To what extent does Don DeLillo’s White Noise criticise postmodern American culture in the 1980s?

In Thomas De Zengotita’s book Mediated: How the Media Shape the World Around You (2004), the writer concludes with a personal anecdote. On September 11, 2001, he was sitting in a park by the East River in Brooklyn when American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the World Trade Center. De Zengotita’s narrative that follows this occurrence is interesting and relevant to Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), the subject of my Higher Level essay, in that De Zengotita begins by describing his personal experience of what we now call ‘9/11’. This is unremarkable given that De Zengotita really was in Brooklyn. However, as De Zengotita goes on to reveal, his own story quickly melds into the narrative of a larger ‘event’, continuously reconstructed through incessant media representation. His sense of ‘objective reality’, therefore, is distorted as it blends confusingly with other mediated and fragmented narratives. Although concerned, Zengotita observes postmodernity from an academic’s perspective. For many of the characters of DeLillo’s novel, not least Jack and Babette, their experience of a fictionalised postmodern America[1], where the mediated is more significant than the real, is overwhelming and disorientating as they struggle to find meaning in their lives and fail to lead purposeful lives. Jack and Babette, like most of the novel’s other older characters, ultimately fail to comprehend and navigate postmodern America. It is a society dominated by technology, television, advertising, and mass consumption. This society gives rise to – you may say produces – alienated individuals who, in a state of anomie, lack fixed, essential identities. The physical environment is poisoned, the natural world is disappearing, and there is an absence of morality and spirituality. It is possible to see White Noise, as a playful novel that celebrates the collapse of ‘grand narratives’, the optimism of the Enlightenment, and the failure of science. After all, the novel is often ironic, and the deadpan dialogue is frequently hilarious. However, beyond the humour is, almost certainly in my view, a serious, intended criticism of postmodern America. Outside of endless television and mindless conspicuous consumption, postmodern society cannot give comfort or provide questions to fundamental questions about human life and mortality. Its only solution is, as Postman (1985) asserts (in the same year DeLillo published White Noise), to amuse ourselves to death.

The postmodern artistic style and the criticism of postmodernity are apparent from the first page of White Noise. When “the station wagons arrived at noon” (3), they do so, apparently, without drivers. If, following the ambition of the Enlightenment, technology is a vehicle to promote social progress, in postmodernity the Enlightenment is ironically inverted so that technology determines human lives.[2] In DeLillo’s opening paragraph, the station wagons bring with them, not people, but more things, the list of which is increasingly inessential, most would say, to human existence. His asyndeton foreshadows a novel that will be interested in the implications of constant excess. As the first paragraph shifts to the second, there is a shift in narrative perspective with the unanticipated insertion of Jack Gladney’s first-person narration. The abrupt change in narrative perspective, perhaps an example of what Barry refers to as “fragmentation” (88), is typical of postmodernity and postmodern texts. DeLillo’s concentration on consumption and the jagged, sometimes many-voiced narrative is well illustrated in the media snippets inserted into the novel like a postmodern corruption of the Holy Trinity. How can the reader explain, for example, the apparently arbitrary insertion of “the Airport Marriot, the Downtown Travelodge, the Sheraton Inn and Conference Centre” (15) into Jack’s narrative? The answer, it seems, is that this is not Jack’s narrative; rather it is an example of the novel’s omnipresent ‘white noise’, the ubiquity of which permeates the cultural landscape of postmodern America and, by extension, the cognitive lives of DeLillo’s characters.

