic) disappearance. The writer/thinker must die – as
‘Baudrillard’ – to become real” (47). Similarly, Bill Gray, the individual, has to
disappear—to die symbolically—in order for his public persona to come to life and
“become real” (47). His symbolic death occurs when he becomes a simulacra incorporated
in the media, which metaphorically confirms the end of the man, the artist, as it is replaced
by an image, by hyperreality. Arguably, his picture presents a two-dimensional abstraction
of “Bill Gray” that would be accessible to a larger public than he, as a genuine individual,
could ever be. Both attempts to disappear publicly and re-appear as a picture reflect
44
hyperreal dynamics as they equally negate Bill’s subjectivity and turn him into a
commodity, like Ginsberg in the 1960s and 1970s, the masses regard as authentic.
The publication of his picture would also irrevocably confirm the death and
consumption of Willard Skansey Jr. initiated by the creation of “Bill Gray” the persona. As
Mark Osteen contends, “Bill has been usurped by his brand name which, with its neutrally
colored surname and common first name, inscribes his position as a commodity or medium
of exchange” (American Magic 197). Skansey Jr.’s name change exemplifies how
consumer culture seeks to supress all referents with its own language, that of pictures,
advertisements and simulacra. Moreover, the name change evokes Baudrillard’s argument
that media culture participates in the “liquidation of all referentials” by “substituting the
signs of the real for the real” (2). In the same way, Brita reminds Bill that “from the
moment your picture appears you’ll be expected to look just like it. And if you meet people
somewhere, they will absolutely question your right to look different from your picture”
(DeLillo 43). Brita’s comment shows that only the information that circulates in the media
is considered pertinent and accurate since it is part of the dominant communicational
apparatus of capitalist society. In addition, her statement highlights that “Bill Gray” is made
up of the information available on him in popular culture; the accumulation of all this
material constitutes his public persona.23 The function of Bill’s picture is to convey new
evidence as to what the “true” Bill Gray should look like to the masses. In Jean Baudrillard
from Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond, Kellner explains that “signs and modes of
representation come to constitute ‘reality,’ and signs gain autonomy and, in interaction with
other signs, come to constitute a new type of social order in which it is signs and codes that
constitute ‘the real’” (63). Bill’s self-imposed invisibility and silence make him a victim of
this “social order” based on the “interaction” between capitalist representations; this
intertextuality of media signs, which Baudrillard designates as hyperreality, defines him.
Bill’s books are also signs whose circulation on the market end up replacing his
actual physical presence, which further expresses his commodification and subjugation to
the hyperreal. As David Clippinger stresses, Bill is “prisoner to outside forces—namely, the
23
In the same vein, in DeLillo’s White Noise, Jack Gladney is told by a SIMUVAC employee that “you are
the sum total of your data. No man escapes that” (136).
45
media and the publishing world” (141) and his “worth, as determined by society, has been
as an image constructed and maintained by the publishing world” (146). As a matter of fact,
DeLillo suggests that visual media are not the only forces susceptible of supporting the
hyperreal. The entire capitalist system’s communicational apparatus, including artistic
productions considered subversive (such as Bill Gray’s novels), bolster it. Bill is concerned
about being reduced to a picture, but he has already been commercialized in novels that
supposedly encapsulate his core ideas and principles (i.e. his individuality). The publishing
market has already transformed him into a mass-produced commodity that, in and of itself,
fascinates the public and sells the illusion of readily available intellectual integrity to the
masses.
His novels incarnate his public face to Scott Martineau, who, when walking through
a bookstore, “found Bill Gray’s two lean novels in their latest trade editions, a matched pair
banded in austere umbers and rusts. He liked to check the shelves for Bill” (DeLillo 20).
Equating Bill with his books implies that they are replications that can be purchased by the
general public. His novels and his face act as metonyms for his entire subjectivity; they
become interchangeable for aficionados like Scott who declares: “Doesn’t his work, his life
show on his face?” (60). This example demonstrates that Bill Gray cannot escape his
market identity; fundamentally, “Bill Gray” is nothing more than a brand promoted by
publishers like Charlie Everson. Charlie even admits that “[t]here’s an excitement that
attaches to [Bill’s] name” (99). For Scott, such excitement translates in the profound
conviction that Bill Gray’s words and writings are sacred;24 Scott takes pride in “being part
of this epic preservation, the neatly amassed evidence of driven art. This was the holy
place, the inner book, long rows of typewriter bond buried in a cellar in the bleak hills”
(DeLillo 32). Here, DeLillo shows that the market turned Bill into a mass-produced forgery
that purportedly embodies a non-conformist ethos. In reality, Bill and his books were
divested of their subversive power the moment they were integrated into consumer culture.
As Scott’s fanaticism illustrates, they support the mass replication of a fabricated ideal that
ultimately profits the capitalist system because it encourages consumerism.
24
In Don DeLillo: Balance at the Edge of Belief, Jesse Kavadlo writes: “In Mao II, the needs, longings, and
desires that make us human become packaged and sold, disintegrating the border between what we need, who
we are, and what we buy. . . . [Mao II] is about the profound anxiety inherent to a world in which the holy and
the spiritual are easily conflated and confused with purchasing power, reclusion, and hero worship” (76).
46
While Scott is as much a product of media culture as Bill is, he also reproduces its
asphyxiating effect on Bill’s individuality. In addition to acting as his servant and to
organizing his daily life, Scott knows the true identity of Bill Gray; however, he “would
never reveal the name change to anyone. He would keep absolutely silent. . . . It would
sustain and expand Scott, it would bring him closer than ever to Bill, keeping the secret of
his name” (185). Even though Scott knows that Bill Gray is in fact Willard Skansey Jr. and
has become a failed writer, he refuses to expose him as a fraud and abandon the idealized
image he has of him. As Margaret Scanlan posits, Scott “sees himself as the guardian of
[Bill’s] image (238). The authority Scott holds over Bill’s writings allows him to organize
the writer’s life into a coherent narrative corresponding to the way he imagined “Bill Gray”
after having read his novels and assimilated his characterization in popular culture.
Scott’s zeal to keep Bill’s identity and reputation static resembles the cult of
personality system characterizing totalitarian regimes. Gordon E. Slethaug claims, in
Beautiful Chaos: Chaos Theory and Metachaotics in Recent American Fiction, that
“[a]bsolute fidelity to any person or movement—even one that seems unorthodox and
anarchic—is always a form of deadening stasis or entropy. . . . [R]ecursion and repetition is
a characteristic of all totalitarian systems” (52). Scott opposes the publication of both Bill’s
picture and new novel because he knows they would alter his master’s fixed identity;25 his
“absolute fidelity” to the ideal that “Bill Gray” incarnates leads to the “deadening stasis” of
Bill Gray, the artist. Scott refuses to see Bill in a new light or to let him produce anything
new, in turn ensuring that he only repeats himself. He admits that they “could make a
king’s whatever, multimillions, with the new book. But it would be the end of Bill as a
myth, a force. Bill gets bigger as his distance from the scene deepens” (53). Scott demands
25
Slethaug presents a similar argument in his book and although I do not wish to develop this idea further
for the sake of conciseness, I believe I must recognize his contribution to the critical discussion on Mao II
and, for this reason, include this excerpt that explains Bill Gray’s similarity to a totalitarian leader: “Bill Gray
is not, then, merely a liberated author, wanting to expose all totalizations and totalitarianism; he is an artist
who wishes to mask his failures through the manipulation of the images of creativity. And so, in his early,
reclusive state, Bill is himself like a terrorist chief, working to control the minds of his readers, to leave them
with an impression based upon his two earlier works of fiction and refusing to risk publication of another kind
of work. Such manipulation of the media, and hence the audience, may be a diminished version of the control
exercised by power-hungry cult leaders and terrorists, but the nature of the wish to order and control is
similar. Such control is fostered by Scott, who has an entropic concern for order, stability, inertia: he wants
Bill’s readers to remember him by the earlier works, and Bill acquiesces in this state of dependency and
servitude” (53).
47
the same narrative over and over; he negates Bill’s self-determination by refusing to see
him change. He annihilates the artist in Gray, and turns him into a passive idol.
DeLillo shows that media culture can transform popular artists into godlike icons as
exemplified in the resemblance between Bill Gray and Mao Zedong.26 The elites of the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) controlled Mao’s image and narrative to maintain a cult
of personality that presented him as the champion of the masses; they used his image and
words to convert the masses to the ideology of the CCP. Daniel Leese explains in “Mao the
Man and Mao the Icon,” that the photographer Edgar Snow played “an important role in
fashioning Mao’s image as the natural leader of the Chinese Revolution” (221). In the same
way, Bill invites the photographer Brita to his undisclosed residence in order to re-define
his public identity. With regards to Mao Zedong, Daniel Leese adds that
[w]hile the symbolic display of power became increasingly standardized and
spread from public places to privates homes, actual encounters between the
populace and the party leadership decreased markedly with the move of the
CCP Center to Zhongnanhai, the ‘New Forbidden City’ in the heart of Beijing.
Here, the top leadership with their families, bodyguards, and servants lived in a
separate, closed-off quarter that developed into a distinct microcosm. (230-1)
Evoking Mao’s example, Bill’s seclusion contributes to the perpetuation of his
romanticized myth; it prevents any human contact susceptible of affecting his reputation.
Moreover, like the elites of the CCP, Scott safeguards this distance vis-à-vis the general
public and preserves “Bill Gray,” the image and the narrative. Scott’s modus operandi
parallels that of the zealots mentioned in George Haddad’s description of Maoist China.
While discussing with Bill in London, George states:
We memorize works that serve as guides to conducting a struggle. Children
memorize parts of stories their parents tell them. They want the same story
again and again. Don’t change a word or they get terribly upset. This is the
unchanged narrative every culture needs in order to survive. In China the
narrative belonged to Mao. People memorized it and recited it to assert the
destiny of their revolution. So the experience of Mao became uncorruptible by
outside forces. It became the living memory of hundreds of millions of people.
26
Jesse Kavaldo discusses the meaning of the title Mao II in relation to both the totalitarian figures present
in the novel and Andy Warhol’s paintings in the chapter “Beyond Novelists and Terrorists: Mao II” of his
book Don DeLillo: Balance at the Edge of Belief. Mark Osteen also draws links between Abu Rashid and
Warhol’s artwork in the chapter “Becoming Incorporated: Spectacular Authorship in Mao II” of his book
American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture.
48
The cult of Mao was the cult of the book. It was a call to unity, a summoning of
crowds where everyone dressed alike and thought alike. (DeLillo 162)
Similarly, Scott vows a cult to Bill’s books and refuses to see the image of “Bill Gray”
change because the coherence of his own life depends on it. His admiration for Bill leads
him to forge his identity based on the ideas expressed in Bill’s novels. Hence, his books
also represent “a call to unity” that prompt Scott to think like Bill, to become a product of
his works (162). The books mediate the way Scott sees the world and expresses himself.
This mediation is best illustrated by the fact that Scott persistently quotes Bill
throughout Mao II, which suggests that Bill’s narratives bear a pressure to conform
equivalent to that of Reverend Moon’s apocalyptic dogma. Indeed, Scott describes the
scene where he found Karen as “[a] Bill Gray touch. It’s a Bill Gray place. It really is” (83).
DeLillo further develops the correspondence between Bill Gray and Moon when he writes
that “[a]fter [Karen] read Bill’s novels she moved from the old sofa into Scott’s bed and it
felt to him as though she’d been there always” (84). Having absorbed Bill Gray’s
narratives, Karen finds her place as Scott’s concubine in an ironic re-enactment of her
Moonie marriage. Whereas Reverend Moon paired Karen with her Moonie husband using
photographs (183), it is Bill’s words that lead her into Scott’s arms. In both instances, the
underlying power of consumer culture operates: the couples are joined by commodities (i.e.
picture and books) produced by consumer culture. Thus, it is the media, and not the artist,
that ultimately holds power over them and champions mass conformity.
Media culture aestheticizes reality and reduces humans to passive consumers of the
hyperreal. For Karen, a former disciple of Reverend Moon’s doctrine, “[e]verything is real”
(85); according to her, “a picture shows the true person even when it is incomplete” (178).27
Karen is incapable of considering her flawed vision of the world because she has
internalized Moon’s narrative. She cannot see through the hyperreal because she does not
question the information she is presented with, which leads her to conflate artificiality and
reality. Karen typifies DeLillo’s concern with authenticity as evoked in Slethaug’s
27
In an interview with Brigitte Desalm, DeLillo declares: “I believe, we are at a point where reality itself is
being consumed, used up, and the aura is all we are left with. We are living in some kind of aura, and reality
is disappearing in a curious way. We walk through the street, we see an act of violence, a shooting, and say:
Just like the movies. We have become unable to grasp something unmediated” (http://perival.com).
