What is man?
What The Sound and the Fury says:
"Man the sum of his climactic experiences Father said. Man the sum of what have you. A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire."
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"Father said that man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired, but then time is your misfortune Father said. A gull on an invisible wire attached through space dragged. You carry the symbol of your frustration into eternity."
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"Father was teaching us that all men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away the sawdust flowing from what wound in what side that not for me died not."
What White Noise says:
"But you said we had a situation."
"I didn't say it. The computer did. The whole system says it. It's what we call a massive data-base tally. Gladney, J. A. K. I punch in the name, the substance, the exposure time and then I tap into your computer history. Your genetics, your personals, your medicals, your psychologicals, your police-and-hospitals. It comes back pulsing stars. This doesn't mean anything is going to happen to you as such, at least not today or tomorrow. It just means that you are the sum total of your data. No man escapes that."
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"Everything that goes on in your whole life is a result of molecules rushing around somewhere in your brain."
"Heinrich's brain theories. They're all true. We're the sum of our chemical impulses."
Interesting the difference 57 years make.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Man the Sum of What Have You
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2 comments:
The first definition that DeLillo gives definitely seems to me a product of the digital age. It couldn't have been written in Faulkner's time.
But I think the difference between the Sound and the Fury tidbits and the reductionism part of White Noise is more a function of setting than any deep philosophical difference between the times . The idea of physical reductionism was around long before Faulkner - Freud certainly hit on it in many respects, as did Descartes, though he assumed man was an exception. Not that I've read the Sound and the Fury, but from what I gather about the places and people that comprise the story, a scientific response would be less likely than an answer made by using metaphors involving recognizable emotions or mundane objects.
I really like the "sum-of-what-have-you" line. It seems like it answers the question ("you know what man is, he's right in front of you") without trying to delve too far, since the more specific any answer to that question is, the more dissatisfying it becomes, like it's leaving something out or ignoring some other details.
Although you're probably right about the physical reductionism predating postmodernism, in White Noise it seemed to coincide with other aspects of postmodernism. It was a philosophy that occurred (at least in the novel, as I see it) due to the increased technological and scientific advances. But probably if I looked I could find an example of this from the modern era.
As to the man the sum of what have you line, I like your reading of it, but I think it was intended a little differently by Faulkner. The father is the voice of nihilism in the novel, so I think that “what have you” may mean more that what man is made of doesn’t matter.
By the by, if you haven’t read TSATF, you really should. It is, as Faulkner phrased it, his “most splendid failure.” I would emphasize the first word over the latter.
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