To a large extent, the novel is concerned with how people respond to the white noise of postmodern excess. The exchange between Jack and his (biological) son, Heinrich, in chapter 6 in is one of the novel’s many funny moments; possibly it is a celebration of postmodernity. The chapter reminds IB students of their Theory of Knowledge class, and involves an epistemological tussle between Jack and Heinrich who argue over whether or not it is raining. Jack insists it is raining as it can be both seen and felt. The relativistic Heinrich recognises the limitation of sense perception as a way of knowing, plays Machiavellian word games, and then goes on to claim that it cannot be raining if rain is not anticipated or confirmed by media technology. While this may be rather benign, later examples of postmodernity’s impact on human experience are much less so: Jack and Babette’s sex life is mediated through erotic literature (chapter 7); the Treadwell’s go missing (chapters 12 and 13) before their ironic rediscovery in a shopping mall; the averted plane crash is made pointless by the absence of media coverage (chapter 18); and the airborne toxic event (from chapter 21) is just that – an event, made cinematic by helicopter lighting. In this section of the novel technology and reality converge, and all sense of rationality and logic are lost. Media can virally transmit a physical response to the airborne toxins and (admittedly comedically) the SIMUVAC team use a real event to prepare for a practice event. Things become more sinister still when, accustomed to media representation, Jack cannot discriminate between the real and the simulated when Babette appears on TV (chapter 20), and then Jack and Heinrich share a moment of enthralled voyeurism as the insane asylum burns down (chapter 32). It is this that Baudrillard (quoted in Barry, 89) means when he refers to ‘hyperreality’, where all bonds between real and simulated, sign and signified are lost. The implication is particularly apparent in chapter 32. Jack and Heinrich have a difficult relationship in the novel. Heinrich is typical of the children in the novel in that he is more knowing than the adult characters (such as Jack). Jack and Heinrich typically ‘talk past’ each other. Either Heinrich beats Jack in epistemological arguments or, it seems to Jack, Heinrich talks in non-sequiturs. Ironically and remarkably, however, they bond as people burn to death. Heinrich says to his father, “It’s funny how you can look at it and look at it […] just like a fire in a fireplace”. Jack responds without admonishment, asking, “are you saying the two kinds of fire are equally compelling?” (229). Neither character can easily distinguish the synthetic from the real or the innocuous from the significant. Only when the smell of the burning ‘spoils their enjoyment’ is the reverie broken and the characters head home. 

Revelling as people are incinerated does leave you in some “pretty repulsive company” (Barry, 91). Postmodernism is a superficial offering of choice and plenitude. In reality (sic) it leaves individuals unanchored in a world where commodity relations replace human relations. Jack Gladney is a pathetic figure. He is free to create his persona, but creates a caricature that is itself a commodity, recognising that he is “the false character that follows the name around” (17). Meeting a colleague, Eric Massingale, in the supermarket – a frequent setting in the novel, associated with mass consumption – Jack is made to feel insecure. Massingale tells Jack that without the dark glasses that are part of his professional persona as a college lecturer he looks “harmless”. Responding to Massingale’s comment, Jack tells the reader “the encounter put me in the mood to shop” (83). Jack then embarks on an extravagant spending spree, buying items he does not need to soften his self-doubt. Ultimately, Jack’s shopping leaves him and his family with a sense of emptiness and loneliness. As Jack says, “we drove home in silence. We went to our respective rooms, wishing to be alone” (84). It is a poignant moment, allowing readers to recognise the futility of consumption as a response to normal human anxiety. Jack’s career is a failure, built not on the study of Hitler, but rather on mediated representations of Hitler. Unable to speak German, he is consumed with angst. And, when he bizarrely conflates Hitler with Elvis Presley (chapter 12), the obvious amorality of the juxtaposition leads me to think I would rather live in a reality, full of contestation and strife if necessary, than to claim that the tangible and authentic are illusionary, and at best receding out of sight. White Noise is an often funny novel. However, its criticism of postmodern America is clear. If it were to substitute the television for the Internet and smart phones, it would be, unfortunately, a fine description of the present.

Works Cited:

Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Manchester University Press, 2017.

DeLillo, Don. White Noise. Viking Penguin, 1985.

De Zengotita, Thomas. Mediated: How the Media Shape the World Around You. Bloomsbury, 2004.

Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Viking Penguin, 1985.

1448 words.