Don DeLillo, Jean Baudrillard, and the Consumer Conundrum By Mar ...

way that is amenable to the tenets of consumer ideology; as objects, they are neither agents of change nor capable of change themselves. Under such conditions, the denizens of the consumer society are in no position to enact any form of revolution, let alone one based on such esoteric theories as Baudrillard proffers.

Enter DeLillo. Sharing Baudrillard's interest in consumer culture, the American author has ruminated at length on the relationship between individuals and the (often brand-name) objects that constitute their environment. In Americana, DeLillo's first novel, protagonist David Bell strives to realize a sense of identity independent from that of his father, an advertising executive whose television commercials represent the most influential texts of David's childhood. In White Noise, which won the National Book Award in 1985, college professor Jack Gladney seeks to elude the specter of death by losing himself in the gleaming aisles of his local supermarket and by immersing himself in the study of Adolf Hitler's use of propaganda to become a larger-than-life (and, Gladney wants to believe, larger-than-death) historical icon. More recently, Cosmopolis follows the aforementioned young billionaire Eric Packer in his efforts, as the novel's dust jacket explains, “to pursue a cataclysmic bet against the yen and to get a haircut across town.” Through these and all of DeLillo's novels, commodities and other signs of consumer culture do not serve as mere props; rather, as Frank Lentricchia notes in Introducing Don DeLillo, they are “of the essence” (6). That is, DeLillo's novels present consumer culture not just as a backdrop but as a matrix of contemporary values by, through, and against which his characters struggle to define and redefine themselves and, in so doing, reshape the culture that attempts to define them.

Unlike Baudrillard, DeLillo envisions a world in which subjectivity remains intact and the subject has the capacity to alter the ideological framework of society. According to Lentricchia, DeLillo writes in a mode that “marks writers who conceive their vocation as an act of cultural criticism; who invent in order to intervene; whose work is a kind of anatomy, an effort to represent their culture in its totality; and who desire to move readers to the view that the shape and fate of