CULTURE.
Between Art and Reality “Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead.” -Don DeLillo, White Noise Words by Aaron Finnegan
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his quote is the very last line from
DeLillo’s first novel, explores these
White Noise, a book concerned
concepts as it follows a news broadcaster
with ideas of mortality, mass
who embarks on a road trip across Middle
hysteria, and the nature of reality itself.
America to document what the country
A lot of DeLillo’s work centres on this
is “really like”. This desire to document
idea that reality as we perceive it is not
what is “unquestionably real”, and to
necessarily how it is perceived by others.
represent it in its most attractive form,
He is compelled by the ideas of French
is not just a literary one. This permeates
philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s concept
every facet of our society and has done
of simulation and simulacra. Briefly,
so in various forms for centuries. From
Baudrillard’s theories on simulation and
the polished representations of divinity
simulacrum are as follows: a simulation
that cover the ceiling of the Sistine
is a false representation of something
chapel to the advertising culture of the
tangible and real, while a simulacrum is a
1960s that sought to show Americans
representation of something that has so
the paradigms of a nuclear family; we are
many different forms of simulation that
continuously bombarded with images
it has no discernible original. Americana,
that try to represent an ideal that has
