White Noise

Introduction by Mark Osteen

White Noise has often been dubbed Don DeLillo's "breakout book." This term is usually meant in one of two ways: either that the work has achieved greater commercial success than an author's previous works, or that it has raised the author's art to a higher level. In the case of White Noise, the second is arguable, but the first is definitely true, for the novel garnered the best reviews and strongest sales of DeLillo's career to that point. It is not difficult to understand why it became one of the most widely acclaimed fictional works of the 1980s: its mordantly witty anatomy of the postnuclear family; its sly satire of television, advertising, and academia; its letter-perfect portrayal of the sounds and sights of supermarkets, malls, and tabloids all strike chords that reverberate strongly with contemporary Americans.

When White Noise was first published in January 1985, reviewers were struck by its timeliness; indeed, appearing only a month after a toxic chemical leak at a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, killed some 2,500 people, DeLillo's novel-with an "airborne toxic event" at its center-seemed almost eerily prescient. Although a few reviewers criticized its plot (or alleged plotlessness), found its witticisms too clever, or accused the author of "trendiness," these voices were drowned out by a chorus of praise. As they did in his earlier novels, reviewers recognized the validity of DeLillo's insights about the oppressive effects of contemporary cultural institutions and applauded the astonishing linguistic gifts White Noise displays in its sparkling dialogue and in Jack Gladney's alternately bemused, frightened, and self-critical narrative voice. Many readers found Gladney more approachable than the alienated protagonists of DeLillo's previous works; many adults- especially, I suspect, academics-would echo Gladney's blend of denunciation of and baffled appreciation for popular culture. But the novel's most immediately appealing quality is its humor: it's simply a very funny book. I remember reading aloud to friends Jack and Babette's precoital conversation about "entering," Heinrich's stubborn refusal to accept his senses' evidence of rain, and the uproarious one-upmanship of the American Environments department. Although DeLillo's earlier novels were also humorous, they carried a more sardonic, Swiftian edge that lacerated with a cooler precision. Many readers have found White Noise's humor more palatable because it is leavened by a warmth and compassion less obvious in DeLillo's earlier work.

Much of this warm comedy is derived from DeLillo's slightly skewed depiction of the postmodern family, where the once-solid core of mom, dad, and kids has given way to a loose aggregate of siblings, step-siblings, and ex-spouses rotating in various impermanent groupings. Jack Gladney, professor of Hitler Studies at the College-on-the-Hill in a town called Blacksmith, has four children: Mary Alice (age 19) and Steffie (9), from his first and second marriages to Dana Breed-love; Heinrich (14), from his marriage to Janet Savory (now known as Mother Devi); and Bee (12), from his marriage to Tweedy Browner. Only Heinrich and Steffie live with Jack. His wife Babette's three children are Denise (age 11), Eugene (8), and Wilder (about 2). As Thomas Ferraro points out, since Wilder is not Jack's child, this "family" can have been together no more than two years; moreover, not one child is living with a full sibling (Ferraro 1991, 17). This condition of permanent impermanence affects all of Blacksmith, a place of "tag sales and yard sales" where "failed possessions" testify to failed marriages (White Noise, 59). Things change so rapidly that even the family members seem unclear about the details. No wonder Jack sees the family as the "cradle of the world's misinformation" (81).

But though the family's handle on facts is hilariously shaky, their conversations also suggest the unfunny results of living in a high-technology society: there is abundant information around, but nobody seems to know anything. And just as the family members gorge themselves with disposable information and fast food, so are they also inundated by consumer goods, not only when they visit the supermarket and the mall, but also when they are at home watching television, which they seem to do constantly. Indeed, White Noise is preoccupied with consumerism and with the values inherent in a consumer society. DeLillo's treatment of these ubiquitous features of contemporary life is surprisingly balanced: although he satirizes the family's addictions, he gives many of the best lines to Jack's colleague Murray Jay Siskind, who enthusiastically celebrates television and shopping as contemporary religious rituals. DeLillo dramatizes the omnipresence of TV and consumerism by punctuating the scenes with disembodied electronic voices and lists of brand names. Simultaneously attesting to the novel's highly textured realism and violating it by reminding us of the author's controlling presence, these mysterious, often acerbic insertions are one reason the novel has been called "postmodern."