49
argument that “DeLillo’s characters all feel especially vulnerable because the borders of
reality are so difficult to define” (32-33). She embodies the masses who willingly
relinquish their uniqueness to follow the ideals proposed by authority figures such as the
media or charismatic leaders. Like other members of her creed, Karen is obsessed with
Reverend Moon and “does not dream anymore except about Master. They all dream about
him. They see him in visions. He stands in the room with them when his three-dimensional
body is thousands of miles away” (DeLillo 9). The emphasis placed on Moon’s threedimensional being underscores the importance of his two-dimensional picture, which
obliterates his actual physical presence. Similar to the way Scott regards Bill’s novels, the
picture of Reverend Moon represents his true identity for Karen and other Moonies. It is his
image they see in dreams and visions; it invades their minds, and leads them to abandon
their individuality.
Like Bill and Scott, Karen exemplifies the crucial role language plays in the
construction of both identity and reality. For her, adopting the language of Reverend Moon
results in the submission of her heart, body and soul to her master. Karen’s complete
devotion and abandonment to Moon are manifested in her use of broken English:
She said, ‘Heart of God is only homeland. Pali-pali. Total children of the
world.’ . . .
She said, ‘For there is single vision now. Man come to us from far away.
God all minute every day. Hurry-up time come soon.’ . . .
She had Master’s total voice ready in her head. (193-4)
She speaks in a manner that mimicks that of Moon because she has assimilated his
ideological discourse—“his total voice”—and lost her own voice. Moon’s doctrine and the
cult of personality it sustains are what unite Karen to other Moonies; they share his words,
his “total voice,” and believe that participating in his chant brings them closer to
contentment, that it “moves them deeper into oneness” (16). The reproduction of Moonie’s
words implies the acceptance of his dialectical vision of the world, which separates the
Moonies from other human beings. Travelling with her fellow Moonies, “every truth was
magnified, everything they said and did separated them from the misery jig going on out
there. They looked through the windows and saw the faces of fallen-world people. It
50
totalized their attachment to true father” (13). Like Bill, Karen believes in a partition
between those who share her ideal and those who do not; in addition, like the brand/myth
“Bill Gray”, her cult promotes conformity and homogeneity amongst those who adopt it.
Moonies “all feel the same, young people from fifty countries, immunized against the
language of self. . . . They stand and chant, fortified by the blood of numbers” (8). Sharing
the “total voice” requires them to silence “the language of self,” that is, their own
individuality.
While Ginsberg’s prophetic visions aimed at liberating others’ subjectivity by
providing them with an example, this “total voice” acts like that of Moloch as it alienates
the Moonies. Accepting Moon’s dogma as encompassed in his religious chant, “leads
[Moonies] out past love and joy, past the beauty of their mission, out past miracles and
surrendered self. There is something in the chant, the fact of chanting, the being-one, that
transports them with its power. . . . The chant becomes the boundaries of the world (15).
The chant is what separates the Old World from that of Moonies. It is the frontier that sets
them apart from the world. Entering the New World promised by Moon involves
undergoing an illusory and regressive transformation that kills their own sense of
individuality and therefore defeats the frontier myth. For the Moonies though, the chant is
redemptive and it catalyses their passage into a new life; indeed, “[t]hey chant for worldshattering rapture, for the truth of prophecies and astonishment. They chant for new life,
peace eternal, the end of soul-lonely pain” (16). The transformative process the chant
initiates is antithetical to frontier mythology, for leaving the fallen world and beginning
anew as Moonie also implies accepting total disaffiliation with the self. Moon actually
prescribes the abandonment of both ego and independence as a means to achieve salvation.
Karen’s passage from “corrupt” mainstream society into Moon’s supposedly
innocent and liberating reality corresponds to an ironic re-enactment of the frontier myth. In
accordance with frontier mythology, she believes in a dichotomy between an Old and a
New world. Yet, Karen’s passage from the Old to the New world is not redemptive and
does not offer her the opportunity to re-create herself and reveal her true essence, as the
frontier myth promises; Moonie ideology requires her to relinquish her individuality and
independence in the process. Her transformation is not self-initiated; she reproduces both
51
Moon’s identity and his vision of reality, and, as such, has none of her own. Indeed, in The
Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo,
Stephanie S. Halldorson maintains that Karen is
a traitor to the American myth of the heroic self-made, self-aware individual;
she is a traitor to the false hero—the assumed hero—who is the current
incarnation of the self-reliant. . . . She is looking for boundaries, and when she
does not find a heroic narrative to satisfy her she turns to the end narrative
offered by Sun Myung Moon. It is a narrative that reduces the world to a single
identity, offering the impossibility of a return to a childish state wherein the
individual and the identity are merged as one. (158)
Halldorson is right in suggesting that Reverend Moon’s “end narrative” seeks to mould its
believers into a homogeneous and like-minded mass; however, Moon’s core message is
grounded on the dichotomy between believers and unbelievers, between an Old and a New
world. Moon needs his followers to trust that the world in which they live is spiritually
bankrupt; he needs them to see capitalist society as fallen and corrupted by unbelievers in
order for him and his “end narrative” to become credible alternatives. Paradoxically, his
creed does not really reject postmodern capitalist society since it utilizes and benefits from
its obsession with the image. The Moonies’ cult of Reverend Moon’s image implies that all
mass narratives actually support consumer culture and, as such, the hyperreal.
DeLillo and Baudrillard both show that, in postmodern societies, consumer culture
acts as a form of cult that enforces a hegemonic ideology/mindset onto people through
simulacra. The similarity between DeLillo’s and Baudrillard's respective portrayals of the
authority of consumer culture over “the real” is best articulated by Karen’s deprogramming.
In “Cult Fiction: ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ Communities in the Contemporary American Novel,”
Colin Hutchinson affirms that
Mao II suggests that the mechanics of life as a cult member are not so different
from those within mainstream society. Karen likens the attitudes and practices
of her parents and the de-programmers they hire to the brainwashing techniques
of the Moonies, and her susceptibility to both is said to be the outcome of the
assault upon the individual within consumer society of the gamut of selling
techniques employed by the commercial media. Behind the latter lies the profit
motive, but this is no less true of the Moonies. (47-8)
52
Persuasive narratives and constant repetitions are used to deprogram her, and incite her to
adopt what mainstream society defines as “normality.” Ironically, the techniques used to
conduct this process partake in a brainwashing that substitutes Moon’s simulacra for those
of the general population: “They cited case histories. They repeated key phrases. They
played tapes and showed movies on the wall. The shades were drawn all the time and the
door stayed locked” (79). Here, DeLillo indicates that documents like “case histories,”
“tapes,” and “movies” function as authoritative narratives used to teach Karen how to
behave in a mainstream capitalist society that marginalizes her faith and compels her to
adopt its conventions. Instead of Moon’s “total voice,” the hyperreality and the ideology
prevailing in mainstream society become accessible to her in the intertextuality between
these documents. They all promote the same discourse and, as such, take part in the “total
voice” of consumer and media cultures.
Karen is unconsciously forced to internalize a discourse that opposes sanity
(capitalist society) to insanity (Reverend Moon’s cult). DeLillo writes:
They told her, The trouble with postcult is that you lose your link to the
fate of mankind.
They said, We know you’re a good person who’s just going through a
rough adjustment. . . .
They forced her to agree that the church had made her a drone. She
chanted, Made me a drone, made me a drone. . . .
They told her, Okay you are going to a deprogramming center. (82)
Here, the personal pronoun “They” not only designates the nameless agents responsible for
deprogramming Karen, but also stands for the anonymous authoritarian voices that
permeate consumer culture and subconsciously affect the minds and behaviours of
individuals like Karen. “They” tell Karen who she is, how she should behave, and, most
importantly, how she should feel about her Moonie past. “They” place her in a passive
position where she is forced to assimilate the ideology the majority of her contemporaries
share. DeLillo writes that “They” repeat to Karen, “You were brainwashed. You were
programmed. You have the transfixed gaze. . . . Programmed. Brainwashed. Indoctrinated”
(79-80). Karen is faced with a discourse that isolates her and that creates a frontier between
53
herself and “Their” world. As long as she holds on to Moonie ideas, she remains an
“other.” To be considered cured, avoid isolation, and become part of “Us,” she must
internalize their ideology. Yet, this compliance turns her into a product of mass culture still
incapable of being independent or affirming her individuality. She remains oblivious to the
fact that “They” decide what it means to be “brainwashed,” and to be normal. These
examples illustrate that consumer culture is a totalitarian force without official agents. In
fact, “They” are as totalitarian as Reverend Moon and Abu Rashid because they control the
public discourse within their own microcosm. This allows them to define reality through
the propagation of their own ideological narrative; in deciding who are to be regarded as
heroes, foes, or martyrs, and what is news-worthy or not, they create an iconography, a
hyperreal metanarrative supporting their dogma.
The permeating influence consumer culture has on human subjectivity is also
represented in the power of its language to affect one’s conceptualization of reality. DeLillo
shows that the hyperreal produces its own global language comprised of images, brands,
and advertisement that Karen, Scott, and Brita all accept and perceive as coherent.
Similarly, Baudrillard sees marketing and propaganda as indistinguishable in postmodern
culture, for all discourses are part of the global language of capitalism and its propagation
feeds the simulacra. He writes that
[p]ropaganda becomes the marketing and merchandising of idea-forces, of
political men and parties with their ‘trademark image.’ Propaganda approaches
advertising as it would the vehicular model of the only great and veritable ideaforce of this competiting society: the commodity and the mark. This
convergence defines a society—ours—in which there is no longer any
difference between the economic and the political, because the same language
reigns in both. (88)
As Baudrillard explains, in the hyperreal age, “the commodity and the mark” become the
defining elements of language because reality has been aestheticized by the capitalist
system. To make sense to people, the syntax of this global language must partake in
consumer and media cultures; it must rely on images and commodities. As images have
become the main vehicle for ideas, they begin to replace the ideas and make sense through
their interaction with other images. For example, while visiting New York, Karen is
overwhelmed with culturally incompatible words and signs, which, nonetheless, find
54
coherence in their advertising function. For her, the signs constitute “a dialect for the eye.
She read the signs and sayings near the park. The Polish bars, the Turkish baths, Hebrew on
the windows, Russian in the headlines, there were painted names and skulls. Everything she
saw was some kind of vernacular” (DeLillo 175). While gazing over Broadway, Scott
similarly notices “[t]he signs for Mita, Midori, Kirin, Magno, Suntory-words that were part
of some synthetic mass language, the Esperanto of jet lag” (23). Here, DeLillo implies that
all languages are reduced to reproducible signs unattached to socio-cultural or historical
contexts; they are only fit for commercial ends. The only Esperanto, the sole global
language, is that of consumerism found on advertisement posters and goods. This is further
expressed through the fact that the Sendero Luminoso graffiti that Karen “kept seeing . . .
on half-demolished walls and boarded storefronts” (175) is devoid of political connotation.
In her mind, this graffiti does not express political support for a Peruvian Maoist group; it is
advertising similar to all the other signs she sees around her. In this way, DeLillo echoes
Baudrillard’s idea that politics and the economy are no longer different: both obey the rules
of market branding, of “the commodity and the mark” (Baudrillard 88). Politics, arts, and
economics are all reduced to products dependent on the media to be disseminated, adopted,
and reproduced.
Paralleling Scott and Karen’s description of New York, Brita’s experience of Beirut
also involves her encounter with an amalgam of signs foreign to their Lebanese context. In
Beirut, Brita notices Coke II placards whose presence evoke capitalist globalization; she
sees
signs for a new soft drink, Coke II, signs slapped on cement-block walls, and
she has the crazy idea that these advertising placards herald the presence of the
Maoist group. Because the lettering is so intensely red . . . and Brita gets
another crazy idea, that these are like the big character posters of the Cultural
Revolution in China. . . . Because there is a certain physical resemblance. The
placards are stacked ten high in some places, up past the second storey, and
they crowd each other, they edge over and proclaim, thousands of Arabic words
weaving between the letters and Roman numerals of the Coke II logo. (230)
Although it seems absurd to her, Brita perceives a crack in the fabric of the hyperreal; she
gets a glimpse of the inherent paradox of having these seemingly contradictory signs
55
cohabit in Beirut and in New York. Brita understands that capitalism has assimilated
culture and art, reducing reality to a simulated intertextuality of commodities and slogans.
