Frank Lentricchia's 1989 essay in Raritan (see page 412), together with the two essay collections he subsequently edited, helped attract academic attention to DeLillo's work. Lentricchia discusses the "most photographed barn in America " as one of DeLillo's-and our own- "primal scenes," finding in it a perfect instance of how images have supplanted events in contemporary America.
Both LeClair and Lentricchia discuss DeLillo's language, but they emphasize most his authority as a cultural critic. Their emphasis has been shared by many critics, as White Noise has gone on to become one of the most frequently taught and analyzed contemporary novels. With the rise of cultural studies in the academy, many literary critics diverted their attention to the very arenas-TV, advertising, pop culture-depicted in White Noise, applying theories such as those propounded by French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard. In his highly influential book Simulations, Baudrillard argues that original ideas and events have now been replaced by simulacra-an infinite regress of reproductions without origins; in turn, the "real" has given way to what he calls the "hyperreal" (Baudrillard 1988, 166). John Frow was the first to elucidate the connection between White Noise and Baudrillardian simulacra, arguing that the replacement of originals by simulations has worked both to pervert and preserve American myths of origins and authenticity. One of the main forces behind this shift, Frow argues, is television, which, along with the consumer capitalism it serves, reduces all phenomena to mere information.
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.
White Noise
To Sue Buck and to Lois Wallace
I Waves and Radiation
1
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.