The difference between orange juice and agent orange: Don DeLillo's Underworld and the location of cultural critique in the age of ideological complicity

Abstract

The novels of the New Yorker Don DeLillo repeatedly feature witty and ironic observations about aspects of contemporary history, society, and culture. Critical work on acclaimed novels like White Noise (1984), Libra (1988) or Mao II (1991) predominately consider these fictions to depict the conditions of postmodernity. Many critics regard DeLillo as the celebratory voice of a consumerist culture whose capacity to critique this culture is limited by his own ideological complicity. In addition, the reader's position is similarly considered: postmodernity, understood as totalising and relativistic, ostensibly refutes any form or formation of a cultural critique on the part of the reader. This thesis considers the validity of claims that DeLillo is a postmodern writer, and revisits the critical limitations arising from a postmodern aesthetics and explores the evaluative component within DeLillo's poetics. It argues that reading strategies encouraged by the novel enable the reader to generate ways of evaluation through the juxtapositions made possible by irony, thus counteracting a relativistic and totalised conception of postmodernity. In doing so it challenges conventional views on DeLillo's work as being complicit with the ideological assumptions inherent in the cultural moment it represents, and invites a re-reading of Underworld (1997), not simply as a novel that portrays American social and cultural dynamics during the Cold War period, but as a narrative of cultural critique.