돈 들릴로: 포스트모던 오리엔탈리스트?

Abstract

This paper explores what might be called the orientalist aspect of Don DeLillo’s postmodernist novels. DeLillo is often called postmodern because his works represent the lives saturated and dominated by free-floating media- and commercial images in contemporary American society, particularly focusing on the depthlessness and affectlessness of those lives. In terms of narrative strategies, too, he is well known as a postmodernist: the film-like fragmented tyle of representation, the idiosyncratic articulations of contingent episodes, the ironic twists and parodying of the dominant cultural, ideological elements. This paper, however, claims that DeLillo’s works can be better understood if we closely analyze the ways in which his fiction portrays non-Western individuals, attitudes, and conventions. By juxtaposing dichotomous pairs such as the individualist vs. the collectivist, the democratic vs. the totalitarian, and the peaceful vs. the violent, DeLillo’s works strongly reinscribe traditional Western dichotomy, or the epistemological basis of traditional Western orientalism. Even though he does not explicitly connects himself to the ideology of colonialism and orientalism, DeLillo cannot be said to be free of the traditional orientalist ideology because his narrative is heavily predicated on the traditional Western representational stereotypes which have been used to define the West as a better self-counterpart of the Orient-Other. This paper finally raises a question of whether the recontainment of DeLillo’s fiction by the traditional Western narrative ideology is a result of his being an American writer or it is a result of the ideology of postmodernism itself.