In Harold Bloom’s eyes, Don DeLillo is one of the four living American writers whose works deserve constant attentions from literary critics (Bloom,
“Dumbing”). In Introducing Don DeLillo, Frank Lentricchia presented DeLillo to the reader as a “Bad Citizen” because of his refusal to write in accordance with the petty and complacent realism of the day. What differentiates DeLillo from other writers is his attempt to “represent their culture totally,” that is, to do a “cultural . . . anatomy”
(Lentricchia, “American” 2). In his oeuvre, White Noise remains the most discussed text because of its accessibility and brilliant treatments of various issues in contemporary American culture (Engles and Duvall 5). The novel is taught across various disciplines, including literature, religious study, technology and culture, communication and even medical science (Engles and Duvall 1). Its in-depth exploration of contemporary society attracts the readers for its depiction arguably categorized as postmodern phenomenon. The most important of all, White Noise gives the reader a sense of intimacy with the life portrayed in it. In Jeffrey Ebbesen’s words, the book’s attraction comes from “its reference to the inescapable commercialism of reader’s everyday lives” (10). Thus, studying White Noise privileges one to reflect, with contemporaneity, for the human nature in the living circumstance that is still
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undergoing the changes brought by the ongoing evolution of global capitalism.
Overall, the novel represents how a middle-class family suffers from a general fear of death so that they seek consolation from consumption and technology besides other futile means. The dominance of media in the protagonists’ lives and consciousness led many critics to focus on the loss of the reality and the rise of a new fascism (Duvall 170). The collective intoxication with consumer stimulations condensed in proliferating images deprives people of their intellectual autonomy and produces a crowd indoctrinated only with capitalist logic. The outbreak of a toxic leakage crystallizes their fear and mobilizes the plot that tends toward an ambiguous ending, troubling most of the critics. One has to decide whether DeLillo celebrates or warns about the postmodern enjoyment culminated throughout the narrative (Millard 126). Interpretations of the ending are divided over the issue whether there is a way out of the predicament depicted in the novel. As critics located the problems with different emphases, the answer varies. One of the most accepted versions of the story is that the spontaneous move to criticize the absurdities from the reader’s part should be attributed to the author’s calculated decision. That is to say, DeLillo’s work requires the reader to actually confront the issues inherent not only within the novel but also within his or her own life. However, to read the novel more closely in light of this, one would find that the ending does more than causing the reader to be aware of
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the subjugation in the capitalist system. The ending also depicts how that awareness would lead to more vicious cycle if one treats it lightly. In this thesis, two questions will be answered: firstly, why is the capitalist system so irresistible in White Noise?
Secondly, why, even with critical consciousness, does the protagonist fail to realize any potential for subversion?
In the beginning of the novel, the domestic living of the Gladneys is unfolded.
Jack Gladney, a prominent professor of Hitler study in Blacksmith, enjoys a casual living. He has a wife called Babette, whose optimism and naivety provide Jack a satisfying family life. The children living with them come from different marriages, but they are well united under the same roof. Steffie, the youngest girl, likes to wear a protective mask. Denise, the daughter of Babette, is well read in the medical dictionary even though she is not much older than Steffie. She deems it as her responsibility to protect her mother from anything that might jeopardize her health.
Heinrich is a smart adolescent whose knowledge and quick temper often unsettle his parents. Wilder, the youngest child, offers pleasure and sense of security to every member in the family by just being there. Finally, there is Murray Siskind. Even though he is a new comer to the town and college where Jack lives and works, he quickly merges with the family. He flirts with Babette, studies the kids, wins Jack’s confidence. What they all, except Heinrich, share is a love in supermarkets. However,
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beneath scattered records of daily living, an undercurrent disrupts the narrative from time to time: Jack Gladney fears death extremely. While unfolding the grotesque postmodern landscape, Jack as the narrator keeps encountering things that remind him of his mortality. On the one hand, he uses those grotesque devices to ignore the death fear—compulsive shopping, academic protection, TV-watching and etc. On the other hand, his emptiness of being is exposed from time to time. His academic achievement is more an appearance than hard-won success. He tries very hard to conceal the fact that he can’t understand German; he has to learn basic German so as to survive a forthcoming Hitler conference. His authority as a father is also challenged a lot by Heinrich in the family. Whenever he is painfully exposed as being impotent of controlling, he resorts to more pleasure.
