A White European American Perspective: Imagining Family and Community in Don Delillo’s White Noise

Abstract

Accenting Coleridge’s mania for metaphysical energy and unity, the epigraph’s emphasis on contraction and expansion, on infinity and finitude, and on the unifying power of opposition broadly composes key fundamentals of his overall philosophical imagination. I intend to show how these transcendental and dialectical insights can be used as a narrative or “reading” strategy for DeLillo’s White Noise. Let me begin with a contemporary advocate of Coleridge’s approach. In Sources, processes (sic) and methods (sic) in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, Kathleen Wheeler configures Coleridge’s imagination similarly, as a “structural principle” for the entire Biographia Literaria (127). Closely reading chapters twelve and thirteen, she demonstrates how Coleridge’s discussion about the imagination is actually an act of the imagination. Interpreting the famously incomplete quality of these two chapters as the necessary gap that must be filled by the imagination, Wheeler provides an active role for some of the interpretative structures of romantic theory that I have been proposing throughout this book: These missing parts may be alternatively seen as satirical addresses to the reader who keeps waiting for and expecting to be provided discursively with a knowledge of imagination. Instead Coleridge presents his reader with all that discussion can provide, namely a beautifully designed occasion for imaginative response. (130)

... the transcendental philosopher says; grant me a nature having two contrary forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinite, and I will cause the world of intelligences with the whole system of their representations to rise up before you.

Biographia Literaria 1: 297¹