"Wallowing in the “Great Dark Lake of Male Rage:" The Masculine Ecology of Don DeLillo's White Noise
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay explores Don DeLillo’s White Noise in terms of Jack Gladney’s crisis of masculinity, which is bound up in a longing for the protagonist to return to nature, which figures in the novel as the last bastion of authentic masculinity. As critics of White Noise have clearly established, Jack suffers from a discernible cultural malaise--a sense of profound dislocation in the midst of technological hypermediations of self and reality. I extend this reading of the novel by arguing that this cultural malaise prompts in Jack nostalgia for an imaginary moment when masculine subjectivity was constituted by and through an intimate relation to pre-technological nature. This conception of nature as the site of pristine masculinity, as is indicated by Jack's preoccupation with pre-modern warriors like Attila the Hun and Genghis Kahn, draws on a host of conceptual affiliations between nature and masculinity--immediacy, authenticity, corporeality, essence—that have long been mobilized in the recapitulation of American masculinity. Ironically, the novel enacts Jack’s refusal of a culturally-mediated (even technologically-mediated) sense of self through his reliance on cultural nostalgia for a more “authentic,” more “natural” reality. This nostalgia ultimately incites violence as Jack retreats into essentialist conceptions of masculinity that appear, to the main character at least, as his only defense against the artifice and uncertainty of postmodernity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".