If the novel ends in chapter thirty nine, Jack’s violence might take on a tinge of redemption. However, chapter forty provides further complication for the overall significance of Jack’s attempted murder. The outbreak of the real in Jack does not persist in the blank represented by the disjointedness of contents between the last two chapters. For a closer inspection of the last chapter, one will find that it is more a return to previous lifestyle than a reconfiguration of symptoms. Fear of death, after all,
“is psychologically subordinate to the narcissistic fear of harm to one’s body” (Lacan, Écrits 100). Jack’s love of self leads him to finally forsake the potential of subversion
and become a Lacanian pervert. To capture the pervasiveness of perversion in contemporary society, Adam Kotsko labeled one of the chapters as “the reign of perversion” (85). Jack’s narrative portrays a wide-spreading phenomenon of suppressing inconvenient truth in order to protect one’s fond lifestyle. It may not be intentional, but it can be found in several social forces that reinforce the pathetic inactivity depicted in the last chapter. Though Jack’s narrative shows his disagreement with the phenomenon, he finally finds his way to be at peace with the status quo.
With the outbreak of the air borne toxic event, Jack and other adults exemplifies the human tendency to suppress inconvenient truth in order to sustain normality. Their behaviors conform to Laplanche and Pontalis’ definition of
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disavowal, which is “a specific mode of defense which consists in the subject’s refusing to recognize the reality of a traumatic perception” (Laplanche and Pontalis 118). This is best illustrated by Jack’s way of denying the possibility that the spillage of Nyodene D in the neighborhood would in any way put their life in danger.
Confronted by children’s questionings and information, Jack only repeats answers like,
“[The cloud] won’t come this way,” “It just won’t,” “I just know” or “Because it won’t” (DeLillo 109-111). But he himself is aware of the threat. Pretending that they don’t care very much, he and Babette suppress their fear so that they become
“thick-voiced” (DeLillo 113). He imagines that the pollution caused by the spillage
“would penetrate, seep into the genes, show itself in bodies not yet born” (DeLillo 114). With the situation becomes more and more urgent, each member of the family suppress his or her fear and worry, maintaining the appearance of normality very hard (DeLillo 115). They “avoid eye contact,” fearing of “being noticed” by each other (DeLillo 116). Finally, Steffie’s nervous breakdown sets the family to motion, getting everybody out of the house as they follow the direction from the sirens outside (DeLillo 116).
Octave Mannoni, in his “‘I Know Well, but All the Same . . .’,” demonstrates how, after multiple painful exposures of the contradictions in one’s belief, one can still hold fast to that belief. The belief might undergo some revisions, but the overall
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impossibility of that belief is not altered. In the case of Santa Clause, the burden of proof is shifted to the children because the disillusioned adults protect the belief now by saying that the children need this figure to be happy (Mannoni 76). In other words, the adults simply disavow the fact that Santa Claus is just a human fabrication and continue to believe this myth in another form, that is, believing in the children’s shoes.
Verleugnung, or fetishism, can thus be “explained by the persistence of desire and the laws of the primary process” (Mannoni 81). That is to say, when the disavower’s fantasy is in danger of being exterminated by disadvantageous and undeniable evidences, the antagonistic factors undergo repression so that the subject can continue desiring. Fetishism is thus a form of defense mechanism that allows human being to keep working and living when “surrounded by a world of hostile facts” (DeLillo 82).
The characters’ fetishism represented in White Noise, however, is rather unhealthy.
The reason behind Jack’s disavowals lies in his attachment to his “routines.”
For Žižek, the symptom of avoiding traumatic encounters in contemporary society manifests itself in the subject’s powerlessness to let go of the “comfortable routine of jouissance” in his normal living (Kotsko 61). When Heinrich keeps urging Jack to pay
attention to the spillage, Jack wants Babette to prepare for dinner though it is rather early (DeLillo 112). In dinning, there is the “sensory array [he] ordinarily cherish”
while a “colloquial density that makes family life the one medium of sense
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knowledge . . . is routinely contained” (DeLillo 115; emphasis mine). Dinning in face of the catastrophe is used for helping him to pretend that nothing has changed. It is a ritual designed for reassuring him that the lively family life would not be disturbed by the cloud coming this way. But his routine still cannot keep him from being deeply unsettled by the danger (DeLillo 114, 116). After Jack learns that Nyodene D has entered into his body and will stay in it for the next forty years, his most poignant remark is that this “marks the end of uneventful things” (DeLillo 145). That is to say, the days in which he can maintain his comfortable routine are gone forever. His lament for “uneventful things” recalls his former prayers for the eternal extension of
“aimless days” (DeLillo 18, 97). The “aimless days” stands for the unbroken chain of enjoyment inherent in his daily routine that keeps him from worry and fear of death.