Brita’s self-awareness about media and consumer culture makes her the only
character in Mao II capable of exposing the hyperreal and resisting its homogenizing
power. To resist, she offers her artistic vision as an alternative. She knows that photography
objectifies subjects and turn people into reproducible commodities; she recognizes that her
art contributes to the hyperreal:
She was thinking that everything that came into her mind lately and developed
as a perception seemed at once to enter the culture, to become a painting or
photograph or hairstyle or slogan. She was the dumbest details of her private
thoughts on postcards and billboards. She saw the names of writers she was
scheduled to photograph, saw them in newspapers and magazines, obscure
people climbing into print as if she carried some contagious glow out around
the world. (165)
Echoing Charles Everson’s comment that human ideas construct and shape the world and
that “reality is invented” (132), Brita is conscious of the power of images over
constructions of reality. Nevertheless, she believes that new realities and ideas must be
available to counter those that dominate mainstream culture and enforce mass conformity;
in this sense, she shares Ginsberg’s pioneer artistic spirit. Ginsberg and Brita both provide
alternatives to a hegemonic and artificial reality—the Old World—through their subjective
visions; this is why she seeks to express her individuality and ideas through her
photographs. She explains that after years of taking pictures in New York City, she
began to think it was somehow, strangely—not valid. No matter what I shot,
how much horror, reality, misery, ruined bodies, bloody faces, it was all so
fucking pretty in the end. Do you know? And so I had to work out for myself
certain complicated things that are probably very simple. (24-5)
Brita refuses to take pictures that curtail complex political situations to simplified aesthetic
productions; she does not want to be complicit in the dissemination of fabricated images
divorced from their dramatic referent. More importantly, she knows that the denotative
nature of her pictures cannot faithfully convey the connotative trauma they represent. Laura
Barrett argues that “[r]egardless of the medium, DeLillo is skeptical of representation that
doesn’t recognize its limits or challenge its reader, of reductive images, of literal language”
56
(63). Brita incarnates DeLillo’s skepticism as her role in the novel is to challenge
conventions. As Barrett points out, “Mao II suggests that the artist is likely to be a
photographer as a writer” (62). Brita is a DeLilloan artist because she “recognize[s]
[representation’s] limits” and challenges a purely aesthetic approach to photography. For
example, in response to Bill’s confession that he is “a bad actor” during the photoshoot
(DeLillo 42), Brita retorts, “Not for me or my camera. I see the person, not some idea he
wants to make of himself” (43). In this passage, DeLillo implies that she can disrupt the
illusive, or reductive, image that is “Bill Gray.” As an artist, Brita wants to go beyond the
idea that both Bill and media culture have made of himself.
Brita knows that she can alter the social definition of “Bill Gray” as her picture
offers new information about him. By taking Bill’s picture, Brita participates in the
evolution of his myth. Following the photoshoot, Scott tells Brita that “[w]e have a life here
that’s carefully balanced. There’s a lot of planning and thinking behind the way Bill lives
and now there’s a crack all of a sudden. What’s it called, a fissure” (57). Brita’s entrance
into their world represents this crack in the veneer of Bill Gray’s fabricated image. Scott
realizes that Brita causes this “fissure” since she has the power to change their lives
irrevocably because her pictures can destroy the myth of “Bill Gray” and reveal the
artificiality of his persona. Discussing her views on the task of photographing Bill, she
declares: “I don’t want to do pictures that make a revelation, that say here he is after all
these years. A simple study piece is better. I want to do pictures that are unobtrusive, shy
actually. Like a work-in-progress. Not so permanent and finished” (DeLillo 26). Brita
refuses to be complicit in a publicity stunt; she does not want to reproduce the stereotype of
the reclusive writer who finally re-emerges after so many years. Instead, she uses her
medium to create art that is “[l]ike a work-in-progress. Not so permanent and finished.” In
other words, she wants art that is original and thought-provoking because it does not simply
mimic what others—publishers and the mainstream media—have done before her. Her
pictures do not have a fixed meaning; they are open to interpretation and, as such, offer new
perspectives on Bill Gray.
57
Paradoxically, Brita’s encounter with Bill provokes her realization that, once her
work enters the public sphere, she loses all control over it; it becomes “permanent and
finished” in the hands of others (26). DeLillo writes that Brita
was the person who traveled compulsively to photograph the unknown, the
untranslated, the inaccessible, the politically suspect, the hunted, the silenced.
So it was a form of validation, rosy endorsement, when a writer like Bill
offered to pose for her. Then why this strange off-balance mood? . . . Keep a
distance. . . . How could she keep a distance if she’d already taken the picture?
This was the partnership, the little misery. (66-67)
Brita wants to create photographs that go beyond the superficiality she equates with
commercial photography as her efforts to show the reality of those invisible in the
mainstream media reveal. Ironically, having been in contact with the “invisible” Bill Gray
ensures that Brita’s life and work will both become famous. For Brita, the partnership with
Bill is indeed “a form of validation, a rosy endorsement,” but it also means a betrayal of her
ideals, “the little misery” of becoming a celebrity herself. She comes to understand that Bill
Gray is a “brand name” (Osteen, American Magic 197) with a market value now associated
with her own name and oeuvre. Working with him, Brita cannot “keep a distance” since she
(the artist) and Bill Gray (her subject) become linked.28 Stepping into the hyperreality of his
celebrity corresponds to a perverted frontier experience since it implies also becoming
incorporated. Moving from anonymity to fame is not a positive transformation because it
means losing control over her public image and turning her work into popular
entertainment. Therefore, Brita simultaneously affirms her individuality and rejects the
hyperreal by attempting to resist incorporation. She shows that self-determination is
impossible within the hyperreal and, as such, that she has to leave it to remain true to
herself.
Brita chooses not to publish Bill’s pictures because she refuses to produce art that
supports mass conformity and capitalist ideology. In her mind, art needs to resist both. Her
artistic principles explain why she stops photographing novelists after her encounter with
28
For more on the relationship between the artist and his work in Mao II, see Jesse Kavadlo’s book Don
DeLillo: Balance at the Edge of Belief. Kavadlo explains that “DeLillo shows the paradoxical ways in which
art is simultaneously elevated and destroyed when art is coupled with the artist so strongly that the art itself
becomes moot. And this, the novel seems to say, ultimately destroys not just the art’s aura, but also the artist’s
humanity. Only the artist’s image grows, parasitically feeding off of the art and the artist him or herself” (81)
58
Bill and decides to concentrate instead on terrorists. At first sight, she seems to enact
George Haddad’s belief that
[i]n societies reduced to blur and glut, terror is the only meaningful act. . . .
Only the lethal believer, the person who kills and dies for faith. Everything else
is absorbed. The artists is absorbed, the madman in the street is absorbed, and
processed and incorporated. Give him a dollar, put him in a TV commercial.
Only the terrorist stands outside. The culture hasn’t figured out how to
assimilate him. (157)
Haddad is convinced that terrorists stand outside the capitalist system because they fight to
overthrow it. Conversely, the encounter between Brita and Abu Rashid demonstrates that
terrorists also need media attention to be recognized and affect the general population.
Haddad’s argument is fallacious since, like the “subversive” Bill Gray, the terrorist is also
“absorbed, and processed and incorporated” by capitalist culture.
In fact, Abu Rashid’s terrorist revolution is carried as a marketing campaign. Like
the consumer culture he claims to abhor, Rashid utilizes his contemporaries’ obsession with
visual culture to make his cause popular, to sell his ideology. He uses his image to provide
his followers with a model that prescribes obedience, conformism, and complete devotion
to his Maoist revolution. For example, Rashid gives his followers T-shirts on which his
face is printed; his interpreter describes them as providing the masses with
a vision they will accept and obey. These children need an identity
outside the narrow function of who they are and where they come from. . . .
We teach them identity, sense of purpose. They are all children of Abu
Rashid. All men one man. . . . The image of Rashid is their identity. (233)
Rashid turns his face into a logo, an advertisement that both encapsulates and symbolizes
his revolutionary ideology. He requires his admirers to give up their individuality and
imitate the image with which he provides them. The interpreter explains to Brita that
Rashid’s followers all wear hoods because they “have no face or speech. Their features are
identical. They are his features. They don’t need their own features or voices. They are
surrendering these things to something powerful and great” (234). Rashid’s political
platform is grounded on the creation of a hyperreal “brand” image with which the masses
must identify. Those who adopt his “brand” believe it expresses their own ideas and
59
individuality, but it actually suppresses them; it becomes associated with their identity in
the same way that someone who wears a company logo on his clothes, consciously or not,
advertises that particular company’s message and ideals.
While he defines himself as Maoist, Rashid ironically relies on promotional Tshirts, an emblematic product of capitalist visual culture, to both promote and ensure the
success of his anti-communist revolution. Thus, he is a not a revolutionary; he is product of
media culture and, consequently, of capitalism. Mark Osteen argues that
terrorists don’t finally control their own spectacles, because the coherence of
act and image that they rely upon for their dissemination of dread requires the
collusions of the photographers, producers, and executives who transmit and
own the images. In fact, control of the public mind (always fleeting and partial)
really belongs to the media corporations who authorize the images that
terrorists produce. . . .
[F]ar from being ‘outside’ of capitalism, terrorists perfectly exemplify how it
engulfs even those discourses that seem to oppose it. (American Magic 206-7)
Like Bill’s novels, Rashid’s “children” are mass products who become substitutes for his
public face; they are imitations of an original Abu Rashid who ultimately confirms that he
is himself only a simulacrum; he is not “‘outside’ of capitalism” nor has he any real hold on
“the public mind” because he does not “control [his] own spectacles.” When Rashid turns
his own image into a revolutionary symbol, he willingly reduces himself and his cause to a
visual sign. Rashid attempts to use media culture for his own profit, but he has no authority
over it. His reliance on a fabricated image leaves him entirely dependent on the media,
which explains why he invites Brita to take and publish his picture. Like Bill Gray, Abu
Rashid loses control over his popular myth when he becomes associated with a constructed,
reproducible, and consumable image of himself.
The encounter between Brita and Rashid illustrates that an artist who questions the
nature of reality and conventions can provoke change capable of disrupting the hyperreal
and its dehumanizing effects. Their confrontation opposes a genuine artist who desires to
express an authentic vision of the real and a simulacrum who reproduces a single image on
a massive scale to enforce mass conformity. Acknowledging that finite works are always
susceptible to being mass produced in the hyperreal age, DeLillo suggests that the process
60
leading to the product—the artistic impetus, and not the product itself—is where meaning
and thought-provoking ideas lay. This is exemplified in the episode of Rashid’s photoshoot
through which DeLillo provides an insight into Brita’s psychological state. In reaction to
Rashid’s ideological discourse, Brita thinks to herself that this is
[e]loquent macho bullshit. But she says nothing because what she can she
say. She runs through the roll, leaving a single exposure. On an impulse she
walks over to the boy at the door and removes his hood. Lifts it off his head and
drops it on the floor. Doesn’t lift it very gently either. She is smiling all the
time. And takes two steps back and snaps his picture.
She does this because it seems important. (236)
Her act is spontaneous and unmediated; more importantly, it crystallizes her opposition to
Rashid’s totalitarian ideology.29 DeLillo, through Brita, describes Rashid’s rhetoric as
29
There does not seem to be any critical consensus with regards to the meaning of this scene. For this
reason, I included those that I consider the most potent to help the reader have a better understanding of the
variety of interpretations concerning this particular episode. Laura Barrett argues in “‘Here But Also There’:
Subjectivity and Postmodern Space in Mao II” that, “just as the reader adjusts to photographs as destructive of
rather than constructive of identity, DeLillo again reverses the expectations. By removing one of the boys’
hoods and snapping his photograph, Brita assumes she is restoring identity and using the camera as a giver of
life” (801). Differently, David Clippinger writes in “‘Only Half There’: Don DeLillo’s Image of the Writer in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” that “Brita responds to Rashid’s explanation in a telling fashion by
snatching the hood from the head of one of Rashid’s sons and snapping his ‘identity’ as captured in the lens of
the camera. Her anger, in this respect, might be understood as her rejection of the ‘mechanical reproduction’
of human subjectivity, but it is an anger that fails to take into consideration the extent to which photography
and its ‘reproductibility’ contributes to the disintegration of individual ‘aura’ and, thereby, dehumanizes”
(150). In The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo,
Stephanie S. Halldorson contends that “rather than engaging in a dialogue with Rashid, [Brita] hides within
her camera” (171) and that her “impulse to engage not with Rashid but with the audience (the boy) is
intuitively astute, but she has no idea why she is doing it. Brita’s assault on the boy might be a statement of
priority of the individual over the communal identity but she has no plan and no idea what she really means”
(172). According to Halldorson, “[i]f Brita has proved anything to anyone in this scene, it is only to herself
and only what she had already felt when she had walked into the room” (173). In my opinion, the most
compelling interpretation of Brita’s reaction to Abu Rashid’s discourse comes from Mark Osteen who
explains in “DeLillo’s Dedalian artists” that “[Brita] removes one boy’s hood and snaps his picture . . . as if to
acquire the boy, to supplant Rashid’s image with one she had authored, and thereby demonstrate the limits of
Rashid’s control. . . . Brita’s gesture suggests her cunning awareness of her social and political power:
photographs may glorify or diminish, even figuratively murder or revivify, as the situation affords” (145).
