s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all]'s Reviews > White Noise

‘All plots tend to move deathward,’ lectures Jack Gladney, the Hitler studies teacher central to Don DeLillo’s White Noise, ‘this is the nature of plots.’ This comic masterpiece of postmodern anxieties does indeed move towards death—the meta-statement as much a Chekov’s gun as the actual gun Gladney is given—yet the whole wild ride is permeated and beleaguered by thought of the inevitability of death. Just like all of us. Though originally titled Panasonic, the title White Noise is a nod to the constant white noise of society that chirps, hums and whirs to the cacophonous tune of industry, entertainment and consumerism that numb our minds to our mortality salience, DeLillo interrogate our aversion to death in a culture where consumerism has practically become the new religion and steers it into the chaos of disaster emergency. White Noise hits harder than it did when I first read it over a decade ago and the novel feels just as urgent and relevant as ever, especially with a global pandemic now resonating through society. DeLillo’s love for language and philosophical investigations come alive in this humorous and insightful National Book Award winning novel, making for a scathing criticism that finds the pulse on US consumerist society and our trepidations of our own death and decay.

‘Man’s guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death.’

Published in 1985, White Noise came out just a year before the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster and amidst an increasingly technology anxious world. ‘The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear,’ DeLillo writes, and as technology plays an increasing role in every aspect of society from medicine to communication there are always the fears that what we create may be our undoing. White Noise is a book jittering with anxieties, from the pre-eminent Hitler expert’s imposter syndrome over not being able to speak German to the experimental drug, Dylar, which claims to remove your fears and obsessive thoughts about death, and DeLillo brilliantly depicts a death avoidance society that has plunged itself into consumerism and symbolic living to stave off the creeping reality of death and finality as an form of terror management theory. But with each step we take to push away death, it still comes. ‘Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent.’ What a great line, honestly.

‘No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.’

Much of the novel, told through Jack often in dramatic fashion that dips into something akin to what his classroom lectures would sound like, investigates the different ‘white noises’ of the book and how death is always a major fulcrum for our psychological responses in the world. There is the idea that death makes life precious, questioning if ‘anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit,’ but also the rebuttal that ‘what good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety?’ He and his fifth wife, Babette, often discuss who they hope dies first, weighing out if their fear or loneliness overrides their fear of death, and acknowledging the inevitability that their many children will grow up and out of the house. Family, in a way, is a sort of white noise too. Or any sort of group to belong in.

‘To become a crowd is to keep out death. To break off from a crowd is to risk death as an individual, to face dying alone. Crowds came for this reason above all others. They were there to be a crowd.’

Jack is all too aware of this as the leading Hitler scholar, arguing ‘Hitler was larger that death,’ which points to how authoritarianism rises out of fears and anxieties. Fear of the unknown, the Other, collapse, etc., all drives people towards a group mentality. When a sudden accident occurs in their town—The Airborne Toxic Event—leaving a great dark cloud over town like an unavoidable symbol of death, thoughts of mortality reach a fever pitch.

‘I feel sad for people and the queer part we play in our own disasters.’

According to Trauma Management Theory, mortality salience (the awareness of one’s death) wedded to death anxiety in incidents like this (or, say, global COVID) causes people to solidify their worldview and react in ways they feel will defend their social groups. To become a crowd, as Jack says, to boost self-esteem which TMT states reduces mortality salience. It is an existential terror of death, coupled with feeling a lack of control against the inevitable, that causes people to then react in ways to try and assert control over some aspect of their life. The higher the fear of death/lack of control, the more people try to push it out or scapegoat it, blaming others, or reacting violently. This is especially true of people who have an overinflated desire to be controlling (think of the men two weeks into the COVID pandemic so overcome with fears of their own mortality they broke into my State’s capitol building armed for murder). This idea also exists in John Steinbeck’s theory of the phalanx about crowd mentality. The idea is that being reactionary is an attempt to assert control on a situation that feels beyond you, and in White Noise attempts to control or assuage death are everywhere from the rampant consumerism to the Dylar drug. Think of the crowds, the groups, the solidifying of ideologies we’ve seen in the past few years in reaction to, or grifting off of, a global pandemic. Even I found myself reacting, such as really launching back into running at this time. As someone that loves reading for subtext, in my mind in longer runs I would chide myself “what are you running from, eh? Is it ?” We all find our soothing methods and self-medicating behaviors.

‘It is surely possible to be awed by a thing that threatens your life, to see it as a cosmic force, so much larger than yourself, more powerful, created by elemental and wilful rhythms.’

But there is also a general sense of trying to assert control in the general uncertainty of the world. With the Airborne Toxic Event there is the uncertainty of what to do and what is even happening. ‘In a crisis the true facts are whatever other people say they are,’ DeLillo writes, ‘no one’s knowledge is less secure than your own.’ Had this been written today that would feel very on the nose amidst the past years where grifting off misinformation and gaslighting increased the uncertainties of truth. White Noise also touches on distrust of authority, who are often as uncertain as everyone else but tasked with upholding a false certainty. There is a brilliant dark humor in aspects such as SIMUVAC running simulation evacuations though it is a real evacuation.

‘It seems that danger assigns to public voices the responsibility of a rhythm, as if in metrical units there is a coherence we can use to balance whatever senseless and furious event is about to come rushing around our heads.’