When nothing happens, he is allowed to indulge in his imagination and a false sense that his enjoyment will last forever.
For the townspeople, their disavowal of the disaster is also exhibited in their intensification of enjoyment. After the air borne toxic event, their way to overlook it is to expand the supermarket (DeLillo 159). Shopping, to the people in Blacksmith, is here underscored as an indispensible mode of living. But the sign of repression is evident; the supermarket has to be more beautiful and more spacious even though the rest of the town looks rather bleak after the disaster (DeLillo 162). “Everything was
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fine,” Jack observes, “would continue to be fine, would eventually get even better as long as the supermarket did not slip” (DeLillo 162). The supermarket here stands as a source of belief, telling people that their routine of enjoyment will not be disturbed even after a horrible disaster like the air borne toxic event takes away many lives.
Shopping has a ritualistic function that assures them that nothing really changes at all.
The indication of the aftermath is to be found in the shattered looks and paranoiac attitude of the elder people (DeLillo 159-60). Yet, the Gladneys rather enjoy the new
“sensory” stimulations in the expanded areas of the supermarket (DeLillo 159).
According to Jack, “the oven aroma of bread and cake combined with the sight of a bloodstained man pounding at strips of living veal was pretty exciting for us all”
(DeLillo 159). They represent the townspeople’s unaffectedness in their enjoyment except when Jack is reminded of the terribleness of death by Murray (DeLillo 160-2).
The traumatic memory of the disaster thus persists in Blacksmith’s subconscious and would not be easily resuscitated. It manifests itself in people’s abhorrence toward the clothes of the research team who look for signs of contamination in Blacksmith (DeLillo 165). They would refuse to look at the team in “Mylex suit,” but would be rather friendly with the dogs that are with the team (DeLillo 165). The town’s powerlessness to confront the issue is explained away by the absence of a big city nearby (DeLillo 168-9). The logic is that, since there is no city around Blacksmith, the
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townspeople has no basis to structure their suffering: they cannot blame the contamination to the urbanization or industrialization that is associated with big cities (DeLillo 168). They are content with dialing a newly established hotline and confiding their problem of Déjà vu (DeLillo 168). In such a way, the townspeople shun away from looking at the wound the air borne toxic event leaves them with.
Though people in Blacksmith try to bury the impacts of the air borne toxic event, the crisis brings many conflicts in Jack’s life onto surface. Jack’s mortality forbids him from authentically believing in anything that can’t rid him of the anxiety.
He obtains a position that defies easy identification with the Other that subjugates subjects with reference to all kinds of “authority.” To be more specific, his sense of mortality causes him to be aware of the paralysis brought by the fetishism of the enjoyable routine. A contrast is immediately made in Jack’s perceptions of the cloud composed of the Nyodene D.. After he learns about his ill condition, he perceives the toxic cloud in a more realistic light than the first time (DeLillo 151). It’s no longer
“some death ship in a Norse legend” (DeLillo 124). The helicopters do not seem “to be spotlighting the cloud for us as if it were part of a sound-and-light show” (DeLillo 124). He, for the first time, sees the dangerous substance in its evil aspect, without the mitigation of a sense of ordinary movie show as “some dreamed emotion that accompanies the dreamer out of sleep” (DeLillo 124). Rather, the cloud is associated
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with the whole capitalist system. The accompanying helicopters and the aircrafts now make the cloud “resemble . . . a national promotion for death, a multimillion-dollar campaign backed by radio spots, heavy print and billboard, TV saturation” (DeLillo 151). In other words, Jack perceives that it is the capitalist system that generates such
“death” which is “immense beyond comprehension” (DeLillo 151).