Osteen develops his argument further in American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture
and asserts that “[a]s she is leaving, ‘on an impulse’ she removes the hood of one of Rashid’s boys and snaps
his picture (M 236), at once restoring the boy’s original identity and re-authoring the boy by acquiring his
image, which she is now free to alter or exploit as she wishes. Before she leaves she also makes a point of
shaking Rashid’s hand and ‘pronouncing her name slowly’ (M 237) as if to say, ‘I am not a child of Abu
Rashid, and I contest your authority, even as my camera records it.’ Her act reminds Rashid that he is nothing
without her, just as the boy is nothing without Rashid: the real author in this scene is not Rashid, but Brita.
The impulsiveness of Brita’s decision to photograph the child suggests both an exertion and a suspension of
will. And indeed, her authority may lie precisely in the spontaneity of her act, which dramatizes John Berger’s
analysis of the creative essence of photography. Photographs, he argues, are the products of a ‘single
61
“[e]loquent macho bullshit,” but he interestingly adds that Brita “says nothing because what
she can she say” (236). Through this passage, DeLillo makes it obvious that Brita disagrees
with Rashid’s ideas, yet only her and the reader are aware of her opinion.
The shift from Brita’s inner dialogue to third-person narration serves to explain
what motivates her to take the picture; she cannot speak her mind freely in such
environment, so she uses image—the language of the hyperreal age—to express her
political stance. The inclusion of Brita’s inner dialogue in this episode infuses her picture
with a symbolic meaning; the picture is a political statement, an act of defiance that “seems
important” to her (236). What “seems important” to her is not explained; yet, her actions
clearly challenge Rashid’s authority. The ambiguity that characterizes this episode suggests
that DeLillo wants Brita’s subversive action to move from the denotative to the connotative
level, the level of interpretation and meaning.30 DeLillo provides context to the production
of this picture that situates it as an act of resistance. This context renders the picture unique
because it emphasizes the fact that the creative impulse behind the artwork cannot be
reproduced. Brita’s medium allows her to contextualize the real and undermine the image
of Abu Rashid.31 Indeed, the mass media hold considerable influence on the meaning and
the reception, of an image because they contextualize it. The power to contextualize signs
(i.e. images or languages) enables them to ascribe a reading to a situation; it induces the
masses to adopt particular interpretations, leaving alternatives veiled behind the hyperreal.
In conclusion, in Mao II, Don DeLillo shows that artists, totalitarian leaders, and the
mass media alike use images and narratives to propose models supposed to lead to personal
constitutive choice’ —the moment selected to push the button—and thus their meaning is necessarily
ambiguous. That is, because the choice of the moment is instantaneous, and because the photographer cannot
know for certain how the photo will turn out, photography is ‘weak in intentionality,’ and thus permits
interference and accident to dilute the photographer’s creativity authority (quoted in Michaels 237). In turn,
this dilution of authority invites (even requires) each viewer to interpret a photograph differently, and thus
defeats any attempt whether by authoritarian leaders or multinational corporations, and whether the
photograph is a portrait or an ad—to reduce the image to a univocal meaning. Thus the photograph both
expresses the subjectivity of the photographer and demands the superimposition of the viewer’s; it is both
social and personal, at once a document and an interpretation” (212).
30
Thomas Carmichael, building on Roland Barthes’ writings, affirms: “The traumatic photo aspires to an
unmediated glimpse of the real and always falls back into the necessary awareness of its own processes of
signification” (216).
31
Regarding this particular element of the novel, Jeoffrey S. Bull argues that “Brita’s camera can both
undermine the absolutism of Rashid and help promote his message. Although it can subvert his totalist design
by catching scenes that contract his rule, it also fixes things, limits how they can be known” (221-222).
62
contentment but that, in reality, support capitalist values. Although their discourses might
seem revolutionary or anti-conformist, they are still based on the creation and the
preservation of a hyperreality. Bill Gray, Scott Martineau, Karen Janney, and Abu Rashid
all believe in a partition between their own view of the “truth” and that of the capitalist
society they seek to convert to their ideology. However, they all fail to understand that their
dialectical view of the world is fallacious, for their revolutionary narratives do not oppose
capitalism, media culture, or the hyperreal; they actually increase their influence. These
characters’ lack of self-awareness confines them to the status of products of the hyperreal
and prevents them from transcending their predicament in order to gain control over their
lives and initiate significant social change. They replicate the frontier myth of
transformative passage, but their metaphorical journey only confirms they are assimilated
in the hyperreal. While they think stepping outside of capitalist society gives them the
opportunity to find self-fulfillment, independence, and self-determination, they support the
capitalist system and, in the process, lose both independence of mind and control over their
identities. They cannot re-create themselves according to their own ideals because the
hyperreal fabricates and mediates these very ideals, causing them to be mere simulacra.
DeLillo shows that artists need to be aware of the power of media culture to
incorporate them and alter the meaning of their art. Only Brita questions the Old World of
hyperreality and uses her medium to reveal its artificiality. While it could be argued that her
pictures are her views, Brita strives not to impose them on her subjects. Instead, she, as
mouthpiece for DeLillo, invites their audience to question their reality without offering
prescription. DeLillo and, by extension, Brita do not offer definitive answers and, as such,
generate ideas susceptible of initiating self-questioning and progress.
63
Chapter three: Palahniuk’s Survivor: Escaping the
Hyperreal Garden of Eden32
The two previous chapters argued that, for Ginsberg and DeLillo, the abandonment of
a capitalistic and hyperreal mindset can trigger the emergence of more creative, genuine,
and humane individuals and communities. Likewise, in Survivor Palahniuk expresses the
necessity to re-evaluate an essentially capitalistic understanding of the American Dream
that supports mass conformity as well as economic competition and hierarchy at the
expense of self-determination and solidarity. Palahniuk depicts an American society where
religion, government, and media promote hyperreal ideals of success that propagate the
belief that self-improvement and happiness can be attained through consumption and
accumulation of capital. In his non-fiction work Stranger than Fiction, Palahniuk
acknowledges that
[A]ll my books are about a lonely person looking for some way to connect with
other people. In a way, that is the opposite of the American Dream: to get rich
you can rise about the rabble, all those people on the freeway or, worse, the bus.
No, the dream is a big house, off alone somewhere. . . . Some lovely isolated
nest where you can invite only the rabble you like. An environment you can
control, free from conflict and pain. Where you rule. (xv)33
Survivor illustrates those ideas effectively through Tender’s final rejection of his wealth
and celebrity status, that is, of the life and identity his agent and media team have fabricated
to make him appealing to the general public. The reclamation of his life story from the
control of the capitalistic and hyperreal culture that the Creedish church, the caseworker,
and the agent represent holds the promise of self-renewal that is central to frontier
mythology.
32
Sean O’Brien and Chris Button both offer compelling and exhaustive analyses of Survivor that deal with
Baudrillard, hyperreality, as well as Tender’s commodification in their MA theses. While their theoretical
framework is different from mine as they do not explore the relationship between hyperreality and frontier
mythology in Palahniuk’s novel, our interpretations and ideas coincide in many ways. Hence, I cite their
respective works in footnotes whenever our arguments seem to intersect. Although these quotations have not
influenced my argumentation, I acknowledge when our views look similar and give O’Brien and Button the
credit they deserve for their excellent research projects.
33
Palahniuk also expresses this view “[i]n an interview with C. P. Farley, [in which he] states that the one
of the recurrent themes of his books is that the central character realizes that it is necessary to move from a
world of seclusion into a more communal way of living: ‘The books are always about taking a character from
faux happiness and isolation back into community, into dysfunctional, unpleasant, chaotic, but ultimately
more fulfilling community’” (qtd. in Simmons and Allen 125).
65
This chapter will demonstrate how Survivor manifests the thematic interconnection
between hyperreality and frontier mythology in late 1990s American literature. My
objective is to show how Tender’s journey between realities that he and mainstream society
regard as diametrically opposed—the Creedish church colony and the outside world; sanity
and insanity; obscurity and fame—and the metamorphoses they cause evoke two important
and interrelated tropes of American literature: the dichotomy between the Old and the New
World and the transformation of the American Adam into a Christlike figure. In his study
of frontier mythology David Mogen explains that
[t]he relationship between the Old World and the New World is indeed
ambiguous and ambivalent. Traditionally the Old World primarily signifies the
dead hand of the past, yet it can also represent civilization and grace and power.
The New World can represent both unlimited promise and brutish deprivation.
. . . And the hero’s rebirth can be stillborn or monstrous; the ideals pursued can
be inspiring, unworthy, or unrealized; the urgency of the struggle to realize the
Dream can be ennobling, absurd, self-defeating. ‘Progress’ often destroys what
the frontier heroes most love, so that the visionary metamorphosis theme can
also dramatize the ironic price of ‘success.’ (27)
Invoking Mogen’s view, Tender initially believes that his Creedish faith differentiates him
from the sinful capitalist society—the Old World—he strives to transform. As a member of
the Creedish church—the New World—Tender thinks that he is already saved—that he has
already undergone his rebirth—and that he can redeem the civilized but corrupt Old World.
Following the Deliverance and the discovery that he is the last Creedish alive, Tender falls
under the control of an agent who fabricates and disseminates the idea that he is a Messiah
whose religious innocence makes him an alternative to the same corrupt capitalistic world.
Like Bill Gray in Mao II, Tender’s identity is hyperreal; he “is not a Messiah of any sort.
He is a simulacrum, without any reference to a real deity” (O’Brien 23) who “has no
control over anything, [although] his show creates the illusion of the complete opposite
reality” (McCampbell 152). His re-birth into a hyperreal saviour is ironic and “monstrous”
(Mogen 27) as it turns him into a commodity that promotes the belief that consuming his
image and discourse can help others progress and succeed. Tender comes to personify the
notion that being successful is contingent upon being good looking, wealthy, and famous
(McCampbell 154). To adopt his simulacral definition of progress and success entails the
negation of one’s individuality and conforming to the ideals propagated in media culture.
66
Hence, Tender contributes to the impotence and homogenization of those who accept and
consume his ideology.
Tender’s metamorphosis into a celebrity is in fact regressive; he only truly manages
to improve his situation when he discovers his genuine self away from the influence of the
hyperreal and ideological narratives that modulate his identity. His passage from an identity
that elites like the Creedish elders, the caseworker, and the agent define to one he freely rewrites once he becomes a self-determined terrorist/narrator represents his transformation
from Adam to Christ. Concerning the figures of Adam and Christ in American literature,
Mark Busby writes:
Contemporary American novelists do not use the Adam figure as a realistically
possible heroic figure, but many of them do present the innocent Adam in the
process of becoming Adam’s counterpoint figure in religious typology: Christ.
. . . The character usually comes to understand the illusory nature of his world,
and he knows that for destructive illusions to be overthrown they must be
clearly articulated. Contemporary writers emphasize the importance of
language that creates illusions and that conversely can be used to strip away
inhumane beliefs and create humane ones. Usually when the character becomes
Christlike, he also becomes a writer (logos). Besides an awareness of language,
the Christlike traits are an awareness of discord, complexity, human limitation,
the problems of the past, and the need for community and love. (100-101)
Accordingly, Tender becomes mature and self-reliant—he becomes Christlike—once he
refuses other people’s narratives and becomes the narrator, or the “writer (logos),” of his
own life story.34 Once he understands “the illusory nature of his world,” that is, the
deceptions and the process that have made him a servant and a product, he begins to look at
his past retrospectively and shares, or “articulates,” what he has learned through
storytelling. In fact, Chris Button contends that Tender’s “introspection provides a unique
narrative perspective on and an insider's view of how celebrity shapes and exploits people
by selling them as commodities” (7). Tender literally deconstructs the process that made
him a celebrity in order to reveal its evils. His acquisition of narrative authority (logos)
through the hijacking of a plane and the ensuing exposition of the dehumanizing effects—
34
In his article entitled “With Us or Against Us: Chuck Palahniuk’s 9/11,” Jesse Kavadlo claims that in
both Fight Club and Survivor the protagonists’ “discovery of narrative authority seems crucial, emblematic of
Palahniuk’s own sense of the connective redemptive powers of story. Both books pivot upon the point in
which the characters take control of their lives by taking control of their story” (108).
