돈 들릴로의 『침묵』과 포스트휴먼 답보상태

초록

This paper explores Don DeLillo’s most recent novel The Silence (2020) with the focus of the posthuman along with the significance of language that DeLillo has explored throughout his work. Foregrounding the sudden digital breakdown where all the screens go blank, the novel stages scenes of paralysis and helplessness induced by our addiction to technology. How do people linguistically and existentially cope with this silence when we have “[l]ost systems in the crux of everyday life” (The Silence 55)? Analyzing the traces of the catastrophic event left on the novel’s textual level, such as fragmented, disconnected musings and monologues deprived of abiding context and attributable narrator, I demonstrate how the novel offers more than just an apocalyptic warning of our technological dependence. Attested by the characters’ inability to formulate meaningful conversations or their state of ennui without the habitual comfort provided by media and internet, the novel suggests that the “airborne toxic” silence has always been there, just deafened by all the “white noise” created by the buzzing networks. In this sense, what DeLillo problematizes in the novel is not just our media-saturated and technocratic world, but our habitual and preconditioned, or almost simulated response to it. To extend and deepen the question of the posthuman, I situate DeLillo’s texts in the discourses of N. Katherine Hayles, Rosi Braidotti, and Lauren Berlant to examine how DeLillo construes the silence as something redemptive, which can generate new perspectives and renewed understanding of what it means to be human in the posthuman era.

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