Thus, the shattering of Jack’s fantasy leads to the discoveries of his entanglement with several social forces. One force is the New Age spirituality that supports their enjoyment in the capitalist system. By definition, New Age refers to a sub-cultural movement that seeks to “merge elements from different belief systems and practices” unified by shared mystical experiences and the emphasis on “true self”
(“New”). Its belief includes “reincarnation, . . . the existence of spiritual beings, . . . all religions are one in God’s eyes, . . . [and] a respect for and interest in the mystical traditions of world religions such as Tibetan Buddhism” (“New”). In White Noise, the landscape of belief system is post-Christian (Eaton 146). The remnant expression of Christian belief is the church that is used for Babette’s posture class (Conroy 157).
Tibetan Buddhism, UFO sightings and psychic attract more attention than the old school Christian belief or atheism (DeLillo 223).
The New Age version of Tibetan Buddhism in White Noise is appropriated to the benumbing effect of disavowal. Žižek suspects that New Age belief is “the
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obscene underside” of capitalism (Žižek, Totalitarianism 216). It is “the opium of the people” in that it eases people’s anxiety in the madly accelerated competition of the capitalist world (Žižek, On 13). Before the air borne toxic event, Jack is dimly aware of the connection of the two. Janet, Jack’s wife in his second marriage, is an example of the combination of capitalism and New Age religion. She used to work for a secret intelligence agency as “a foreign currency analyst” and then resigns and retreats to an ashram (DeLillo 203). Yet, even in the retreat, Janet is able to utilize her training and turn the regulation of the ashram into a “business” (DeLillo 87). The strategies include “investments, real estate, tax shelters,” having no difference with the capitalist way of massive accumulation of money (DeLillo 87). In commenting Janet, Jack says that she has realized her dream of having “[p]eace of mind in a profit-oriented context”
(DeLillo 87). Also, Jack associates the university atmosphere supported by a huge amount of wealth with “a far Eastern dream, too remote to be interpreted” (DeLillo 41). Recalling Murray’s “peeling off the layer of unspeakability,” Jack tries to comment on the “ungainly posture” of the students who sit in the library (DeLillo 41).
Jack attributes their spoiled manner of sitting to the wealth of their parents (DeLillo 41). The “far Eastern dream” is thus an euphemism for the class antagonism brought by the “massive insurance coverage” of their “accomplished” parents (DeLillo 4).
The most important function of this belief system is to support one’s
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enjoyment in consumption by cancelling the threat of death. Once shopping in the supermarket earlier in the novel, Jack attentively listens to Murray’s free associations of supermarket and the art of dying in Tibet. The appropriation of exotic belief, so characteristic of New Age spirituality, creates a theory that contributes to Jack’s enjoyment in the supermarket. According to Murray, the supermarket is comparable to the place where the human soul enters after death and be restored “to itself some of the divinity lost at birth” (DeLillo 37). Entering the supermarket promises the bliss that can easily be obtained. Thus, there is no need to fear that the enjoyment will end one day because one can experience reincarnation if one goes shopping in the supermarket. Once one enters into the supermarket, he or she can enjoy the ultimate bliss depicted by different religious discourses, no matter it is called “uterine rebirth or Judeo-Christian afterlife or out of body experience or a trip on a UFO or whatever we wish to call it” (DeLillo 38). But the superiority of supermarket is clearly indicated in the passages. It is easy, convenient and comfortable in contrast to the effort the Tibetan makes in facing death. All consumers have to do is to “simply walk toward the sliding doors” (DeLillo 38). Most important of all, the consumer doesn’t have to die before he or she can be “spiritually recharged” (DeLillo 37). The privilege of shopping can be best summarized as follow: “Here we don’t die, we shop”
(DeLillo 38). As long as there is supermarket, one can be assured of his enjoyment in
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immortality.
Back in the time when Jack enjoys his “aimless days,” Murray is able to brag about his theory of reincarnation and Jack is willing to adopt his terminology. But after Jack learns about his infection, this belief suddenly loses its efficacy. The undeniability of mortality generates a little distance between the popular belief and one’s perception of reality. After he learns his condition from SIMUVAC, Jack finds Babette reading from a pack of tabloids to a group of blind. He determines to listen to her telling the stories so that he can pay less attention to his health condition (DeLillo 137). Anyone there can recognize that those stories of reincarnation, UFO, and the ghosts of celebrities are designed for reassuring them about life after death. But they are still too outlandish to be credible, and Jack marvels at people’s efforts in
“inventing hope” (DeLillo 141). Deep inside, Jack feels alienated from the stories told by Babette’s genuine narrative voice. He dispassionately analyzes the pattern of those stories and the audiences’ responses (DeLillo 139, 141). They are as cold and calm as him. They take the constructed hope into account and appreciate the reflexivity of the situation: the authors somehow shape the stories in a way that they fit in the present situation (DeLillo 141). The blinds are like Jack, who feels no bond to believe in the stories told, but they still stick together as if the stories can relieve them from worry.