This makes me think of our current age of social media where, sure, it is great everyone gets a voice but the element of social media algorithms boosting voices based more on popularity (and paid content) can make it difficult to parse out which voices have actual authority on subjects or are even worth listening to. You have to sift through the static sometimes wondering “is this actually a bad take?” Or “is this even accurate?” and then there is the capitalist aspects of society where opinions are valued most due to profitability (even social profitability such as reinforcing one’s own world view) only increasing the maelstrom of bad faith framing. We live in a white noise of opinions crackling in social media static where the loudest opinions are those attempting to discredit others and often motivated by self-preservation over “truth”.

I love the uncertainty of the effects from the disaster that DeLillo instills, such as Jack receiving a timeline towards death that seems indistinguishable from a timeline of death by aging. It just becomes a lingering idea just like the already regular thoughts of inevitable death. Another aspect I truly appreciate is how DeLillo keys into how uncertainty leads to art:

‘The toxic event had released a spirit of imagination. People spun tales, others listened spellbound. There was a growing respect for the vivid rumor, the most chilling tale… We began to marvel at our own ability to manufacture awe.’

We pass on stories, write songs or poems that capture the current mood and moment, and these are the artifacts of a disaster that become the footholds to scale an understanding of a culture in a place and time in hindsight. But above all, it is all ways we compensate for control in the face of uncertainty.

This accounts for the philosophical tone the novel takes, one part earnest philosophical investigation and another part lampooning academic seriousness. Jack and his colleague friend Murray engage in circuitous discourses on a wide variety of topics throughout the book with a certainty only a learned academic can muster, though the certainty of their conclusions is vague. Though they are able to leap into the ways ‘everything is concealed in symbolism, hidden by veils of mystery and layers of cultural material.’ This opens the narrative up for incredible observations, however, with gorgeous passages on everything from the cultural signifiers in supermarkets to a co-lecture on Elvis and Hitler’s relationships with their mothers. Take Murray’s explanation of supermarkets for example:

‘Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.’

The simulation of religious experience colors the novel in many ways, such as Jack’s daughter saying brand names—Toyota Celica—in her sleep ‘like the name of an ancient power in the sky.’ Consumerism has replaced God in America and even the nuns don’t believe but put up a front because ‘the nonbelievers need the believers. They are desperate to have someone believe,’ and even mocks Jack for thinking anyone would sanely believe in a god. It is the burden of worry people impose on status figures like nuns, doctors and even politicians, handing them the reigns of reality to grapple with death as a way of avoiding it. Consuming, however, becomes the biggest short-cut to a sense of self-esteem that would stave off mortality salience, such as the following on the effects of purchasing:

‘ I began to grow in value and self regard. I filled myself out, found new aspects of myself, located a person I’d forgotten existed. Brightness settled around me.’

It becomes a stand-in for real life, like tv plots and literature become a stand-in for life to put the death on the screen or the page, in the aisle and behind the counters.

This is, perhaps, where I find DeLillo to be at his finest: discussing issues of phenomenology and language. We see much of the world as a symbolic replica of what Martin Heidegger termed dasein, or the thing-in-and-of-itself. Early in the novel, Jack and Murray visit ‘the most photographed bridge’ where they observe nobody sees the actual bridge, only the spectacle of it and ‘[t]hey are taking pictures of taking pictures.’ They exist in Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle. Which is why symbolism is so central to the novel as a sense of control. Jack mentions of Babette all the ways that are ‘the point of Babette,’ constructing a literary reality over the true, chaotic reality that is life (and also attempting to assert a sense of control). Which is much of what literature is, carefully constructing a world of ideas we can control and cast death as a character as opposed to a real force that strikes without warning.

The ultimate form of control against death, it seems, is violence. ‘The killer, in theory, attempts to defeat his own death by killing others. He buys time, he buys life.’ Jack receives a gun from his father-in-law (there are some great anxieties of masculinity here, with Jack feeling lesser due to his inability for household repairs that Vernon finds second nature) and, as all plots move deathward, it is no surprise this culminates into a violent confrontation with the man sleeping with his wife in a way that seem adjacent to a similar climax in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Here we witness a major side-effect of Dylar is to interpret words literally, being unable to tell signifier from the signified, and shouting ‘ plunging aircraft’ causes his target to react as if there is in fact a plane crash occurring. This is a clever nod to the idea that society moving into the spectacle to cover reality erodes our ability to differentiate between symbol and actuality.

‘May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan.’

Ultimately, we are left to question if all narrative in life merely moves towards death or if narrative is a way to ‘seek shape and control’ our lives during our limited time. Should we drift and let things come as they may, knowing the cliff of death will be here eventually? Or should we plot and plunge towards death. White Noise is a fabulous book and a deserving winner of the National Book Award (DeLillo, known for a distaste for public fame accepted the award in person saying ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t be here tonight, but I thank you all for coming.’). Comedic and insightful, with a penchant for the pretentious as part of the gag, White Noise has a lasting power that seems all the more relevant in a modern age of social media (symbolic of ‘authentic’ communication?), late-stage capitalism, misinformation and a literal global pandemic. It is an excellent look at the wear mortality salience drives people into empty symbols or consumerism or religion and into crowd mentality like authoritarianism to abate the loss of control against the reality of finality. DeLillo knocks it out of the park in White Noise with a smart and flowing prose that soars through the stratosphere in order to carry the heady philosophical investigations and this is certainly a book worth revisiting again and again.

5/5

‘How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn't they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?’