67
the consequences of “destructive illusions” and “inhumane beliefs” (Busby 100-101)—that
religious orthodoxy and hyperreal consumer culture have had on his life evoke the idea of
re-birth. Emancipated from his hyperreal life, Tender begins anew; away from the public
eye, he is ready to start a family—an alternative community—with his lover Fertility Hollis
and, as such, shows he believes in “the need for community and love” (101).35 The story he
dictates to the black box of Flight 2039 is then the testimony of his passage from the Old
World to the New World, from hyperreality into his own reality, from an innocent Adam to
a self-aware Christ.
Tender was raised a member of the Creedish church, a religious community which
claims that happiness and truth are exclusive domains of the afterlife. As Mary W.
McCampbell explains in her article “‘Paradigms are Dissolving Left and Right’:
Baudrillard’s Anti-Apocalypse and Chuck Palahniuk’s Survivor,” Tender “was trained to
live an earthly life whose main focus was the afterlife” (148). As a result, he does not
question or attempt to ameliorate his condition because God has already determined his
fate. According to the Creedish dogma, everything emanates from God, which thus
eliminates the possibility of free-will. Tender explains that
Whatever happened in the world was a decree from God. A task to be
completed. Any crying or joy just got in the way of your being useful. Any
emotion was decadent. Anticipation or regret was a silly extra. A luxury.
That was the definition of your faith. Nothing was to be known. Anything
was to be expected. (273)
Like the Moonies in DeLillo’s Mao II, Tender constructs his identity around the religious
narrative his leaders offer him. He is the product of an ideological education that requires
him to repress his emotions in order to be productive, or “useful;” he must concentrate
35
In an email published on his official fan site The Cult, Palahniuk writes: “The end of Survivor isn't nearly
so complicated. It's noted on page 7(8?) that a pile of valuable offerings has been left in the front of the
passenger cabin. This pile includes a cassette recorder. Even before our hero starts to dictate his story -during the few minutes he's supposed to be taking a piss -- he's actually in the bathroom dictating the last
chapter into the cassette recorder. It's just ranting, nothing important plot-wise, and it can be interrupted at any
point by the destruction of the plane.
The minute the fourth engine flames out, he starts the cassette talking, then bails out, into Fertility's
waiting arms (she's omniscient, you know). The rest of the book is just one machine whining and bitching to
another machine. The crash will destroy the smaller recorder, but the surviving black box will make it appear
that Tender is dead” (http://chuckpalahniuk.net/content/chuck-explains-ending-survivor).
68
exclusively on his “task” to re-create the Kingdom of Heaven by working in the outside
world and earning his salvation (273). David Simmons and Nicola Allen agree with this
contention in “Reading Chuck Palahniuk’s Survivor and Haunted as a Critique of ‘The
Culture Industry”; they write that “[t]he Church appears to deny its followers any sense of
happiness in an attempt to maximize profits. Such a practice selects to ignore its members’
‘true needs’ in favor of maintaining order” (120). Confining ontological and existential
matters to the afterlife both ensures the Creedish system cannot be altered and secures
Tender’s acceptance of his “task.” He states:
My whole life growing up, I’d been working toward this, toward baptism
and getting placed in a job cleaning houses in the wicked outside world.
When the people I worked for had sent the church a donation for my first
month’s work, I was beaming. I really believed I was helping create Heaven on
Earth. (231)
Earning money for his church makes him feel fulfilled and successful because Tender’s
faith in Creedish dogma blinds him to the fact he was “bred and trained and sold” as cheap
labour to increase their fortune (41).36 Indeed, his efforts only profit the Creedish elite for
whom, as Adam explains, “their children were their income. Their children were chattel”
(42). Tender’s education entraps him in a fixed and self-negating life/identity to which he
cannot imagine any alternative. In fact, in an interview with Matt Kavanagh, Palahniuk
points out that “Tender continues to use the model for success he was taught as a child:
Work Hard. Be Good. Please others. He clings to that blueprint until it fails him
completely, and he’s forced to create an adult path of his own” (186). That “blueprint”
governs his life because he considers it an absolute truth; it establishes how he should look,
think, and behave. More importantly, it condemns what is foreign to Creedish precepts.
The Creedish “blueprint” that Tender embraces entails the acceptance of a
dialectical conceptualization of the world opposing the Creedish and the outside world.37
36
The Creedish primogeniture system demands that Tender leaves the church district colony to accomplish
his “task” in the outside world after his seventeenth birthday because he is not the Branson family’s first son,
his twin brother Adam being born seconds before him (Palahniuk 274).
37
Sean O’Brien states in his MA thesis “Survivor”: Creating Identity Through Self-destruction that “[t]he
system of rules and regulations devised by the church . . . functioned by antagonizing itself against the
‘godless’ consumer world Tender was sent to live in, its power created by opposition to the values of
consumer society. Tender’s sense of morality and duty was created through this opposition. He had a
69
The Creedish designation of mainstream American society as “the outside world”
highlights the symbolic dichotomy between both worlds that is also characteristic of
frontier mythology. Tender is convinced he is one of God’s chosen people whose piety
renders him capable of saving “the wicked outside world” (Palahniuk 231). He affirms:
It felt good to stand out from the world, just mysterious and pious. You
weren’t a lantern under any basket. You stood out righteous as a sore thumb.
You were the one holy man to keep God from crushing all the Sodom and
Gomorrah seething around you in the Valley Plaza Shopping Center.
You were everyone’s savior, whether they knew it or not. (230-231)
As a Church-proclaimed “savior,” Tender believes that he is different from the inhabitants
of the outside world. He thinks he is an example they should follow and that his presence in
the outside world can salvage it and trigger the creation of a perfect—or utopian—society.
For Tender and the other Creedish, the sinfulness of the outside world resides in its
narcissistic and consumeristic culture as the association between the damned cities of
Sodom and Gomorrah and a shopping centre presented in the previous quotation suggests.
For the Creedish, American society faces impending destruction because it idolizes and
depends on commodities, which makes it guilty of the deadly sins of sloth and pride. Adam
teaches Tender that, “[i]n the outside world . . . it was a bargain with the devil that powered
automobiles and carried airplanes across the sky. Evil flowed through electric wires to
make people lazy. . . . people had mirrors and everyone was busy seeing how they looked.
It was shameful” (273). The Creedish see modern technology as an evil force that brings
the peoples of the outside world to revere “the false idols” of appearance and possessions,
and to lose their humanity and sense of community. Adam also tells Tender that “[p]eople
used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were
too scared of being alone” (275) and that “[i]n the outside world . . . people were visited in
their houses by spirits they called television. Spirits spoke to people through what they
called the radio” (275). Although Creedish stereotypes of the outside world might seem
reference for a ‘real’ world, for real values. There was a definite good and evil, and Tender could decipher the
difference between the two, simply through recalling the teachings of his childhood. Despite the madness of
the consumer world he struggled to survive in, Tender always had a reference to ‘reality’ in the memories of
his church. It was a place of definite right and wrong that defined his world and his roles. However, even this
‘reality’ is revealed as a simulation–a false creation, continuing the theme of unreality in Palahniuk’s novel
and suggesting that maybe all of our realities are based upon simulation” (16).
70
simplistic, Adam’s equation of media with spirits is valid from a Baudrillardian point of
view. Indeed, the media do influence people’s conceptualization of reality through the
promotion of particular modes of being and thinking. While the Creedish find spiritual
guidance in the Bible and organize their society around its precepts, mainstream society
communicates with its spirits, that is, the consumerist and conformist ideology
disseminated in the media. The culture of mainstream society—popular culture—gravitates
around the messages and images this ideology endorses. While following the models the
media disseminate is proof of social integration in mainstream society, the same attitude is
sinful according to the Creedish.
Tender’s forced integration into mainstream American society illustrates that both
mainstream and Creedish cultures define themselves in opposition to the other. In a manner
resembling the deprogramming of Karen in DeLillo’s Mao II, Tender falls under the
paternalizing tutelage of the caseworker, an employee of the government who personifies
state control. Tender is enrolled in the “Survivor Retention Program” designed to ensure
that he does not kill himself after the caseworker informs him that the Deliverance, the
mass suicide supposed to lead all Creedish to eternal happiness in Heaven, has occurred.
The caseworker, and by association the society for whom she works, sees Tender as an
innocent victim of Creedish brainwashing who must be brought back to the “right path.”
Accompanied by three policemen at their first encounter, and thus demonstrating her
authority and coercive power, she tells him:
‘We know what you’ve been programmed to do at this point. . . .
You were the innocent victim of a terrible oppressive cult, but we’re here
to help you get back on your feet. . . .
Your life has been a miserable nightmare up to now, but you’re going to
be okay. Are you hearing me? Be patient, and you’ll be just fine.’ (227-228)
Her discourse suggests how she wants him to abandon his Creedish dialectical belief
system in favour of that of her society. Indeed, the labelling of his church as “a terrible
oppressive cult” and of his past life as “a miserable nightmare” implies that the Creedish
education Tender once considered his greatest asset and distinguishing trait has reduced
him to the status of gullible and maladapted victim—of outsider—in the eyes of
71
mainstream society. As a result, the caseworker’s task is to “cure” him, to make him adapt
to what her society considers acceptable. Her promises that he needs to “[b]e patient” and
that he will eventually “be just fine” imply that he has to undergo a long process of
reformation (227). To “be just fine,” he has to relinquish his Creedish past—his Old
World—and enter mainstream society—his New World—as a “normal” citizen (227).
Therefore, adopting mainstream culture should be a form of redemptive progress for
Tender. This transformative journey between the two ideological systems implies a redefinition of his identity that evokes frontier mythology. However, Tender is not a selfdetermined individual but one who depends on simulacra to understand how the New
World wants him to be.
His therapy with the caseworker demonstrates that social conventions are equally
established through indoctrination. In a society that conceives the real in terms of
dialectical opposites—the formula of “Us vs Them” is a potent example—Tender’s
Creedish past can only be negative because it deviates from what the caseworker’s society
defines as a normal lifestyle. To her society, Tender’s devotion to Creedish dogma is
understood as the result of madness. As such, the stigma attached to the Creedish beliefs
and way of life proves American society’s normality. As Baudrillard claims, “[a]ll
normality sees itself today in the light of madness, which was nothing but its insignificant
remainder” (145). Baudrillard’s ideas suggest that the desire of the state to cure “madness”
might hide the fact that mainstream society itself is in fact mad because it does not allow
divergence to exist “freely” within its frontiers (O’Brien 22); the state delimits the very
parameters of normality. Hence, its guardians, like the caseworker, have the legitimacy and
the obligation to reform or assimilate any alternative discourse—to kill the germs of
possible subversion—in order to preserve balance in the system.38
Accordingly, the caseworker attempts to diagnose Tender because she can only
conceive his Creedish faith—his acceptance of a reality alternative to hers—as
symptomatic of a psychological disease. The parameters she relies on to evaluate sanity and
insanity come from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
38
Ron Riekki corroborates Baudrillard’s argument in his contention that “when religious [ideological state
apparatuses (ISAs)] cooperate and all of the other ISAs work in tandem to ensure that thinking outside of
ideology is wrong, dangerous, and even insane, then the ISA/carceral network becomes incontestable” (96).
72
This book is to her what the Bible is to the Creedish; she adopts the DSM as her guidebook
to life, or to recuperate Palahniuk’s words, as her blueprint. It circumscribes her
understanding of reality and identity by categorizing behaviours, lifestyles, and ways of
thinking as either good or bad, sane or insane. Moreover, through her dependence on the
DSM, Palahniuk evokes the authority of capitalism over the manner in which she conceives
reality. He illustrates this by presenting the classifications contained in the DSM as
arbitrary. Palahniuk writes that “edition to edition, the symptoms change. Sane people are
insane by a new standard. People who used to be called insane are the picture of mental
health” (88). The uncertainty of what it means to be sane from “edition to edition” (88)
relativizes Tender’s insanity and unveils that, according to Palahniuk, reality obeys the
market in a consumer society.39 Reality is redefined in agreement with advances in
scientific, empirical research. One cannot simply dismiss the contribution of worldrenowned researchers to the DSM or its validity as a scientific work—and I must stress that
it is not my intention to do so—nonetheless, one has to recognize that the DSM is also a
commodity. The new information each new edition contains—progress in the form of
scientific knowledge—becomes accessible through consumption. The caseworker must
purchase every new edition—and its new definitions—in order to stay up-to-date and
qualified. She needs them to be able to work efficiently, but also needs to work to afford
them. As O’Brien indicates, she “is dependent upon her books and degree for identity. Her
job is to diagnose and treat diseases, which in turn has converted even the disorders of the
body into a commodity for consumption and labeling” (21). Through Tender’s narration,
Palahniuk presents the caseworker as the product of an educational system intrinsically
linked to consumerism that has taught her she has to purchase and assimilate the ideas
contained in the latest theories to remain authoritative. She depends on an economic system
that requires her to accept that order and meaning can always be acquired through
consumption. Thus, her reality is hyperreal in the eyes of Palahniuk; he suggests that she
relies on models whose legitimacy essentially derives from their novelty.