One would expect to find reliable reassurance in some authority which is
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based on well-researched knowledge, such as a college professor, when the air borne toxic event happens. But Jack’s confiding to Murray disappoints him, again. As the tabloid fails him, he decides to look for another relief. He runs into Murray, who is flirting with a group of prostitutes. Being too busy at obtaining perverse sexual pleasure, his colleague friend cannot provide him with the consolation he wants. He only suggests that Jack should “work harder on . . . Hitler” (DeLillo 146).
Disappointed, Jack looks hard on his friend and thinks, “[h]ow much did he know?”
(DeLillo 146) Jack’s question is indicative of DeLillo’s doubt of the authority based on the learning in university. In the beginning, the college Jack belongs to is a result of scrupulous political and commercial articulation. In chapter one, Jack tells us that the origin of Hitler department comes from his idea. When Jack discussed the idea with the chancellor in 1968, “he was quick to see the possibilities” (DeLillo 4). While in chapter three, Murray reveals that “[t]he college is internationally known as a result of Hitler studies” (DeLillo 11). That is to say, in consequence to the chancellor’s trust and investment, his idea is proved as a big success in the inter-university competition.
As a result, Jack secures a life of wide renown in academia: “Nobody on the faculty of any college or university in this part of country can so much as utter the word Hitler without a nod in [Jack’s] direction” (DeLillo 11). He is now so valuable and accomplished that he only has to teach one class a week (DeLillo 25). But the
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department still attracts hardworking students as depicted in chapter six, sustaining the finance of the university with their parents’ money (DeLillo 26). As for the chancellor, he “went on to serve as adviser to Nixon, Ford and Carter before” dying a rich death—a ski lift accident in Austria (DeLillo 4). This suggests how successful and legendary he is in the natural selection of university market. It is therefore not surprising that the professors reinforce the injunction to enjoy as discussed in chapter two of this thesis.
The mode of their manufacturing knowledge represented by Jack and his colleagues turns people into “bundles of needs” that are accustomed to be soothed by
“those who are in charge” (Dean 98). According to University Discourse, the possessor of knowledge wins more reverence than the placeholder of kingship in contemporary society (Fink, Subject 132). Though the so-called experts usually obtain their position through hard learning, their recognition is rooted in an implicit power relation as the truth position in the diagram is occupied by S1. That is to say, every expert is a little master who is authorized to stick to his or her “opinion” no matter his or her own private interest might underlie it (Dean 98). For Žižek, the disguised Master Signifier in capitalist society has been the superego injunction to enjoy for a long time (“Lacan’s” 96). In Jack and his colleagues’ cases, it is their eccentricity and the impulse to enjoy that stick out in their living and teaching. The subject of their
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study values self expression. In the college, Jack’s colleagues study pop gum, soda can and cereal box (DeLillo 10). The phenomenology of teeth brushing and the posture of sexual penetration are treated with academic precision (DeLillo 67, 69).
Alfonse’s combativeness is manifested not in academic debate but in table talk concerning his idol, James Dean. The minute details about what they have done on the day Dean died are treated with utmost respect in honor of this rebellious figure (DeLillo 68). They also identically seem to be stuffed with complaints, menace and pride of being particular: “Together they look like teamster officials assembled to identify the body of a mutilated colleague. The impression is one of pervasive bitterness, suspicion and intrigue” (DeLillo 9-10). During their conversation, it can be observed how pale their moral view is. They aren’t afraid to show the “Brooklyn
Alfonse’s combativeness is manifested not in academic debate but in table talk concerning his idol, James Dean. The minute details about what they have done on the day Dean died are treated with utmost respect in honor of this rebellious figure (DeLillo 68). They also identically seem to be stuffed with complaints, menace and pride of being particular: “Together they look like teamster officials assembled to identify the body of a mutilated colleague. The impression is one of pervasive bitterness, suspicion and intrigue” (DeLillo 9-10). During their conversation, it can be observed how pale their moral view is. They aren’t afraid to show the “Brooklyn