The occurrence of a fatal accident near their house, however, changes his life eternally. The spill of a highly dangerous chemical results in the evacuation of the whole town. There are casualties and other terrifying things. What’s most unacceptable to Jack is that he learns that he has inhaled some measure of the fatal chemical and that there is no means to get rid of the chemical. It is the uncertainty about when the fatality will emerge that pressures Jack the most. In a sense, he won’t be able to indulge in his enjoyment of casual living before. The fear of death haunts him and dominates his consciousness for evermore. While those around him seem to
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intensify their enjoyment, which is also an effect of the air bourn toxic event, Jack comes nearer to the brink of breakdown. It is under this circumstance that Babette confesses to him that she has been involved in a secret experiment and extramarital relationship with the manager of that experiment, that is, Willie Mink. The reason lies in her fear of death, which motivates her to test a kind of medicine called Dylar to rid the fear biologically. The relationship between Jack and Babette is injured, yet Jack’s sole purpose of life now hangs on the hope to rid his fear of death by that mysterious medicine. He tries to coax the information out of Babette, but she refuses to tell him where Mink is. Not before long, Jack learns the information he needs from a friend in the chemistry department. With the installment of a pistol and the influence of Murray’s luring speech, Jack determines to kill Willie Mink and takes all the Dylar with him. Jack shoots Willie Mink twice so that Mink passes out. Afterward, Jack places the pistol in Mink’s hand to feign a suicide case. However, Mink suddenly comes by and shoots Jack in the wrist. The accident seems to bring Jack to sense so that he decides to save Mink from dying. In the next chapter, Jack doesn’t mention any consequence of the attempted murder, but presents to the reader three separate descriptions of his life: Firstly, Wilder rides his bicycle through a highway alone. The dangers don’t scare him until he is nearly drowned in a nearby pool. Secondly, Jack and Babette watch the sunset together without any conversation, quite different from
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before. Thirdly, Jack continues his habit of shopping in the supermarket. The novel then ends in a serene mood of satisfaction as he approaches the terminal counter in his favorite supermarket to check out.
Tom LeClair, writing the first important scholarly discussion of White Noise, maintained that the ending suggests “a modicum of hope” because it resists “a reductionist way of knowing” and thus retains a “natural complexity” (230). For LeClair, it is man’s instrumental reason that stupefies and distorts the natural complexity so that Jack Gladney relies on things varying from media talk to murder plot to escape from the uncontrollable mystery in life (6). DeLillo’s refrain from posing a clear-cut resolution of the conflicts culminated throughout the narrative signifies the victory of the mystery of life. By not adding any comment to Wilder’s adventure, Jack testifies his transformation from a person who would try mastering any phenomenon by posing his “reductionist way of knowing” to one who simply
“accepts” things as they are (LeClair 223). Fortunately, the sense of acceptance prevails in Jack’s watching of the sunset; not wanting to make sense of the toxic sunset further elevates the status of “acceptance” (LeClair 223). What’s more,
“DeLillo passes to the reader the uncertainty” in the last episode of shopping in the supermarket (LeClair 223). The reader has to decide whether Jack’s last fascination with tabloid is “literal” or an ironic “resistance to the ‘binary’ simplification” (LeClair
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223). In this elevation of “uncertainty,” the novel can’t be more “mysterious.”