39
O’Brien also supports this view; in his MA thesis he writes: “The fact that the DSM can be changed and
updated to produce ‘new definitions of what is acceptable, what’s normal, what’s sane’ (Palahniuk 88) hints
at the madness of a society whose definitions of normality are defined by referencing a manual whose very
nature is unstable and hints that even our concept of sanity is that of a third-order simulation, a system of
signs and signifiers that is ever changing, ‘masking the absence of a profound reality’ (Baudrillard ‘The
Precession of Simulacra’ 6).” (22)
73
By presenting the DSM as unstable, Palahniuk implies that mainstream society’s
concepts of good and evil are as arbitrary as those of the Creedish. In both societies, the
elevation of particular ideas to truths results from their acceptance as such by the masses;
this acceptance is what holds the belief system of each society together. For the Creedish,
acceptance is established through years of religious education that make believers like
Tender assimilate a fabricated vision of Creedish life. Adam discloses the truth to his
brother when he states, “‘[y]ou were always in school. You just remember what they taught
you Creedish life was like a hundred years ago. . . . The Creedish elders were a pack of
racist, sexist white slavers. . . . Everything you remember is wrong’” (41-42). Like the
Creedish elders who manipulate their youth to preserve and expand their church’s
exploitative scheme, the outside world’s elite relies on its educational system, media, and
state apparatus (officers) to define the real in a manner that maintains the status quo.40
Simmons and Allen argue that “Palahniuk uses the Church as a means of critiquing
contemporary America. Indeed, the ideology of The Creedish Church resembles the tenets
of the culture industry in several ways. The cult teaches its members to take on a passive,
unquestioning role” (119). Both cultures encourage conformity, obedience and
homogeneity from their followers; both cultures are subsidiaries to capitalism. Likewise,
both societies attempt to erode their members’ subjectivity and agency in hopes of making
them good, productive servants of the system.
Under the “Survivor Retention Program,” Tender emulates the caseworker’s models
and, as a result, assimilates her hyperreal understanding of the world. He leaves behind his
Old World—the Creedish belief system—to enter the New World of mainstream capitalist
society as a perpetrator of simulations. He recalls that “the caseworker could throw the
DSM on the floor and whatever page it fell open to, that was how I’d try to look for the
week. We were happy enough this way. For a while. She felt she was making progress
every week. I had a script to tell me how to act” (Palahniuk 207). Tender’s simulations give
the caseworker the illusion he progresses towards recovery—i.e. assimilation into
mainstream culture—because he conforms to her models, but he does not make any
40
In fact, Simmons and Allen posit that “Tender’s saintliness is based primarily on his ability to subdue the
masses, comforting them with a phoney spiritualism that is designed to prevent them from questioning the
status quo” (121).
74
significant advancements; his passage between the two worlds does not allow him to realize
the frontier myth of self-renewal since he remains a servant whose consistency lies in his
obedience to those who control narratives. He admits that “all my life I’ve been trained to
obey. All I did was try and make her lousy diagnosis look right. The caseworker told me
the symptoms, and I did my best to manifest them and let her cure me” (209). He only
simulates the symptoms the caseworker presents to him, and, as such, he cannot be “cured”
or reformed. However, he demonstrates that appearing to conform to hyperreal ideals is
sufficient to be considered normal in her society.
This particular scene is also evocative of Baudrillard’s theories. Indeed, Baudrillard
also uses the example of a patient who simulates symptoms in his theorization of simulacra.
He writes, “if any symptom can be ‘produced,’ and can no longer be taken as a fact of
nature, then every illness can be considered as simulatable and simulated, and medicine
loses its meaning since it only knows how to treat ‘real’ illnesses according to their
objective causes” (3). Then, according to Baudrillard’s idea, the caseworker cannot cure
Tender because she is trained to fix well-defined problems that meet established criteria.41
The irony is that her criteria are not even constant since they change following every new
DSM edition. What Tender learns from the caseworker is that, in order to please others, he
has to follow the latest model, the latest theory they offer him. As he learns to simulate and
give the illusion of improvement, he also becomes a participant in hyperreal culture.
However, following the death of the caseworker and upon learning he is the last
surviving Creedish (172), Tender begins to believe in the possibility of becoming selfreliant and of re-creating himself. According to his own self-determined narrative, Tender
feels that her death liberates him from his past identities as a Creedish and a “Survivor
Retention Program” client. For him, the fact that “[n]ow nobody knows [his] past” (158) is
an opportunity to become his own master and begin a new life with a new identity. He
symbolically writes an autobiographical paragraph in the caseworker’s folder; this text
41
Sean O’Brien has also noted the similarity between Baudrillard’s ideas on hyperreality and Tender’s
simulations in his MA thesis. He astutely observes that “[i]f a disease can be simulated and modeled without
actually infecting someone, it becomes a product for our imagination. The same, Baudrillard argues, could
apply to God and even our “reality.” Because Tender can simulate the various symptoms of the disorders in
the DSM catalogs, they lose their creative power to the machinations of the consumption-driven system” (22).
75
stands as both the obituary to his former self and the announcement of his re-birth. He
proclaims:
Survivor Retention Client Number Eighty-four has lost everyone he ever
loved and everything that gave his life meaning. He is tired and sleeps most of
the time. He has started drinking and smoking. He has no appetite. He seldom
bathes and hasn’t shaved in weeks.
Ten years ago, he was the hardworking salt of the earth. All he wanted
was to go to Heaven. Sitting here today, everything that he worked for in the
world is lost. All his external rules and controls are gone.
There is no Hell. There is no Heaven.
Still, just dawning on him is the idea that now anything is possible.
Now he wants everything. (167)
At that very moment, Tender looks retrospectively at his past and talks about it in his own
words; he explains his situation and state of mind, no longer following the caseworker’s
criteria, the DSM, or Creedish ideology, but his own ideas. His assertion that “[a]ll his
external rules and controls are gone” (167) suggests his disillusionment with Heaven and
Hell as well as with the “Survivor Retention Program”; he moves from an oppressive world
into a new one, or “mov[es] away from salvation and into the future” (166) as he phrases it.
Freed from the caseworker’s patronizing control and Creedish ideology (with its selfnegating concept of salvation), Tender thinks he can begin anew as a “Celebrity Superstar”
(167). He is optimistic about the future because he thinks he can achieve anything in his
new identity. This, again, evokes frontier mythology as it represents Tender’s new
beginning in his new utopian World, where he can realize his dreams because he is free
from the bounds of his Old World.
The traits Tender displays after the death of the caseworker invoke R.W.B. Lewis’s
portrayal of the American Adam. Lewis describes this archetypal character of American
literature as
an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched
and undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race; an individual
standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever
awaited him with the aid of his own unique and inherent resources. . . . [T]he
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new hero (in praise or disapproval) was most easily identified with Adam
before the Fall. . . . His moral position was prior to experience, and in his very
newness he was fundamentally innocent. The world and history lay all before
him. (5)
In agreement with Lewis’s definition, Tender also thinks he is “emancipated from history,
happily bereft of ancestry” because “nobody knows [his] past” (Palahniuk 158).
Nevertheless, he is not a typical American Adam; he is rather “the innocent Adam in the
process of becoming Adam’s counterpoint figure in religious typology: Christ” (Busby
100). Tender is an impotent Adam who is not “self-reliant and self-propelling” (Lewis 5)
and who depends on others to guide him through life because he has not yet taken control
of it. At that point, he is not Christlike because he follows others’ narratives instead of
creating his own; he has to become a hyperreal Adam/Messiah before he can become a
mature Christlike figure. As McCampbell writes, Tender “constantly looks outside of
himself to find some sense of order, a plan from which to run his life, give him identity and
provide structure” (150). As such, he “replaces the [Creedish] cult’s unsound metanarrative
for an equally false, manipulative one as he succumbs to a media agent’s persistent offers
to make him a celebrity” (152). Indeed, Tender rapidly abandons the idea of becoming the
architect of his own identity after the initial excitement following the caseworker’s death.
He confesses: “The truth is there’s always been someone to tell me what to do. The church.
The people who I work for. The caseworker. And I can’t stand the idea of being alone. I
can’t bear the thought of being free” (Palahniuk 160). Tender is attracted to the agent’s
proposal to make him famous precisely because he is too afraid to be independent. He
adopts the agent’s idea that celebrity is synonymous with success and that it can make him
a better person; he internalizes the narrative that stardom can lead to salvation. Tender
explains that, “[a]ccording to the agent, the biggest factor that makes you a saint is the
amount of press coverage you get. . . . The key to salvation is how much attention you get”
(152). In reality, becoming a celebrity does not empower Tender; instead, he remains a
servant of the capitalist system. To get people’s attention, he has to offer a new product, a
new image susceptible of attracting the masses. Also, he has to make the public believe he
truly is a saint. However, he can only become one if the public accepts to see him as such.
77
Tender thinks he can become saintlike and achieve self-renewal by modifying his
image. He changes his appearance to fit the model the agent wants him to emulate. Indeed,
the agent affirms: “[o]ur first big job is to modify you so you’ll fit the campaign” (144). He
turns Tender into a commodity that must look and act in agreement with the image
fabricated by the marketing campaign. He is “a product being launched” (148), marketed as
a remedy for those the agent describes as “‘young people out in the world struggling with
outdated religions or with no religions, think of those people as your target market’” (135).
For the agent, marketing defines reality; in truth, marketing presents as genuine and
authentic that which is fabricated, and, as such, sustains the hyperreal. According to the
agent, if something is “copyrighted” then it means it is real (146) “and that includes
[Tender]” (146). Tender states: “I’m doing this is because the agent says there’s thirty
pounds too much of men for him to make famous. . . . The same way every generation
reinvents Christ, the agent’s giving me the same makeover” (153). However, the makeover
turns him into a non-being. As the “Serenadons,” the pills that do not actually “exist yet”
but that the agent markets as “the best antianxiety treatment ever invented,” Tender
becomes the next best remedy for those dissatisfied with postmodern culture (140). Like
the “Serenadons” whose efficacy he has to “[j]ust pretend . . . for the placebo effect” (140),
the Tender Branson launched on the market is a fraud that the real Tender initially believes
in and sells to the world.42 Although “his celebrity is a kind of monstrosity or selfmutilation involving many chemicals and procedures that make him into a ‘product’ (148)”
(Truffin 80), Tender still tells himself:
[Y]ou’re the American Dream. You are the constant-growth economy.
According to the agent, the people out there looking for a leader, they
want vibrant. . . . They want more than human. . . . Nobody wants just
anatomically correct. People want anatomical enhancement. Surgically
augmented. New and improved. Silicone-implanted. Collagen-injected.
(Palahniuk 136)
The modifications to his physique make him fit the hyperreal exemplar of a “leader” who is
“more than human” (136), of one who successfully re-defines himself and realizes the
42
In an interview with Matt Kavanagh, Palahniuk states: “All my books deal with the paradox of staying
aware of mortality while not being stopped by the fear of death. My characters use their physical bodies as
vehicles or means for living a full life, not trying to preserve their youth and prevent death. They’re willing to
destroy their appearance and current identity for a chance at real enlightenment and insight” (415-416).
78
dream of going from rags to riches, from victimhood to stardom. Conversely, according to
McCampbell, his metamorphosis into a “successful” man represents an “illusion of
progress,” “a modern metanarrative in which ‘progress’, the new religion or ‘salvation’ is
defined by external, material factors such as beauty and wealth” (154). Tender claims that
“[p]eople are looking for how to put everything together. They need a unified theory that
combines glamour and holiness, fashion and spirituality. People need to reconcile being
good and being good-looking” (Palahniuk 135). He endorses the idea that emulating his
blueprint can help others improve. He personifies a hyperreal ideal of success the agent and
his team manipulate to sell the products and the narrative attached to his name.