Another reason is that White Noise flouts the conventions it seems to invoke, imitating a number of different genres, but ultimately fitting none of them. For example, the relatively plotless part 1 presents itself as a hyperintelligent TV sitcom, complete with brainy children, zany friends, and banal conflicts. Even here, however, DeLillo alludes to deeper disturbances: Jack and Babette debate about who will die first; Wilder ululates at length for no apparent reason. Things turn much darker when, in part 2, the family is forced to flee a toxic leak; the book begins to resemble a disaster thriller, except that DeLillo is less interested in providing graphic descriptions of poisoning than in tracing its subtler, long-term effects, especially on Jack, who is exposed to the toxic substance and hence "tentatively scheduled to die" (202). No longer comforted by hunkering in Hitler's penumbra, and bereft of strong ties to religion, community, or family, Jack becomes desperately obsessed with his mortality. The novel seems to veer into a midlife crisis tale. But Jack doesn't take up skydiving or learn to box. Instead, after learning that Babette has been involved in a secret experiment involving Dylar, a drug designed to dispel the fear of death, he schemes to get some at any cost. Jack's less attractive qualities-self-absorption, hypocrisy, rage-emerge, prompting him to devise an implausible plot that itself seems to come from a TV movie. Yet Jack's alternately ludicrous and pathetic confrontation with his nemesis neither solves his problem nor resolves the plot, which does not, after all, "move death-ward" (26). With this enigmatic, postmodernist conclusion, the novel moves beyond all the formulae it has employed.

Even those who cherish the novel's comedy cannot ignore its deeply ominous undercurrent, for White Noise is most of all a profound study of the American way of death: one of DeLillo's working titles was "The American Book of the Dead." It gains much of its remarkable resonance from its unflinching depiction of the nameless fear pervading postmodern society. Like Murray Siskind, DeLillo is particularly interested in "American magic and dread," and his novel dramatizes how our obsessions with exercise and disease, our millennialist religions, our tabloid stories of resurrection and celebrity worship, and our compulsive consumerism offer charms to counteract the terror of oblivion.

White Noise is thus also a novel about religion-or, perhaps more accurately, about belief. Like DeLillo's later novel, Mao II (1991), it asks, "When the old God leaves the world, what happens to all the unexpended faith?" (Mao II, 7). DeLillo has long been attracted to books that "open out onto some larger mystery" (LeClair 1982, 26); White Noise is such a book, one that alludes constantly to what lies just beyond our hearing, to the mysterious, the untellable, the numinous-to what DeLillo calls the "radiance in dailiness" (see page 330 of this volume). The novel defamiliarizes our familiar world by listening to the sounds and listing the products and places-television, supermarkets, and shopping centers, as well as "The Airport Marriott, the Downtown Travelodge, the Sheraton Inn and Conference Center" (White Noise, 15)-that channel the spiritual yearnings of contemporary Americans. In White Noise we revisit those temples where Americans seek "[p]eace of mind in a profit-oriented context" (87).

Despite its undeniable originality, White Noise also reprises the themes and strategies of DeLillo's earlier works. Like his first three novels, it features a first-person narrator who maintains an uneasy relationship with mass culture. David Bell, the protagonist of DeLillo's first novel, Americana (1971), drops out of his job at a television network to make an autobiographical film scrutinizing Americans' worship of televised and advertised images. In one scene (reprinted here on page 335), a character in Bell 's film calls television "an electronic form of packaging," a phrase that White Noise retransmits in its recurrent litanies of brand names and broadcast voices.

The glut of images and glamour of celebrity displayed in White Noise's tabloids take center stage in Great Jones Street (1973) and Mao II. Like Gladney, both Bucky Wunderlick, the earlier novel's rock-star protagonist, and Mao II's novelist Bill Gray seek what Wunderlick calls a "moral form to master commerce"-a means of discovering authenticity in a world crowded with images and commodities (Great Jones Street, 70). Like Bell, these characters withdraw into cocoons where they script private narratives or pursue semisacred quests, only to find their efforts transformed into just another spectacle or consumer item.

Another theme that White Noise shares with DeLillo's earlier novels is the social impact of technology, particularly its most devastating products-atomic weapons and poisonous waste. Gary Harkness, the narrator of End Zone (1972), discovers a disturbing fascination with the language and "theology" of nuclear war. End Zone foreshadows White Noise both in its parody of disaster novels and in its protagonist's ambivalence about technology and its consequences. Similarly, Ratner's Star (1976) blends mathematics and Menippean satire to mount a scathing critique of scientific authority, exposing it as an elaborate form of magic that neither consoles nor contains the fear of mortality it conceals. In these earlier novels, as in White Noise, science engenders a deep and dangerous alienation from nature. DeLillo has returned to these themes in his most recent novel, Underworld (1997), which meditates on the intertwined relationship between waste and weapons.