Several critics, however, had pointed out the connection between the sense of mystery and the mesmerism of the capitalist logic. Though Jack may not place his trust at the “reductionist way of knowing,” such as the medical discourse represented by Jack’s doctor near the end of the novel, “he is more susceptible . . . to the deeply embedded narratives of television, to its identity- and consciousness-shaping social myths” as illustrated by Jack’s appreciation of “Toyota Celica” (Fuller 22). In White Noise, the bombardments of the stimulations in TV and other media to shop led
Duvall to conclude that the novel describes how “Americans and their acts of consumption are unconsciously scripted by advertising” (Duvall, “White” 125). The postmodern mystery also prevails in universities, places where enigmas should be solved. Jack, his colleagues and the students all reinforce a certain class division in the society and reproduce similar taste as consumers (Ebbesen 145). The sense of mystery sustained by homogenous reasoning—supported by and supporting capitalist logic—is thus particularly fragile so that “the readers . . . always feel uneasy anticipation while reading” as if something terrible would happen “only on the next page” (Ebbesen 124). In other words, the sense of mystery can be suffocating and anxiety-stirring if it is associated with the capitalist pursuit of interest. Just as the beautiful sunset that is colored by the residue of microorganism in the air is “tinged
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with dread” (DeLillo 162), the impenetrability of postmodern landscape always
“involves terror” (Frow 418).
Following LeCalir, then, John Frow wrote a Marxist critique of White Noise.
The proliferating narratives inherent in media shapes people’s living and perception, as illustrated by a group of identical parents showing off their material power and appreciating each other in the beginning of the novel (Frow 419). Frow argued that the “types” that define individual success have actually permeated the consciousness of people in White Noise so that “the type ceaselessly imitates itself” (Frow 420). The result of this proliferation of types is the equalization between human being and commodity (Frow 425). In a speech delivered in the classroom, Murray criticizes the students’ status as independent thinkers as it disqualifies them from being the innocent children who are “targetable by advertisers and mass producers” (DeLillo 50). In other words, they fail to fit into the type that advertisers shape for stimulating shopping and, therefore, the student’s values are diminished as they cannot meet the producers’ demand for contributing to the mass consumption. Though the
“propositions are monstrous,” Frow thought that DeLillo didn’t envision a possible solution to the loss of humane value caused by the proliferation of types (426). The only place Jack can face death with courage is in the movie (DeLillo 99). Therefore, it
“is . . . only through cultural mediation, that a vision of nonmediation is
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possible—and therefore absurd” (Frow 425). In other words, the salvation in White Noise is in such a circularity within the capitalist system that people can only be
dragged along in its endless reification.
Some critics, however, opposed this pessimistic portrait of consumerism because they detected in it a uniting power for group identity. For Thomas Ferraro, one of the postmodern crises depicted in White Noise is the disintegration of the family structure (18). But Ferraro argued that DeLillo tried to emphasize “how actual families manage nevertheless to sustain themselves” through shopping instead of how the cult of individualism thrives (19). Ferraro interpreted the craziest shopping in the novel as “a balm for the slings and arrows” that inflict Jack’s self-esteem (21).
Because of Jack’s urge to shop, the whole family, being otherwise “difficult to recruit under ordinary conditions,” is united for the prospect of accumulating desirable goods (Ferraro22). Shopping allows the father to join the personal interests of his daughters and his daughters to “wait on” him, thus reestablishing “hierarchies and identities within the family” (Ferraro 23). Also, for Cornel Bonca, the white noise that is associated with “media noise, the techno-static of a consumer culture that penetrates our homes and our minds” is what unites human beings in face of the threat of death (463). Media talk actually “encompasses a wide variety of human utterance,” and, in speaking, one is able to “bridge the lonely distances,’ to ‘establish a structure against
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the terror of our soul” (Bonca 464). Therefore, when Steffie uttered the brand name,
“Toyota Celica,” in her dream, the feeling of transcendence felt by Jack speaks about DeLillo’s hope in the infiltration of advertisement. Under the frightening circumstance, Steffie achieved a connection with the crowd shaped by TV commercials so that her “dread dissolve[s] in the chanting of this media mantra”
(Bonca 470). For Frank Lentricchia, the brand name is “a curious human bond, the stuff of community” (Lentricchia, “Tales” 105). Though Jack might resist the leveling down of intellectual sophistication brought by mass culture (Lentricchia, “Tales” 104), the anesthetizing function of “his banal, semi-stupid brand name apprehension of the world” would finally overcome his high modernist impulse to maintain a distance with the mass culture (Lentricchia, “Tales” 108). Stripping all layers apart, Lentricchia found that the “authentic Jack” whose “wittiness,” “attachment to” his family and “devotion” is all “supported by the supermarket . . ., by the shopping mall”
(“Tales” 111). However, Lentricchia did show some concern about the future of the society that is united by the power of consumerism. Insane, sitting alone in a hotel, mumbling fragmented and irrelevant sentences before a TV set, Willie Mink is “the compacted image of consumerism in the society of the electronic media” (Lentricchia,
“Tales” 113). The dimension of inter-personal relationship is reduced to man’s relationship with TV. Even Ferraro doubted of the bond made of material power as it
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turns the family into a group integrated for mercenary purpose (Ferraro 24). Though the family structure seems to be upheld throughout the course of shopping, it disintegrates with each member “wishing to be alone” after shopping (DeLillo 84).
