Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985) 

White Noise :     

·        multiple and simultaneous channels of cultural “noise” combined into one stream-of-consciousness static blur.

·        “Waves and Radiation” in the supermarket [see pp.36-38, + pp.168-69]  The back-ground babble of brand-name consumerism.

Settings:

·        College on the Hill (with its ironic allusion to the “city on a hill” metaphors of Bradford, Winthrop, and early Puritan self-mythology)

·        Dept. of American Environments (Alphonse “Fast Food” Stompanato, Chair)

·        Iron City (the de-industrialized, “downsized” rust-belt cities of the Midwest [Detroit, Gary, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Toledo, and more locally, Rockford, Decatur, Danville, Peoria, the Quad Cities, etc.]

·        Blacksmith (allusions to the pre-industrial life of old New England villages, but also every modern suburb and its built-in nostalgia for anglophile “estate” life — perhaps also tied to the mass popularity of the Southern aristocratic plantation myth cast as a distinctly national myth, promulgated by such films as “The Birth of a Nation” and “Gone With the Wind”)

·        The Mid-Village Mall (The Mall of America)

·        The Supermarket (a postmodern Tibet full of “orientalist” exoticism alongside “American Cheese” offering magically transcendent identity)

·        The Interstate Highway (now called the Eisenhower Interstate Highways system, originally called the National Defense and Interstate Highway System)

·        The TV and the Radio (and what it/they “said”)

Style/Structure: 

·        A loosely designed, mostly plotless, episodic structure

·        Pastiche of multiple forms (the TV sitcom, the disaster thriller, the midlife crisis tale, the made-for-TV murder mystery, . . .  what else?)

·        Jack as Narrator: dead-pan ironic narration, sometimes directed outward, sometimes inward.  It is nearly impossible to always know whether Jack speaks for DeLillo or whether Jack is a classic example of the unreliable narrator and DeLillo is mocking and critiquing Jack and what he stands for.

·        Three Part Structure mirrors the “nature” cycle (Fall, Winter, Spring) of the academic calendar

Themes:  (from Osteen's Intro, except the last)

·        the deleterious effects of capitalism

·        the power of electronic images and simulated, “hyper-reality” to displace the “real”

·        the tyrannical authority and dangerous byproducts of science and technology

·        the unholy alliance of consumerism and violence

·        the quest for sacredness in a secularized world

·        whiteness and white flight amidst the renewed nationalism of the New Right

Some early 1980s Cultural Moments {Objects of Documentary Representation}: 

·        Cable TV — MTV, CNN, The Weather Channel (CABLE HEALTH, CABLE WEATHER, CABLE NEWS, CABLE NATURE (231))

·        BMWs, YUPPIES, malls, and suburban sprawl

·        Punk Rock (a band called Elivis-Hitler) / New Wave / Early Gen X (The Replacements) 

·        Ronald Reagan (SIMU-President) + New Right nationalism, Patriotism, and renewed Cold-War hype

·        Religious Fundamentalism + the spectacle of the Televangelist {Jim and Tammy Baker and the Heritage USA scandal, Oral Roberts and the Tower of Power, Pat Robertson and the 700 Club, Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority}

·        The De-industrialization of the Midwest Iron-Belt and transfer of manufacturing jobs to off-shore non-union sweatshop labor

·        The Mall of America, Theme Park extravaganzas, Euro-Disney

·        ATM Machines and Electronic Banking; a flood of credit card marketing by the finance industries

·        personal computers (IBM's PC and the Apple II)

·        MRI and a "new generation" of medical imaging technologies

·        Prozac and a whole new generation of psycho-pharmaceuticals

·        AIDS, Homophobia (with ACT UP activism forming in response)

·        Shock Jock and Talk Radio

·        “Reality” TV — “Faces of Death” Videos

·        Popular Culture Studies, Academic postmodernist studies, Multiculturalism and neo-marxism/post-marxism

·        A Backlash against feminism, and a re-assertion of hunter-gather machismo -- "Iron John"

·        Neo-Conservative Attacks on Politicized Academia (“Cultural Illiteracy,” “The Closing of the American Mind,” “Political Correctness” debates, Curriculum “canon” debates; attacks on the NEA, calls for dismantling the Dept. of Education) 

Dylarama =  

·        Dylar + Dalai Lama (or perhaps Dylar + the Hindu “rama”) which symbolizes the “mystical” power that media and technology has on the contemporary American consciousness.

·        Dylar + “O-Rama” as in the common ad-speak suffix meaning “mega” or “more,” which represents DeLillo’s critique of the language and values of consumerism in both the novel and American culture more generally (including  an unqualified belief in food and medicine industries and their attendant corporate capitalist ideologies.  “Operation Margarine” to exponential degrees.)

·        Dylar + Diorama (a three-dimensional model), which indicates that Dylar, whatever it symbolizes, represents a microcosm of the larger action in the novel, which is itself a microcosm/simulation of postmodern American culture.  Diorama invites us to look at the relationship between the map or model of reality and  the reality itself — the model/map as another form of hyper-reality.)

The end: A Resolution or Just an Ending?: 

·        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 towards those “postmodern sunsets” to which the residents of Blacksmith flock?

·        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 dazed acceptance?  Issuing a sardonic warning?  Declaring a numbed neutrality?