In addition to changing his image, the agent and his team imprison Tender in a
hyperreal identity by re-writing his past in an autobiography that is completely at odds with
his actual life story. Right after he accepts to meet the agent in New York, Tender reports
that “a team of people I’d never met, people in New York who knew nothing about me,
were writing my autobiography. . . . I told the agent I already knew my childhood. Over the
phone he said, ‘This version’s better’” (159-160). He ceases to be an Adam figure
“emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry” (Lewis 5), whose past is unknown
to all (Palahniuk 158) the moment the autobiography is released on the market. The
publication of his forged autobiography confirms that Tender has lost ownership over his
past. Moreover, it attests that Tender Branson enters the public sphere as a fabrication of
the media rather than as himself: he has been reduced to “a household name,” or a brand
name, by the agent’s “extensive media campaign” (Button 7). His commodification, his
transformation into a brand name/product without control over his identity is further
expressed in his statement that “[t]he hardest part of my being a famous celebrated celebrity
religious leader is having to live down to people’s expectations” (Palahniuk 89). Like Bill
Gray in DeLillo’s Mao II, Tender’s public identity—that is, the sum of the information that
circulates about him in the media—supersedes his original self once he becomes famous.
As a result, the public wants him to conform to the image that information suggests about
him and he has to “live down to [their] expectations” (89) even though they might be
unrealistic. As a famous televangelist, Tender is essentially a hyperreal Adam trapped in an
equally fictitious Garden of Eden.
79
He is an icon that supposedly represents an alternative to mainstream society. The
masses expect him to be unique and different from them because he was raised shielded
from their culture’s influence. They associate the brand name “Tender Branson” with a
prelapsarian Adam unspoiled by media culture, technology, and consumerism, but the
information they have about him and his past is fallacious. Tender complains that
People are always asking me if I can operate a toaster. . . . People don’t
want for me to act to worldly. They’re looking for me to have a kind of Garden
of Eden, pre-apple innocence. A kind of baby Jesus naiveté.
People ask, do I know how a television works? No, I don’t, but most
people don’t. (90)
In fact, the masses expect him to incarnate an innocence they believe to have disappeared in
their hyper technological and increasingly conformist postmodern culture. Eduardo
Mendieta contends, in “Surviving American Culture: On Chuck Palahniuk,” that “[o]ur
faith in the extraordinary becomes yearning for a world that is not homogenized and
serialized. In a mass culture of mass consumption, the singular becomes the prophetic, but
the prophetic in turn becomes that which is manufactured by the culture industry” (398). As
a manufactured celebrity whose identity is reduced to a brand name under the control of the
culture industry the agent and his team personify, Tender can only “progress” in the
marketplace. His brand name/myth, as argued before, is founded upon a fake narrative
about his past, which entails that his myth continues to exist solely in the re-actualization of
that narrative (Palahniuk 74). In turn, Tender lives in a perpetual present and is not the
alternative to a “homogenized and serialized” world, but its epitome (Mendieta 398).
Palahniuk shows that what Tender Branson personifies has to be reified, “serialized,” massreproduced, and constantly repackaged—in a way that evokes how Palahniuk
conceptualizes the DSM—to appear new and remain appealing to the masses.43
To meet the demands of a consumer-driven society, Tender is asked to be always
more performant, to endorse more products, to sell more commodities: “[n]o matter how
much [he] do[es], they still want more, better, faster, different, newer, bigger” (Palahniuk
43
Along the same line, Chris Button contends that “Tender becomes the vessel for this prepackaged,
recycled celebrity novelty and becomes the face of the Creedish church. Just as celebrities exist as cultural
metonyms for concepts such as success and sex appeal, Tender exists in the media and the public
consciousness as a cultural metonym for the tragedy surrounding the Creedish church” (85).
80
91). Since he exists as a brand name/product on the capitalist market, he has to obey its law
of constant economic growth and proliferate in the shape of different products to ensure
that the interest in him endures. These products become attached to his hyperreal identity;
they become extensions of his own identity, which invokes Baudrillard’s assertion that
[f]ew objects today are offered alone, without a context of objects to speak for
them. And the relation of the consumer to the object has consequently changed;
the object is no longer referred to in relation a specific utility, but as a
collection of objects in their total meaning. . . . The display window, the
advertisement, the manufacturer and the brand name here play an essential role
in imposing a coherent and collective vision, of an almost inseparable totality.
(qtd. in Kellner 13, Baudrillard’s emphasis)
Palahniuk illustrates Baudrillard’s theory since he shows that around the brand name
“Tender Branson” a plethora of commodities revolves that stand as metonyms for the myth
he incarnates. In fact, when the agent buys the copyright to Tender’s image and name, he
also acquires “the Tender Branson Media and Merchandising Syndicate, including but not
limited to book sales, broadcast programming, artwork, live performances, and cosmetics,
namely men’s cologne” (74). What Tender Branson sells is an ideal, the assurance that
progress and contentment can be attained through the consumption of the products attached
to his brand name.44
Each of his appearances in the media serves to promote both that Tender Branson
ideal and his products. Like his image and his life story, Tender’s discourse is controlled by
the agent and his team to make sure it respects the hyperreal branding they have created.
44
Button presents a similar argument in his MA thesis in which he writes: “just as the members of the
Creedish cult in Tender's class surrender their individuality to serve the cult financially through a life of
ascetic labor, the followers of Tender's celebrity related doctrines mute their individuality by adopting the
lifestyle advice he preaches/sells to them . . . both religious and celebrity worship are negotiated through
material means: objects of idolatry and relics. . . . The consumer products attached to him, such as prayer
books, replica dolls, and a clothing line, are both objects of religious idolatry and relics consumed by people
in order to feel closer to Tender's celebrity” (7-8). Through his media influence, Tender becomes a promoter
of a certain model, lifestyle, and rules; according to Button: “Celebrities exist in our culture as secular deities,
dictating public behaviour from an exalted social position with omnipresent media influence. In Survivor, the
role models that celebrity and cult religion construct embody institutionally sanctioned rules or trends, which
instruct people how to behave” (87).
In the same vein, Eduardo Mendieta observes that “[t]he idols and stars of the culture industry have
become the saints of mass culture, and along with it come their hagiography and practices of worship and
miracle performance. If religion was the opium of the masses, mass culture has becomes its crack” (398).
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Describing the events that took place during a television interview, Tender admits that he
does not talk freely but only repeats the words written for him on the teleprompter:
The TelePrompTer says: YOU CAN FIND ALL THE VIVID
ACCOUNTS OF THE CREEDISH SEX CRIMES IN MY BOOK. IT’S
CALLED SAVED FROM SALVATION AND IT’S IN BOOKSTORES
EVERYWHERE. . . .
Most of what’s on the TelePrompTer is from my autobiography I didn’t
write. The terrible childhood I didn’t have. . . .
According to the TelePrompTer: MY NEWEST BOOK, THE BOOK OF
VERY COMMON PRAYER, IS AN IMPORTANT TOOL FOR COPING WITH
STRESSES WE ALL EXPERIENCE. IT’S CALLED THE BOOK OF VERY
COMMON PRAYER AND IT’S IN BOOKSTORES EVERYWHERE. (105-6)
Tender only repeats the words “from [the] autobiography [he] didn’t write” (105).
Therefore, he re-actualizes the forged narrative about his past in a new medium. He also
offers something “fresh” to his audience by presenting his autobiography—the narrative of
his past trauma—alongside his “NEWEST BOOK, THE BOOK OF VERY COMMON
PRAYER” (105), which is supposed to help remedy everyday problems. Nevertheless, his
new book is only published and sought after as a result of the fame Tender has gained
following the publication of his fake life story. This further demonstrates that his hyperreal
past is the foundation of his public identity and that he has no control over the latter
because he does not have a voice of his own.
Tender manages to escape this commodification, this hyperreal Garden of Eden,
when he acquires narrative authority. His brother Adam Branson and lover Fertility Hollis
awaken him to the fact that he lives a lie, “that he has become just another tool enabling the
Culture Industry to control the masses” (Simmons and Allen 122) and “that the ‘false
needs’ of the Culture Industry are not sufficient to satisfy the individual” (123). Adam and
Fertility lead him to a new awareness about his past and his status of celebrity. They make
him understand that fame has not empowered him and that the Creedish, the caseworker,
and the agent have convinced him to believe in grand narratives designed to manipulate
him and generate profit. Of course, Adam Branson’s name and his role in the story call to
mind the biblical figure of Adam. He first understands the lies that governed his society and
used his newly acquired knowledge to initiate Tender’s fall from his fake Eden. He
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manages to escape the hyperreal mindset by himself and then teaches Tender to do the
same. According to O’Brien, “Adam forces Tender to review the past critically and reevaluate his memories of Creedish life” (48) and “[t]his information allows Tender a new
perspective on himself and his life” (48). Adam triggers Tender’s realization that he has
been a slave all his life and that he has to have sexual intercourse in order to get a sense of
individuality. Simmons and Allen note: “Tender is only able to begin reaching towards
satisfaction of his ‘true needs’ once he has experienced an act of genuine communion with
another human being, in this case having sex with Fertility Hollis” (123). Losing his
virginity to Fertility awakens him to the fact he has to fulfill his “true needs” of love and
self-determination; it functions as an epiphany that ignites his desire to assert his identity in
the act of storytelling. Her name evokes the fertility of the New World that he can cultivate
because of her, which will lead to a greater understanding of his entire life. He gains access
to the new World and begins to claim it by re-creating himself in the tradition of the
aforementioned American Adam figure.
When Tender hijacks the plane, he gains access to a medium, the black box, he can
use to tell “the story of what happened” (Palahniuk 289) and symbolically re-write his
autobiography by “reveal[ing] himself to the public in a narrative completely different from
the one provided by his agent and all of those around him” (O’Brien 44). He uses the black
box “to reclaim his story” (43), and subsequently retrieve ownership over his life and his
identity. Tender’s desire to set the record straight and offer his version of his life story are
expressed in one of the first points he tries to make in the narrative: “I’m going to keep
saying it, but it’s true. I’m not a murderer” (Palahniuk 288). Not only does he want to
convince people that he is innocent, but he is also very much concerned about his story
reaching an audience. Indeed, Tender “yell[s] back for [the pilot] to be sure and listen to the
tape” (285) because he wants his story to be heard and knows that, although the plane will
crash, “[t]he flight recorder will record every word in the cockpit. . . . And [his] story will
survive” (285). These excerpts suggest that Tender is conscious of both the power of stories
and his position as narrator. In his narrative, he re-creates his public identity as he takes on
the subversive role of hijacker and also ensures his version of Tender Branson will survive.
His terrorist act and the narrative attached to it—the latter articulating the rationale for his
action and thus establishing his new identity—will conjointly generate sufficient public
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interest and symbolic force—because of the considerable impact terrorist acts have on both
media coverage and public consciousness—to overcome the Tender Branson persona the
media have created.45 Ultimately, Tender rearranges and re-organizes his life story into a
coherent whole—the novel Survivor—that acts as a counter-narrative to the hegemony of
hyperreality.
Palahniuk’s decision to number the pages of Survivor decreasingly and to begin the
novel when Tender only has a few hours left before Flight 2039 crashes informs the reader
that Tender has some critical distance vis-à-vis the events he describes in his narrative
because they have already happened. Tender Branson, the narrator, is a different person
from the Tender Branson who is the impotent protagonist of the story. The narrator
understands how both media culture and hyperreality function and, unlike his prior self, he
has a voice of his own. In addition, Palahniuk’s acknowledgement that Tender successfully
escapes before the plane crashes implies that his journey must be interpreted as liberating
(“The Ending of Survivor.”) His story represents an escape from a hyperreal world where
his identity is manipulated to profit economic elites like the Creedish elders and the agent.
When Tender recognizes that simulations govern his life and subsequently becomes a
hijacker, he leaves behind the hyperreal and finally turns into a Christlike figure, that is, a
truly independent and self-determined narrator, a non-conformist who upsets the status quo.
Fertility tells him:
All your life, you’ve needed other people to tell you what to do. . . . Well,
nobody can help you with this situation. . . . All I know is that you will find a
way out of this mess. You’ll find a way to leave your whole screwed-up life
story behind. You’ll be dead to the whole world. . . . And after you can tell your
life story and walk away from it. . . . after that we’ll start a new life together
and live happily ever after. (6)
Her statement suggests that Tender conforms to Busby’s argument that “[w]hen the
character becomes Christlike, he also becomes a writer (logos). Besides an awareness of
45
Similarly, Button argues that “Tender is very careful to construct the type of image he leaves behind.
Like celebrity, the box allows Tender to once again refashion himself to attract public interest in the most
effective way” (103), that is to say, “by dramatically crashing the plane into the Australian outback (285),
ensuring a spectacular demise and the requisite media attention” (102). Button also highlights that “[w]hether
he is aware of it or not, this bid for martyrdom, as a tragic victim of celebrity, recalls the convention of the
tragic death of the young star, an archetype known for increasing and solidifying posthumous fame and
legacy” (102).