Thus, some critics reject to regard mass culture with its deteriorating power as the final answer to the dilemma posed in the novel and would rather place their belief in an autonomous self vis-à-vis the penetrating influence of society. They strive to locate an authentic self that somehow survives the homogenization brought by the social corruption. Theron Britt explained that it is easy to read White Noise along this line with American novels categorized under realism, naturalism and modernism (Britt 103). “Many of these novels,” according to Britt, “turn on notions of autonomous identity, usually pitting the individual against a constraining society and valorizing . . . that individual as a corrective to social ills” (Britt 103).
Hence, Paul Maltby, one of the critics who first opposed the pessimism of the readings based on literary theories, argued that DeLillo retained a vision of redemption in Jack’s imaginary moment such as the intrusion of brand names in his consciousness (Maltby 274). It denotes “an autonomous realm of experience and to provide a standard by which to judge the spiritually atrophied culture of late capitalism” (Maltby 274). That is to say, Jack’s sometimes outlandish associations are sites in which critique and freedom are possible. Jack’s fascination with “children . . .
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and the sublime” speaks about “an affirmation that the near-global culture of late capitalism cannot exhaust the possibilities of human experience” (Maltby 275).
For Joseph Dewey, White Noise exemplifies how Jack Gladney makes use of and is used by “the crowd” inherent in his family, career, TV and scientific discourse, and how he finally learns to live alone without them (80). The monstrosity of death leads Jack finally to give up “any illusion of community” so that the three instances in the last chapter “confirm Gladney’s isolation and apartness” (Dewey 90). In other words, DeLillo demonstrated how one can face death only on his own and it is only in this way that human dignity can be maintained (Dewey 90). The end of the novel thus shows a Gladney with an “unsuspected strength,” elevating the autonomy of a character that is long portrayed as a weak person (Dewey 91). Stacey Olster also reinforced this portrait of Jack by representing him as a free agent who refuses to comply with social pressure. Near the end of the novel, Jack claims that he would not pay another visit to his doctor after being terrorized by those who know how to analyze his condition (DeLillo 309). It is a protest against the inhuman treatment from the doctors, and, in refusing to deal with his condition, Jack rejects one device—that is, technology—that he constantly utilizes to evade death. For Olster, DeLillo’s attribution of “that small amount of volition” to Jack testifies “DeLillo’s own authorial triumph” (92).
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Still, that is not the very end of the story. In the last episode of the last chapter, Jack describes how the customers are trying to maintain their dignified appearance while bewildering at the new arrangement in the supermarket (DeLillo 309-10). Jack’s ironic tone in portraying the pathetic customers cannot hide his participation in the activity that sustains the whole disorienting business. In the end, DeLillo seems to indicate that Jack resigns to the capitalist system because he looks to the “holographic scanners” that are able to “decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly” (DeLillo 310). However confusing the world is, Jack seems to say, there are always devices to measure the price and thus, determine the significance of everything. One doesn’t have to be bothered by the postmodern mystery, for some others will always reduce it to understandable forms, such as the amount of money that indicates how much more he has to earn or pay. In this way, money is still the pillar of authority that stabilizes Jack’s mood and the decoder that enables him to indulge in the mysterious but retarding realm of postmodern spirituality represented by the tabloids at the terminal counter (DeLillo 310).
Thus, to search for a self-reliant Jack who resists the capitalist system proves
Thus, to search for a self-reliant Jack who resists the capitalist system proves