It is perhaps cliché to claim a novel to be “even more relevant today than when it was written,” yet White Noise is one novel that easily lives up to that billing. Recently re-released for the book’s twenty-fifth anniversary, DeLillo’s novel was an incisive look at American culture at the time. In 2010, his observations seem less prescient and more of a reminder that American culture has been lumbering toward our current age of information overload for quite some time.
The narrator of White Noise, Jack Gladney, states, “All plots tend to move deathward.” Every story, every person, every thing is on an inevitable collision course with death. Beyond this fascination with death, the plot of White Noise is not clearly focused and does not fall into typical preconceptions of story arc. DeLillo is more interested in applying postmodern sensibilities to American consumer culture and crafting stunning prose than he is with developing realistic characters and situations.
The characters in a DeLillo novel do not seem to converse in a conventional manner. Each person exists as an information stream; sometimes these streams cross and the conversation becomes logical, but just as often the conversations are peppered with non-sequiturs and seem reminiscent of the breakdown of communication in Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist play The Bald Soprano. The jump from one topic to another is seemingly fueled by the pace of life. Transitions between topics happen suddenly and without segues. When the conversation is logical, it occupies a space of hyper-logic, where even the minutest point will be reduced to its most basic level.
“It’s going to rain tonight.”
“It’s raining now,” I said.
“The radio said tonight.”
“Look at the windshield,” I said. “Is that rain or isn’t it?”
“I’m only telling you what they said.”
“Just because it’s on the radio doesn’t mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses.”
“Our senses? Our senses are wrong a lot more often than they’re right. This has been proved in the laboratory.”
This particular conversation extends another page and a half.
Part of DeLillo’s sensibility is to question our shared knowledge and the appearances of things. According to literary theorist Jean Baudrillard, a facet of postmodernism is that the original and the simulation of the original are indistinguishable, to the point where the simulation can precede the actual event. Though literary theory is not particularly amusing on its own, DeLillo mines the concept for humor and absurdity. When a train car overturns, unleashing a potentially toxic cloud into the sky, a team wearing SIMUVAC armbands responds. Gladney, in talking with a SIMUVAC worker, finds out that SIMUVAC stands for “simulated evacuation” a program intended to rehearse disaster scenarios in order to respond to them more effectively should actual disaster strike.
“But this evacuation isn’t simulated. It’s real.”
“We know that. But we thought we could use it as a model.”
“A form of practice? Are you saying you saw a chance to use the real event in order to rehearse the simulation?”
“We took it right to the streets.”
This is postmodernism boiled down to its most basic tenets. Though the toxic cloud (which quickly undergoes linguistic revision from “feathery plume” to “black billowing cloud” to “airborne toxic event”) and the evacuation are real, the workers are only prepared to simulate disaster, not face actual terror. He uses postmodernism as a source of amusement and probes at some deeper questions. Has society become completely illogical? Are we ever truly prepared for a disaster? Gladney cites the airborne toxic event as a true “event” in that it “marks the end of uneventful things.” After a decade that brought 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, the end of the uneventful is something worth considering.
The title, White Noise, refers to perhaps the biggest unifying theme within the novel: the diminishing signal-to-noise ratio of modern life. DeLillo inserts overheard television and radio commercials throughout the work, which provide constant background noise to the characters’ activities. Brand names become mantras and mystical phrases, imbued with the magic of carefully market-tested mass appeal. DeLillo likes to take his characters to the supermarket to observe brightly-colored products with exaggerated benefits that may have little substance behind the packaging. The consumer hive of the suburban shopping mall is also portrayed as a terrifying carnival that nearly claims the lives of two senior citizens. Nowadays, with the dawn of the internet age, advertisements are more prevalent and intrusive in the daily life of an average person than ever before. Shopping malls are bigger, and the government’s solution to economic crisis is to tell Americans to go shopping. DeLillo hardly seems satirical in light of these societal developments.
DeLillo’s prose is hyper-observant, at times reading as if an alien were seeing and describing life on Earth for the first time. Yet there’s a beauty to his style. Even though these detailed digressions may not advance the skeleton of plot, they provide tremendous aesthetic satisfaction. The serious, beautiful, philosophical poetry of DeLillo’s writing comes through as his narrator visits a graveyard:
The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.
DeLillo’s writing has deep emotional resonance not through the empathy he creates between the reader and his characters (as there is virtually none) but from his ideas that ask readers to connect to themselves and the world in which they move. He paints life in America as halfway to dystopia, yet presents his vision with humor and beauty in equal parts along the way. White Noise is a novel of ideas that can still surprise and inform readers 25 years after its publication.
(February, 2010)
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