DeLillo's next three novels, Players (1977), Running Dog (1978), and The Names (1982), offer variations on the terrorist thriller, in which bewildered protagonists seek solace in cathartic violence. Players adumbrates White Noise not only in its superbly rendered dialogue and its depiction of the sedative effects of television (see the excerpt reprinted on pages 342-43), but also in its sharp portrayal of contemporary marriage. Like Jack Gladney, Lyle and Pammy Wynant, the bored protagonists of Players, are at once tranquilized and terrorized by the institutions with which they are inextricably involved. The swift, cinematic Running Dog marks DeLillo's first analysis of what Gladney calls the "continuing mass appeal of fascist tyranny" (25). Much of that appeal, according to Running Dog, issues from the insinuation of filmed images into every crevice of our lives. If in White Noise television is a ubiquitous voice droning at the edges of consciousness, in Running Dog the omnipresence of cameras transforms all behavior into acting, disabling characters from discriminating between real things and images. The Names, the novel about American expatriates that immediately precedes White Noise, explicitly investigated for the first time what had always been DeLillo's implicit subject: the nature and value of language itself. Although the plot outline resembles those of DeLillo's earlier novels, The Names leaves us with DeLillo's first hopeful denouement, as narrator James Axton recognizes in his son's exhilaratingly mangled prose a source of redemption that, prefigures Jack Gladney's discovery of "splendid transcendence" in the utterances of his children (155).

The works that followed White Noise have shown DeLillo continuing to experiment with form and subject. In 1986, The Day Room, a play, was first produced. It meditates on the relationship between madness and inspiration and features a straitjacketed actor playing a television set (which, as in White Noise, provides absurdly apposite comments). DeLillo's subsequent novels have equalled the critical and commercial triumph of White Noise. Libra (1988), brilliantly synthesizing a fictional biography of Lee Harvey Oswald with a plausible account of a conspiracy to kill President John Kennedy, earned nearly as many critical plaudits and even more commercial success than White Noise. Although distinct in both theme and structure, it shares with White Noise a self-reflexive consideration of our need for plots. Mao II, like Libra, won a major national award and for the first time directly addressed DeLillo's understanding of the writer's place in society.

Underworld, a monumental chronicle of America since 1951, unfolding mostly in reverse, is DeLillo's most universally acclaimed and best-selling work so far. While most of DeLillo's works have been compact, even terse, Underworld covers a vast canvas with dozens of characters. One of its protagonists, the haunted "waste analyst" Nick Shay, recalls Gladney in his obsession with the detritus of consumer culture and his attraction to violence and the demonic. Although Underworld is at once broader and more personal than DeLillo's earlier novels-drawing for the first time upon his background as an Italian American reared in the Bronx-it expands again on the relationship between "American magic and dread," analyzing the myriad theologies through which Americans seek to reclaim transcendence in a world of fearsome technologies and fulsome messages.

White Noise thus brings together many of DeLillo's obsessions: the deleterious effects of capitalism, the power of electronic images, the tyrannical authority and dangerous byproducts of science, the unholy alliance of consumerism and violence, and the quest for sacredness in a secularized world. Like all of his fiction, it displays his virtuoso command of language and, particularly, his ventriloquistic capacity to mimic the argots of various cultural forms. In it he amplifies the noises around us and permits us to hear again how these sounds shape our own voices and beliefs.

The first critical analysis of White Noise appeared only two years after its publication, in Tom LeClair's influential book, In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. LeClair places DeLillo in the canon of other American "systems novelists" (such as Thomas Pynchon), who analyze the effects of institutions on the individual. LeClair's chapter on White Noise (reprinted here on pages 387-411) presents the Gladneys' trash compactor as a self-reflexive image of both the novel itself and of postmodern America; he goes on to argue that DeLillo finds in that rubbish a source of transcendence that enables Jack to glean a more satisfactory relationship with nature, his body, and death.

Frank Lentricchia's 1989 essay in Raritan (see page 412), together with the two essay collections he subsequently edited, helped attract academic attention to DeLillo's work. Lentricchia discusses the "most photographed barn in America " as one of DeLillo's-and our own- "primal scenes," finding in it a perfect instance of how images have supplanted events in contemporary America.

Both LeClair and Lentricchia discuss DeLillo's language, but they emphasize most his authority as a cultural critic. Their emphasis has been shared by many critics, as White Noise has gone on to become one of the most frequently taught and analyzed contemporary novels. With the rise of cultural studies in the academy, many literary critics diverted their attention to the very arenas-TV, advertising, pop culture-depicted in White Noise, applying theories such as those propounded by French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard. In his highly influential book Simulations, Baudrillard argues that original ideas and events have now been replaced by simulacra-an infinite regress of reproductions without origins; in turn, the "real" has given way to what he calls the "hyperreal" (Baudrillard 1988, 166). John Frow was the first to elucidate the connection between White Noise and Baudrillardian simulacra, arguing that the replacement of originals by simulations has worked both to pervert and preserve American myths of origins and authenticity. One of the main forces behind this shift, Frow argues, is television, which, along with the consumer capitalism it serves, reduces all phenomena to mere information.