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language, the Christlike traits are an awareness of discord, complexity, human limitation,
the problems of the past, and the need for community and love” (101). Accordingly, Tender
becomes a writer after he takes control of Flight 2039 and begins narrating his story to the
black box. Through this medium he acquires a narrative voice—“an awareness of
language”—that he uses to forge his new identity and worldview in his own words.46 By
doing so, Tender liberates himself from his hyperreal prison, which, in turn, allows him to
found a family—an alternative community—with his lover Fertility.
To conclude, Survivor is essentially a coming-of-age story, or as Mendieta phrases
it, one of Palahniuk’s “turned around Bildungsromans” (395) because it recounts Tender’s
passage from naïve Adam to mature Christ, and, consequently, evokes the interconnection
between hyperreality and frontier mythology. Tender’s narrative sheds light on the modus
operandi of those who have made him a serf of the capitalist system and a false Messiah in
order to manipulate the masses. Throughout the novel, he shares his knowledge about
ideology and hyperreality as well as about the way they shape people’s conceptualization of
both themselves and the world. He reveals how the Creedish fooled him into thinking that
he had to work for his church in the outside world to attain salvation. He also shows how
the caseworker compelled him to accept the capitalist ideology of mainstream society
and—unconsciously—taught him to simulate progress and contentment in order to please
others. Finally, he describes how the agent and his team trained him to fool the public into
believing in his fabricated myth/identity. His transformative journey from an indoctrinated
and docile servant into a self-made man shows that in order to realize the ideals of selfreliance and self-determination encompassed in the American frontier myth, he has to leave
behind the hyperreality of capitalist society and begin anew.
46
According to Foucauldian theory, language “enables me to speak, it constrains what I can say, it
constitutes me as a speaking subject (i.e. it situates and produces my subjectivity: I know myself in language;
I think in language; I talk to myself in language” (qtd. in 101 Storey).
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Conclusion
In this thesis, I set out to demonstrate that, from the 1950s to the end of the 1990s,
hyperreality has persisted as the new frontier and, in turn, that frontier mythology is an
intricate part of postmodern American literature. This thesis identifies the dialectical
conflicts between two worlds/mindsets, the frontier myth, and the rejection of hyperreality
as recurrent concerns in Allen Ginsberg’s poems “Howl,” “America,” and “A Supermarket
in California,” as well as Don DeLillo’s Mao II and Chuck Palahniuk’s Survivor. Although
they were produced and set in different decades, each work, I argue, recuperates frontier
mythology and evokes the myth of the second chance by presenting protagonists who
change their mindsets through a symbolic passage from a corrupt Old World to an
uncorrupted New World. In the societies that Ginsberg, DeLillo, and Palahniuk depict, the
Old World is associated with civilization, conformity, and hyperreality, whereas the New
World corresponds to a mindset that allows the protagonists to affirm their independence
from the Old World and become creators of their own realities rather than followers of
others’.
I have built my theoretical framework on Frederick Jackson Turner’s ideas as well
as those of other theorists of the frontier in order to define the essential components of
frontier mythology and identify their influence on the American consciousness. I use this
critical corpus to reveal both the importance of the frontier myth of the second chance and
that of the frontier ideals of freedom, self-reliance and self-determination in my chosen
works. This framework has also allowed me to identify the frontier-related leitmotifs of
metamorphoses and of conflicts between the Old and the New World in the poems and the
novels. By using theorists of the frontier along with Jean Baudrillard’s writings and critical
works on his theories, I manage to define hyperreality and establish how it is similar to the
Old World in frontier mythology. This theoretical framework has helped me to illustrate
how media and consumer cultures produce and propagate simulacra that, in turn, create the
hegemonic and conformist world of hyperreality. In addition, it has helped me to confirm
that, like the Old World, hyperreality is antithetical to the New World and that, as such, it
negates frontier ideals as well as the possibility of (symbolic) rebirth.
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I have used a methodology that combines close-reading analysis and socio-cultural
criticism to validate my contention that hyperreality is the new frontier in postmodern
America. By supporting my close-reading analyses of the chosen works with critical
sources from different fields related to cultural studies, I have identified the role consumer
and media cultures play in both creating and supporting hyperreality in American society,
and that, from the 1950s up to the late 1990s. My analysis of the repercussions of
hyperreality on the societies and the characters depicted by Ginsberg, DeLillo, and
Palahniuk reveals that, in each of the works studied, hyperreality is invoked similarly: it is
omnipresent in postmodern capitalist America and it resembles the Old World of frontier
mythology since one must escape it to be self-determined.
In chapter one, my analyses of Ginsberg’s poems establishes that the 1950s’
mainstream culture both glorify American consumerism as an ideal and create the myth of a
perfect America that in turn produces a national identity based on simulacra and
hyperreality. Subsequently, those who did not fit this hyperreal ideal are branded unAmerican and silenced. I argue that Allen Ginsberg echoes frontier mythology as he
challenges this hegemonic and conformist ideology; he celebrates his otherness and relies
on his visions to refashion his world, to conjure his ideal America, his New World.
My study of “Howl” shows how Ginsberg’s poetic persona tries to liberate America
from the ideology of Moloch that has turned the country into a prison. I explain that
Moloch’s America claims to be perfect and democratic although it silences individuality
and protest. In reaction to this, Ginsberg denounces the hypocrisy of Moloch’s hyperreality,
and proclaims his distinct voice as alternative; he celebrates the democratic spirit of
America by becoming the voice of the disaffiliated youth who refuse Moloch’s corrupt
world. Ginsberg’s persona envisions a new America—a New World—where they are
independent from Moloch’s hyperreality and free to exercise their right to selfdetermination. Therefore, Ginsberg’s rejection of hyperreality triggers his redemptive
journey from alienation to self-expression and community.
I discuss “America” to further exemplify Ginsberg’s belief that his country is
governed by a homogenizing consumer-driven culture that obliterates its citizens’ identity.
He condemns the fact that mass media and anti-communist propaganda simplify reality and
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impose an ideology that both glorifies American capitalist society and demonizes what
does not conform to its models. I demonstrate that Ginsberg conceives his prophetic visions
both as expressions of his unmediated self and as means to overthrow the hyperreal world
that represses them. He chooses to cultivate such visions in order to conjure up a new and
better America.
In my analysis of “A Supermarket in California,” I argue that Ginsberg presents a
society where people are disconnected from the natural world because they only relate to it
through commodities, which is evocative of the correlation between hyperreality and
consumerism. My analysis of the first section of poem shows that, at first, Ginsberg’s
persona is hypnotized by the artificial lights of the supermarket and feels compelled to
consume the images and products available in it. I argue that the supermarket serves as a
microcosm of the hyperreal America. In this microcosm, people seek contentment through
consumerism; they are not self-reliant as they are seduced by mass culture’s simulacra. By
examining the last section of the poem, I demonstrate that Ginsberg ultimately decides to
adopt and share Walt Whitman’s vision of an “America of love” (11); like Whitman,
Ginsberg’s persona accepts that his poetic vision can change the nature of his environment
and, as such, that he can free both the supermarket and the country from hyperreality. The
three poems studied in this chapter highlight that frontier mythology is an important
element of Ginsberg’s oeuvre and that, for Ginsberg, the rejection of hyperreality results in
self-empowerment outside of its world/mindset.
My analysis of DeLillo’s Mao II in chapter two reveals that frontier mythology and
the hyperreal frontier have persisted in the socio-cultural context of the 1980s. In the
society of Mao II, images and narratives participate in the creation of a hyperreality where
even subversive writers and terrorists are agents of consumer culture. DeLillo shows that
the pre-eminence of simulacra over facts results in the disappearance of the frontier
between the genuine and the hyperreal. I contend that Bill Gray’s career depends on
hyperreality because he does not create new ideas, but survives by giving the illusion of
rebelling against consumer culture. Bill paradoxically denounces the disappearance of
human subjectivity in media-driven society; yet his refusal to engage publicly with societal
issues strengthens his own myth and supports the status quo. I illustrate how he uses the
89
media and the fascination of popular culture with “stars” to create his “brand name”
(Osteen, American Magic 19) and ensure that his myth remains profitable.
My analysis of the characters of Scott and Karen demonstrates that, although Bill’s
persona/myth is a simulacrum, his status as a famous novelist gives him authority over
them because they believe it to be authentic. They do not see that their entire world is
interconnected in hyperreal, globalized cultures and economic systems that participate in
the domestication and homogenization of the masses. I contend that Scott and Karen have
no control over their identities and that they are only servants of hyperreality. They believe
in fabricated ideological narratives that both define and limit their reality and their identity.
My point is that the example of Scott and Karen reveals that Bill’s novels function much
like Reverend Moon’s apocalyptic dogma and Abu Rashid’s terrorist organization. Indeed,
they participate in the creation of a single-minded mass by promising that adopting the
ideology they propagate makes these characters different from mainstream capitalist
society, which, in turn, encourages them to reform this “corrupt” Old World. However, I
show that their ideologies do not offer gateways to the New World. They do not represent
valid alternatives to the hyperreality of media and consumer cultures because they are its
products.
I establish, through my examination of Brita Nilsson’s character, that she is Mao
II’s real hero because she understands how hyperreality functions. Indeed, her attitude
towards photography delineated during her photoshoots with Bill and Rashid demonstrates
that she knows how reality is constructed and that she is aware of her power to create and
destroy myths. I argue that Brita’s desire to keep on crafting thought-provoking art evokes
DeLillo’s belief that artists are still capable of creating progressive ideas despite the
omnipresence of hyperreality in postmodern societies. Brita’s independence of mind, free
spirit, and unique vision invoke the possibility of a New World/mindset that can offset the
hegemony of conformist hyperreality.
In chapter three, I explain that, in Survivor, Tender undergoes different
metamorphoses, first from servant to his church and then to capitalist society, to famous
evangelist turning pariah, and finally to terrorist/narrator. My analysis of the novel reveals
that Tender’s transformation from a candid religious serf to a famous televangelist is
90
regressive although his society perceives it as a form of progress; indeed, he becomes
prisoner of an identity that is fabricated, manipulated and passed as authentic. However,
Tender realizes the frontier myth and goes from an Adamic to a Christ figure when he
finally understands the functioning of hyperreality and uses his knowledge to re-define his
identity. My analysis of Tender’s Creedish education thus shows that he has internalized
the belief in dialectical worlds, which is evocative of frontier mythology. Indeed, he is
certain that he has been chosen to transform the corrupt Old World into a perfect New
World by converting it to his faith. My conclusion is that he needs to leave his Eden—the
utopian life he associates with the Creedish church district—to enter and redeem capitalist
and technological American society.
I demonstrate how, throughout the novel, Palahniuk deconstructs his protagonist’s
commodification and the fabrication of the brand name “Tender Branson.” I establish that
Tender’s public identity/myth becomes attached to his brand name after the Deliverance
occurs and he becomes publicly known and marketed as the last Creedish. I explain how
his agent turns him into a product, a hyperreal image aimed at selling commodities to the
masses under the guise of religious innocence. This transformation results in the masses’
expectations that Tender must conform, that is, look, act, and talk in accordance with the
simulacra the agent’s marketing campaign has propagated.
I contend that narration enables Tender to re-claim his identity and affirm his
independence from hyperreality. I show that he comes to maturity when he recognizes that
both religion and consumer culture have forced him to internalize fallacious conceptions of
progress that have governed his life and resulted in his alienation. I argue that this new
knowledge prompts him to relinquish his dual identities of cult victim and celebrity, to
hijack Flight 2030, and, ultimately, to become the narrator of his own story. My analysis of
the novel proves that Tender’s rejection of hyperreality evokes frontier mythology as he
moves from the position of follower and servant to that of a free and self-reliant creator
who re-defines his life and his identity. I also demonstrate how this rejection allows him to
find a new community, a family with Fertility, which represents his success at starting a
new life outside of the corrupt world of hyperreality. The objective of my analysis is to
show that the recurrence of the themes of hyperreality and frontier mythology in this novel
91
of the late 1990s renders manifest the persistence of hyperreality as the new frontier
throughout the second half of the twentieth century.
In conclusion, Ginsberg, DeLillo, and Palahniuk all provide examples of societies in
which the second chance encompassed in both frontier mythology and its corollary, the
American Dream, are pursued through devotion to simulacral ideals of progress and
success propagated by media and consumer cultures. Yet these authors offer alternatives as
they engage with frontier mythology through protagonists and personas that incarnate the
pioneer spirit of independence and self-reliance. Their heroes follow their own truths or
prophetic/artistic visions and subsequently manage to reveal their identity as well as their
ideal world despite being faced with the homogenizing forces of hyperreality. My analysis
of the works of Ginsberg, DeLillo, and Palahniuk points to the conclusion that deviation
from the norm can lead to progress. Moreover, it asserts that there is not one universal truth
or reality, but a multitude of them; each is equally valid as long as it does not stifle or
silence others.
92
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