Don DeLillo: White Noise

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.

The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus. In single file they eased around the orange I-beam sculpture and moved toward the dormitories. The roofs of the station wagons were loaded down with carefully secured suitcases full of light and heavy clothing; with boxes of blankets, boots and shoes, stationery and books, sheets, pillows, quilts; with rolled-up rugs and sleeping bags; with bicycles, skis, rucksacks, English and Western saddles, inflated rafts. As cars slowed to a crawl and stopped, students sprang out and raced to the rear doors to begin removing the objects inside; the stereo sets, radios, personal computers; small refrigerators and table ranges; the cartons of phonograph records and cassettes; the hairdryers and styling irons; the tennis rackets, soccer balls, hockey and lacrosse sticks, bows and arrows; the controlled substances, the birth control pills and devices; the jurik food still in shopping bags-onion-and-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut creme patties, Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints.

I've witnessed this spectacle every September for twenty-one years. It is a brilliant event, invariably. The students greet each other with comic cries and gestures of sodden collapse. Their summer has been bloated with criminal pleasures, as always. The parents stand sun-dazed near their automobiles, seeing images of themselves in every direction. The conscientious suntans. The well-made faces and wry looks. They feel a sense of renewal, of communal recognition. The women crisp and alert, in diet trim, knowing people's names. Their husbands content to measure out the time, distant but ungrudging, accomplished in parenthood, something about them suggesting massive insurance coverage. This assembly of station wagons, as much as anything they might do in the course of the year, more than formal liturgies or laws, tells the parents they are a collection of the like-minded and the spiritually akin, a people, a nation.

I left my office and walked down the hill and into town. There are houses in town with turrets and two-story porches where people sit in the shade of ancient maples. There are Greek revival and Gothic churches. There is an insane asylum with an elongated portico, ornamented dormers and a steeply pitched roof topped by a pineapple finial. Babette and I and our children by previous marriages live at the end of a quiet street in what was once a wooded area with deep ravines. There is an expressway beyond the backyard now, well below us, and at night as we settle into our brass bed the sparse traffic washes past, a remote and steady murmur around our sleep, as of dead souls babbling at the edge of a dream.