Foreign Objects, or, DeLillo Minimalist

In our standard history of U.S. fiction, the late seventies see the rise of minimalism, a form of writing putatively characterized, as Mark McGurl summarizes this critical commonplace, by “retreat or self-concealment” from “the kinds of things one finds in history textbooks” into “the smallness, privacy, and racial homogeneity of domestic life in the late 1970s and 80s.”¹ Upon closer inspection, however, this account seems, like a patient undergoing analysis, to resolutely ignore what is right on the surface.² Consider, for instance, Jayne Anne Phillips’s Machine Dreams (1984) and Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country (1985), to cite the work of two authors commonly placed in the minimalist camp. Both these books unfold their stories of everyday life in West Virginia and Kentucky, respectively, against the backdrop of big historical events, in particular the Vietnam War. Indeed, we might take Phillips and Mason’s books as hinge texts between minimalism and another fictional genre of the late seventies and eighties: the Vietnam novel which in the work of Tim O’Brien and others foregrounds what Cathy Caruth has influentially described as the traumatic “response to an unexpected or overwhelming violent event or events that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in repeated flashbacks, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena.”³ Through its understanding of trauma as that which disrupts linear narrative, and its emphasis on “the repetitive reenactments of people who have experienced painful events,”⁴ Caruth’s formulation suggests an important formal correspondence between the Vietnam novel of the late seventies and eighties and minimalism. Minimalism, I will argue below, needs to be understood less through its frequently domestic content than through its formal commitment to discrete objects divorced from systems that give them meaning. The Vietnam novel extends this commitment to the materials of narrative itself, presenting images and memories stripped of (because presumably lost to) the organizing principles of linear narrative. In this essay I focus on this resistance to narrative systematization not so much as a representation of traumatized consciousness (although in the Vietnam novel and elsewhere it is certainly that), but more broadly as a formal response to the failure of the systematic abstractions that governed U.S. foreign policy in the era of modernization theory.

Modernization theory, which emerged from social science departments and foundation-sponsored research projects in the late 1950s and was installed at the center of U.S. foreign policy by the Kennedy administration, proposed that the U.S. take a leadership role in the so-called Third World by “accelerating the natural process through which ‘traditional’ societies would move toward the enlightened ‘modernity’ most clearly represented by America itself.”⁵ In identifying this process as “natural,” the modernization theorists demonstrated their commitment to what Nils Gilman describes as a universalizing model of development whose “ideal terminus”—characterized by “social leveling to minimize class distinctions; state-guided industrialism; an exaltation of rationalism, science, and expertise as the guide for democratic institutions; and convergence on a consensual model of social organization based on progressive taxation and state provision of social benefits”—was “an abstract version of what postwar American liberals wished their [own] country to be.”⁶ While he urges caution towards the “potted histor[y]” of modernization theory that declares it “discredited by the early 1970s” thanks to its “reductionist . . . conception of change abroad,” Gilman nonetheless describes it as “a modernism of order, plan, and mastery” whose proponents stubbornly clung to an abstract vision of how history should proceed even when it conflicted with empirical evidence in places like Vietnam.⁷

In what follows, I tease out the relationship between U.S. fiction of the late seventies and eighties and the failure of modernization theory by reading Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise as a response to this failure in both Vietnam and, several years later, Iran. This is not a standard approach to the novel, which critics have most often treated as a postmodernist updating of Sinclair Lewis’s satires of Middle America.⁸ In contrast to such readings I describe White Noise as a domestic rewriting of DeLillo’s...