Although other critics, most notably Leonard Wilcox, have also interpreted the novel through Baudrillardian paradigms, perhaps the most extreme statement of this viewpoint is that of John Duvall, who argues in the essay reprinted on pages 432-455 that White Noise is "an extended gloss… on Baudrillard's notion of consumer society." Duvall makes the radical claim that consumer society, which pretends to foster free choice, actually inhibits it and thereby promotes a "protofascist" system that recapitulates the abuses of Nazi Germany. Like Frow, Duvall concentrates on television, which inverts the relationship between mediated and immediate experiences, so that only what is broadcast by the media seems real. Other critics, such as Ferraro, have offered more moderate versions of Duvall's arguments. Still, Duvall's piece is exemplary in its treatment of Murray Siskind as the novel's Mephistophelean spokesman for what, Duvall argues, DeLillo finds most dangerous.

Cornel Bonca opposes critics like Duvall and their inferences about DeLillo's Baudrillardian views (see page 456 of this volume). Drawing evidence from both White Noise and The Names, Bonca distinguishes between two kinds of "white noise": one issuing from capitalism and commodities, the other deriving from a deeper source in human consciousness. This latter may, he argues, counteract our mortal dread. Bonca isolates three scenes-Wilder's wailing in chapter 16, Steffie's chanting of "Toyota Celica" during the airborne toxic event, and the German nun's words about belief near the end of the novel-to expose the way that DeLillo discovers a "purer speech" beneath and within the novel's babble of voices.

Arthur M. Saltzman also scrutinizes DeLillo's language; unlike Bonca, however, who reads white noise as symbol for the denial or fear of death, Saltzman hears as it as a monotonous, narcotizing sound (see page 480 of this volume). The toxicity of our world resides, for Saltzman, as much in our saturation by formulaic language as in black, billowing clouds; the antidote for this aural poison lies in the incisive originality of DeLillo's metaphorical language. Like Bonca, Saltzman finds the novel groping for something luminous within the quotidian, that "radiance in dailiness" cited earlier.

Saltzman and Bonca suggest a new slant in DeLillo criticism. Both LeClair and Lentricchia noted how DeLillo's work leaves a place for "the poetry of mystery, awe, and commitment" (Lentricchia, New Essays, 7), and recent criticism has swerved more decidedly toward reading DeLillo in religious or mystical terms. Paul Maltby sees in DeLillo's faith in the redemptive power of language a reaffirmation of the visionary metaphysics of Romantics such as Wordsworth (see page 498 of this volume). Against postmodernist readings of DeLillo, Maltby describes a humanist seeker of the sublime; thus, although Maltby again focuses on Steffie's chanting of "Toyota Celica," he finds in it not Saltzman's "synthetic and deadly" consumer drug, but a potential for sublimity within banality that nonetheless exposes the emptiness and superficiality of contemporary culture.

Clearly White Noise is rich enough to provoke contradictory responses, and it will continue to intrigue us because it eludes full explanation. Its conclusion is particularly noteworthy in this regard. How should we interpret Wilder's tricycle ride across the interstate? Is he divinely protected or just lucky? What does it imply about Jack's faith in the wisdom and innocence of children? What is Jack's-and DeLillo's – attitude toward those "postmodern sunsets" to which the residents of Blacksmith flock? And what is the tone of Jack's final description of the supermarket, with its tabloids offering "Everything that is not food or love" (326)? Is he voicing a dazed acceptance? Issuing a sardonic warning? Declaring a numbed neutrality? The author neither judges, spells out his message, nor provides a tidy conclusion.

This final passage exemplifies how DeLillo operates from the inside of the cultural institutions that he is assessing to instigate a dialogue with postmodern culture that takes place in the very language we speak, albeit one more beautifully rendered and ironically gauged, one that borrows familiar formulae but maintains a measured opposition. Masking its critique in celebration, White Noise inhabits the very heart of postmodern culture to weigh its menaces against its marvels, alerting us to its wonder as well as its waste.

Mark Osteen

WORKS CITED

Baudrillard, Jean. Selected Writings. Edited by Mark Poster. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988.

DeLillo, Don. Americana . Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971. Reprint, New York: Penguin, 1989.

Great Jones Street. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973.

"An Interview with Don DeLillo." By Tom LeClair. Contemporary Literature 23 (1982): 19-31.

Mao II. New York; Viking, 1991.

"An Outsider in This Society." Interview by Anthony DeCurtis.

In Introducing Don DeLillo, edited by Frank Lentricchia. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991.

Ferraro, Thomas J. "Whole Families Shopping at Night!" In New Essays on White Noise, edited by Frank Lentricchia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Lentricchia, Frank. Introduction to New Essays on White Noise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Wilcox, Leonard. "Baudrillard, DeLillo's White Noise, and the End of Heroic Narrative." Contemporary Literature 32 (1991): 346-65.